"As per my last email" is just an absolute nightmare phrase, a thing that you hate to see. It's also the title of NOIA's new single, a skittering, thumping, glitched-out avant-club track about the neverending always-online hell of office-job life in our corroded present. With digital effects chopping her voice into shards, NOIA repeats a few phrases again and again: "As per my last email, I haven't been able to focus," "I’m available all night, all day, every day."
The Barcelona-born, Brooklyn-based artist Gisela Fullà-Silvestre works as a composer and sound designer for movies and TV, and she also makes experimental electronic pop under the name NOIA. "As Per My Last Email," out today, is her first new music since her 2023 full-length debut gisela. It works as a fizzy, disorienting banger, as well as a stressed-out response to a stressful reality. The song's Varya Rootwood stars an extremely pregnant Fullà-Silvestre in surreal permutations of intrusive work environment. In a press release, NOIA says:
It’s what happens when "just circling back" becomes a way of life. A song about the slow collapse of hyperfunctionality, that state of being permanently "on," answering messages at midnight, running on notifications instead of sleep, until you’re less a person than a broken, over-wired robot still sending polite replies.
Director Rootwood says:
We shot this video in the Bronx Riviera in the midst of August last year, with a small team of amazing and generous artists. The video brings office core into natural landscapes, exploring the dissolved boundary between work and life in late-stage capitalism. Set across two surreal "office" locations — a forest and an ocean beach — we follow Gisela as she sings, "working" in a neverending attempt to keep up. Through the video, she is stuck in uncomfortable positions, moving in a glitched, strained rhythm until finally she becomes part of the machine herself. Part painterly, part eerie, the video reflects on what it costs us to be always on: a freedom that might not be freedom at all.
It's an unsettling, cathartic piece of work, and you can check it out below.
"As Per My Last Email" is out now on Casa Fulla/Translucent Frequency.
