The Flenser today released a new live album by experimental industrial noise artist Uboa, and I'm singling it out today because this release touches on the intersection of heavy music and wellness. Uboa mastermind Xandra Metcalfe has been diagnosed with some chronic conditions, and sales of this recording will help fund her medical care. Bandcamp link and full background on the recording after the break. 

In 2024, Uboa was commissioned by Roadburn to compose two original works: “Calm Down,” a soothing piece, and its counterpart, “Meltdown,” performed alongside TOomD’s “Shut Down.” At the time, Uboa was dealing with upheaval in her private life related to AuDHD and preparing for her first overseas performances. The two pieces became a way of exploring a familiar cycle of overwhelm and exhaustion, and of coming to terms with the difficulty of navigating a world that often expects disabled people to function as though they are not disabled.

Every Reactor Four a Friend is the live recording of “Meltdown,” captured from the desk at Roadburn and subsequently remixed and slightly reworked. Elements of the performance, including onboard vocal effects and some microphones, were absent from the available stems, requiring creative decisions in the mix. There are small differences from what was heard in the room or on the original live video, but the intention was to translate the force of that performance into a recording that could exist on its own.

The title takes its name from Reactor Four at Chernobyl, the reactor that melted down in the 1986 nuclear disaster. Here, meltdown becomes a metaphor not for failure but for what happens when a system is pushed beyond what it can contain. For Uboa, the record is about resisting the shame attached to autistic overwhelm and the expectation that it should simply be suppressed.

“It’s about embracing the overwhelm rather than shaming oneself for it,” Uboa says. “All the shame, anger and overwhelm was put in this short performance.”

Musically, Every Reactor Four a Friend is Uboa at her most direct. Built largely from power electronics and cut up harsh noise, it recalls the extremity of earlier work such as The Sky May Be while standing in stark contrast to the increasingly intricate construction of her recent records and EPs. It is a document of Uboa as a live performer: immediate, volatile and deliberately overstimulating.

The circumstances surrounding the work have also changed since it was written. Uboa composed “Meltdown” before becoming more seriously chronically ill following a viral infection, lending its confrontation with disability and personal limits an unintended additional weight. What began as an attempt to make sense of overwhelm now captures a particular moment just before those limits shifted again.

Every Reactor Four a Friend does not attempt to resolve that overwhelm. It gives it somewhere to go. As Uboa puts it, “Sometimes it’s fine to just crash the fuck out. Sometimes it is necessary.”