The mouth on the cover appears to have survived the disappearance of the person surrounding it. Kevin Tomkins’ painting contains flesh-colored masses, doubled heads, open cavities and shapes that may be bodies until another glance turns them back into paint. The image has no stable front or background. Everything seems to be entering, leaving or being digested by everything else. The title supplies the closest thing to a diagnosis: Sans Palatine Uvula, a body described through something missing from the rear of its mouth.
The palatine uvula is the small fleshy projection suspended from the soft palate. It occupies a threshold where breathing, swallowing and vocal formation meet. It is not the sole mechanism governing those functions, but it participates in the mobile boundary between the mouth, throat and nasal passage. Naming an album “without palatine uvula” imagines the voice after one of its minor anatomical gatekeepers has disappeared.
The phrase sounds medically exact while describing an impossible artistic condition. Junko is not literally singing without an uvula, larynx, tongue or intact throat. The album removes her voice from the ordinary evidence of a body through recording, editing, sampling, distortion and rearrangement. We hear vocal action while the person producing it is no longer physically present. The sound has crossed out of anatomy and entered machinery.
Every recording does this to some degree. A microphone separates voice from breath and preserves the result after the singer has left the room. Sans Palatine Uvula makes that separation its central material. Junko’s live-recorded voice becomes a body that Kevin Tomkins and Paul Taylor can cut apart, repeat, slow, layer, obscure and place inside environments that did not exist during the original performance.
This is not simply Sutcliffe Jügend playing behind Junko as three musicians sharing a conventional session. The collaboration is partly forensic and architectural. Junko supplies an already extraordinary human event. Tomkins studies its fragments, performs additional voice editing, manipulates selected tracks, and surrounds them with autoharp, electronics, samples and musical box. Taylor introduces guitar and synthesizer. The voice becomes both collaborator and found object.
The label described Junko’s screams as a canvas upon which Sutcliffe Jügend could work. That metaphor is revealing but insufficient. A canvas is passive. It accepts whatever the painter places upon it. Junko’s voice refuses that position. It punctures the composition, overwhelms accompaniment and repeatedly forces the electronics to reorganize themselves around its frequencies. The canvas keeps screaming through the paint.
Junko Hiroshige had been performing with Hijokaidan since 1982, developing one of the most recognizable vocal presences in noise without treating it as a theatrical character requiring elaborate explanation. When asked whether she deliberately imitates disturbing sounds or trains her voice to sustain them, she described the method as natural, free and shaped through Hijokaidan. She acknowledged that listeners may find it uncomfortable, but did not present discomfort as a grand strategy.
That simplicity is important. Western descriptions of Junko often reach immediately for torture chambers, dying animals, terrorized children, demonic possession and female suffering. The comparisons reveal how listeners interpret the frequency, but they do not necessarily describe what Junko believes she is expressing. Her voice may cause the listener to imagine agony without being a representation of agony.
The difference is enormous. If the scream is assumed to mean pain, Junko becomes a victim inside every review. If it is assumed to mean aggression, she becomes an attacker. If it is heard only as transgression, she becomes evidence of the reviewer’s tolerance. Junko’s own description offers another possibility: the sound exists because making it is natural to her within this music. It may not require translation into a psychological emergency.
Sans Palatine Uvula places pressure upon that freedom by surrounding it with titles of injury. “Mouth Ripping,” “Throat Ripper,” “Mouth Leak,” “Lip Splitter,” “Sans Larynx” and “Tongue Splitter” create an anatomical narrative the voice does not provide by itself. The track names ask us to hear damage. Junko’s sound keeps exceeding the diagnosis.
This creates the album’s central moral and artistic tension. Sutcliffe Jügend takes the voice of another artist, removes it from its original physical occasion and classifies the resulting pieces through torn mouths, leaking throats and absent organs. The process could be heard as domination, with the woman’s scream converted into material for two men’s machinery. It can also be heard as collaboration between an uncontrollable source and artists fascinated by what happens when control is attempted.
The record never settles the question because Junko does not sound captured. Her voice may be edited, but each fragment retains agency at the level of sound. A single high shriek can dominate an entire electronic landscape. Repetition does not necessarily weaken it. The repeated fragment begins behaving like an alarm whose cause has been removed, leaving pure urgency behind.
