JK Flesh

They say matter is given mass by Justin K. Broadrick. Metal listeners will know him through Godflesh, whose industrial weight has crossed genre boundaries since the late 1980s. Others arrive through Techno Animal’s dirty hip-hop grooves, the ecstatic Jesu or Council Estate Electronics. Here, the focus is JK Flesh.

When Posthuman appeared on 3BY3 in 2012, the project still carried something of Godflesh’s Us and Them: massive guitar noise, violent vocals and thick atmospheres. The subsequent split with Prurient, Worship Is the Cleansing of the Imagination, travelled further into the hostile ground between metal and heavy electronics without losing that identity. By Rise Above, released by Electric Deluxe in 2016, JK Flesh had become something else again: a sound as hypnotic as it was immense.

In the records

STM 200 is a semi-live session. Broadrick combines DJing with live mixing of stems from his own tracks, bringing machines into the performance. Most of these twelve pieces date from 2015–2016. They were gritty to begin with, but there is even less polish here, as if they were meteors disintegrating through friction.

The slower motion turns JK Flesh into a shambling, unstoppable body. The music’s connection to minimal techno becomes more apparent, even as its surfaces warp under pressure. There is a malicious humour in the hi-hats and the shifting weight of the rhythms. Chopping, slowing and dubbing the material reveals a narcotic side of these tracks.

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It is easy to lose oneself in the details inside that wall of sound: half-delivered melodies, a snare’s unusually short decay, the physical presence of a bassline. The way the tracks are reimagined and joined together makes this an hour to return to.

The mix recalls François Arnal’s 1959 painting La Lumière Toujours Plus Lointaine. Organic, overbearing and at times pitch black, it also contains a playfulness that unsettles any fixed reading.

Justinas S13 on JK Flesh

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What makes this contribution worth reopening is the decision to put finished tracks back at risk. A stem can be stretched, a familiar rhythm made unstable, a piece of recorded music turned into something that happens again in the room. For me, that is the lasting invitation in STM 200: to hear production as a continuing physical practice.

Broadrick’s catalogue continues to develop. The 2026 split Shouting the Odds pairs JK Flesh with Mick Harris’s Monrella, while Rise Above is available again through Avalanche. They offer two routes out of this archive recording: back to the material around it, or forward into the ongoing work.

JK Flesh on the mix

Recorded live by Justin K Broadrick as JK FLESH at Avalanche, no overdubs, no post processing.

Hybrid of DJ and live mixing of stems from existing tracks, coupled with live machines in the mix. All tracks are chopped, screwed, dubbed and mutated.