In a long conversation with Side-Line, Erica Dunham of Unter Null looks back at the project from the standpoint of “The Rise From Ruin (and the Ritual of Becoming)”, the double CD that Alfa Matrix released on 26 June 2026. She does not see herself as someone rebuilt from scratch, only as a later version of the same person: the fire that launched the project in 1998 never went out, and the music came back because there was more to say, not because she wanted to relive anything. The reissue, she explains, closes a circle with the instinct-driven younger self of the “Sick Fuck” era and lifts any shame about that early chaos, while also reopening material she had buried. Revisiting it was emotionally hard, because old recordings bring old versions of you back into the room, yet it also felt like reclaiming a story. She now hears memory and grief behind the same voice, and feels protective of the songs’ fire.
Dunham calls “Coming Up To Breathe” proof of life after years of artistic silence, exhaustion, trauma and loss, and presents “You Made A Monster” as part exorcism, part confrontation and part recognition, with the “monster” standing for something altered under pressure rather than something evil. Her anger has not faded, she says; it remains feral but “has learned how to aim”, and distortion still works as both armour and confession. She admits that “Sick Fuck” sometimes boxed her in, and discusses being an angry woman in a scene that read aggression in women differently from aggression in men. The ritual, sacred vocabulary of the “Sacrament” and “Absolution” period was neither fully planned nor accidental, and her classical training, she adds, gives the chaos a spine.
She also describes her side project Stray as a counterpart inside the same body, where Unter Null fights and Stray mourns, and portrays the long silence after “Moving On” as a stretch of grief, caregiving and burnout rather than an absence. The 2008 studio fire taught her that art can burn and still return in another form. Looking ahead, the next Unter Null chapter is meant to stay feral and focused, sharpened by clarity, with nostalgia and performative extremity left behind.
About Unter Null
Erica Dunham is the sole creator of Unter Null, which she founded in Seattle, Washington in 1998 at the age of 17. She studied piano, cello and guitar, and the project began by leaning toward powernoise, with acts such as Noisex, Converter and P.A.L. as reference points. Her self-titled first album followed in 2001, and after signing with Leech and NTT/Annihilvs Records in 2002 she issued “Neocide”, a second album available only on the web.
In 2005 Dunham joined the Belgian label Alfa Matrix. Her debut there, “The Failure Epiphany”, reached number four on the German Alternative Charts (DAC) and was ranked 43rd among the DAC’s albums for 2006, the year the “Sacrament” EP took sixth place on the DAC singles chart. Two more EPs from those years, “Sick Fuck” and “Absolution”, established Unter Null’s confrontational, heavily distorted sound among mid-2000s EBM and aggrotech acts. She toured the US and Europe on the strength of this material, briefly in 2005 and more extensively across Europe in 2006.
Early in 2008 she began a side project, Stray, whose self-titled double CD had guests including Mothboy, Detritus and Testube. On 25 December 2008 a fire wiped out the studio that held her instruments and recording gear; the follow-up “Moving On” was assumed destroyed, but its files were salvaged from a damaged hard disk and the album came out. In 2012 Dunham relocated to Hamburg, and activity then slowed for a long time.
News of a return to the studio arrived in January 2025, followed in March by “Hollow”, a collaboration with Frontal Boundary. In April she put out “Coming Up To Breathe” as a free download, her first new material in over a decade (a separate post marks the first anniversary of that single), and the EPCD “You Made A Monster” followed on Alfa Matrix in July. That September Unter Null headlined the 29th birthday show of Das Bunker at Catch One. The limited double CD “The Rise From Ruin (and the Ritual of Becoming)”, which Alfa Matrix revealed in April 2026, brings the “Failure Epiphany” era together with three EPs — “Sick Fuck”, “Sacrament” and “Absolution” — plus remixes from acts such as Noisuf-X vs. X-Fusion, Aslan Faction and Grendel. It was released on 26 June 2026.
The full question-and-answer session is on Side-Line: Read the full interview on Side-Line.
Hear the double CD
“The Rise From Ruin (and the Ritual of Becoming)” is available now on the Alfa Matrix store, and the collection can also be streamed on Bandcamp. More from the label can be heard on the Alfa Matrix Bandcamp.