“Mouth Ripping” opens with only two minutes to establish the album’s operating procedure. The voice appears as immediate physical intrusion rather than as a singer announcing herself. The surrounding sound does not create a safe introduction or explain which part should be considered musical. Junko enters at the point where another record might build toward climax.
The title can be heard in two directions. The mouth may be ripped apart by the force passing through it, or the mouth itself may rip the air and listener. One interpretation makes the vocalist the damaged body. The other makes her voice the instrument of damage. The recording keeps changing which side of that relationship seems dominant.
Noise scenes frequently turn listening into a test of endurance, but Junko complicates that ritual. Enduring her voice is not necessarily the same as hearing it. A listener can remain seated for forty-five minutes and learn nothing except pride in having stayed. The more interesting task is to notice variation inside what initially appears to be one impossible shriek.
Her pitch bends. The edge frays. Pressure fluctuates. Some sounds narrow into a needle, while others widen into a torn metallic sheet. Breath occasionally becomes audible behind the frequency. A scream can seem almost comic for a fraction of a second, then become frightening because laughter and distress share more vocal territory than polite language admits.
“Throat Ripper” extends the opening attack but begins making the source less stable. The throat is both passage and producer, a living tube through which breath becomes socially recognizable sound. Calling something a throat ripper suggests an external weapon, yet Junko’s voice appears capable of injuring the throat from within. Production and destruction become the same act.
This is one reason the album can activate bodily imagination so intensely. The listener knows that a human throat generated the original sound, even when processing makes the result resemble metal, steam or electrical feedback. The body is never entirely absent. It remains as a troubling cause behind the abstraction.
Electronic noise made entirely from machines can be imagined as industrial weather. Junko prevents that distance. Every high frequency carries a residual question: what did a person physically do to produce this? The listener may feel their own throat tightening in sympathetic response, constructing phantom strain inside a body that has remained silent.
Yet Junko has said she does not train extensively and needs only a brief sound check. What sounds impossibly damaging to another person may belong to the practiced natural territory of her own vocal instrument. The listener’s bodily projection is not medical evidence. It is imagination attempting to understand an unfamiliar technique.
“Mouth Leak” introduces a different kind of failure. Ripping is sudden and violent; leaking is gradual. A leak means the boundary remains mostly intact while something escapes through an opening that should not exist. Sound itself is a controlled leak from the body. Air crosses tissue, acquires vibration and leaves carrying information about the person inside.
Junko’s voice carries almost no conventional linguistic information, but it reveals enormous physical presence. We cannot quote what she says because she may not be saying anything in the ordinary sense. The leak transmits pressure, timbre, duration and force rather than a sentence.
This can feel more intimate than lyrics. Language allows the singer to choose what part of the interior becomes public. Nonverbal voice exposes material conditions that are harder to edit conceptually: breath, strain, saliva, pitch, muscular action and the point where control becomes indistinguishable from release.
Tomkins’ editing creates a second leak. The original performance is no longer sealed within its time and location. Fragments escape into another composition, detached from what preceded and followed them. The collaborators can repeat a moment Junko herself performed only once. Recording creates a body that does not heal because the cut can be reopened indefinitely.
“Mouth Slipping” suggests loss of grip rather than rupture. The mouth slips away from intention. Speech fails to attach correctly to thought. The lips and tongue continue moving, but the identity expected to govern them begins sliding somewhere else.
This is close to the sensation of hearing a familiar human voice cross into noise. We recognize the source category but cannot stabilize its social meaning. Is Junko frightened, ecstatic, furious, amused or simply producing sound? The mouth remains human while the emotional face attached to it keeps slipping.
That indeterminacy protects the voice from becoming a straightforward horror effect. Horror films teach us to interpret screams according to visible events. Someone sees the threat, the mouth opens, and the sound confirms fear. Here the event is missing. The scream has been cut away from its cause and placed inside an environment constructed afterward.
The listener becomes responsible for inventing the invisible event. One person imagines torture. Another imagines birth, exorcism, machinery, animal communication, spiritual release or the pure pleasure of vocal extremity. The sound contains none of those images literally. It creates a vacancy into which biography and belief rush.
