Moss - Cthonic Rites

I

From Branden W. Joseph's excellent "Beyond the Dream Syndicate. Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage":

"For Walter Benjamin, who theorized an 'optical unconscious' in relation to photography and film, the camera's ability to capture spaces and events not 'informed by human consciousness,' particularly through its capacity for enlargement (as in a microscope) or slow motion, was a means of revealing previously unseen possibilities for comprehension, interpretation, and action:

Photography reveals in this material [enlarged "details of structure, cellular tissue," and the like] physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things - meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable.

On the other hand, film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden detail in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of action (Spielraum)."

John Cage understood the dronework of La Monte Young as something like Walter Benjamin's 'acoustical unconscious': "Listening to these pieces has been for me an experience that has changed my way of hearing, of hearing everything. It is like when one sees something through a microscope: afterward, one sees differently, even without a microscope. With Young's music, you can say that you hear in the interior of the sound, in the interior of the action. (..) At that moment, listening reverts to placing a particular object under a microscope so that the object becomes an entire universe, simply because it is enlarged to that extent. It ceases to be an object."



II

Microscopic music: more contemporary examples are found in Electronica, especially in the 1990's microgenre 'Clicks and Cuts'. The genre zoomed in on sonic detritus, magnified aural decay, enlarged pops, hisses, whirrs, glitches, clicks, scratches, noise until they formed a 'vast and unsuspected' soundscape. The unintended, indeterminate, near-aleatory nature of the sounds used ensure that these soundscapes are 'not informed by human consciousness'. The work of Thomas Köner is a case in point: his music evokes arctic panoramas by blowing up "...stuttering mechanical sounds (imagine the sound of film that has been rewound but hasn't been shut off, the trail of film flapping against the canister)..." (here).

But in a sense, using electronica to magnify sound is facile: computer engineering expedites closing up to the sound. To magnify sound events without the aid of software like Reaktor, Ableton Live, Super Collider and MAX/MSP is much more challenging.

Nevertheless, UK Doom Metal band Moss' manages to coax hidden detail from from its hiding place in waking nightmares on their classic 2005 album Cthonic Rites, released on the excellent Aurora Borealis record label both on cd and magnificent triple vinyl.

Imagine Marduk's 1999 Black Metal album Panzer Division Marduk slowed down so much that the breakneck speed blast beat drums become immense, cyclopean structures; slowed down such much that the headlong rush of tremolo is transfigured into a large, slow-crawling glacier of noise, formed from compacted layers of distortion. For the listener, Moss makes it possible to explore the crevasses, moraines, striations, eskers, ridges, chatter marks, drumlins and cracks in the familiar sound of Black Metal.

Moss' slowing-down of Black Metal reveals a vertiginous musical underworld, where the dimensional relationships are askew, where the proportions are wrong. This should come as no surprise, as the work of HP Lovecraft is a major inspiration for Moss: disproportionality of scales is a constant theme in that horror writer's work. In his 1991 essay "H.P. Lovecraft. Contre le monde, contre la vie", Michel Houellebecq describes the work of the Providence recluse as "...a vertiginous literature; and there is no vertigo without a certain disproportionality of scales, without a certain juxtaposition of the minuscule and the unlimited, the specific and the infinite."

In Moss' Doom Metal, one can discover a warped, nightmarish and barren world.


Post scriptum

Here and here are links to recent interviews with Moss. Here and here and here are links to older interviews.

Dead Raven Choir - My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind (pt. 3)

Here are some YouTube videos of the songs Dead Raven Choir covered for his album "My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind".



Neko Case performing her song "Favorite".




"Bluenose" by Stan Rogers.




Cole Porter's "It's All Right With Me", covered by Tom Waits.




"Genesis Hall" by the Fairport Convention's Richard Thompson.




"The Trees They Do Grow High" covered by Andy Clark.

