Australian sound artist Thembi Soddell has released a new short film from her latest LP, Love Songs, out now on Room40.

Love Songs is an intense and extreme assault on the senses, an album full of dynamic tension and unforgiving sonic environments. The album looks to abuse within relationships and the connection to mental illness, as Thembi explains:

“The title Love Songs is a little dark humor on my behalf. As the compositional process evolved the work became a meditation on the lived experience of insidious forms of abuse within supposedly loving relationships, in connection with certain forms of mental illness. These experiences are ones of extremes and emotional intensities; the tensions between horror, beauty, rage, desire, confusion, love, and perceptual annihilation. Also, a good deal of the source material for the album is the voice. I asked Alice Hui-Sheng Chang to vocalize perceptual collapse, which I sampled and manipulated into expressions of these themes. So, these are my love songs.”

The album was also released alongside an extensive book that outlines “more literal readings of her ideas of sonic affect, contemporary relationships, and the nature of becoming.”

You can pick up the album here, with the film for the album’s opening track streaming in full via the player above.