DENAMIS and Sasco Team Up for Poetry Album 'Depletion Halos'

Electronic hip hop producer and composer Sascois is collaborating with poet DENAMIS (aka Dena Igusti) on an upcoming documentary poetry album titled "Depletion Halos," slated to be released June 26.

The project is described as "a sonic interrogation on our culture's obsession with hurt bodies and who gets to be considered hurt." The tracks incorporate Sasco's waterline instrumentals with DENAMIS' interrogations on how survivors of gender-based violence are portrayed.

The duo aims to showcase the way anticipated grief of community, gentrification, and exploitation of girls of color in the media force survivors to both minimize and sensationalize the impacts of the harm done to them for the sake of a larger community. Through recollections of high school, interview reenactments, and school fights in girls' bathrooms, the album explores what redemption looks like for someone who is only known for what has happened to their body.

The tracks on Depletion Halos, all but two of which were created specifically for their respective poems, draw from across the musical spectrum, including feedback loops, hip-hop sampling techniques, granular synthesis, electroacoustic jams, and more as a backdrop for DENAMIS's poetry.

The title is largely inspired by the study of black holes. Says DENAMIS: "As a survivor whose work surrounds the terrible things that have been done to me, I wanted to explore the impacts of violence without having to recount what happened in excruciating detail."

Their first single, "in which i calcify to pixels" will be released on May 26. Their second single "after the incision" will follow on June 12.

About Sasco

Sasco is the pseudonym of producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Steven McArdle. His life as a musician began by playing drums at an early age, which eventually led to studying and working as a Jazz drummer and Classical percussionist. He's worked as a live performer and studio musician in these fields, while also bringing his skills to various Rock and Pop bands, Hip-Hop production and DJing, multiple Brass Bands, Electroacoustic ensembles, Latin music groups, and more. He's also dedicated time to being a music educator, both in the classroom and privately, as well as freelancing in audio engineering.

Since early 2015, he's been synthesizing all of this, as well as an independent study of electronic music into the sonic palette of music he's released as Sasco. Notable works include 2024's The Hottest Year on Record, a noisy recontextualization of Electroacoustic music into Hip-Hop beats, 2025's Contacting, a collaborative album with rapper Sunmundi, and 2026's Misophonia I-V, an ongoing series of projects exploring different compositional methods and styles.

Sasco has been featured in Caltrops Press, Bandcamp Daily, GQ, Cabbages Hip-Hop, The Rap Music Plug Podcast, Free Music Empire, Sudaty Raport, Focus Hip-Hop, RoundHouse Music, ANTII, WPKN, and more.

About DENAMIS

DENAMIS (also known as Dena Igusti) is a queer Indonesian writer born and raised in Queens. Alongside using playwriting and poetry to preserve archives of queer Indonesian and Southeast Asian diasporic migration in New York City, they use writing to advocate for LGBTQ+ survivors of gender-based violence. They have served as an advisory board member for the New York City Council's FGM/C Advisory Committee. T