Dead Raven Choir - My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind (pt. 2)

That Polish musician Smolken creates corroded Black Metal cover versions of Folk songs - either traditional songs or songs of 'invented tradition' - stands to reason.

After all, the Black Metal has used elements of Folk since the former genre's infancy: just think of Ulver's 1995 album "Bergtatt", which incorporated acoustic folk guitar playing and frilly blouses. And, judging from mp3 blogs such as "Blodvargr", Black Metal now has such unlikely bedfellows as 'alpine folk', 'apocalyptic folk', 'neofolk' and 'nordic folk'. European Folk is one of the strands of Black Metal's 'spider's web of significance'.

And as for covering American folk songs by Fairport Convention's Richard Thompson and Townes Van Zandt - I see that as a return to the origins of Black Metal - isn't traditional American country music one of the formative influences on Rock, which eventually transformed into Black Metal, amongst others?

So I repeat - that Dead Raven Choir fashions an aesthetic unity out of the two genres is not in itself surprising.

But playing a Black Metal cover of one of the classics of the Cole Porter songbook - "It's All Right With Me" - that is odd! Cole Porter, that means: show tunes, musical comedies, sophistication, socialites, homosexuality and Broadway. Few musics could be more at odds with Black Metal than the Cole Porter songbook.

Many a reviewer has expressed the suspicion that Smolken is lampooning the songs that he covers in his unique fashion. In a review of Wolfmangler's "Cooking With Wolves" in Wire 284 Edwin Pouncey writes: "There is a grim determination at work here that makes it hard to tell if Smolken despises or secretly adores his chosen victims - or whether this is all some elaborate jape to raise the hackles of those fans who might feel 20th century Broadway classics and the work of the author GK Chesterton (to name two influences) have no place in the underworld of Black Metal". Sam Davies writes about "My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind" in Wire 285: "There's something very deadpan about Dead Raven Choir. They scratch away at the extreme limits of scorched-earth harshness with enough determination for any Metal fan, but at the same time hold out the possibility of a very subtle send-up. Its trebly tinniness subverts the normal smothering sludge of the genre, and in its pillaging of folk forms seems to [be] deliberately toying with fey wispiness".

In "The Pleasure Of The Text" Roland Barthes writes that there is a break or fissure in the writings of the Marquis De Sade. On the one side of that break is a good, moral text which faithfully copies a canonical model; and on the other side is a empty, mobile text which subverts the canonical text.

The same break can be found in Dead Raven Choir's music. For Pouncey, Black Metal is the text which subverts 20th century Broadway classics; for Davies, trebly tinniness, folk forms and their fey wispiness seem to subvert Black Metal.

That leads me to conclude that, while the break still exists in Dead Raven Choir's music, the question which side is which has become indeterminable. Both Black Metal and 20th century Broadway classics function as canonical text; both Black Metal and 20th century are a subversive text which satirizes the canonical text. Could it be said that Dead Raven Choir is hyper-Sadean music?

The information about Dead Raven Choir on the bands MySpace page seems to suggest that Smolken makes his music quite in earnest: "DEAD RAVEN CHOIR is a horrid blight upon black metal and does great damage to credible black metal artists everywhere. Or perhaps it's keeping black metal alive and interesting. DEAD RAVEN CHOIR doesn't care which it is, just plays black metal covers of country and folk songs".

What if we interpret the cover version of Cole Porter's "It's All Right With Me" just as earnestly?

The performer of the song's lyrics plays the role of a jilted lover who seeks forgetfulness in someone else's arms, knowing very well the wrongness of his actions. Loneliness and a sense of being-out-of-place pervade the song. Cole Porter himself - a homosexual in an age in which such a sexual orientation was tolerated at best - suffered from severe depressions: Wikipedia states that he was one of the first people who experienced electric shock therapy. Furthermore, a riding accident crushed his legs and left him in chronic pain, largely crippled; in the end, the legs had to be amputated.

