Text by Meritxell Rosell
A lone body moves through urban spaces, dark and dimly lit; the body’s gracile and stong gestures fold between control and rupture, as if negotiating something internal with each movement; a manifestation of presence, tension, and a physical language that feels both grounded and slightly otherworldly.
This is what unfolds in the new short video for Artur M Puga’s Bruisehugh, a track on his latest release, Scrolling Thru the Wound (YUKU, 2026), a work that takes us into a suburban dark dream where movement seems to confront existence.
The Berlin-based sound artist and producer has joined forces with London-based director Luis Rojo and dancer Jamal Sterrett. The collaboration with Rojo began with the intention of taking this video away from the CGI-heavy visual language dominating electronic music and instead returning to something more direct: the human body, presence, and friction.
Puga reached out looking for a departure from digital aesthetics, feeling that the current moment called for something more grounded. As he puts it, Don’t get me wrong, the possibilities current technology allows are incredibly exciting, but I feel like, whether we like it or not, we are living in rough times. I strongly felt these times demanded going back to the very core of things: the human body as a tool for confrontation, and presence as a slap in the face.
What followed was a process that was hauntingly aligned. Puga shared the music with the videographer without much explanation, and Rojo came back with a vision that closely matched the emotional space the track (and record) was created from. That connection, maybe, came from a shared position: both living outside their countries of origin, navigating a sense of isolation and existing slightly on the margins.
At the centre of the video is dancer Jamal Sterrett. His presence shifts the work into something beyond. He comes from a third-generation dancer of an incredibly rich tradition originating in Jamaica that later mutated in the States. It’s called Bruk Up/Flex dancing, and part of it (following African traditions brought to Jamaica) involves channelling the spiritual realm. It’s about letting the body be “inhabited” by ancient spirits. It feels truly otherworldly to see and, oddly enough, extremely present and confronting, Puga adds.
Sterrett describes his own expression, Gazelle, as a way of transmuting pain, turning something internal and autobiographical into movement and a vessel for expression. His practice is largely self-taught, shaped over more than a decade, and influenced by forms like flex and mutation, as well as more recent training with a Bruk Up pioneer. His movement often emerges through improvisation, heightened sensory perception of his Asperger’s as a guide for movement, and a responsiveness to both sound and environment.
That immediacy mirrors the way Scrolling Thru the Wound was made. Puga describes the record as coming from a “peripheral position”, feeling like an observer, slightly out of sync, moving through systems without fully belonging. There are multiple layers, competing impulses, and a sense that nothing fully resolves. Instead of imposing order, he allows that instability to exist as it is.
He notes that on listening back, the music sounds more aggressive than previous productions, but not intentionally so. That intensity comes from keeping a certain fragility open, where urgency, fixation, and instability overlap. It’s less about narrative and more about holding those tensions in place.
Rojo’s direction style follows a similar logic. Known for combining strong visual aesthetics with raw storytelling, here he strips things back to focus on the body and its presence within space. The production itself came with the usual limitations, mainly budget, but rather than becoming a defining obstacle, it sits quietly in the background. If anything, it reinforces the piece’s directness. Bruisehugh doesn’t try to explain itself. Like the record it belongs to, it operates through tension. It leaves space for contradiction, for being inside and outside at once, controlled and unstable, distant and exposed.
