Breath & Decay

Breath & Decay is the industrial music and storytelling project of Eric Dusik, writing under the name E.M. August. Created in the mid-2000s, the project combines industrial electronics, EBM momentum, cyberpunk atmosphere, and narrative world-building.

Its songs operate as transmissions from a dystopian future roughly three centuries from now. The world centers on E.M. August, a human struggling through systems of technological control, and GR4P3, a 300-year-old sentient android confronting questions of autonomy, identity, survival, and what remains human inside a machine-governed society.

Breath & Decay’s music moves between fiction and personal reflection, using distortion, machinery, dance-floor rhythm, and melodic hooks to explore surveillance, artificial intelligence, corporate power, persistence, and connection. Longtime collaborator Sean Payne of Cyanotic has helped produce, mix, and shape the project’s sound throughout its history.