The most important fact about Junkyard Behemoth is hidden beneath its apparent format. This is not simply a split album in which Gelsomina occupies one portion and Squamata answers from the other. Both participants recorded material separately and contributed sounds that could be incorporated, rearranged and transformed by the other. The four finished pieces remain individually credited, but their raw matter has already crossed the border between identities. Gelsomina’s twenty-three-minute opening composition may contain Squamata’s machinery; Squamata’s three pieces may carry fragments originating in Gelsomina’s circuitry. Authorship survives, but purity does not. Each artist receives contaminated material and constructs a different organism from it. The album’s title is therefore more than an image of industrial wreckage. A behemoth has been assembled from abandoned components, and nobody can completely determine which bones belonged to whom before the creature stood up.
That exchange gives Junkyard Behemoth a conceptual strength extending far beyond its four-track structure. Noise collaboration often means two people performing simultaneously, each adding more volume until individual gestures become indistinguishable. Here the relationship appears more archaeological and parasitic. One artist sends evidence of an action, perhaps feedback, manipulated electronics, struck metal, mechanical vibration or an already processed recording. The second artist receives that evidence after the original event has ended. He cannot respond to the performer in real time, but he can dissect the remains, amplify certain details, erase others and place the material inside an entirely different environment. Collaboration becomes a form of posthumous communication between sounds. The source is alive when recorded, dead when exchanged, then animated again through editing. What emerges is neither a faithful preservation nor a conventional remix. It is acoustic organ transplantation.
That process belongs naturally inside the Finnish noise underground of the mid-2000s. Gelsomina and Squamata were not isolated names randomly paired by a label. Both circulated within a physical network of artists, concerts, cassette exchanges, small record shops and privately organized performances. Squamata was a Turku duo formed by AE and AO in 2003, while Gelsomina was the harsh-noise and power-electronics project of Pekka Perä-Takala, usually credited as Pekka PT. The artists shared a documented private performance in Turku on September 29, 2006, later issued as a DVDr, and Junkyard Behemoth appeared in early 2007. The chronology does not prove that one event directly produced the other, but it places the album within sustained proximity. These people knew one another’s methods through rooms, equipment, mail and repeated exposure, not merely through names printed in catalogs. Their collaboration belongs to a scene with bodies and addresses.
Turku’s Some Place Else shop and performance space was one visible node in that environment. Between 2004 and 2007 it operated not only as a record store but as an experimental meeting point, hosting Finnish artists including Gelsomina and Squamata alongside international visitors. Spaces like this mattered because noise culture was still substantially material. Recognition did not depend upon a continuous online personality, follower count or promotional campaign. A project existed through a handful of cassettes, a performance attended by twenty people, a photocopied notice, an appearance on a compilation, an envelope mailed abroad, or a CD stocked by one sympathetic shop. Reputation accumulated as sediment. Junkyard Behemoth emerged from this compact ecosystem at the exact moment when physical underground networks and expanding digital circulation were beginning to overlap. Its edition was tiny, but the files could eventually escape the numerical limits of the pressing.
The release also occupies a particularly fertile point in the Freak Animal Records catalog. It appeared as FREAK-CD-038, following Grunt’s Seer of Decay and immediately preceding Bizarre Uproar and Gelsomina’s Assisted Self-Sterilization. Pure’s Fetor followed soon afterward. This sequence captures the label operating as more than a distributor of interchangeable extremity. Each release investigates a distinct relationship among sound, physical degradation, bodily imagery, obsession and control. Junkyard Behemoth contributes an industrial ecology to that run. Its central subject is not solely human aggression, sexuality or psychological collapse, although all remain latent within the music. It asks what happens after manufactured objects have lost their economic function. The junkyard becomes civilization’s external memory, a place where machines remain materially present after society has declared them finished.
A discarded object is not silent. Springs retain tension. Sheets of metal flex in wind and heat. Empty tanks become resonating chambers. Motors, cables, chains, pipes, grilles and frames can be struck, scraped, dragged or electrically reactivated. Industry may consider these items exhausted because they can no longer perform their assigned jobs, but noise discovers a second career hidden inside failure. The washing machine drum that no longer washes becomes percussion. The damaged amplifier that cannot reproduce music accurately becomes a producer of unstable voltage and distortion. The bent sheet that has lost structural usefulness becomes a gong with an irregular frequency spectrum. Junkyard Behemoth treats obsolescence not as disappearance but as liberation from original purpose. Once an object is no longer expected to behave properly, its unwanted acoustic life becomes available.
