LABORED BREATH
The brainchild of SF Bay Area-based solo musician JK, Labored Breath is the artist's sonic interpretation of the slow and inexorable claiming of death. Labored breath is the state of increasingly troubled and fatigued breathing in the dying. It is the onset of reckoning, the moment in which the end comes into sight for the first time in a person's life. It is the total and unmistakeable first manifestation of death to the living, and JK's project Labored Breath explores this concept sonically via the implacable and merciless life-devourment of black metal. Almost in the self-tiled sense, the band's towering debut LP for Sentient Ruin, released in 2021, is titled "Dyspnea", the literal medical definition of having labored breath, a title which encapsulates the project's incipit and core concept, while establishing the project with an ominous aura of inevitability and inescapability. Taking its main queues from the violence and negativity of French black metal (Antaeus, Aosoth, Deathspell Omega), and the sinister atmospherics of Icelandic black metal (Svartidauði, Misþyrming, Sinmara) Labored Breath remains a purely USBM-bred entity with an almost encyclopedic yet defiant approach to the craft, and a strong penchant for unpredictability and unorthodoxy. Bands like Nightbringer, Ruins if Beverast, Blut Aus Nord, as well as certain strains of European funeral doom and death metal are also skillfully referenced or hinted at in the songwriting without ever becoming overly obvious structural identifiers, leaving the project perpetually shrouded in a profound sense of shapeshifting ambiguity.