Death Orgone is the experimental audiovisual laboratory of Frédérick Maheux. Established in 2015, this moniker rose from the embers of another of his named Lamashtu, which subsisted from 2007 to 2015. Lamashtu harbored a bevy of Frédérick’s artistic vectors such as experimental cinema, zines, and collage zines; and it maintained morose, albeit raw expressions of hypocrisies he perceived in the world surrounding him. Time gave way to these interests, however, and given that he allows his perspectives to morph with the reams of literature he absorbs, it was time to move on. Thus emerged Death Orgone.

Though still rather incipient, Death Orgone ushers in a new chapter of interests for Frédérick. Glitch art is chief among them and he exhibited this technique in his 65-minute experimental film, Ana (released in 2015). In 2018, after years of work, he completed his experimental documentary Drug Porn. Both of these cinema explore some of the darker subcultures lurking on the Web, the latter of which delves into narcotics abuse published on social media; the pairing of the spectral glitch apparitions with the hypnotic soundtrack from Bruno R. Julian renders Drug Porn an unnerving, yet mesmerizing escape into a rabbit hole hiding in plain sight. At their core, these films embody Frédérick’s intrigue with the spectacle of the self, the willingness of these individuals to self-destruct, and how the Web can mutate the seemingly sacrosanct notions of community, love, and family into filth.

From Lamashtu, Frédérick has retained his intrigue with collage, but his angle shifted toward his fascination with transhumanism as Death Orgone. In October 2018, he debuted his collage series “Flesh Intolerance” at Maison Close in Bangkok, where he merged and spliced together images from vintage medical textbooks. Its purpose is to unveil clandestine meanings beyond mere flesh and to explore the potential avenues humans could traverse to overcome their corporeal limitations. This endeavor is rather fledgling, though Frédérick plans to augment this series in the year ahead as ideas continue to swirl and mull about in his skull.

Outside of Death Orgone, Frédérick also produces blood curdling, migraine-inducing noise as Un Regard Froid. His frequencies exist somewhere between the harsh terrains of power electronics and death industrial. Algolagnie was his first release, published in 2014. Since then he has unfurled several relatively brief EPs and just in October 2018 he had his first LP, Palinodie (Anticinéma), released by Cioran Records—a belligerent, caustic cluster of tracks channeling the atavistic energy underlying the films each track is based on. Despite this endeavor standing separate from Death Orgone, Frédérick is no stranger to producing noise as he tended to compose the soundtracks for his Lamashtu-era films. Un Regard Froid, however, exists as an uncompromising outlet for him to promulgate distilled antipathy. And somewhere in the abyss prowls a new moniker of his, but its name, its sound, its energy, is and will remain unknown.

In this conversation, Frédérick provides a glimpse at his personal history that led him toward the creation of Lamashtu and the subsequent birth of Death Orgone. He delves into “Flesh Intolerance”, describing his interest in transhumanism and how he went about producing his collage pieces. He articulates the ideas and moods he crafted on Palinodie (Anticinéma), he dissects some of the layers of his glitch technique whilst discussing the creation process of Drug Porn, and he looks to a new frontier of artistic expression: video games. There is much to unearth in this conversation. Thank you so much for listening.