“Lip Splitter” is short enough to behave like a sharp instrument inserted between the longer constructions. The title reduces vocal production to its outer border. Lips are the visible part of speech, where internal breath finally meets the world and becomes shaped into consonants, names, kisses, insults and prayer.
A split lip also makes speech materially costly. Language passes across an injury and may reopen it. On this album, every vocal act is named as if the organ producing it is being damaged by the attempt. Voice becomes evidence of a body sacrificing its boundaries to communicate.
But Junko’s refusal of conventional communication undermines that sacrificial narrative. She does not appear to be struggling to tell us a hidden sentence. The sound may be complete without translation. The violence could belong not to the voice but to the listener’s demand that every human utterance explain itself.
The first five tracks are brief and concentrated, repeatedly presenting the voice from different angles. Then “Sans Larynx” opens a much larger chamber. The larynx contains the vocal folds and plays a central role in producing voiced sound. A track called “without larynx” should be voiceless, yet it contains Junko and Kevin Tomkins, guitar and autoharp, acoustic vibration and electronic manipulation.
The title creates a productive impossibility: a voice continuing after its presumed source has been removed. This is what recorded sound already does. The larynx was present at the original moment, but it is absent from playback. The speaker cone moves without lungs. The file screams without tissue.
The recording becomes a kind of technological spirit, not supernatural in origin but ghostlike in behavior. An action survives its actor’s absence, enters rooms the original body never visited and repeats with no additional effort from the throat that produced it.
This may be one reason recorded voices have always carried spiritual associations. Long before listeners understood microphones and magnetic storage intimately, the voice of an absent or dead person emerging from machinery resembled communication across an impossible boundary. Recording converts presence into a repeatable haunting.
Sutcliffe Jügend emphasizes that condition rather than concealing it behind realistic reproduction. The manipulation tells us continually that this is not Junko standing naturally inside our room. It is a constructed vocal afterlife, cut into shapes no human breath could sustain continuously.
Paul Taylor’s guitar gives “Sans Larynx” another layer of displaced anatomy. A guitar is itself a resonating body with a neck, and amplification allows its vibrations to survive far beyond the instrument’s natural acoustic scale. Voice and guitar meet as two bodies made unnaturally large through electricity.
Kevin Tomkins’ autoharp introduces a more fragile association. The instrument belongs historically to folk rooms, homes, schools and communal song. Its strings can suggest order, chord and tenderness. Within this album, the autoharp appears like a surviving domestic object inside an operating theater.
That contrast prevents the music from becoming a single uninterrupted texture of punishment. Sutcliffe Jügend’s contribution is not simply “more noise” placed behind Junko. Tomkins and Taylor build differences in space, material and temperature so the voice can appear to occupy changing architectures.
At times the arrangement seems to retreat from Junko rather than attack her. Empty zones form around a cry. A guitar line behaves like a shadow at another depth. Electronics resemble damaged ventilation. The voice remains the brightest object but not always the loudest one.
This is where the collaboration becomes more than the collision of two famous noise names. Hijokaidan and Sutcliffe Jügend represent different histories of extremity, but the record does not simply alternate Japanese screaming with British power electronics. Tomkins and Taylor treat Junko’s voice as a compositional problem requiring methods they would not necessarily use with their own vocals.
Kevin Tomkins’ usual voice carries words, persona, accusation and psychological narrative. Junko’s voice removes those supports. He cannot respond only at the level of lyrical meaning because there may be no lyric to answer. The collaboration forces Sutcliffe Jügend to compose around frequency, gesture and bodily suggestion.
“Throat Leak” returns to brevity after “Sans Larynx,” almost as though the larger structure has left pressure escaping from a damaged seam. The transition reveals how sequence can create anatomy. Short pieces become incisions between longer chambers. The album does not behave like ten independent tracks collected casually. It resembles one body repeatedly opened at different points.
The titles obsess over the mouth and throat while neglecting the rest of the body. There are no hands, feet, heart or eyes. The album’s human being is reduced to the apparatus through which interior pressure crosses into public sound.
This reduction mirrors the way performers can become identified with one capability. Junko the person disappears behind “Junko’s scream.” Decades of life, relationships, humor, ordinary speech and listening are compressed into the vocal act for which audiences know her.