For me, Dead Raven Choir's cover brings out the depressive aspect of "It's All Right With Me", an aspect which remains latent in most it's performances. The sombre, distorted and stunted sound of Dead Raven Choir's unique and inspiring brand of Black Metal is in tune with these hidden currents in one of Cole Porter's greatest hits.

To conclude this post, here are Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole performing Cole Porter's "It's All Right With Me":







Post Scriptum

I really shouldn't write a second post on Dead Raven Choir's "My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind". After all, Wolfmangler's PKlima quoted a my review of that band's album "Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves" as an example of 'extremely bad poetry'. But then again, I'm a second-rate mystic, a parasite of the sublime, a plagiarist of ecstasy - what to expect but a debacle when it comes to poetry?

Dead Raven Choir - My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind

In an interesting post about Burial's excellent "Untrue" album on the "An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming" blog, Loki writes: "A bad mp3 rip might even enhance the spaciousness because Burial seems to be about holes, about absence. A few seconds of silence as an i-pod struggles and whirrs seems to me apt for this album and I'm sure I'm hearing more gaps than there are".

Interesting: where Loki finds a bad mp3 rip the most desirable way to listen to Burial's new album (a wide-screen, even panoramic album with a huge depth), I prefer to listen to Dead Raven Choir's new cover album of blackened and corroded folk songs "My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind" on state-of-the-art speakers and audio equipment - even though it flaunts it's "total disregard for all conventions of audio fidelity". In fact, it is proudly announced that the album was "recorded in Poland on cheap and archaic Soviet Bloc technology".

That the Soviet Bloc (I almost wrote: Soviet Blog) origin of the recording technology is underlined, connects the album to Black Metal culture hero Euronymous' admiration for repressive communist dictatorships: "Poland was quite all right, but it could have been even MORE grey and depressing. I like secret police, cold war and worshipping of dictators. I like bugging and spying on people, torture chambers in police stations and that people suddenly “disappear”." It seems the grey and depressing, crude and brutal nature of these dictatorships corresponds to the sound Dead Raven Choir strives for. Certainly, the sombre black and white photographs of the grinding poverty of farmers and workers in the first half of the 20th century which form the album's artwork, answer to that grey and depressing aesthetic.

But what explains the inverted formal relationship between Burial and Dead Raven Choir - great recording played on crappy technology vs. a piss-poor recording played on great technology? Why do I put on my audiophile headphones when listening to Dead Raven Choir's distorted Black Metal Folk songs to hear every nuance of that crude, grey sound?

Is the difference that where Burial's music is about holes and absence, Dead Raven Choir's music embodies holes and absence?



Post scriptum

What's with the Gothic associations that Burial's album evokes? The album reminds Loki of Cranes and the Comte de Lautréamont's "Les Chants De Maldoror", while Transpontine hears Bauhaus in Archangel!

Silvester Anfang - Kosmies Slachtafval

The notorious Malleus Maleficarum was a something of a handbook for witch hunters, written by inquisitors Sprenger and Institoris. The book, which you can find in it's entirety here, consists of three parts: the first examines theological issues raised by the existence of witchcraft, the second examines the the erotic and magical practices of witches as well as the possession of witches by Devils, and the third and final part describes the proper practical and legal methods for the detection and repression of witchcraft. Though the style of the book is academic (combining legal and theological discourse) the content speaks of an macabre obsession with female eroticism. Page upon page details the copulation of witches with incubi and succubi, copulation which takes place in a rural background: fields, forest, villages. The book is the product of , misogynous urbanoid mass hysteria, of the fear of city-dwellers of the country-dwelling female ‘other’.

