Skullflower - Desire for a Holy War

I

What appeared as monolithic and impenetrable at first, gradually revealed itself to be layers and layers of sheer curtain, billowing in the wind. On contact, these curtains ignited the nerves, burning like blood-and-semen-soaked shirt of Nessus, the shirt that poisoned and killed Hercules. Because of this venom, it was impossible to touch the curtains, impossible to draw them away, impossible to see what shone so blindingly bright from behind them.


II

"Desire for a Holy War" - is it a desire to wage a holy war or is it a self-destructive desire to be invaded, pillaged and burned by hordes of religious fanatics? Or is it a desire to contemplate from a distance the whole of the blood-soaked battlefield, like Georges Bataille meditated upon a photograph of Fou Tchou-Li suffering execution by Leng T'che (“death by a thousand cuts”) on April 10th 1905. “I never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.”


III

"Desire for a Holy War" is one of the most inaccessible releases of Matthew Bower's long-running band Skullflower: the music consists of so many superimposed strata of noise that musical structure is no longer audible. Every riff is churned up again and again; tones are uprooted from their harmonies, smashed, and ground to mere sound particles, notes blown to bits and turned to dust; musical forms are leveled and the sound field turned into a desert. "Desire for a Holy War" seethes like a gigantic cauldron. The music is sheer pandemonium.

Nonetheless, after repeated exposures it becomes somewhat possible to distinguish one layer of noise from another. Then, one vaguely discerns shapes in the clouds of smoke and dust that hang over the Metalfield. One hears hypertrophied ostinati, riffs of bloated triumph, hysterical heroism, over-stimulated, over-blown muscularity, chords like bloodthirsty gymnasts overdosed on anabolic steroids and amphetamines, bleeding violently from their rectums.


IV

"For, at Shangri-La as in other pro gyms, the use of anabolic steroids and assorted human growth hormones is both commonplace and massive, as are their resultant physical ailments, from premature baldness (...), bouts of diarrhoea and increased body hair, to spells of dizziness and chronic rectal bleeding (...)."

From: Loïc J.D. Wacquant, "Why Men Desire Muscles", in 'Body & Society', volume 1, number 1, March 1995, Sage Publications.


V

"The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus."

From: Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus'.


VI

"Hört Ihr nicht, wie er aus tausend Städten brüllt, wie rings Gewitter uns umtürmen wie damals, als der Ring der Schlachten uns umschloß? Seht Ihr nicht, wie seine Flamme aus den Augen eines jedes einzelnen glüht? Manchmal wohl schläft er, doch wenn die Erde bebt, entspritzt er kochend allen Vulkanen."

"Do you not hear, how War roars out of a thousand cities, how thunderstorms tower around us, like once the circle of battlefields surrounded us? Do you not see, how its flames glow from the eyes of every single one? Sometimes War may sleep, but when the earth shakes, it erupts all volcanoes."

Ernst Jünger, "Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis" (1922)

Shock Xpress - The essential guide to exploitation cinema

This post is the first in a series of posts inspired by Stefan Jaworzyn's exploitation film fanzine Shock Xpress. These posts will present to you YouTube videos of the films featured in the three books which collect the fanzine's best articles. First, however, some biographical information on Jaworzyn.

In the nineteeneighties and nineties, two worlds intersected in Stefan Jaworzyn: that of Noise Rock and that of exploitation cinema fandom. Jaworzyn was extremely active at the time: not only was he a Noise Rock guitarist, head of a record label, and music critic, but he edited the exploitation fanzine Shock Xpress, and co-organized the horror film festival Shock around the Clock.


Music

Jaworzyn first collaborated with Matthew Bower in the Industrial Noise Rock band Pure. Pure evolved into Skullflower - one of my alltime favorite bands - and Jaworzyn would play on the 1989 Form Destroyer album and the 1990 Ruins and Xaman albums, as well as on several 12 inches. According to the biographic information on Monotremata, Jaworzyn quit Skullflower over a disagreement with Matthew Bower over the mixing of the Xaman album. Jaworzyn went on to join the guitar/drum duo Ascension. According to legend, Jaworzyn replaced a bassist in Ascension who was so horrified by Jaworzyn's audition that he quit not just Ascension but music altogether (sourced from Wire 276). With Jaworzyn on guitar, Ascension evolved into a band which - though still working within Noise Rock - was more explicitly influenced by Free Jazz than Skullflower ever was. In 1996, opening for Sonic Youth at Kentish Town Forum, the band practically caused a riot. Enriched by jazz musicians Simon H. Fell (double bass) and Charles Wharf (soprano sax), Ascension became Descension.

