Listening to the opening track on bela’s Noise and Cries (굉음과울음) sounds like what I’d imagine it feels like to be eaten alive. “The Sage” lures the listener in with a low, menacing growl that conjures the same unsettling sensation as a predator stalking its prey. Shattering the tension is the pounding of a kickdrum that unleashes a cacophony of riotous sounds. Guttural death metal roars are paired against an abrasive rhythm baked on the eotmori jangdan, an irregular traditional Korean beat in what comes across like a call to action. “I wanted to lose control, I wanted to breathe outside of this confinement. I wanted to express my rage outside of gender,” they assert.

If Noise and Cries begins by tearing apart the past limb by limb, what follows is a cruel metamorphosis, where ego melts away and pockets of rage scream out from the rubble. “I wanted to vocalise about the pressurised life in South Korea, and the feeling of loving and hating your homeland,” they expand. “Processing toxic familial (literally and figuratively) relationships not by slowly growing out of it but getting ripped out of it in a second, like a car crash.” Growing up queer and non-binary, the Berlin-based artist takes cues from progressive death metal to obliterate gendered vocals, manipulating their voice to encompass their “subhuman” rage – it’s the first time they’ve recorded their voice. “As a non-binary person with voice dysphoria, I sought growling as a means of transcending gender and arriving in an alien point of view. I wanted to lose control, I wanted to breathe outside of this confinement. I wanted to express my rage outside of gender.”

The album itself is a recording of bela’s live set that attracted the attention of the organisers at leading experimental festival Unsound, who paired up with Berlin-based label Subtext for its release. Combining elements of Berlin club culture and Pungmul, a traditional Korean folk music, bela sings in broken-down Pansori lyrics (a genre of musical storytelling) in imaginary tales that can’t be understood by foreign ears but the mood translates flawlessly. “There’s such joy in listening to a good growl. What if joy was a gender?”

Congrats on the album release. Can you tell me about some of the inspirations behind it?

bela: Thank you! It’s called Noise and Cries, or 굉음과 울음 in Korean. While wading through an absolute storm of a winter (in my personal life, not so much the weather) after arriving in Berlin, I was in a deep state of depression. I was still living in my friend’s place, and I had left so abruptly with all the pressure just piling up. One day, I decided to finally head out and have a walk through the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood and after that walk something clicked in my heart. An image of myself, hit by a car, surfaced in my mind. And I decided to call this album Noise and Cries. I wanted to vocalise about the pressurised life in South Korea, and the feeling of loving and hating your homeland. Processing toxic familial (literally and figuratively) relationships not by slowly growing out of it but getting ripped out of it in a second – like a car crash, like pulling out your baby tooth with a plier.

How would you describe your music?

bela: It’s a hanpuri session of a morally dubious queer South Korean lower-middle class person who wants to poke at people in power but also hides from the power a little bit because of fear. Hanpuri means the un-knotting of sorrow and rage as a verb noun. Have you listened to what people are shouting in the streets? Kind of like that, but done in a way that you would be actually curious about because it's in Korean and it's in growling vocals over an electronic production with a spine.

What's your earliest memories of music? How did you start making music?

bela: Mom was listening to that one famous John Denver album while driving to my aunt’s place in Seoul. That CD was apparently from one of her old restaurant’s clients. Oh and maybe Mozart piano from her music for babies CD. I started making music by covering indie bands on a Garageband app and later bootlegging Britney Spears dubstep era, Hold It Against Me.

Please share the most recent note from your notes App!

bela: ‘Frederic Malle – Portrait of a Lady – Dominique’. Somebody smelled nice in Prague and I just asked what they were wearing and they were kind enough to let me know who made it. I want my significant other to wear it.

“There’s such joy in listening to a good growl. What if joy was a gender?” – bela

What’s your favourite cornershop snack?

bela: Späti are expensive in Berlin so I just go to Kaufland and buy cranberry and white chocolate cookies. Only €1.75. If you love it... I know you, I feel you. But I’m trying to quit cookies because I feel my blood vessels hardening. So to speak. Kind of. Approximately. Who knows?

What’s your weirdest internet obsession?

bela: Weirdness is something I don’t meditate enough on... I always feel too out-weirded by my friends to declare anything I do is weird, by this point. Two of my friends were obsessed with bog butter at some point but that is not the internet. And there are some guys obsessing over Bluey and Delicious in Dungeon. I truly don’t know anymore, I lost it. The weirdest is the South Korean government using the number 2,000 on their press releases.

If you could only listen to one musician for the rest of your life, who would it be?

bela: Why would you do that? But maybe Crystal Kay’s 4 Real album.

What would the line-up be in your nightmare blunt rotation?

bela: I don’t smoke babes. I’m a South Korean, are you telling me to break the law?

What music are you listening to right now?

bela: Online friend’s recommendations and my own stumblings. Andrea Ferraris and Barnacles’ Autumn is Coming, We‘re All in Slowmotion, Seth Cluett’s Forms of Forgetting, Mick Turner’s Moth, Spectral Voice’s Sparagmos, Malibu’s Palaces of Pity and Crystal Kay.

You encounter a hostile alien race and sound is their only mechanism for communication. What song would you play to them to inspire them to spare you and the rest of the human race?

bela: 심청가. Simcheongga. Maybe from the great Ahn Sook Sun.

Noise and Cries is out now