Listening to Antoin Gibson’s new EP, “Serene Despair”, is like discovering a hidden, immaculately designed room in the architecture of your own skull, only to realize the locks are on the outside. This is music as a meticulous, hermetically sealed environment. Knowing Gibson is the sole operator of this venture—the writer, performer, and producer, founder of Circum-Sŏnus—explains the almost unnerving coherence.She isn’t just building tracks; she’s constructing a world with its own physics, and then trapping you inside.
The experience starts in a place of profound despair, a feeling less like sadness and more like the texture of old, cold velvet. But this isn’t a pity party. It’s the chrysalis. From this powerlessness, Gibson resurrects femme fatales not as museum pieces, but as living, breathing psychological states. She hands a Succubus a microphone in an electronic darkwave club, lets a Siren sing an ethereal ballad over synths that feel like deep-sea pressure. It reminds me, strangely, of those anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance—unflinchingly detailed, beautiful, and utterly unsettling. Gibson’s verses are surgical, dissecting the anatomy of control and desire.
She shifts the power dynamic with a predator’s grace. We move from the hunted to the one with teeth, from a willing surrender in the dark to the cold calculus of a witch wielding seduction as a weapon. The production is a paradox, lush yet bleak, like seeing a supernova through a pinhole. One track pushes you onto a shadowy dance floor; the next leaves you stranded in a vast, cinematic quiet.
The EP concludes, the final sound fading into a hum. You’re left holding a mirror, but the unnerving question isn’t what you see. It’s who? Is it still you, or is it the myth that’s been wearing your skin all along?