Furthermore, Jaworzyn worked together with many artists, the best known being his 1992 collaboration with notorious Noise outfit Whitehouse on the Twice Is Not Enough album.

Jaworzyn also ran Shock Records between 1989 and 1996, releasing albums by Ramleh, Skullflower and Sol Invictus, as well as 7 inches by Current 93, Coil and Nurse With Wound.


Horror film

From 1985 to 1990 Jaworzyn edited the Shock Xpress magazine, 'The essential guide to exploitation cinema'. Jaworzyn: "The idea was to write about the weird, obscure movies we were seeing and that nobody else seemed to be covering. There were only a couple of books dealing with them and a couple of US fanzines which were really hard to find. So we wanted to do a similar kind of thing but maybe get the magazine across to more people. The first two issues were a fairly shitty black and white thing then it slowly improved from there until it ended up as a book.". Three books in fact, published in 1991, 1994 and 1996.

From 1988 to 1990, together with horror film journalist and author Alan Jones, Jaworzyn organized the legendary "Shock Around The Clock" horror film festival at the Scala Cinema in King's Cross, London. Showing films such as Hellraiser, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Monkey Shines, The Stepfather, Slugs, Mongolitos, The Church, The Fly II and Bad Taste, the most notorious film shown was perhaps the UK premiere of Jorg Buttgereit's 1987 necrophile film Nekromantik. After Jaworzyn stopped, the festival would eventually transform into the London FrightFest Film Festival.

In 2003, Jaworzyn published The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Companion, a book on Tobe Hooper's brilliant horror film. After publishing this book, Jaworzyn seems to have dropped out of sight.


Synthesis

Perhaps Jaworzyn's attitude to exploitation film can be characterized best by contrasting it to that of the editors of Re/Search Publications' 1986 book Incredibly Strange Films. The editors - V.Vale and Andrea Juno - sought to recuperate exploitation films as a political instrument. The consumption of these films was presented by them as a strategy against class structure and the media's control of society and culture. For them, the value of low-budget films is that they are "transcendent expressions of a single person's individual vision and quirky originality". In Shock Xpress, we do not find such Icarian idealism and naive applications of cinematic auteur theory. For Jaworzyn, exploitation has no redemptive value. In his preface to the second Shock Xpress book, Jaworzyn wrote: "What a successful exploitation picture and/or publication should do is to so infuse the reader with glimpses into the weird and twisted that they become infected, that an overall perspective emerges which the viewer of reader is part of and can never escape...!". For Jaworzyn, consuming an exploitation film meant exposing oneself to virulent mental pollution, to a contagious psychological disease.

Jaworzyn's work as an exploitation film fan and as a noise musician seem to have fed into each other. Where his appreciation of exploitation film is far removed from the political strategies of the Incredibly Strange Movies book, his approach to Free Jazz is far removed from that genre's idealism. Even when Free Jazz is at it's most chaotic, dense and noisy, the musicians tend to justify the music in politico-spiritual terms "Silva saw broad extra-musical ramifications in his procedures. He believed that by rejecting all externally imposed constraints the inherent goodness in men would surface and enable them to function in absolute harmony with both nature and each other. "Man," he said to me once, coming off an especially vigorous set. "In another ten years we won't even need traffic lights we're gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another"." With Jaworzyn's music one senses no such idealizations: in his work, one hears music rotting, dissolving, pulverizing. His noise is filth, smut, dirt - like the movies he writes about.

The upcoming series of YouTube video posts is a tribute to Jaworzyn's work.


Post scriptum

Here is an interview with Jaworzyn.

Here is an interview with Derek Bailey by Jaworzyn.

Here is a review of a Descension concert by the Wire's Ben Watson.

Here is a review of the Shock Around The Clock festival.

Can anyone tell me if the Scum List still exists, and if so how to subscribe?

Skullflower - Exquisite Fucking Boredom

"By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forests, and jewelled alligators glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of crystalline rivers. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown..."

