I keep on not dying

So many artists will relate to FHMY; he doesn’t see art as a calling but more like a curse. In his latest collaboration with AQL, "I Keep on Not Dying", the Egyptian artist taps into the tormented logic of Kafka and Camus — not for aesthetic flair, but to map the internal cost of staying alive in a world that feels structurally against you. There’s no salvation in sound here. Just noise, memory, pressure. And a refusal to disappear.

This isn’t a homage to Western rock influences creeping into Cairo’s underground. It’s the opposite. It’s the sound of an artist contorting under the pressure of simply existing, making meaning out of contradiction, and finding language — philosophical, sonic, or otherwise — to speak about violence without glorifying it.

FHMY’s sound pulls heavily from shoegaze and noise traditions, but it feels more like a personal collapse than a genre exercise. Drenched in distortion and static, the track closes with a sampled poem from Neon Genesis Evangelion, as if anime’s apocalyptic melodrama is the only fitting frame for a life lived inside a contradiction: to be visible but unseen, to be thinking but unheard, to scream into reverb that never settles.

A quote from Tarkovsky haunts the track’s conception: “Art is born out of an ill-designed world.” The sentiment echoes in every screech of distortion and submerged vocal. If Kafka’s Metamorphosis left its character trapped as a bug, FHMY’s transformation is even crueler — he wakes up as himself, over and over again, condemned to feel and create in a loop that never ends.

Noise becomes more than a genre here — it’s a coping mechanism. A refusal. A weapon. "I Keep on Not Dying" doesn’t offer transcendence. It leaves you submerged in the fog of a society that doesn’t kill you, but doesn’t let you live either.

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