Exotica - Les Baxter (2)

From 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"[The films Les Baxter was scoring] draped themselves loosely around invasions from without - space monsters, voodoo zombies, revivified mummies, commie rockets - or they sparked paranoid alarms of panic within - biker gangs, body snatchers, vertical corpses, vampires roaming the suburbs - ensuring teen appeal by a judicious combination of fixations. They were dedicated to the alienated outsider: the alien, the creature, the thing, the biker, the drunk, the lonely surfer, the man who shrinks to nothing, the woman who grows into a fifty-foot monster, the man with x-ray eyes whose nightmare of perception was to see through the surface of society, so incurring his own destruction."

Here are some trailers for films scored by Les Baxter.


Bride And The Beast (1958)




The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)





Savage Sisters (1974)

Wallace Stevens - The Snow Man

Reproduced below is a poem by Wallace Stevens: 'The Snow Man'. Of course, anything to do with snow and ice is 'gefundenes Fressen' for Black Metal aficionados. But more specifically, the poem explores themes that are relevant to both my post on Ofermod and my posts on Paysage D'Hiver.



The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Ofermod - Mystérion Tés Anomias

Many sociological accounts until the nineteeninetees would suggest that people join cults, sects and occult groups out of socio-economic frustration and social isolation; occultists are marginal people subscribing to marginal beliefs. More recent research, such as Tanya Luhrmann's 'Persuasions of the Witch's Craft' suggests otherwise: most paganists are solid, well-functioning middle-class suburbanites, not Lumpenproletariat. Rather than "ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, (...) vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars" (Marx), occultists are secretaries, civil servants, computer workers.

However, that most occultists are middle-class suburbanites leaves open the possibility that some are marginal people. Swedish Black Metal band Ofermod are a case in point.

Guitarist Michayah, the driving force behind Ofermod, is a convicted heroin dealer, and a (former?) addict. Heroin addiction is a virtual guarantee for socio-economic frustration and social isolation: in an interview with Terrorizer magazine Michayah speaks of the 'violence and misery that one has to face each and every day'. What's more, Michayah has been in prison almost without interruption since March 2006, having been convicted for assault, robbery and other violent crimes.

Michayah is also a dedicated occultist, his intellectually elaborate yet violent 'chaos theology' taking inspiration from Qabbalah, Aleister Crowley and Gnosticism. Michayah's occult practice seems to be a relatively socially isolated endeavor, as it takes place outside Wiccan witchcraft communities ('covens') or formalized Western Mysteries fraternities.

As Michayah posits his theological position as fundamental to his music, I will explore it a little further. Unusually for religiously oriented Black Metal, Michaya has rejected Satanism and Evil: "Only Christian exoteric fools can be Satanists". His theology posits Chaos as a supreme and remote deity (the 'Lord of Radiant Darkness'). This deity is 'utter spiritual death' and exists beyond Good and Evil. Good and Evil are concepts of the material world. It is essential to free oneself from this base material world and from bodily existence, which is a prison of flesh. Michayah: "The very creation of the entire cosmos can be related to as an act of pure evil, so from this point of view, its destruction must be considered a blessing. (...) To be human is to be cursed. But there is a way out of this circle of the worms called men, and it is called theurgy and magic. The transformation of the human to the super-human." Here, Michaya's theology is obviously strongly Gnosticist, albeit with a Nietzschean slant.

By rejecting Evil, Michaya has repudiated transgression as a too this-worldly endeavor. Equally, he has rejected Good. Transgression of any symbolic boundary sustains that boundary; thus, transgression supposes a degree, a hypocrisy, which Michaya rejects. By rejecting both transgression and the boundary that is transgressed, Michayah has deprived himself of everything but self-interest.

Indeed, Michayah submits himself rigorously to self-interest. The interviews published on the Ofermod website evince an agressive, overwrought (drug-fostered?) egotism: "Most of the people who listen to Black/Death Metal should go and kill themselves, simply because they are not worthy to dwell in the same dimension as myself.' His tales about drug use, the criminal world and his knowledge of the occult only serve to exaggerate his own importance, power, and notoriety. In an interview with Terrorizer magazine, Michayah promotes the use of heroin (!), not as a way to dissolve the ego but on the contrary to harden it: "It is not only educational about the human nature, but also a process that hardens the individual, with all the violence and misery one has to face each and every day." Heroin is not only highly addictive but also generates a strong tolerance in the user: soon, the drug is used primarily to avoid to prevent the effects of withdrawal, i.e. for future well-being instead of momentary loss of self. Thus, heroin addiction produces economic subservience. Michayah is profoundly servile, a hysterical slave to his self.