In J.G. Ballard's 1964 short story "The Illuminated Man" and his 1966 novel "The Crystal World" forests are turning into a vast, brilliant, multi-colored crystalline mass which gradually expands to fill all space, transforming flora, fauna and man alike. This luminescent transfiguration is a reflection of a cosmic process in which the dimension of time is affected: "As more and more time 'leaks' away, the process of supersaturation continues, the original atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foothold upon existence."

UK Noise Rock band Skullflower's 2003 album 'Exquisite Fucking Boredom' reminded me strongly of these two works of fiction.

Skullflower, formed in 1985, is one of the bands of Matthew Bower (Total, Hototogisu, Pure, Sunroof!). 'Exquisite Fucking Boredom' was produced by Colin Potter, a musician and engineer who worked with 'England's Hidden Reverse' luminaries such as Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Organum, and Ora. Two tracks were reworked by Neil Campbell (Vibracathedral Orchestra, Astral Social Club).

The first track on the album, "Celestial Highway I", introduces the stomping and stoopid yet incredibly catchy riff which takes center stage on the album, a Black Sabbath riff seen through a Krautrock kaleidoscope. The riff, repeated ad infinitum, measures time, is time: an 'equable', forward-propelling, motorik motion.

But as the album continues its trajectory through the musical spheres - Celestial Highway II and III, Saturn, Return To Forever, and Celestial Highway IV - time leaks away. Like Ballard's forests, the elementary, time-marking riff is slowly encrusted with glimmering, sparkling splinters of light, with shimmering jewelry, with spectral gems. Marked with so many prismatic, light-suppurating wounds and crowned with an aureole of needles and spurs of glass and quartz, the riff is slowly dragged down, transformed into an immortal, exotic, translucent baroque church, surrendering its musical and time-keeping identity. Gradually, all musical space is saturated with a brilliantly beautiful, multi-colored crystalline mass.

At the end of Ballard's 'The Illuminated Man', the protagonist is resolved to return to the phantasmagoric forest he has fled, seeking the gift of immortality through crystallization, seeking "an ultimate macro-cosmic zero beyond the wildest dreams of Plato and Democritus."

Likewise, this listener has been enticed to return to Skullflower's album again and again, succumbing to the enticements of its enchanted entropy, of its luminous ennui, of its orgasmic tedium.

"However apostate we may be in this world, there perforce we become apostles of the prismatic sun."

Hototogisu - Some Blood Will Stick

Hototogisu's 2006 album 'Some Blood Will Stick' is a really intense and desolate experience.

It contains edited and remastered Noise Rock from two earlier Hototogisu albums: Swoon Scream (2004) and Awful Symmetry (2005). Both albums were released as cdr-s on Heavy Blossom, Hototogisu's own record label, in editions limited to a mere 100. Needless to say, both albums have been long sold out.

There is a paradoxical aspect to the music: where one would expect the mastering of the album to match the raw, primitive and visceral nature of Matthew Bower and Marcia Bassett's noise, the production is in fact sophisticated, with a great sense of space in the music. Record label VHF, which released this album, is quite right to call the mastering "crushing and invigorating".

The mastering was done by Scott Hull at Visceral Sound, his studio in Bethesda, Maryland. He is the current guitarist and producer for Grindcore bands Pig Destroyer, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, and Japanese Torture Comedy Hour; he is also a former member of Anal Cunt. Hull has collaborated with Matthew Bower several times: he mastered Skullflower's Orange Canyon Mind and Tribulation albums, as well Hototogisu's album Prayer Rug Exorcism. Furthermore, he remastered the recent rerelease of Skullflower's epochal IIIrd Gatekeeper album.

Hull's background in Grindcore points to something important. Where many reviewers have strained to make a connection between Hototogisu and Skullflower's music and Black Metal, I would say that a connection between that music and Grindcore is much more relevant.

It should be pointed out that Matthew Bower emerged from the very same scene that Grindcore emerged from: the British Industrial, Crust Punk and Noise Rock underground of the early-to-mid 1980s. In fact, Skullflower has toured together with Industrial Grindcore band Godflesh. Furthermore, that band's Justin Broadrick, who was in the very first incarnation of Napalm Death (the founding fathers of Grindcore), released two Skullflower albums (IIIrd Gatekeeper and Infinityland) on his HeadDirt label.

