Noise Against Fascism flexes their tendons, clenches their fist and pulls back from the brink to deliver a blistering cacophony of harsh electronics for a new release on Brachliegen. Hand/Fist is aural struggle against a feeling of contemporary socio-political melancholia, manifest in two differing approaches to confrontational noise and bludgeoning tone. In the wake of a relentless decimation of social communality, Mathias Kristersson cites the importance of art and utopian ideals for both the individual and collective political imagination as the central tenets of the Noise Against Fascism project.

Opening side Hand is an immediate, claustrophobic piece. It moves like vessels under the skin; tweaks of bioelectricity swarm beneath a constant slab of force, which remains firm and unerring despite the constant and subtle shifting of the deluge. Swathes of oscillations stab and recoil, feeding back into themselves in a stutter before driving downwards once more into the confusion of an electrical storm. Piercing through squealing abscesses of clattering feedback, sounds are led to the slaughter kicking and screaming, only to dust themselves off and go back for more. Respite comes occasionally, peaking its head above the maelstrom, only to be swiftly dragged back down by the heavy undertow of noise.

Fist feels primordial in comparison, minimalist in its slow and steady throbs of overblown sombre drone. Circling the abyss, a turgid electronic dirge sounds the lament. A swollen and flickering groan of church organ tone, clenched in the bondage of an undulating tidal flow, it pounds like a fist on the chest as swathes of static seep in like the slow rot of some timeless, tired pestilence. Locking itself into this unnerving groove, the dragging weight of the track eats away at itself for 12 minutes, before the great beast collapses back into its pit.

The open hand shows the lines of its palm, the hopes for a future and the marks of the past; it is fluid and flexible, open but vulnerable. The closed fist is ready to strike, a symbol of unified action and solidarity in the face of constant threat. Each remains co-constitutive of the other — two sides of the same force — united by a becoming they share in collective strength and action.