Serenda - Second Skin [Rhythm Section]

Format: 12" in printed sleeve.
CAT: RS073LP 

Rhythm Section proudly welcomes emerging London producer Serenda to the label with a striking sophomore EP: “Second Skin.”

Serenda’s productions drink from the canon of Black electronic music with a fearless intuition: always deep, always moving, always unpredictable—executed with a highly precise emotional fluidity.

“Second Skin” is a constantly mutating soundworld where flesh, identity, and memory blur into something entirely new. The EP wasn’t written as an explicit statement about duality or identity, but in retrospect, that’s exactly what it revealed.

Reveling in the twisted, chaotic percussion associated with greats like Maurice Fulton and Joe Claussell, Serenda’s music balances light and dark, the organic and the mechanical, tension and release.

The dualities of her approach are evident throughout the EP, but despite these opposites, a great sense of balance is found. Influences are worn proudly, but conventions are cast aside without hesitation. Serenda is an artist who refuses to fit into one category.

“I like to play with the tension between seduction and rebellion. I wanted to make music that felt like flesh under the club lights: real, sweating, mutating.”

“Part Seven” seduces us with a soft, Larry Heard-esque Juno pad before disintegrating into deconstructed club sound design and growling basslines reminiscent of Malin Génie at her most experimental.

The title track, “Ms. Nightstress,” floats us into a primordial soup of frenetic drums and cascading shadowy chords. It’s an unexpected spin on heads-down big-room techno. Just when you think you know where it’s going, the saxophones and R&B vocals come in, evoking Carl Craig at his most unhinged.

“People expect me to be one thing,” she says,
“…but I never am. And that tension—that refusal to fit—is where I find my power.”

Each track moves as if a different skin is shed: visceral club rhythms, tender and off-kilter grooves, distorted percussion and haunting motifs. Together they form a body: shedding, sweating, and mutating. It’s music for the dancefloor, but also for liminal spaces, for becoming.

“I realized after that the EP sounds so diverse because I am very diverse,” Serenda says. “These sounds, moods, and textures are all parts of me. I don’t fit into one category, and maybe that is the point. I am the through-line. I am all of it… I am dual.”

This record packs a massive punch for a four-track EP. It’s a significant statement from a singular artist. It’s music for transforming bodies; for those who find power in their own contradictions.

“Second Skin is the beginning of the myth,” Serenda explains. “It’s a premonition. A skin shedding, but also an arrival.”