Hototogisu's Some Blood Will Stick can be heard as a psychedelicized, liquid slide Grindcore; an improvisational Grindcore in which the Crust Punk-influenced riffing has been radically destructured; a Grindcore in which the Hardcore and Thrash Metal drumming has disappeared in treacherous currents of scree; a vertical, multidirectional, ecstatic, Free Grindcore; a shot-to-hell Grindcore; a Grindcore which moves in mindbending waves.

Hototogisu - Green

"Green" (2005) has been called Hototogisu's Black Metal album. This would be true, if there were such a thing as celebratory, effervescent Black Metal. "Green" is Free Black Metal where ecstatic noise, many-colored like confetti, glitter and streamers, replace the cemetery-like black-and-gray tints.

Many Black Metal bands are one-man endeavors, following the example set by Burzum's obnoxious Kristian "Varg" Vikernes. A sense of loneliness often pervades the music these bands produce, personal as well as cosmic loneliness.

"One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world. Individual loneliness is a personal drama; one can feel lonely even in the midst of great natural beauty. An outcast in the world, indifferent to its being dazzling or dismal, self-consumed with triumphs and failures, engrossed in inner drama — such is the fate of the solitary. The feeling of cosmic loneliness, on the other hand, stems not so much from man's subjective agony as from an awareness of the world's isolation, of objective nothingness. It is as if all the splendors of this world were to vanish at once, leaving behind the dull monotony of a cemetery" (E.M. Cioran, 'On The Heights Of Despair).

Indeed, Black Metal can be "self-consumed with triumphs and failures, engrossed in inner drama" to the point of egotism, a self-centeredness that is all the more irritating because these dramas of the self are completely unrelated to the social... In fact, these dramas are anti-social: Black Metal's loneliness is part and parcel of it's hateful misanthropist ideology.

"Green" on the other hand, even though Hototogisu consists of only two persons (Marcia Bassett and Matthew Bower), radiates a sense of communal festivity that is at once personal and cosmic. The album presents a euphoric continuity between Bassett's music and Bower's, a ludic abandonment, an ineffable affinity.

That is not to say it is music without an edge: the noise still is as sharp as a samurai's sword.

Habermas' 'ideal speech situations’, those rational, idealized, Icarian structures which have plagued Improv, have been swept away by euphoric firestorms, ecstatically lacerated by guitar strings, buried under beatific blast beats, deliciously dissolved in drone. The titles of the performances (such as "Hellebore", "Ascend On Blackened Wings", "Crucified Forest") shake up the fixed, the finished and the predictable: they are at once loving caricatures of clichéd Black Metal song titles and acts of cruelty towards utilitarian rationalism. And the name of Bassett's and Bower's band points towards death: "Hototogisu" is the Japanese word for cuckoo, a bird which in Japanese culture is a symbol of the netherworld. Hototogisu is a feathered psychopomp which shows listeners the way to a colorful and joyous hell, to an infernal and communal 'realm of pure possibility' called "Green".




Post scriptum

Interestingly, like Cioran, Black Metal often presents it's spectacle of loneliness against a decor of great natural beauty, specifically the rural and wild landscapes of Norway.

Mirag - Black Temple Carved In Smoke

I

"A high platform, roofed and pillared, approached on three sides by tiers of steps of its own length and width. At one end, a deep, semi-enclosed shrine in which, dimly half-visible, looms the figure of the goddess. Black of face she is, with a monstrous lolling tongue, dripping blood. Of her four hands, one grasps a bleeding human head, one a knife, the third, outstretched, cradles blood, the fourth, raised in menace, is empty. In the shadows close about her feet stand the priests ministrant.

On the long platform before the deity, men and women prostrate themselves in vehement supplication. Among them stroll lounging boys, sucking lollypops fixed on sticks. Also, a white bull-calf wanders, while one reverend graybeard in the midst of it all, squatting cross-legged on the pavement before a great book, lifts up a droning voice.

(...)

Of a sudden, a piercing outburst of shrill bleating. We turn the corner of the edifice to reach the open courtyard at the end opposite the shrine. Here stand two priests, one with a cutlass in his hand, the other holding a young goat. The goat shrieks, for in the air is that smell that all beasts fear. A crash of sound, as before the goddess drums thunder. The priest who holds the goat swings it up and drops it, stretched by the legs, its screaming head held fast in a cleft post. The second priest with a single blow of his cutlass decapitates the little creature. The blood gushes forth on the pavement, the drums and the gongs before the goddess burst out wildly. "Kali! Kali! Kali!" shout all the priests and the suppliants together, some flinging themselves face downward on the temple floor.

