Heinali and Matt Finney are a transcontinental avant-garde electronic music project consisting of Ukranian composer Oleg Shpudeiko (Heinali) and Alabama-based spoken word poet Matt Finney. Their new album, How We Lived (their first for The Flenser), sees the duo return with their first release since 2011. Like their prior collaborations, Heinali provides a lush, foreboding soundtrack to Matt Finney's bleak narrations, but How We Lived demonstrates a more considered approach. The result is four long tracks which are denser and more cogent than anything they've released in the past. Matt Finney provides his most intimate and harrowing words to date, evoking the type anguish and enmity that only someone who has probed the depths of despair can. 

The duo first met online in 2010 and immediately began collaborating on their first EP. From there they established a prolific working relationship, recording and releasing a series of albums and EPs over the next two years. After the release of 2011's Ain't No Night, Matt Finney found himself in a bad place. A series of misfortunes, including familial illness, the death of his biological father, a miscarriage, and the failed release of their follow up album, drove him to drugs and alcohol. For the next two years he lived in a trailer as far away from society as he could get, where he languished in misery and rage. He gave up writing and human contact entirely. Eventually, his head cleared enough for him to realize how much his past work with Heinali had helped him deal with life's seemingly endless disappointments, and he emerged from his self-imposed exile eager to feel that catharsis again. The duo reconnected and began collaborating on new material. How We Lived is the result of those missing years. 

How We lived will be released digitally and as a limited edition vinyl LP by The Flenser on August 11th 2017. Pre-order. Bandcamp. European pre-order. Back in 2011, experimental upstarts Wreck and Reference self-released their debut EP, Black Cassette. Drawing on the blown out intensity of black metal and the angularity of noise rock, Black Cassette was a radical vision that captivated the underground music scene, including The Flenser. It was immediately apparent that Wreck and Reference operated in their own intriguing realm of heavy music, representing an existential challenge to genre orthodoxy. Their crashing riffs and abrasive noise, fraught with themes of determinism and Cormac McCarthy-esque isolation, were a breath of apocalyptic air in the often stagnant world of metal music. But the most surprising aspect of their artfully constructed sound was that the duo utilized only samples and live drums to create it. Recorded in a garage in the "Howling Wastelands" of California, Black Cassette was originally self-released by the band as a limited cassette in 2011, then as a limited CDr on Music Ruins Lives. Later that year it was remastered for a vinyl release by The Flenser. That version is long sold out and has become a sought after collectors item. Now, Black Cassette is set to be re-pressed on vinyl from the original master for the first time since its initial run with brand new artwork. Pre-order. Bandcamp. European pre-order.