The 4-track EP Scar Routine, now presented on exude records, is a record about what happens after rupture.

Not the wound itself, and not the fantasy of returning to a body or a self untouched by what happened. It inhabits the strange territory afterwards, when pain has already altered the tissue and the question becomes how to live with what remains, how to soften around it, and how to participate in one’s own healing.

Across the EP, physical recovery becomes a language for psychic repair. The songs move through paralysis, dissociation, rage, grief, self-abandonment, reconstruction and care, repeatedly returning to the same wounds from different angles. Sometimes the instinct is to disappear. Sometimes it is to dismantle everything. Sometimes it is simply to stay.

In Paralysis, the body becomes unreachable. There is no ground, no movement, no touch, no colour, no sound. The raw and percussive elements music with the staccato synth stabbing through the drums are underlining the stress the mind is in even though the body is in freeze. The longing for someone to pull the self out of the nightmare eventually collapses into a frightening recognition: there are no rescuers coming.

“I am my only rescuer.”

But Scar Routine does not leave that recognition in isolation.

Aktar 7ada is the beginning of the self-rescue to acquire the gestures of tenderness: I comfort myself. I witness myself. I warm myself. I hold myself. I protect myself. I forgive myself.

“I am the one who needs me the most” 

is not an argument for isolation. It is the recognition that whatever love, intimacy or community may exist around us, we cannot build a life by continuously abandoning ourselves. It’s almost as if the hectic and raw musical sphere is being tamed into a polyrhythmic layer of comfort underlined with a strong and soothing bassline.

To tend to the wound is to refuse self-abandonment.

Tafkeek, dismantling, takes that practice into the structures of the mind. Old assumptions, filters and patterns are pulled apart, inspected and rearranged. The self that appears afterwards is neither an untouched former self nor an entirely new person. Rolling repetitiveness was in the center of the musical curation around it like attending to a wound in rhythm and frequency with a certain attitude to strengthen the scar for it to be harder to break. It is this scar tissue: material formed through rupture and repair, carrying the history of what happened while becoming capable of something different. By the end, even the heart is reclaimed.

In Yom Wara Yom, healing loses any illusion of being a single breakthrough. It happens day after day after day. Writing becomes a way of recovering voice. Understanding arrives incrementally. Tight spaces can be widened. What feels impossible can be made slightly easier.

And here, the practice begins to move outward.

A hand is offered. A shoulder becomes somewhere to rest a head. Tears are allowed to fall in a dubbed out sea of low end with strings sliding in and out of a meditative sonical sphere. The attempt to create safety for oneself expands into the possibility of creating safer spaces together.

What begins with “I am my only rescuer” does not end in self-sufficiency. Instead, the record arrives at something more interdependent: no one else can do the intimate work of tending to our wounds for us, but neither are we meant to heal alone.

TRACKLIST

1. Praralisis

2. Aktar 7ada

3. Tafkeek

4. Yom Wara Yom

CREDITS

Vocals + Lyrics: Enana
Music Production: Damiana
Mixing + Mastering: Damiana
Photography:
Artwork:
Text: Enana
Label: exude records

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Damiana — Linktree | Instagram | SoundCloud