Meantime, and instantly, a woman who waited behind the killers of the goat has rushed forward and fallen on all fours to lap up the blood with her tongue --"in the hope of having a child." And now a second woman, stooping, sops at the blood with a cloth, and thrusts the cloth into her bosom, while half a dozen sick, sore dogs, horribly misshapen by nameless diseases, stick their hungry muzzles into the lengthening pool of gore".

Katherine Mayo, "Mother India", New York 1927 (via Georges Bataille, "Kali", Documents 6, 1930).


II

Mirag is another of the maniacally prolific Matthew Bower's (Skullflower, Hototogisu, Sunroof!, Total, Pure) many projects.

The project's name possibly refers to the Mi'raj or "Night Journey". This is the ascension of the Prophet Muhammad to the Heavens, an ascension which "... exhibits shamanic content" (Eliade). If my interpretation is correct, it is the second reference to Islam I've spotted in Bower's work - the other being Hototogisu's "Prayer Rug Exorcism".

However, the spirit animating the 15-minute release "Black Temple Carved In Smoke" is very far from the spirit of doctrinal orthodoxy dominating Islam, the 'legal religion' which seeks to subject the tiniest details of domestic and private life to the rule of law.

"Black Temple Carved In Smoke" does not bow to the rule of law but instead exalts night, terror, destruction and chaos - those very attributes the Hindu goddess Kali, whose temple is described in the opening quote of this post, embodies. The gory and chaotic guitar noise bleeds out of the speakers like the blood of the sacrificed goat flows over the temple's dirty pavement. Far off is the blissful and bright electric guitar light of Bower's Sunroof! project: the smoke in which this black temple is carved is as thick as the heaviest incense, as hallucinatory as opium fumes and as lethal to inhale as a cloud of soot, tar and ash. It sounds like a sick, sore and horribly misshapen Tony Conrad, like a monstrous and four-armed La Monte Young, like a John Cale with a red, lolling tongue dripping blood. It is perhaps the most frightening thing Bower has ever done.

"Black Temple Carved In Smoke" is released by Battlecruiser, a sublabel of Celebrate Psi Phenomenon which is run by one of Bower's frequent collaborators: New Zealand's noisemeister Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel, Black Boned Angel, Ming). Battlecruiser ("New Wave Of Bad-ass Heavy Metal") is used by Kneale to put out more metal-oriented material than on the main label. The Battlecruiser label's artwork consists uniformly of an outtake of some sinister medieval woodcut and an almost-unreadable Metal-style band name logo in silver against a black background. The artwork serves to present a strong aesthetic unity for it's releases, in a manner not unlike Berlin's Chain Reaction label.

I found Bower's two-track album so powerful as to disturb my sense of time - after listening to the album for the first time I was unable to tell whether ten minutes or an hour had passed. So the short duration of this release should not dissuade anyone from purchasing it: it is a generous offering regardless of it's duration in minutes.

So stick your hungry muzzles into this pool of musical gore, fling yourselves face downward on the floor of this "Black Temple Carved In Smoke": it is intoxicating.



Post scriptum

Bataille's highly interesting entry on Kali in Document's critical dictionary will perhaps be the subject of a future post, as well as an analysis of the perverted use Bataille makes of Katherine Mayo's sensationalistic and pro-colonialist (!) book.

Gandhi said about the book: "This book is cleverly and powerfully written. The carefully chosen quotations give it the false appearance of a truthful book. But the impression it leaves on my mind, is that it is the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon, or to give a graphic description of the stench exuded by the opened drains. If Miss Mayo had confessed that she had come to India merely to open out and examine the drains of India, there would perhaps be little to complain about her compilation. But she declared her abominable and patently wrong conclusion with a certain amount of triumph: 'the drains are India'".

Where Mayo wanted to expose "the drains of India" so that they would be cleansed, Bataille wanted to change the course of that river of filth and direct it towards bourgeois Europe, where hygiene is sacrosanct...