This idea helps distinguish the album from noise that pursues abstraction through electronics alone. Gelsomina and Squamata certainly employ feedback and processing, but the descriptions surrounding the release repeatedly emphasize scrap metal, machine crackle, concrete clatter, low-frequency thunder and physical performance. One hears not merely signals but resistance. The material appears to push back against the performers. Metal is heavy, awkward and capable of injuring the person attempting to control it. Feedback likewise behaves according to a relationship among microphones, speakers, amplification and space. It can be guided, but it cannot be wholly commanded. Both acoustic scrap and electronic feedback therefore produce negotiations between intention and instability. The musician initiates a system whose response exceeds the initial gesture.
Gelsomina’s “The Mercy Seat Is Melting” consumes nearly half the disc. At 23:42, it is not simply the first track but the album’s principal chamber, the furnace through which the listener must pass before reaching Squamata’s more divided sequence. Its title immediately places punishment, judgment and physical dissolution in the same frame. “The Mercy Seat” carries biblical associations with the covering of the Ark of the Covenant, a site where divine presence, judgment and atonement meet. In twentieth-century music, the phrase is also inseparable from Nick Cave’s song about a condemned prisoner approaching execution in the electric chair. Gelsomina adds one destabilizing verb: melting. The seat of judgment no longer remains architecturally or morally solid. Authority liquefies along with the condemned body. Electricity does not merely pass through the prisoner; it overheats the institution administering the sentence.
That title gives the music a theological and technological ambiguity. Is mercy itself melting away, leaving only punishment? Is the execution apparatus becoming too hot to preserve its form? Or is the boundary separating criminal, witness, judge and machine collapsing into the same molten substance? Harsh noise is uniquely equipped to sustain these questions because distortion confuses source and consequence. A scream, an overloaded circuit and a piece of tearing metal may occupy adjacent frequency ranges. Once heavily processed, the listener cannot always determine whether a sound began in a human body, an electrical system or an inanimate object. Identity burns off. What remains is pressure, vibration and the awareness that something is being transformed beyond recovery.
Pekka PT’s Gelsomina work was unusually receptive to source manipulation and cinematic association. Other releases drew upon material supplied by collaborators, invoked filmmakers including Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Cronenberg and Peter Greenaway, or combined abrasive electronics with psychological and visual references. This made Gelsomina more than a project devoted to undifferentiated sonic force. Its harshness could function as montage. Sounds collided the way dissimilar images collide in experimental film, creating meaning not through linear explanation but through proximity. A voice fragment placed beside shrieking feedback changes the emotional identity of both. A metallic repetition beneath low-frequency turbulence can suggest labor, captivity, ritual or malfunction without becoming a literal representation of any one of them.
“The Mercy Seat Is Melting” brings that montage instinct into the scrapyard. The documented materials of the album, feedback, metallic force and exchanged recordings, are fused into an extended process rather than presented as a catalog of separate effects. The piece’s duration matters because melting requires time. Destruction by impact is immediate and legible; destruction through heat is gradual, deforming the object while it remains recognizable. The listener is permitted to hear structures endure, buckle and disappear into surrounding density. Repetition does not stabilize the track. It increases temperature. Each recurrence returns with more accumulated damage, as though the recording medium itself were being forced to carry a load beyond its tolerance.
Gelsomina’s project name creates an additional, possibly unintended tension. Gelsomina is also the name of the fragile central character in Federico Fellini’s La Strada, a performer sold into the service of a brutal strongman and carried through a landscape of cruelty, comedy and spiritual desolation. There is no need to insist that every Gelsomina recording directly illustrates Fellini’s film, but the association hovers around the name. The contrast is powerful: a word connected in cinema with vulnerability and wounded innocence fronts music capable of extraordinary violence. Junkyard Behemoth intensifies the contradiction. Its Gelsomina does not stand outside the machine as a passive victim. The project enters the machinery, processes it and returns as something larger and less humanly readable.