For sociologist Emil Durkheim, the sacred world is coterminous with the world of the social. Society does not only - like a divinity - establish moral rules, it has the power to call forth or inhibit conduct, irrespective of any utilitarian calculation of beneficial or harmful results. Furthermore, society has a stimulating and invigorating effect on it's members: in a crowd one becomes capable of exalted emotions and conduct of which one is incapable when left to one's individual resources. Society is to it's members what a god is to the faithful.

Social isolation is in effect the absence of the social. Where the social is absent, it has no power to call forth or inhibit conduct: anomie is the result. Only unrestrained utilitarian calculation remains. In the case of Michayah, this calculation is bolstered by identity politics, by disengagement with social relations, and by a refusal to communicate. Utter spiritual death means the absence of the stimulation, invigoration or exaltation that the social inspires. Michayah has deified his impasse, his social dead end.

Michayah can be likened to Jean Genet - or, to put it more exactly, the philosophical portrait of Jean Genet's painted by Georges Bataille in his 1957 book 'Literature and Evil':

"Genet's will is no longer the furtive will of any man, of any 'sinner' who is satisfied with a minimum of irregularity. It requires a general negation of the taboo, a search for Evil relentlessly pursued till the moment when every barrier has been broken and we reach a state of complete collapse. (...) An unlimited weakness becomes evident; it affects disinterested crime and the basest calculation, open cynicism and treason. No taboo gives Genet the sensation of a taboo anymore and, with numb senses, he finally founders."

So what about the music?

Ofermod's 'Mystérion Tés Anomias' is composed of two parts. The first, Mysterium Iniquitatis, was originally released as a 7" in 1998 by Pounding Metal Productions; the second, Netivah Ha-Chokmah, was recorded in 2004. Both were recorded in the Necromorbus studios and both were released by French Black Metal label Norma Evangelium Diaboli in March 2005 on the cd under review.

The albums starts with a passage of Alfred Schnittke's music, which slowly builds and builds an builds the tension until an eruption takes place, an eruption that is best described as a cold conflagration of Black and Death Metal. The sound is fuller and clearer, less fuzzy than is usual with Black Metal recordings, and the musicianship is technically excellent - as is to be expected from a musician who studies technically highly complex forms of occultism. The 'art brut' character that is associated with some Black Metal bands (Striborg, Dead Reptile Shrine) is far off: rather than damaged and demented, the music is eerie and intelligent. Rather than communicative, the singing (or more accurately: shouting) is self-absorbed, pompous and demonstrative; I am reminded a little of fake-medieval techno-gothic band Will, but thankfully the singing is not as ludicrously bad as John McRae's vocals for that band and does not distract from the music. Though short - a mere 26 minutes - this is an excellent album, that I can wholeheartedly recommend. The excellence of Ofermod's music is reflected by the fact that it has influenced other important Black Metal bands, such as Ondskapt, Watain and Funeral Mist.

Michayah's refusal to communicate, does not mean that his audience perforce cannot communicate with the music he has created - as long as the audience is willing to sever the ties that bind the music to its creator. The destiny of a artistic creation lies not in creator, but in its destination, in its audience. As an audience, we can use Ofermod's music in a way that refuses Michayah's egotistic theology and bathe in the eerie unlight of the music's cold conflagration.



Post scriptum

From Ofermod's website: "In December 2005 the Holy Union of OFERMOD will once again enter Necromorbus Studios. This time to start the recording process of their long-awaited full length debut: "Pentagrammaton". (...) Some titles that will be included on the album are: (...) "A Likeness To Yah". Pentagrammaton would be the first Black Metal album to have a Rastafari song title! ;-)

Here is Stewart Voegtlin's review of Ofermod's album.

Here is a very interesting article on Marx's concept of the 'lumpenproletariat'.

Exotica - Cry of the Banshee

From 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"In the sleevenotes of Les Baxter's 1970 soundtrack for Gordon Hessler's American International film, Cry Of The Banshee, Baxter archly reported that one passage in the music had been reported by friends 'to cause an apparition to materialize. I had no idea, in my own writing, that such a thing was taking place, although every composer knows that sometimes when he is writing he will write things he doesn't remember, as if they come from an "outside" source. Whatever caused this, some said that during this particular passage they thought they saw Satan materialize - others were not sure just who the spiritual image was, but I feel I must warn those who have a fear of the supernatural of the possibility of such an occurence."



Find the record sleeve - including the notes! - and a rip of the soundtrack here.

Euronymous as Kafka (pt. 3)

"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History.

