England / Ohio’s Mat Sweet presents his latest album under the Boduf Songs moniker via The Flenser! Stench of Exist is at once his most accessible and most esoteric work to date; from the opium flow of the tracks, running headily into one another like tributaries to river, to the muted-industrial-electronic-effected drums underscoring the spiraling melodies and fluttering drones, to the clean and rich guitar, abstracted cycles and feedback walls, its whispered doom metal masquerades as a lullaby. Stench of Exist unfolds languorously, laced with mysterious electronic filigree. Gorgeously intimate, it transforms the minimal into maximal with layers of electro-detritus wreathed in lush guitar strums, street-side field recordings, reverberating pianos and softly crooned vocals. It is a record of rain and cities and nighttime. The collision of arabesque tonalities with electronic sound and ambience brings to mind the promise of Blade Runner—half-asleep at 4:00 A.M. and slightly medicated, with pyramids and flame-spewing cityscapes in downpour glowing against the fluttering eyelids in the almost-dreaming consciousness. A record for saturnine commuters, on headphones, after sunset.
“Unsettling and gorgeous...” —All Music Guide
“In Boduf Songs’ brutal theology, darkness devours light, death defeats the living, and nature and culture are at perpetual fisticuffs.” —Pitchfork
“Boduf Songs makes some of the duskiest, autumnal and beautiful loner psychedelia.” —Stereogum
“The spare use of his blurry instrumentation is the secret ingredient to the horror in these songs. Sweet packs a punch for such a quiet fellow, and his vortex is indeed a powerful one.” —Tiny Mix Tapes