After the sustained engulfment of the opening piece, Squamata’s “Poison On Poison” changes the album’s internal dimensions. A contemporary account described it as comparatively calmer after Gelsomina’s melting, though “calmer” within this environment remains a relative measurement. Its twelve minutes are marked by thunderous lower frequencies and high squeals moving across the stereo field. The title proposes accumulation without neutralization. Conventional chemistry suggests that a poison might be counteracted by an antidote, diluted by another substance or rendered inactive through treatment. Here poison is laid upon poison. Damage becomes the medium in which further damage circulates.
The spatial behavior is important. A low-frequency foundation establishes weight and apparent scale, while sharper sounds travel above or across it. This creates an organism with different levels of activity: a massive body below, nervous signals moving rapidly along its exterior. The behemoth is no longer an undifferentiated heap. It has metabolism. The low end provides organs and bulk; the squeals function as insects, alarms, exposed nerves or fragments of machinery rotating at dangerous speed. Their movement from one side to another prevents the listener from locating a stable center. The creature’s mass is obvious, but its head remains impossible to identify.
The name Squamata contributes to this bodily reading. In zoological classification, Squamata is the order containing snakes, lizards and related scaled reptiles. Whether AE and AO selected the term for its scientific meaning or simply for its sound, the word introduces skin, shedding, flexible anatomy and cold-blooded movement. Reptiles do not grow by preserving one permanent exterior. They periodically abandon a surface that once belonged to them. That image suits a project constructed from exchanged recordings. Source material becomes shed skin. It retains the shape of an earlier body but can be inhabited, displayed or torn apart by another.
Noise itself frequently behaves in this reptilian manner. A performer develops a technique, exhausts it, discards its visible form and retains only the muscular knowledge beneath it. A cassette becomes a CD, then files; each format is another skin surrounding the same unstable contents. Junkyard Behemoth arrived in a plastic keep case, a form associated more readily with video than with an ordinary compact disc jewel box. The packaging makes the release feel like an industrial component or evidence container rather than a conventional album. Its limited pressing of 300 copies gave the object a brief physical life, but the sound has continued migrating through rips, blogs and private archives. The skin changes while the vibration survives.
Squamata’s second contribution, “Die Elixiere Des Jeufels,” appears to deform the title of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Gothic novel Die Elixiere des Teufels, The Devil’s Elixirs. The printed “Jeufels” may be an intentional mutation, a typographical error or a piece of noise introduced into language itself. Whatever its origin, the damaged title is appropriate. Hoffmann’s novel is a delirious structure of temptation, murder, religious corruption, unstable identity and doubling. Its monk protagonist drinks from a forbidden elixir and enters a narrative in which guilt, inheritance, madness and resemblance repeatedly make the self impossible to secure. Squamata’s title drags that nineteenth-century crisis into an electronic and metallic environment.
An elixir normally promises concentrated transformation. It may heal, intoxicate, preserve life or open access to forbidden knowledge. Squamata’s version offers no clean distinction between medicine and poison. The preceding track has already established toxicity as cumulative; now the toxin becomes sacramental. The machine does not simply attack the body from outside. It is consumed. Feedback becomes a potion made from the system’s own excessive return, an output routed back into input until the circuit begins feeding upon itself. This is one of noise music’s most compelling technical and philosophical loops. The machine hears its own voice, reacts to it, produces a louder answer, and rapidly loses any external subject. It becomes narcissistic, possessed by self-reference.
This relationship mirrors the Gothic double. A feedback signal is both the original sound and its pursuing duplicate. Each cycle resembles what came before while accumulating distortion. The double is never an exact copy; it is the original returning with altered intensity. Hoffmann’s characters encounter identities that seem to repeat, inherit or impersonate one another. Squamata’s circuitry does something comparable without narrative. Tone follows tone, reflection follows reflection, until origin becomes impossible to recover. The result is not a story about possession but a possessed system, one whose behavior has crossed from instrument into apparent appetite.
