Cindytalk is the mercurial, expressionist outlet of Scottish artist Cinder, the incarnation of the Edinburgh-based late seventies punk band The Freeze, and is inspired by the crossroads of exploratory British post-punk and early European industrial music. Cindytalk constantly moved between industrial, post-punk, ambient, underground techno, and fully improvised music, while incorporating its interdisciplinary approach to performance, film, and other media. This included collaborations with This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins, and bassist Massimo Pupillo (of Zu, who, together with Cinder and Thighpaulsandra, aka Timothy Charles Lewis of space-rock Hawkwind, are the live iteration of Cindytalk ). Today, Cindytalk desires to create «a pure music».
That We Must Pass Through This Life is Cindytalk’s second album for Richard Chartier’s sound art kabel, LINE, following When the Moon is a Thread (LINE, 2023). The album features four carefully layered, expressionist, minimalist ambient poems that swing between abstract emotion and distant, nuanced noises. The titles of the pieces are borrowed from a poem by Japanese mid-Heian poet Izumi Shikibu: «I go out of the darkness / Onto a path of darkness / lit only by the far off moon / On the edge of the mountains». The cover photo was taken by Cinder of the Beaver Moon above Shawlands, Glasgow, in November 2025.
That We Must Pass Through This Life suggests an elusive sensibility of being out of time or of time suspended. The four pieces sound like cinematic, atmospheric dreamscapes, but of mysterious, dark, and alien landscapes. But with a captivating, highly immersive presence that reaches its emotional climax on the last, «on the edge of the mountains», suggesting an awakening to a lively, cathartic morning.
The release of That We Must Pass Through This Life coincides with Cindytalk’s other album, Sunset And Forever (The Helen Scarsdale Agency, 2026). Both albums were recorded simultaneously in the spring and Summer of 2025, using sonic sources from old hard drives, and sounds previously unused or only partially used, now reworked, with additional sounds.
Eyal Hareuveni