Hototogisu - "Prayer Rug Exorcism"

"The vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it out with the treasures of memory and knowledge, with all that is put at its disposal by experience, culture, and history, not to mention what the imagination itself may invent or dream. So the imagination is never at a loss when it comes to making something rich and compelling out of a subject that might almost seem an absence of all life and significance." - Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, 1966


Hototogisu's album "Prayer Rug Exorcism" presents that band's Free guitar noise at it's most brutal and relentless. The four parts that comprise the album were recorded live in 2005 at four different venues: The Black Chapel in Leeds; CCA in Glasgow; Holy Trinity Church in Leeds, and Brudenell Social Club in Leeds in 2005. That the tracks were recorded live had in effect on the production quality: "Prayer Rug Exorcism" is as lo-fi as a Black Metal album.

However brutal the noise may be, it is also quite abstract, dispensing with recognizable musical structures, dispensing with conventional meaning. In a sense, the album's noise is as inaccessible as a stone, as impenetrable to the mind as a rock. "Stones have no vocabulary", wrote Roger Caillois in his brilliant 1966 book "The Writing of Stones": a book which consists of lyrical texts about the stones Caillois had been collecting since he first put his hands on a labradorite in 1952. In exceedingly beautiful passages, Caillois describes the colors, lines, surfaces, textures, shapes and forms of agates, onyx, jasper and other stones: solidified geological violence, "...more destructive and brutal than the weak force of humans". Of course, Hototogisu's noise is fast-rushing, frenetic even, far from solidified. But if one could freeze-frame Hototogisu's fast-rushing noise, the result might well be the audio equivalent of the black minerals Caillois describes.

The album's title is a rich metaphor, and indeed the music is as sinister as a fundamentalist Islamic take on the 1973 horror film The Exorcist: "The movie starts with an elderly Pakistani imam who studies early-Islamic writings in the Iraqi city of Mosul. After talking to a local, higher-ranking cleric, he then travels to a spot where a strange statue of a pre-Islamic deity stands. He sees an ominous-looking American soldier nearby, and two dogs fighting. Meanwhile a young imam at a fundamentalist madrassa, begins to doubt his faith while dealing with his mother's terminal sickness." The title led me to explore disquieting YouTube video's of djinnis being exorcised by imams (here and here and here), and mindbending examples of Pakistani ("Lollywood") horrorfilm (here and here).

It also led me to ponder at length the meaning of the word 'exorcism' in the title. 'Exorcism' at first seemed an inappropriate title for this sinister album. Aren't exorcisms entirely on the right-handed side of religion, on the side of the law and taboo, on the side of punishment? Nonetheless, Bataille wrote that laws are only created in order to transgress them - if so, are exorcisms only staged to perform an ecstatic possession by demons? Or does the title refer to a cleansing of the type Coil have talked about in their 2001 interview with Dutch VPRO Radio - noise music which is so intense that it cleanses the listener of the banalities of everyday existence?

The music itself as well as the title pointed me to Cammell and Roeg's 1970 film Performance, in which Mick Jagger plays Turner, a decadent hippie pop star who holds court in a crumbling London mansion rich in Islamic rugs. In a crucial scene in this hallucinatory film, a photograph of Jorge Luis Borges flashes in a shattered looking glass as the camera takes us on a tracking shot which follows a bullet penetrating Turner's skull. The psychedelic violence, rich in literary connotations, of that cinematographic moment corresponds exactly to 'Prayer Rug Exorcism'.

Browsing through "The Writing of Stones", I was reminded how Caillois employed a Surrealized structuralism - or better: a structuralized Surrealism - as a method to explore correspondences between stones on the one hand and mythology and metaphysics on the other. And this led me back to the first mythological association that the album called forth: Islamic exorcism. I was caught up in an intellectual feedback loop, and I started to hear a squealing, screeching, ringing noise of feedback in my mind's ear ... brutal and relentless.

Hototogisu + Burning Star Core - "Volume 1"

I

Contemplation of music sometimes calls forth images in the mind's eye.

I saw something of the beauty of factory chimneys collapsing in slow motion in the november 2005 collaboration of Hototogisu and Burning Star Core: the beauty of a nineteenth century red-brick smokestack, sign and symbol of mankind's labor, keeling over after a demolition charge is exploded at it's base, and toppling, breaking into pieces, falling apart as it hurtles towards the muddy, stinking earth, ending it's life in a monstrous cloud of dust.