The record participates in that compression while also making it visible. Its entire vocabulary anatomizes the famous voice. Yet the more closely the sound is examined, the less easily the person can be reduced to one effect. Junko’s scream contains too many internal differences to remain a logo.
“Throat Slipper” stretches past five minutes and turns a small grammatical oddity into a strange creature. A ripper performs an action. A slipper may be something that slips, but it is also an object worn quietly inside the home. The title brings violence and domestic softness absurdly close.
That instability suits the sound. Junko’s voice can be physically punishing while carrying a peculiar familiarity once the ear adjusts. What initially seems uninhabitable develops contours. The listener begins anticipating the return of certain pitches and textures. The impossible sound starts becoming a room.
This adaptation is not necessarily desensitization. It may be learning. The first encounter registers danger because the sound does not fit established categories. Continued attention discovers variation and method. The nervous system stops treating every second as identical alarm and begins hearing decisions.
Noise culture sometimes treats this adaptation as proof that the listener has become harder. A better interpretation is that perception has become more detailed. The achievement is not that nothing hurts anymore. It is that sensation has acquired vocabulary.
“Sans Palatine,” the fourteen-minute center of gravity, removes the entire palate rather than only its uvula. The palate forms the roof of the mouth and separates oral from nasal space. In vocal production, its hard and soft regions help shape resonance and articulation. Without the palate, the familiar chamber through which voice becomes voice has collapsed.
The track responds by constructing an artificial chamber from guitar, synthesizer, sampler, autoharp and two human vocal presences. If anatomy is removed, composition must become anatomy. Electronics supply walls. Repetition supplies muscle. Frequency supplies pressure. Editing creates valves where tissue once governed passage.
This is the album’s most complete transformation of Junko’s voice from performance into environment. The scream no longer appears only as an event placed against a background. It becomes part of the material through which the background is built.
Tomkins’ own vocals introduce semantic and gendered contrast. His voice carries the history of power electronics as command, confession, threat and damaged male interiority. Junko’s voice refuses recognizable language. One speaker tries to occupy meaning; the other can dissolve meaning through pitch alone.
Their meeting does not become a conventional duet. The voices seem to exist at different stages of human formation. Tomkins speaks from within social identity, even when that identity is distorted. Junko’s vocalization seems to arrive before or after social identity, either not yet organized into words or released from needing them.
The effect can resemble invocation, but the entity summoned is not necessarily a demon or external spirit. It may be the voice stripped of biography, the capacity of a human body to produce a signal before culture decides what that signal means.
Goetic ritual offers a useful metaphor because it depends upon names, boundaries and controlled manifestation. The track titles name anatomical forces and failures. The studio provides a bounded space. Editing determines when the voice enters and disappears. Yet Junko’s sound behaves like something the circle cannot fully contain.
The danger in occult language is that it can make human craft appear mysteriously uncaused. Nothing here requires a supernatural explanation. Junko used her body and technique. Lea Cummings recorded the live source. Tomkins edited, manipulated and produced. Taylor played guitar and synth. The power comes partly from knowing that ordinary human actions can produce something that feels beyond ordinary humanity.
That factual chain does not reduce the mystery. It relocates it. The mystery becomes the body’s capacity, the ear’s reaction and the transformation that recording permits. Human beings built the chamber, then discovered that the chamber could alter how human sound was perceived.
This is closer to alchemy than possession: not summoning an outside intelligence, but placing familiar matter under conditions that reveal another state. Voice becomes texture. Pain becomes an interpretation rather than a fact. Machinery becomes throat. A small fleshy organ at the back of the mouth becomes the title of an international collaboration.
The collaboration itself has a distributed body. Junko’s Japanese noise history meets an English duo. Lea Cummings provides the live recording. Yuko Under supplies photography, liner notes and translation. James Hadfield contributes photography. Godscum handles photography, design and layout. A Singapore label manufactures and distributes the result. The album is not simply “East meets West.” It is a network of people carrying sound, image and language across several locations.
The eight-page booklet contained both Japanese and English text, acknowledging that the meeting could not be contained entirely within one language. Yet the primary voice on the record requires neither. Junko’s scream crosses the language boundary by refusing words, while the surrounding package restores explanation through translation.