Belgian band Silvester Anfang's album "Kosmies Slachtafval" proudly manifests the most terrible fears of these witch hunters. Just take a look at the art work: a black-haired, barely dressed, sickly-looking girl licking a human skull, the Flemish flag in the background - a proud-looking goat with large curled horns in a hilly rural area - a conservatively-dressed young women gazing lovingly on a baby goat - a drawing of a witches' sabbath, three sorcerous hags huddled around a boiling kettle and a fourth riding a goat through the skies ... And the song titles can only confirm the inquisitor's fears: "Mijn vader was een wolf en mijn moeder was een hoer" ("My father was a wolf and my mother was a whore") and "Konfituur voor de satansjeugd" ("Marmelade for the Satanic youth").

Silvester Anfang's "Kosmies Slachtafval" is yet another excellent release from the dependable Aurora Borealis.

The name of the band, "Silvester Anfang", is related to one of the more unlikely episodes in Black Metal history. "Silvester Anfang" is the title of the percussion intro on Mayhem's 1987 mini-album "Deathcrush". The intro is played - of all people - by Tangerine Dream and Kluster member Conrad Schnitzler. It was recorded at the request of Mayhem's front man Øystein Aarseth (perhaps better known under his nom de plume Euronymous). Aarseth was a fan of German electronic music; but Schnitzler had no idea what kind of music Euronymous made. Here is Conrad Schnitzler's account of this strange intersection of very different music styles (link). Mayhem still use the clattering percussion track to open their concerts (link).

The name of the band can be regarded as emblematic for the band's artistic program: a witch's broth of blackened Krautrock with bleak and unnerving ambient synthesizer. But there's even more to Silvester Anfang than that: the music comes across as a Black Metal take on free-form drone-folkies Pelt, as if Pelt had been raised on a steady diet of Burzum, Mayhem, Immortal and Gorgoroth instead of on John Fahey and Americana. It comes as no surprise that Silvester Anfang and Pelt mainman Jack Rose have put out a split 7" on Aim records. "Kosmies Slachtafval" ("Cosmic Offal") is dark and droning, with fingerpicked guitar work and moody, murky drones, the crepescular synths taking the role played by ragas in Pelt's music. Silvester Anfang call their own music "Funeral Folk" - an amalgam of "Funeral Doom" and "Free Folk"?

All in all, I highly recommend "Kosmies Slachtafval". Here are two YouTube videos of Silvester Anfang at play.

L'Acephale - Mord Und Totsclag

"Perception of present reality is a disappointment, and only the imagination can provide lasting enjoyment, in its quest for what is absent" - Marcel Proust.

Marcel, the narrator of Proust's "A La Récherche Du Temps Perdu", is disappointed every time he visits a place or meets a person he has imagined, dreamed about and yearned for. The name of a place or person and the connotations of that name enchant Marcel; real life invariably disenchants. The dream is always more beautiful than the thing dreamed of could in reality be, and dreaming aggravates the disenchantment that is in store for Marcel when he sets out upon his travels.

And so it was for me, listening to US Black Metal band L'Acéphale's album "Mord und Totsclag" (sic), which was released earlier this year.

"Acephale" was the name of a secret society created by Georges Bataille in the late 1930's. Acephale can be interpreted as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to use the means of fascism (conspiracies, mythologizing, violence, fanaticism) against fascism - in fact, Bataille coined the term 'surfascisme' as an ideology which would relate to fascism as 'surrealism' relates to 'realism'. In order to achieve his goals, Bataille applied contemporary ethnological theory (specifically, Marcel Mauss's theory of sacrifice) to the then-current political scene, hoping to employ human sacrifice (!) to reinvigorate society and thereby lead it away from the lure of militaristic dictatorship.

As regular readers of Documents will know, the title and much of the contents of this blog were inspired by the work of Bataille, so a Black Metal band using Bataille's thought would be of immediate interest to me. Furthermore, the album was released by the excellent Avant Metal record label Aurora Borealis, a label whose releases are always thought-provoking. Thus, these names created a mental image (or should I say: a mental sound) which magnified the idea that I had formed of Black Metal, making me imagine a music so blackened, buzzing, dramatic, damaged, droning and formless, so special, it could never be real. "Mord Und Totsclag" was bound to disappoint.