And - as if contagious - this image gave rise to other images of collapse, to new visions of disaster, to immense displays of annihilation, the images proliferating in a frenzy until they reach a cosmic scale: star systems crumbling, galaxies exploding, the universe tearing itself apart.

Is the escalation to a cosmic scale caused by the symbol for infinity (∞) on the artwork? Are the astronomical associations caused by the name of one of the two collaborating bands: Burning Star Core?


II

Burning Star Core (BXC) is a free noise group loosely centered around Cincinatti, Ohio resident C. Spencer Yeh, a classically trained violinist. In this incarnation of BXC, Yeh (violin, voice, electronics) is assisted by Trevor Tremaine (drums, percussion, objects) and Robert Beatty (acoustic appraiser, electronics, Moog). Beatty and Tremaine form two-thirds of Hair Police.

Hototogisu is the name of a conspiracy by Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Sunroof!, Total, Pure) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph, GHQ). Both Bassett and Bower maltreat "guitar, electronics, voice" on this release.

The cd comes in a unusual but very nice packaging (a black polycase) and comes with a button with the face of one of the five musician's (I got Marcia Bassett!).

In the first three tracks, Tremaine and Beatty provide rhythm and basslines to the noise paroxysms of Bower, Bassett and Yeh. The flows and intensities of Hototogisu's fever-pitched scree seem - through a trick of perspective - to be slowed down by their juxtaposition to Tremaine's and Beatty's drum and bass. This juxtaposition of time frames works to transform Hototogisu's music into a gloriously ragged, raw, scorched and blackened krautrock - Can's 'Tago Mago' re-imagined as a disaster movie - a kosmische disaster movie.

The fourth track is a long and ominous guitar drone drifting, gradually picking up speed and finally hurtling through the dark interstellar void. Outer Space Gamelan's Matt likens it to yet another disaster scene: "...a field recording of the razed turf where the factories and buildings responsible for the creation of this music once stood".

For much of the recording, I couldn't discern C. Spencer Yeh's violin from the infernal din created by the guitarists. However, in the last and shortest of the five untitled tracks, the violin is foregrounded. This coda evokes yet another time frame: the instrument calls forth historical time, by virtue of it's long history which has spun a very thick spider's web of associations around it. And what is called forth is yet another disaster, a "... catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of (our) feet" (Benjamin).


III

The fantasmata evoked by Hototogisu + Burning Star Core's music were for me "... a species of liminal monster (...) whose combination of familiar and unfamiliar features or unfamiliar combination of familiar features provokes [me] into thought, provides [me] with new perspectives, one can be excited by them; the implications, suggestions and supporting values entwined with their literal use enable [me] to see the subject matter in a new way" (Victor Turner): to see the music as an exquisitely beautiful disaster.



Post scriptum

Here is a link to the Dronedisco site.

Here is a link to a review of this album on the Outer Space Gamelan blog, and here a link to a Brainwashed review.

Hototogisu - Spooked Summer

In october 1936 Roger Caillois published a short essay called "Le complexe de Midi" ("The Noon Complex") in the surrealist magazine Minotaure. In the essay, Caillois explores the mythological meaning given to the noon hour in premodern societies, arguing that not midnight but midday is the original witching hour. "In ancient Greece, noon was in fact the hour of transition, marking the boundary between the reign of the Uranian and of the infernal Gods. But noon is also the time when shade is at a low point, and thus when the exposed soul is most vulnerable to dangers of all kinds. For similar reasons, noon is generally the hour when the dead make their appearance - they who cast no shadow. On the most elementary level, these are the reasons noon is preordained to witness the apparitions of ghosts. (...) The sun's burning heat is unforgiving at this suffocating time of day. Heatstroke, sunstroke, cerebral fever, and their attendant mental and physical ailments offered sufficient prove of demonic activity to persude people that they existed".

Noon relates to the day as the midsummer relates to the year. Thus, it should come as no surprise that summer is a haunted season, that summer can lay as much claim to being 'the season of the witch' as autumn or winter. At Midsummer Day, the premodern peasantry of Europe lit bonfires, walked in a procession around their fields with torches, and rolled a burning wheel down the hillside, all to exorcize the demons of the summer solstice. Sir James Frazer in 'The Golden Bough': " [A medieval writer] tells us that boys burned bones and filth of various kinds to make a foul smoke, and the smoke drove away certain noxious dragons which at this time, exited by the summer heat, copulated in the air and poisoned the wells and rivers by dropping their seed in them (...)". Summer is spooked!