This creates another productive contradiction. The vocal sound may be universally physical, but its artistic context is not universal. Listeners bring different histories of Japanese noise, British industrial culture, gender, performance and bodily expression. Translation helps carry facts, but no booklet can standardize what the scream becomes inside each nervous system.
The Singapore origin of 4iB Records matters because it disrupts the simple story of two prestigious scenes communicating directly. An independent label in another part of the world recognized the relationship, financed a limited edition and gave the collaboration a physical body. Music culture survives through these apparently peripheral nodes, places that become central by connecting artists who might otherwise remain separated.
The original object was made in an individually numbered edition of five hundred, housed in a gatefold cardboard sleeve with an inner CD carrier and booklet. The package invited handling: opening, removing, unfolding and reading before the listener reached the disc.
Private Release preserves only one visual face and a 221.22-megabyte FLAC folder. Most of the original tactile sequence has disappeared from the page. We do not see the numbered sticker, booklet, photographs, bilingual text, inner sleeve or disc artwork. The digital copy retains the complete audible body while presenting only one piece of skin.
That imbalance feels strangely appropriate. Sans Palatine Uvula is already about a voice separated from its body. The post separates the sound from most of its package. The FLAC file retains the waveform without the gatefold, paper texture, edition number or hands required to open it.
Lossless preservation can keep every available sample while still losing an enormous amount of the experience. This does not make the FLAC worthless. It reveals that data fidelity and object completeness are different things. The audio may be technically intact while the path into it has become thinner.
The cover that remains is unusually dense enough to carry some of that missing physicality. Tomkins’ painting looks scraped, layered and bodily. Beige, white, brown and red forms collide like tissue viewed through frosted glass. A dark horizontal band divides the image, while the lower pink field gives the central mass something resembling a floor.
Near the top, an open mouth appears among doubled pale heads. Below, another figure collapses into its own limbs. The image may depict violence, birth, intimacy, medical examination or none of these. Like Junko’s voice, it generates bodily interpretation without confirming one narrative.
Kevin Tomkins’ paintings across later Sutcliffe Jügend releases often resist the documentary shock imagery associated with earlier industrial culture. Instead of importing a crime photograph whose reality supplies instant force, the painted image makes force less certain. The viewer must participate in constructing what has happened.
The same is true of this album. There is no lyric sheet explaining whose throat is ripped or why. The titles supply injury, but the sound never confirms a victim. The listener manufactures the scene.
That act of manufacture deserves attention because extreme art is often discussed as though the artist alone places darkness into the audience. The audience brings enormous material. A scream becomes frightening partly because the listener knows what screams have meant in other situations. The record activates an archive already stored inside the body.
That archive includes infancy. Before a child learns words, vocal distress summons another person. A scream is among the earliest signals that sound can alter the world. Junko’s high range may touch those early pathways before adult interpretation has fully assembled.
It also includes alarm systems, animals, metal friction, emergency brakes and feedback. Several unrelated sources occupy similar frequencies because sharp high sound is effective at forcing attention. The nervous system does not wait for aesthetic judgment before responding.
Junko works inside that involuntary zone. Her voice can make the body react before the listener decides whether the music is enjoyable, meaningful or morally acceptable. Sutcliffe Jügend then builds compositions around the delay between bodily response and conscious interpretation.
“Sans Palatine” sustains that delay long enough for the first alarm to change into something else. The listener may discover calm inside the intensity, fascination inside aversion or beauty inside frequencies initially registered only as attack.
This does not mean the harshness has been conquered. The sound can become newly difficult after familiarity. A certain cut, sudden return or isolated cry may restore the original bodily shock. The album breathes by alternating adaptation and renewed exposure.
“Tongue Splitter” closes with another organ responsible for converting interior intention into articulated language. The tongue shapes speech, taste and touch. Splitting it creates an old image of deception, but also literal division: one organ moving in two directions.
The track’s musical box is a perfect final instrument. A musical box turns a small mechanical cylinder into a delicate repeating melody, often associated with childhood, memory and private keepsakes. Placed beside Junko’s voice, it sounds like a model of civilized music continuing to perform after the mouth has been dismantled.
