Second Skin by Serenda
Rhythm Section is proud to welcome emerging London based Producer, Serenda to the label with an arresting sophomore EP: “Second Skin”
Serenda's productions draw from the canon of Black electronic music with fearless intuition-always deep, always moving, always unpredictable: executed with a deft emotional fluidity.
Second Skin is a shape-shifting sonic world where flesh, identity, and memory blur into something entirely new. The EP wasn't written as an overt statement about duality or identity-but in retrospect, that's exactly what it revealed.
Revelling in the twisted, chaotic percussion associated with greats such as Maurice Fulton and Joe Clausell, Serenda’s music balances light and dark, organic and mechanical, tension and release.
The dualities of her approach are evident throughout the EP but despite all these opposites, a great sense of balance is found. Influences are worn proudly on her sleeve but conventions are confidently thrown out of the window. Serenda is an artist who refuses to fit into a box.
" I enjoy a lot playing with the tension between seduction and defiance. I wanted to make music that feels like flesh under club lights-real, sweating, mutating."
“Part Seven” teases us with a soft Larry Heard-esque Juno pad before it disintegrates into deconstructed-club era sound design and growling baselines reminiscent of Malin Genie at his most experimental.
The lead track “Ms. Nightstress” has us floating in a primordial soup of frenetic drums and cascading doom chords. It’s a heads-down-big-room techno curveball. Just when we think we know where it’s taking us, in come the saxophones and the R&B vocals - invoking Carl Craig at his most demented.
"People expect me to be one thing," she says,
“…but I never am. And that tension-that refusal to fit-is where l find my power."
Each track moves with a different skin peeling away - guttural club rhythms, tender off-kilter grooves, distorted percussion and haunting motifs. Together, they form a body: shedding, sweating, mutating. It's music for the dancefloor-but also for liminal spaces, for becoming.
"I realised afterwards that the EP sounds so diverse because I am so diverse," Serenda says. "These different sounds, moods, and textures-they're all parts of me. I don't fit into one category, and maybe that's the point. I'm the common thread. I'm all of it…am dual."
This record packs so much punch for a 4 track EP. It’s a major statement from a singular artist.
It's music for bodies in flux; for those finding power in their own contradictions.
“Second Skin is the beginning of the mythos," Serenda explains. "It's a premonition. A shedding-but also an arrival."
Tracklist
| 1. | Angry Sol | 5:13 |
| 2. | Hive Mind | 4:48 |
| 3. | Part Seven | 4:02 |
| 4. | Ms. Nightstress | 5:27 |
