SHINJUKU THIEF - Sacred Fury

The name, unknown to most, is inspired by a film by Nagisa Oshima; the music can be likened to martial, orchestral industrial, an approach not unlike that of Nurse With Wound or Boyd Rice, but with a unique and highly personal "cinematic" appeal. The mind behind it all is Darrin Verhagen, an Australian from Melbourne, where he teaches at the Royal Institute of Technology and composes soundtracks for theatre, dance, film, video games and more.

Above all, though, Prof. Verhagen has been active - albeit largely overlooked - in the record industry since the early Nineties, with a series of albums (most released under the name Shinjuku Thief, but also under other pseudonyms or his real name) that are truly ahead of their time in originality and refinement.

Moving along the border between gothic, ambient, classical and industrial, without really belonging to any of those genres, Verhagen has managed to craft genuine masterpieces such as "The Witch Hunter" (1995) and "Medea" (2003).

"Sacred Fury" is his first work released by an international label (his previous albums all came out on Dorobo, the artist's own imprint), the Swedish Fin de Siècle, and it consists of 16 short orchestral fragments which Verhagen works over at the mixing desk with meticulous precision: a sculptor of sound skilled at polishing and cloaking his musical mosaics - often suffocating and austere, at times even extremely violent - in elegance and mystery, the Australian dilutes, deforms and distorts the textures and harmonies of his "gothic orchestra" to produce true "sound images", in service of a concept that this time centres on the theme of war.

The album unfolds along trajectories that, as usual, explore delicacy and terror without ever tipping too far toward either side: the first part is nonetheless the more tense and ferocious, opening with a delicate "Prologue" and making way for the bombardments and chilling screams (and silences) of "Lesion", the destructive frequencies of "Rupture", the clangour of "Black Rope Hell" and the demonic dance of "Burning Heat".

In the closing stretch, though, the mood loosens up, and from the still-warm wreckage emerge evocative sketches like "Reverie", and chamber-like adagios such as the magnificent "Balm" and "Suture" (which nonetheless closes with a sudden, violent slap).

And serving as the watershed moment is the driving title-track, with its symphonic surges.

But the short, or very short, individual episodes, however brilliant their ideas, matter less than their cumulative sum.

"Sacred Fury" is a single body, an evocative flow, suggesting spaces to be explored, visions waiting to be given shape and life.

And it's the album in which Verhagen sums up his experiments and condenses his entire arsenal as composer and producer.

"Sacred Fury" isn't his best work, but it can be an excellent starting point if you want to get to know the work of this eclectic, original, and unjustly overlooked artist.

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30/04/2026