You Run Through the World Like An Open Razor

(Album Release 31st of October 2025)

Bruise Blood

‘You Run Through the World Like An Open Razor’

The taxidermy parrot had been a constant presence, there on the mantelpiece in Mike Bourne’s childhood home for as long as anyone could remember. No one was quite sure where it had come from – an heirloom? A chance find from an antique shop? All that seemed clear was that over time it had assumed mystical significance, watching calmly over everything that ensued.

Years and several domestic interior rethinks later, the parrot was withdrawn from its post, yet seemed too important to simply retire to a box in the attic. It was offered to a local museum, where it was received with thanks. A year or so later however, the museum was suddenly in touch. They were loath to go into details, but they were wondering if the parrot could be returned?

On collecting it, it became clear that strange things had been occurring in its auspices. Malfunctioning electronic equipment, inexplicable temperature changes, barking dogs. These had all happened enough times that certain museum staff were becoming convinced it was cursed.

Mike was offered it, and given it held crucial sway in his early memories, he was glad to give it a new home. There once again it sat, in his room and overlooking his home studio, as he sculpted music that took on unforeseen new dimensions. He pursued these uncanny vibrations right through to the creation of Bruise Blood’s debut, ‘You Run Through This World Like An Open Razor’.

The consequence is an album very much driven by supernatural forces – spectral influence moving through machine form to summon grandeur and abjection both. Whilst Bourne’s work with Teeth Of The Sea might give dystopian signposts to some, the soundscapes and explorations here - channelling techno, industrial, post-punk, minimalism and beyond – function to sculpt one singular vision. Recorded and mixed by Bourne himself and mastered by Amir Shoat (Dean Blunt, Klein, John T.Gast) it’s an audial realm as redolent of the disorientating world of a Harlan Ellison short story as bathing in the relentless strobe light of a 3AM dancefloor epiphany.

Whilst the EBM-tinged and bleakly addictive opening banger ‘The Pressure’ and the acid-fuelled powerdrive of ‘You’re In Control’ hint towards the lure of black-walled basements, You Run Through The World Like An Open Razor is a many-splendored beast, its tentacles extending across territory as disparate as the sinister NIN/PiL showdown ‘Oh But You Can, Oh But You Will’, the NYC-meets-YMO denouement of ‘Glass Nine’ or more surprising still, ‘Until The Sun Breaks Down’ which sends delirious dreampop songcraft through prisms of binary disorientation to rapturous effect.

Perhaps Bruise Blood’s vibrant, excoriating debut is the sound of humanity moving with slow inevitability towards darker times, alchemically transmuted into cinematic serendipity and beauty. Perhaps it’s merely the inspired work of one man, driven by forces he doesn’t entirely understand.

Perhaps only the parrot – the spirit animal still standing sentinel as we embark on an uncertain new aeon – really knows.

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