I unpacked the beautiful, deluxe dvd-packaging, and put the cd in the cd-player, and waited with baited breath for the music to begin. Beginning with the sound of WWII bomber planes, "Mord Und Totsclag" ("Murder And Manslaughter") turned out to be Black Metal melded to industrialized martial neo-folk - a genre I have never had much affinity with. Listening to the music, the sense of disappointment became all the more acute. I found that the sensibility of "Mord Und Totsclag" was very different from that of Bataille's thought. Far from being formless, far from being "...akin to a spider or a gob of spit...", the martial neo-folk influences made the music rigid, regimenting all that was buzzing and droning, putting it all into a uniform. Where Bataille's sense for violence is tragic, that is: internal, for L'Acéphale death and destruction would seem to be merely external, brutal pleasures. Even if the had aimed at 'surfascisme', they arrived at it's realist counterpart.

And had they aimed at 'surfascisme'? Reading their manifesto, they strive for "Volkisch metal" and celebrate Odinistic folkways and beliefs. Only people completely un- or misinformed about Bataille's oeuvre could call their art Volkisch and still believe themselves to operate in the spirit of transgressive thought. Perhaps the many spelling errors in their manifesto - even the album's title contains a mistake! - provide a clue to the question whether L'Acéphale is uninformed or misinformed. The kindest thing I can say about their ideological underpinnings is that it is a hodge-podge.

I've waited a few months before writing this review, in the hope that Time would kindly allow me to discover new landscapes within the music - but alas, I only found the dreariness of parade grounds.

"After having scaled the inaccessible heights of the name Guermantes, on descending the inner slope of the life of the Duchess, I felt on finding there the names, familiar elsewhere, of Victor Hugo, Frans Hals and, I regret to say, Vibert, the same astonishment that an explorer, after having taken into account, in order to visualize the singularity of the native customs in some wild valley of Central America or Northern Africa, its geographical remoteness, the strangeness of its place-names, of its flora, feels on discovering, once he has made his way through a screen of giant aloes or machineels, inhabitants who are engaged in reading Voltaire's Merope or Alzire" - Marcel Proust.

Aurora Borealis

An hommage to the record label and distro, open again at long last!

Dwelling in a dead raven for the glory of crucified wolves

Wolfmangler: a drone like a fallen tree, rotting in a primeval forest in a wet autumn, so thick and mushy one can almost see mushrooms growing on it...

Wolfmangler: a drone so heavy and slow it makes one drowsy, like polish plum brandy burning it's way through one veins and brain; a drone so slow it's decomposing, like a procession of mad lepers...

Wolfmangler: a blackened improvised doom metal drone of double bass, two electric basses, flute, bassoon, trombone and the unintelligible mumbling of texts by Frank Sinatra, HP Lovecraft and Tyrtaeus; the sinister drone of a Pole called Smolken, of 'Dead Raven Choir' and 'Garlic Yarg' notoriety; a drone which sounds as if a Current 93 goose has been force fed a diet of slower, much slower Bathory, Burzum and Darkthrone to fatten it's liver until it is black and poisonous and unfit for consumption...

Dwelling in a dead raven...: Mayhem's Dead kept a rotting raven in a plastic bag to "inhale the scent of death" before going on stage, and this music is like that smell, as if it was music made for smelling rather than for hearing, for groping one's way through a dead raven as large as a concert hall, a morbid maze for the glory of crucified wolves, fascinans ad tremendum...

...for the glory of crucified wolves: to attain the grade of Magus, Aleister Crowley captured a toad, baptized it as Jesus of Nazareth, arrested it and charged it with blasphemy and sedition and then crucified it. It was Crowley's ritual for a Dying God; at the same time it caused the elemental spirit of the slain reptile to serve him. Where the toad was Crowley's blasphemous metaphor for Christ, the wolf is Smolken's; and the elemental spirits of slain wolves serve him. Magnificent.