Pulling out my sutures
Pulling out
Let the blood let
For the last time get out now
Sleep Of Mirrors’ Not My Skin comes slithering out of the Chicago cable-laced gutter with its teeth filed down and its nerves exposed, a bass-driven slab of dark electronic body panic featuring Ronnie Canizaro (Born of Osiris) in a role that may surprise anyone expecting the usual metalworld detonation. Here he sounds less like a frontman trying to split the ceiling and more like a man transmitting from inside the walls, whispering through drywall, steel, dodgy wiring, and whatever awful private chamber keeps producing the self you wake up inside.
The track, from Sleep Of Mirrors’ debut album Crown, out now via Negative Gain Productions, plants Canizaro in a colder habitat: darkwave, electro, dark techno, industrial pressure, and the bruised mechanical glide one might file somewhere between Nine Inch Nails, Front Line Assembly, later Gary Numan, and Ministry at their most bad-tempered. The bassline does the stalking. The electronics scrape and tighten around it. Every element seems greased with hospital antiseptic and club-floor dread, the kind of music that understands the body as equipment, accident, prison, disguise, and evidence.
Not My Skin is about identity as an emergency. The lyrics keep returning to secrecy, blood, sutures, alien flesh, and sightless guilt, as if confession has become a surgical procedure performed without anesthesia. “Don’t tell” becomes less a warning than a reflex, the old instruction of someone trained to bury pain until the burial site starts breathing. When the refrain circles back to “Not my skin” and “Eyeless sin,” the song enters that grim zone where the self feels assigned, assembled, and possibly counterfeit. The ending it imagines is no clean liberation. It feels closer to rupture, panic, and a last exit from a world whose rules have suddenly become unbearable.
Directed and produced by Christopher Lee, with cinematography by Cornelius Kite and Tom Birch, the video pairs band footage filmed at Bourbon on Division with visions of a humanoid body under construction. A synthetic form is pieced together, animated, and left to confront the hideous metaphysical joke of receiving a body before receiving any clear consent to inhabit it. Christopher Lee’s video wall visuals, editing, and post effects push the performance footage into a slickly diseased theater of wires, limbs, screens, and staged resurrection.
Watch the video for Not My Skin below:
Not My Skin lands hard in the sick overlap between the nightclub, the lab, the operating room, and the mirror. Sleep Of Mirrors takes the familiar industrial question of man versus machine and drags it inward, toward the private horror of man versus flesh. By the end, the song feels less performed than extracted.
Listen to Not My Skin below and order the single, out now through Negative Gain Productions, here.
Sleep Of Mirrors spoke with Post-Punk.com about the new single and gave us a little insight into its creation:
Ronnie is known for Born of Osiris. How did he end up on a Sleep Of Mirrors track?
Chris: The answer is that we’re just really good friends.
Danny: Yea, the real story is that we’re homies and it’s organic.
Ronnie: We do music Thursdays. We write music together and we have fun. We’re not trying to be someone we’re not. We like doing what we’re doing.
So this was not a traditional “feature” situation?
Jay: On the surface it might look like we just got Ronnie as a feature, but no, that would be misleading.
Danny: Nothing was planned. It just sort of happened.
Chris. Yea, Ronnie was over, because he’s with us all the time when we’re making songs in the studio.
Ronnie: Yea, I was there and I said, “Let me try a vocal on it.”
What was the first spark for “Not My Skin”?
Danny: It came out as a bass riff first, then I added synthesizers and drums and brought it to Chris.
Chris: Right, similar to most of our songs, Danny comes up with some cool beats, synthesizers, and guitars as the bones, and then we bring them into the studio and rework them into songs that we all want to listen to.
Ronnie, what pulled you into this darker electronic world?
Ronnie: I wouldn’t even know about darkwave without Danny. The more I’m around Danny, Jay, and Chris, the more I have become a fan. Everything Danny shows me, I’m like, “Oh, this is cool. Let’s do something like that.”
People who know your voice from Born of Osiris may expect something more aggressive. What do you want them to know?
Chris: I think if people stumble across it and they know Ron and his music, it’s a completely different side of him. It’s less aggressive and more singing. The lyrical content is still intense, but the vocals are definitely not screaming.
Ronnie: It’s whispery and vibey.
Chris: For the vocal style, we were kinda trying to pull inspiration from Billie Eilish a bit. You can kinda hear that in the verses. Then Ron did a really cool chorus, so we just ran with it.
Jay, what does “Not My Skin” mean lyrically?
Jay: I had written a note about abjection, the ambiguity between a subject and an object. Where does the border of a person end? Is my skin the border of who I am, or is it something that I do in the world? That was the original theme, and then Ronnie took some of the lyric lines and created that punch in the chorus.
Ronnie: I was thinking about not feeling like you’re in or have control of your own body as if you’re being manipulated by the chaos around the world. I feel like I’m surrounded by sin and I’m not in my body. That’s how I was interpreting it.
How did that idea become the video concept?
Chris: Based on the lyrics, we kicked around a handful of concepts. Then there was this idea of, what if Not My Skin is actually a bot that is being built? We originally tried to make a build-a-Ron where he’s the bot at the end. But the AI kept giving him boobs, so we scrapped that and just did a more solid concept. It evolved into this idea of something synthetic coming to life and realizing that this is its skin and it doesn’t know how to feel.
Jay: When Chris was creating the music video, the idea of the bot being synthetic and coming to life just seemed to match organically with the song. From beginning to end, all of it felt like it was in the same world.
Ronnie: I think it’s sick.§
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