Pain Goes On is Dyskolia's debut — and the darkest thing Louis Cyphre has made in four years

Louis Cyphre has been building a dark music practice out of Dresden, Germany, for over two decades. Yesterday he released Pain Goes On, the debut full-length from his side project Dyskolia — 11 tracks, 46 minutes, and the first new output he's put into the world in roughly four years. 12

The album opens with "Pain Begins (Intro)" and closes on "Pain Ends (Outro)." That symmetry is deliberate. Everything between those two bookends — "Tortured Soul," "Slow Death," "Paralyzed," "My Final Call," "12 Years," a title track, and a few others — sits in a closed loop about suicide and death. 12 The subject matter isn't decorative darkness — the lyrics on "Tortured Soul" (previewed on his 2024 EP of the same name) run: "dreams turn into nightmares / demons haunting me / the guiding light is far away / darkness is all I see / hope is lost thrown in a hole / madness is coming for me." 3 These are not borrowed aesthetics. The digital download is name-your-price, with lossless and MP3 formats available. 2

To understand Dyskolia, you need the other two projects running in parallel. Cyphre launched La Magra in 2001 — gothic and dark electro with what ReGen Magazine describes as "vampiric undertones." 1 The project now has 14 releases on Bandcamp, with the most recent full-length being In the Dead of Night (Equinoxe Records, January 2022) — a 32-track sprawl that ReGen's Colin Andrew MacDougall called "a laudable effort with plenty of hooks for fans of all things industrial or goth." 14

The second project, Deadly Injection, is his EBM (electronic body music) outlet — harder, more dancefloor-facing. That project's most recent entry was Religion, an EP from November 2025. 15

Dyskolia is neither. Cyphre has described it as "a more darkly electronic and distorted industrial approach" that still wrestles with the same "gloomy yet contemplative" lyrical territory. 1 Less atmospheric fog than La Magra, less functional floor-starter than Deadly Injection — Dyskolia is more distorted and bleak.

The Dyskolia origin story traces back to a remix. Cyphre made a version of "Oder Tod" for his long-time collaborator Acylum (a German dark electro act with an established following in the scene), and the response to that remix pushed him to develop the project further on its own terms. 1

The first Dyskolia release came in November 2024: the Tortured Soul maxi-single EP — four tracks including the original, a B-side called "Sheer Horror," and two remixes, priced at €4.50. 3 Pain Goes On is the follow-through on that foundation: same sonic logic, expanded to a full album structure.

The four years between La Magra's 2022 output and Pain Goes On weren't silence across all three projects — Deadly Injection kept releasing — but in terms of full-length, serious-weight output in Cyphre's heavier and more personal registers, this is the first in a long time. 1 The community hasn't found it yet — zero discussion on Reddit's industrial forums or X as of today — which is normal for work this far underground. Coverage so far is ReGen's write-up by Ilker Yücel (published June 6) and a syndication on the dark electro portal ebm.gr. That's it.

Bandcamp (name your price — MP3/FLAC/more): Pain Goes On — Dyskolia