The artist formerly/also known as People Skills reemerges amidst smoke-clouded light as S.B.A. (meaning Samael B. Aaens, apparently, that B cryptically hanging in the air like the J in Homer. J. Simpson...), though remains glued to the same sticky path of murky sonic unspooling of former exploits, albeit in somewhat (even!) more dissolved form. If there’s a major difference in approach it’s the absence of Jesse S. Dewlow’s voice, with a Heresy Museum an entirely instrumental affair (save for one snippet of sampled dialogue), built from percolating synths and purgatorial drone ambience, like a particularly lunar and decayed Berlin School mutation. This is music firmly for the in-between zones, the sound of collapsing machines and - gulp - liminal spaces that conjures a slightly uneasy feeling of the unknown. People Skills, and Dewlow’s other group, Eyes of the Amaryllis, often expressed that same feeling, but with S.B.A. there’s an even greater gesture towards the outre, a little more nebulous and unmoored, existent in its own sticky amber of time.