The musical box does not respond emotionally. Its mechanism repeats whatever pattern has been pinned into it. Junko’s voice, despite being sampled and repeated, never loses the impression of living volatility. Machine repetition and bodily repetition reveal different kinds of captivity.
A tongue splitter may also describe the entire collaboration. One voice is divided into ten tracks, multiple edits and several artificial bodies. The album speaks in at least two cultural languages and prints two written languages while centering a vocal act beyond language.
The ending does not restore the voice to its original body. There is no final unprocessed performance revealing what everything “really” sounded like. The album leaves us inside the reconstruction.
That choice protects the source from being reduced to a before-and-after demonstration. We are not given pure Junko first and corrupted Junko afterward. Purity would be another fiction. The live recording was already an encounter among performer, room, microphone, audience and recorder.
Sutcliffe Jügend’s manipulation adds another generation rather than destroying an untouched original. The project becomes a chain of custody: body to air, air to microphone, microphone to recording, recording to editor, editor to composition, composition to CD, CD or digital source to FLAC, FLAC to another room.
Each stage protects some information and changes something else. The original breath cannot be recovered. The original room may remain faintly embedded. The exact emotional state is unknowable. The frequency survives well enough to make a distant listener’s throat tighten years later.
This is why “ownership” is such an inadequate way to describe noise history. Junko’s voice belongs to her in the most basic human sense, but once performed and recorded it enters relationships she cannot entirely control. Sutcliffe Jügend shapes it. The label packages it. Reviewers impose suffering upon it. Collectors classify it. Listeners imagine private scenes around it.
The ethical answer is not to pretend circulation can be reversed. It is to remain aware of the human source and resist converting her entirely into material. Junko is not merely “the scream queen,” a torture effect or exotic Japanese ingredient added to British industrial music. She is an artist whose apparently narrow method contains decades of decisions, collaborations and lived freedom.
Her own modest explanations may be more radical than the elaborate mythology around her. She plays naturally. Hijokaidan shaped the voice. Noise can be troublesome and irritating. Some people will be uncomfortable. She does not need to announce every performance to everyone because the people genuinely seeking it can choose to come.
That position removes the coercive pride often attached to extreme art. Junko does not seem interested in tricking unprepared people into proving their weakness. She trusts the seeker to locate the event and accept responsibility for entering.
Sans Palatine Uvula requires a similar choice. It is not background music accidentally encountered through a commercial playlist. Its title, cover and artists tell us that a difficult bodily experience is waiting. Opening the folder is already consent to investigate.
Consent does not determine the reaction. A seeker may still feel overwhelmed, irritated, frightened or physically uncomfortable. Those responses do not indicate failure. Noise becomes useful when it expands perception rather than enforcing one correct display of toughness.
The album is full of acts that could be described as mutilation, yet its deepest achievement may be multiplication. One voice becomes many voices. One live moment becomes ten constructed environments. One body becomes an anatomy of sound. Two established noise histories meet through a Singapore label and generate something neither would have made alone.
The result does not reveal Junko’s hidden mind, nor does it provide a transparent document of Sutcliffe Jügend’s psychology. It reveals their methods of relation. Junko produces sound without explaining it. Tomkins and Taylor answer by building structures that intensify, divide and sometimes shelter it.
The record’s apparent violence may therefore be less about one artist harming another than about every act of recording containing a controlled form of dismemberment. Sound is taken from the body, cut from time, named, ordered and made repeatable. Most music hides this operation behind the illusion of a complete performance. Sans Palatine Uvula turns the operation into its subject.
The absent uvula becomes the perfect emblem. It is a tiny structure few people think about until attention is directed toward it. Remove it conceptually, and the whole mouth suddenly becomes strange. Listening closely to Junko produces a similar effect. A human capacity assumed to be familiar becomes alien without ever ceasing to be human.
After forty-five minutes, ordinary voices may sound newly artificial. Conversation appears full of controlled squeaks, breath failures, swallowed noises and muscular adjustments that social meaning normally teaches us to ignore. The record does not introduce noise into the human voice. It reveals how much noise language has been organizing all along.
The cover’s open mouth no longer needs to belong to a victim or aggressor. It can be the entrance to an acoustic interior larger than the body containing it.
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