The despair surrounding the question of who we actually are within a posthuman technocracy—embedded in the collective of a catastrophic and cybernetic society—is what MurkRat evokes on Drudging the Mire. In her musical and lyrical exploration, Mandy Andresen approaches an understanding of the world that moves beyond an anthropocentric framework. Her artistic vision parallels Thacker’s concept of the world-without-us, in which human subjectivity is unsettled by the perspective of an indifferent universe.
Choirs from the Church of the Cybernetic Post-Apocalypse
Musically fragmented by piano outbursts and screams, the album is radically personal in its construction. Drudging the Mire offers a disturbing, almost intimate form of self-recognition in which disgust, despair, and truth are inseparably intertwined. Andresen frames her misanthropic reflections on humanity within a sacral atmosphere, situated between ritualistic choirs and Gregorian chants. At the same time, she subverts and fractures this sacred dimension by combining the endlessly reverberating voice with minimalist yet crushing guitar work, while repeatedly giving way to eruptions of desperate madness.
This pairing—between reduced, often sacral and near-meditative arrangements and free, not simply aggressive but rather erratic and structurally loose outbursts—permeates nearly every aspect of the music. Piano and drums join in Andresen’s brief spasms of frenzy, while the relentlessly dragging guitar resists these eruptions, remaining as the looming foundation of the sound.
Without these outbursts, Drudging the Mire would remain a monotonous, dark-sacral dark ambient monolith—one that, despite its constant atmospheric gestures toward human decay, would risk dissolving into tedium over the course of an album. The record works precisely because Andresen, together with Anthony Till, strips much of the midrange during the recording process. This enhances the atmosphere, but also reinforces the sense of monotony.
Only in these eruptions does the piano move into the foreground, while Andresen’s brief fits of manic screaming, drowned in reverb, never fully break free from the towering sonic architecture. The voice here is the heartbeat and soul of the music. While everything else establishes a foundational atmosphere, Andresen modulates a wide range of emotional states. Where vocals in funeral doom are often embedded within the overall sound, here they remain—despite the heavy reverb—the central and mediating element.
And Andresen does not simply sing: she whispers, groans, squeals, screams, hisses, exalts, laments, and despairs—projecting the rat allegory of a humanity heading toward its own demise into the world. The album is framed by a minimal, unsettling piano intro with indistinct samples, and a more harmonically defined piano outro that dissolves into an obscure and eerie death industrial sound collage.
Murky Ratmass
MurkRat—derived from “Murky Ratmass”—is a funeral doom project founded by Australian artist Mandy Andresen, reflecting her nihilistic and misanthropic view of humanity and herself. The rat becomes the central symbol, embodying her inner conflict with human existence and her despair at the failure of humanist ideals.
The vision of a human-made destruction within a cybernetic society finds its counterpart in MurkRat’s rat infestation. Drawing on classical psychoanalysis, Drudging the Mire presents a deeply disturbed ego as the product of technocratic conditions—an ego that is aware of both its responsibility as a human being and its powerlessness as an individual.
The Cybernetic Dystopia
This inner fragmentation recalls the dystopian visions of Brave New World and Gattaca, in which technology and genetic manipulation reduce human existence to an industrialized process. The vision in the track Electric Womb, where humans inhabit a designer reality, depicts total control over the body and life of the individual, alienated by both society and technology.
The human being no longer appears as an autonomous subject, but as the product of a systemic order, devoid of control over its own existence—a theme central to both Gattaca and Brave New World. Andresen sketches an ego that exists only as a product of cybernetic reality, as a hollow simulation of a self. It is a subject, as Rosi Braidotti writes, without an autonomous center, inseparably entangled with the destructive structures of a cybernetic society.
These structures—and the forms of self-alienation they produce—are central lyrical and musical themes of Drudging the Mire. In I, Rodent, Andresen portrays an ego that experiences itself as both isolated and part of an anonymous, constantly moving mass. She evokes the tragedy of a subject that imagines itself as the center of the universe, only to find itself trapped within a society that reduces the individual to a link in an endless chain of dehumanization:
“Another writhing body in the ratmass” (I, Rodent)
In an interview with the webzine Metal.de, she explained that everything revolves around rats:
“I use the rodent motif repeatedly because in many ways it is a perfect symbol for the band. MURKRAT is about disgust, outrage, hatred, and despair—and disgust with oneself; there is no trace of self-righteousness in it. It is written in the sewer. Rats are so despised by humans, yet they thrive in the filth we produce. I should emphasize that I find rats beautiful and have unfairly used them as a negative comparison to humans.”
Thus, the rat becomes a symbol of the precarity of human existence, in the sense of Judith Butler: the embodiment of a fragile figure marked by abjection and social rejection, one that exposes from within the failure of the humanist notion of the human as autonomous and elevated.
At the same time, the drive toward self-annihilation (Thanatos) emerges—aligned with Erich Fromm’s bleak vision—as a fundamental aspect of modern human existence.
In parallel with Albert Camus’ idea of the absurd, Andresen reflects on the condition of being human. The absurd describes the gap between the desire for meaning and a world that offers none. Her lyrics are shaped by this conflict, portraying humanity as existing in a world that is neither for nor against it, offering neither meaning nor stability. The self appears as a product of its own self-deceptive attempts at meaning-making—a hyperbolic extension of this realization. Humanity becomes narcissistic, wrapped in a veil of indeterminacy.
Drudging the Mire thus marks a closing point in the direct confrontation with the crisis of the self within a cybernetic society.
Andresen shifts the perspective once more through her explicitly subjective lyrics. The ego stands at the center: fractured, fragmented, caught between the desperately rebelling id and the affirmed disciplinary and control mechanisms of a cybernetic superego. The rat becomes a symbol of paradoxical self-awareness—a despised creature living in filth, a synonym for the human within a Kafkaesque social system, aware of its own fundamental guilt, yet without escape from the structures it has created.
The lyrical self recognizes both its insignificance and the absurdity of its existence—not as triumph, but as existential horror.
Precarious Life
The naked horror of an individual recognizing itself within a life that condemns it to negate its own existence. These precarious lives, as Judith Butler describes them, are not only the result of social exclusion, but also of the individual and collective failure to sustain and shape life itself.
What is understood as the human subject disintegrates within the contradictions between impossible self-realization and sheer despair. Andresen’s misanthropy does not remain an accusation against society alone, but turns equally against the self—formed by cybernetic structures—whose fragmentation mirrors the destructive mechanisms of the world.
It is the pain of an ego that can no longer perceive itself as a unified whole, yet still senses the idea of such unity within itself. It is the perfected outcry of a postmodern self—caught between looming catastrophe and the condemnation to exist within a reality defined by self-disgust and absurdity.