The album’s shortest piece, “Enslaved By Ants,” closes the structure in 7:23. After titles invoking judicial execution, layered poison and diabolical intoxication, enslavement by ants initially seems almost comic. That scale reversal is one of the release’s sharpest ideas. A behemoth implies monumental size, but immense systems are often incapacitated by tiny agents acting collectively. Ants invade electrical housings, walls, food stores and machinery through openings too small for a human hand. No individual ant possesses the strength to overpower a large animal or industrial structure, yet thousands can dismantle, transport or occupy what none could control alone.
The metaphor also describes sound. A huge noise mass may be composed from innumerable small events: clicks, grains, oscillations, short loops, microscopic distortions and repeated impacts. The listener perceives one overwhelming body because the components move too quickly or densely to count. “Enslaved By Ants” turns the apparent hierarchy of the album inside out. The enormous scrapyard monster is not sovereign. Its surfaces are occupied by smaller processes, and those processes determine how the larger body moves. The behemoth has been animated, but it has also become a habitat.
Ant colonies further complicate individual authorship. Their intelligence is distributed. No single ant contains the blueprint for the colony’s total behavior, yet coordinated patterns emerge through local interactions. Junkyard Behemoth works similarly. Gelsomina and Squamata each contribute fragments without controlling every later use of those fragments. The final album contains decisions made by individuals, but its identity emerges from circulation between them. The shared source material functions like chemical information carried through a colony. A sound deposited by one participant causes a response in another; the resulting structure belongs to the network as much as to either named author.
This makes the album’s violence feel strangely generative. Its scrap metal is not simply smashed for the symbolic pleasure of destruction. Broken material becomes a foundation for construction. Feedback is not only a shriek of malfunction but a method of producing continuing energy from return. Distortion does not merely conceal information; it breeds new information by multiplying harmonics and accidental relationships. Even the album’s most abrasive surfaces are busy manufacturing. The junkyard is not the end of industrial life. It is an unauthorized factory whose products no longer have recognized uses.
There is an economic argument buried inside this aesthetic. Modern systems classify objects according to utility, novelty and exchange value. A machine that cannot perform efficiently becomes waste even when most of its material remains intact. Consumer culture depends upon this premature declaration of death. Noise reverses the judgment. It values objects precisely when they cease behaving as intended. A clean signal demonstrates successful engineering; a damaged amplifier reveals processes that engineering normally suppresses. A perfect steel panel disappears into a building; a bent panel makes its materiality audible. What commerce calls failure becomes artistic specificity.
The junkyard is therefore an anti-museum. A museum preserves selected objects by removing them from ordinary use, controlling climate and stabilizing interpretation. A junkyard preserves accidentally. Objects remain exposed to rust, weather, impact and scavenging. Their identities become less certain as labels disappear and components are separated from original assemblies. Noise artists approach this unstable archive without the curator’s obligation to protect it. They strike the exhibit, drag it across concrete, attach a contact microphone, send voltage through it and discover what history sounds like when preservation includes further damage.
Yet the album is not a fantasy of innocent recycling. The word “behemoth” keeps the scale threatening. Industrial debris carries the memory of extraction, labor, pollution, consumption and planned obsolescence. Metal does not appear from nowhere. It has been mined, refined, transported, shaped and discarded through systems extending far beyond the performers. By activating scrap, Gelsomina and Squamata awaken those hidden histories without narrating them directly. The resulting sound can feel exhilarating because it releases enormous physical energy, but its materials also belong to a civilization that produces wreckage faster than it can understand it.
The cover concentrates this history into a compressed brown, black and ochre field. It does not present a clear documentary view of an outdoor salvage yard. Mechanical forms appear layered, enlarged and partially obscured, with structures resembling springs, rods, ribs or collapsed frameworks crossed by heavy black gestures. The artists’ names are written in comparatively delicate white script near the lower center, almost swallowed by the surrounding machinery. Human designation has become a small mark inside the industrial body. The image seems less concerned with identifying particular objects than with creating a diagram of entanglement. Scrap has lost its former categories and become anatomy.
The contrast between the elegant lettering and the damaged mechanical field reflects the album’s internal relationship between composition and force. Nothing here is truly uncontrolled. The artists select, transfer, edit, layer and arrange. The delicacy of those decisions remains embedded inside a surface that presents itself as catastrophic. Harsh noise is often misheard as the opposite of composition because its materials are extreme. In reality, extremity increases the importance of small decisions. A slight shift in frequency can change pressure into pain, depth into flatness, movement into stasis. A few seconds of space can make the following impact feel dramatically larger. An overloaded signal still possesses shape.
