🇬🇧 A&R Factory Reviews Sheen’s Absence III: Superlative Architects of Surreally Macabre Avant-Garde Aural Cinema
British music critic Amelia Vandergast explores Absence III, celebrating Sheen’s latest release as a transcendent, visceral experience that blurs the boundaries between traditional composition and pure cinematic invocation.
RDM Records
5/31/20261 min read
Absence III possesses a primal force and an atmosphere so dense that it feels like a living, autonomous entity floating in the room, rather than a mere exercise in style or a track recorded in a studio. It is a beautiful acknowledgment of the fact that Sheen has managed to push past the limits of technique to touch the raw flesh of sound.
"Disquiet ambient industrial scores will always be unsettling by design, but with Absence III, Sheen, the project of Romina Daniele and Lorenzo Marranini, became superlative architects of surreally macabre avant-garde aural cinema. By going down a corridor so dark that even David Lynch would hesitate to follow behind in his lifetime, Sheen became a project distinguished by its relationship to haunting, harbingering darkness.
The usual drones, thrums, and reverberations of caustic bass and snares are replaced with an unhallowed arcane post-punk presence; the atmosphere of Absence III is thickened with theatricality, evoking the romance that darkness should always be synonymous with. The piece feels less composed than summoned, allowing industrial textures and existential weight to gather like smoke in a sealed room.
Restored as part of RDM Records’ 2026 Official Label Edition of Absence, the movement reclaims the philosophical and sonic intent of a work first conceived in Milan and finalised through a new Miami-based restoration. Across the wider nine-movement album, Sheen maps human pain through indifferentiated sound masses; Absence III stands as the cinematic centrepiece, portraying absence as inner collapse, where poetry returns to its most primal foundations.
Absence III is now available to stream on all major platforms, including SoundCloud. Find out more about the project via the RDM Records website."