An image of a mythical configuration in which Mayhem's Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth figured as the 'left hand' and Burzum's Kristian 'Varg' Vikernes as the 'right hand'' flashed up when I reread the chapter on Kafka in Georges Bataille's 1957 book 'Literature and Evil'. In this mythical configuration, the artist (left hand) harbors a secret desire for a society that denies him the right to exist (right hand). The configuration as it flashed up, was a model for a dramatic process which so influenced social behaviour that it acquired a strange processual inevitability overriding questions of interest, expediency, and morality.

Does this configuration redeem Vikernes' murder? Can the murder be redeemed, or is it inexpiable? And even if it can be redeemed, must it be redeemed? Wouldn't it be, so to speak, a waste of some perfectly good evil? And vice versa: wouldn't redeeming the murder be letting Vikernes off the moral hook too easily? - after all, killing Aarseth caused serious grief to his relatives. Furthermore, wouldn't redeeming the murder make it subservient to utilitarianism and Messianic teleology? And wouldn't "vanquishing the Anti-Christ" be utterly inappropriate for Black Metal?

With Benjamin, I would answer that the murder must be wrested away from Vikernes' fascist ideology - even if I do not believe that can be called 'redemption'.

By interpreting the murder as the result of a dramatic or narrative process model, I have hoped to deny Vikernes the authorship of the killing. One might counter that the "author is dead", that there is no need to "kill" him as an author of a murder. But Vikernes as an author still reigns on the internet, in interviews, magazines, in "Lords of Chaos", as in the very consciousness of metalheads. Vikernes still has authority over the murder: in this sense he is an undead author. These three posts then are an attempt to drive a stake through his fascist heart.

Euronymous as Kafka (pt. 2)

An aphorism, found in Emil Cioran's 1973 book "The Trouble With Being Born", touches on the subject of the previous post:

"One cannot do a writer a greater service than to forbid him to work for some time. One should establish short-lived tyrannies, during which all intellectual work should be halted. Freedom of expression without any limit exposes talented people to a deadly danger, forces them to go beyond their means and stops them from accumulating sensations and experiences. Unlimited freedom is an attack on the spirit".

The aphorism proposes, like Bataille, that literature thrives on (socio-political) circumstances that deny it the right to exist. Like Bataille, Cioran proposes that literature feeds on impossibility. But where Bataille accents the left-handed side of this paradox (revolt, childishness, transgression), Cioran stresses its right-handed side (authority, safety, teleology, limits).

This characterization of these two perspectives on literature, is derived from the work of Robert M. Hertz. Hertz (1881-1915), a French ethnologist, pupil and close friend to Marcel Mauss, wrote a systematic study of the symbolic meaning of the left hand and the right hand: 'La Prominence de la Main Droite' (published in 1928). The symbolic meaning of the two hands is dichotomous. The right hand was associated with authority, adulthood, virtue, faith, limits, truthfulness; the left hand with revolt, defilement, childishness, transgression, crime, fraud and treachery. This dichotomy is applied to the least detail in ritual, in the practice of divination, in customs and beliefs. Hertz' study was a major influence on the thought of Roger Caillois, a French thinker who co-founded the Collège de Sociologie with Georges Bataille.

I must underline that more is at stake here than mere static, cognitive signification: this 'language-game' is as serious as Russian roulette! The symbols of the left and right hand are - as all symbols - metaphoric expressions and dramatizations of (contradictory, paradoxical, tense) social forces in a given society. Furthermore, symbols such as these are dynamic and actively shape events and passions in friendship, sexuality, art and politics.

I interpret the symbol of the artist as a creator who desires a society that denies his right to exist, as a dynamic symbol. I see it as an expression of social and symbolic tensions in the early-nineties Norwegian Black Metal community (and wider Norwegian society), which gave shape to the dramatic relation between Mayhem's Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth and Burzum's Kristian 'Varg' Vikernes.

The artist as a creator who desires a society that denies his right to exist, is a paradoxical symbol. An artist embodying the left-handed side of this paradox was murdered by a fellow artist who embodies the right-handed side of the paradox: the drama which unfolded in the Dream Time of Norwegian Black Metal certainly had a "...strange processual inevitability overriding questions of interest, expediency, or even morality" (Turner). The murder of Mayhem's Aarseth by Burzum's Vikernes was not only a tragedy in the Classical sense of the word. It was and is more than that: it is the frozen image of a configuration pregnant with tensions between opposing but interdependent socio-cultural forces, a configuration that was shocked into crystallization into a monad, not by the thought of the dialectical critic (Benjamin), but by the violence of the act.