DIE DIE BE’s ‘Erased Faces’ is what happens when ‘be yourself’ comes with a fucking dress code. Featuring Dimitri Barbati, the industrial art-rock and experimental electronic track comes for every institution that smiles politely while sanding you down into somebody easier to control. My boyfriend loved the wild-eyed, feral version of me with mascara smeared from everything we’d done at 2 a.m., but four hours before his firm’s holiday party, a white dress straight out of June Cleaver’s closet appeared on my bed because his partners were ‘traditional.’ I sarcastically asked where the fucking pearl necklace was and let him decide which kind I meant. By my second drink, I was staring at the white dress in the bathroom mirror and wondering why the woman he wanted in bed had to disappear before cocktails. ‘Erased Faces’ understands the humiliation of seeing your name attached to a version of yourself that feels counterfeit. That is the sick little bargain ‘Erased Faces’ exposes: they will let you belong once the most alive parts of you are gone.
The opening verse digs into what makes you you, and following its logic makes me feel like I wandered into a philosophy seminar after two martinis without reading the syllabus. “Faux terrain represents a reality to me / Of me to be a me / I’m walking, I’m walking / I’m mistaking my materiality with me / To be a me and believe to be / You believe in me? / Whereby I am actually (only) becoming / In this papers, the faces erased is / No content, impotent and rodent / Character and drive in the body, gone / A figure of figures, I figure / So powerless.” What I hear is somebody realizing that a body and a document can describe you without ever containing you. “Impotent and rodent” may be political degradation or surreal wordplay; pretending I can pin it down would be bullshit.
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Then the song starts checking whether identity belongs to the person wearing it. “Are you me? Are you me? / Are you just like me / Or just believing to be? / I’ve lost my face, says the Pope to Mussolini / I’ve lost my face, says Sokrates to Heraklit / I’ve lost my face, says Frieda to a Medici / Be glad, be glad, be glad / Isn’t it in nothingness where you’re everything?” That is one damn strange guest list. Each name arrives carrying history and a face the world already recognizes, then admits the same private terror. Strip away the image and even power starts begging for proof that somebody is still underneath.
Its sharpest thought arrives when belonging begins to look suspiciously seductive. “In isolation, I can be guided / In unification, I found ground / Faces lead masses / Facelessness in faith unites / The faceless face of abuse / In grimaces, in ruins and bullet holes / In my soul / Leave my soul, leave my soul / Material destruction ruins spirit / Spirits make numb / Are you with me? / Still there with me?” A group can promise safety while quietly taking ownership of whoever steps inside it. When the imagery turns toward physical violence, the philosophical haze finally gets a fucking consequence. Erasure stops being an intellectual exercise once somebody else profits from making you smaller.
By the final passage, it sounds as though somebody is barking instructions during a riot inside your head. “Renounce the faceless faces / The foreign power / Dissolve in a mass of massive masslessness / And raise our faces / Erase our faces / Raise our faces / Erase your face / Raise your face / Erase your faith / Raise your faith / Erase your race.” The wordplay stays slippery as hell, and that instability serves the song. Every order changes meaning according to who gets to give it. Of course the meaning keeps shifting when authority can slap a new name on you whenever it fucking pleases.
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DIE DIE BE founders Liliane Bürli and Bujar Berisha have no patience for polite little songs when the human identity crisis is already this fucked up. The Swiss experimental art-rock project uses drums and synthesizers in theatrical performances that make questions about power feel physical. Their work gets into migration and intimacy without flattening either into a tidy little message for the audience to take home. Self-exploitation brings the especially fucked-up twist, because sometimes you catch yourself doing the institution’s dirty work.
That white-dress holiday party ended with me telling my boyfriend the dress was coming off after dessert, but the pearl necklace was no longer on offer. I stayed for the open bar, then took an Uber home without him. ‘Erased Faces’ understands why leaving felt so damn good: belonging is a shitty prize when admission requires becoming unrecognizable to yourself. The dress spent the night crumpled on his side of the bed; the relationship did not make it through breakfast.