Gelsomina and Squamata approach that shape from complementary directions. Gelsomina’s work often suggests montage, psychological contamination and the transformation of borrowed material. Squamata’s known performances emphasize concrete clatter, metal action, machine sound and the bodily transition from control into raging immersion. Junkyard Behemoth does not flatten those approaches into a shared house style. Instead, it allows them to infect one another while preserving differences. Gelsomina constructs the immense opening furnace. Squamata divides its response into three chambers, moving through poison, Gothic intoxication and insect collectivism. The disc feels less like equal halves than like one large event followed by three examinations of what survived.
Pekka PT ended Gelsomina in 2008 and continued exploring darker industrial territory through Sick Seed. This gives the 2007 release a retrospective importance that would not necessarily have been obvious at the time. It belongs to the final, extraordinarily productive phase of a project that issued tapes, collaborations, live recordings and compact discs at a pace suggesting almost compulsive activity. The same year also brought the Bizarre Uproar collaboration Assisted Self-Sterilization and the wonderfully titled Deus Ex Garbage Can cassette. Those titles reveal a recurring universe of waste, damaged bodies, mechanical intervention and corrupted transcendence. Junkyard Behemoth stands near the center of that universe because its method embodies its imagery. It is not merely music about refuse. It has been built through the reuse of sonic matter.
That distinction is crucial. Conceptual noise can fail when provocative titles and artwork promise an intensity that the recordings do not structurally contain. Here the title, production method, sound sources and packaging reinforce one another. Exchanged recordings are scrap. Individual compositions are rebuilt machines. Feedback is a system consuming its own output. The limited keep-case edition resembles an object recovered from an industrial evidence shelf. The cover collapses machinery into anatomy. Even the four track titles describe structures losing control over themselves: mercy melts, poison accumulates, an elixir possesses its drinker, and a giant is enslaved by insects.
The album’s deepest subject may therefore be failed sovereignty. Judges cannot preserve the mercy seat. Bodies cannot isolate one poison from another. The self cannot drink transformation without becoming divided. The large cannot rule the small. Artists cannot exchange material while retaining complete ownership of its meaning. Machines cannot amplify indefinitely without beginning to generate behavior of their own. Every hierarchy established by the titles is destabilized by circulation. Power moves through the system but belongs permanently to no single part.
This is where Junkyard Behemoth becomes more than a strong Finnish harsh-noise recording from a particularly active period. It proposes an ontology of noise. Things are not defined exclusively by what they were designed to do. Identity continues after function, damage and exchange. An abandoned object remains capable of entering new relationships; a recorded sound can survive separation from its source; an artist’s material can become part of another artist’s language without disappearing completely. The world is filled with afterlives that official systems classify as waste because they lack the vocabulary to recognize transformed use.
The listener participates in that process. To hear only undifferentiated abrasion is to repeat the economic judgment that discarded material has become meaningless. Attention reveals distinctions inside the apparent heap: low-frequency weight, stereo movement, metal resonance, high feedback, layered density, momentary openings and the differing compositional instincts of the two projects. The album teaches perception by initially threatening to overwhelm it. Its force says everything is happening at once; sustained listening answers that no two collisions are identical.
Junkyard Behemoth is perfectly titled because its monster never becomes a singular, polished creation. Bolts remain visible. Different metals retain different resonances. The creature lurches under the pressure of incompatible components, and that instability is precisely what keeps it alive. Gelsomina and Squamata do not restore discarded sounds to respectability. They preserve the damage, add further damage and discover that wreckage can possess structure without becoming repaired.
What rose from this particular Finnish yard in 2007 was not merely a collaboration, a split CD or an hour of hostile electronics. It was a temporary body built from exchanged nervous systems, failed machines and sounds severed from their original owners. Its mercy is molten, its bloodstream poisonous, its sacrament contaminated and its skin alive with insects. Nearly two decades later, the physical edition remains scarce, but the behemoth has continued shedding formats and moving between private archives. It was assembled from refuse, which may be why it has proved so difficult to kill.