And it is this that brings us, dear reader, to Hototogisu's latest release, "Spooked Summer".

Hototogisu is the nom de plume of the collaborations of the immensely prolific Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Sunroof!, Total, Pure) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph, GHQ). "Hototogisu" is the Japanese word for cuckoo, a bird which apparently in Japanese culture is a symbol of the netherworld - an infernal bird, a spook with wings.

"Spooked Summer" is a Midsummer's Day noon hour sun of dissonant drones, blistering guitar distortion, feverish feedback, fiery freeform noise; a heatwave of sound; contemporary sun blindness music. Though beautific and hypnotising, the sound is also harsh, burning it's way though the listener's nervous system, causing hyperthermia as the mind absorbs more and more of the music's sweltering heat.

"But Valter!" I hear some of you say, "You are overdoing the references to the noon's sun for rhetorical reasons". To these readers, I'd like to point out that the image of the sun plays an important role in Matthew Bower's releases. The name of one of his bands - Sunroof! - contains the name of that heavenly body. The fifth track on Skullflower's "Form Destroyer" is called "Solar Anus"; and that band released a 7" called "Rotten Sun". Another Hototogisu release is actually called "Ghosts From The Sun" - the name could well be a direct reference to the noon complex. What's more, Matthew Bower himself refers to his music as burning light. In an interview in Wire 249 (november 2004), he said that his music sounds like having a blinding light shone in your face, and continued: "...we're channeling this intense bright light sound, all shot through with waves and sinuous ribbons. (...) White light angels flared across the retinas of my tightly shut eyes as I flayed the bass". And is it not likely that these white light angels are the very ghostly apparitions that haunt noon-time?

Hototogisu's summer is spooked, haunted, visited by apparitions of the dead, possessed by a host of hideous sun demons. However, Hototogisu's summer is apparently so disquieting that some music journalists reviewing Hototogisu feel they must dispel that uneasiness, dry clean the music, erase all stains, all lipstick traces of transgression. In their reviews, saccharine blissfulness is stressed an the expense of the fearful aspects of the music. In a review of Hototogisu & Prurient collaboration "Snail On A Razor" in Wire 274 (december 2006), Tony Herrington writes: "Unless I'm misreading something in the Hototogisu DNA, this [the Hototogisu & Prurient collaboration] strikes me as a weird hookup, philosophically speaking, because [Prurient mainman] Fernow's roaring noise sounds like some kind of sex-deathwish fulfilment fantasy, whereas Hototogisu music vibrates in multiple frequency patterns that articulates the sheer fucking elation of sensing the blood rushing through your veins more than any other music around right now, with the possible exception of Matthew Bower's solo Skullflower project". Well, we all should be glad that Herrington is no forensic scientist, because he completely bungles his crime scene investigation and DNA profiling analysis. The double helix of sex and death has been one of the main features of Bower's music ever since he started to record in the mid-to-late 1980's. Even a little superficial research into the imagery employed by Bower and his public statements would have pointed out the intimate embrace of eroticism and death in his work. Hototogisu and Skullflower are what the The Theater of Eternal Music might have sounded like if not Pandit Pran Nath but Georges Bataille, philosopher of evil, had been their guru.

So if Hototogisu's summer is haunted, what is the spook's identity? Whose ghost haunts the album? Thinking about this post, I discovered that one cannot write anymore about albums whose title begins with an adjective and ends with 'summer' without calling up the wraiths of the Beach Boys from the timeless hereafter of sun, surf and cars, as presented on their bestselling compilation album "Endless Summer". The symbolic weight of that album's title became even greater when it was appropriated by Fennesz for his brilliant 2001 glitchtronica tribute to Brian Wilson and his messengers. Perhaps Brian Wilson himself is the ghost that haunts the summer- isn't he some kind of Lazarus, one who came back from the dead, a revenant? Was it solar fire that destroyed his mind?

Perhaps the adjective 'spooked' relates to 'endless' in the same way Hototogisu relates to the Beach Boys. 'Endless' means 'unlimited in time', which is a denial of boundaries, of death. On the other hand, the word 'spook' points towards tresholds, to the Beyond, towards those who died. But the relationship of Hototogisu to the Beach Boys is more ambiguous than this bipolar structure, as both are fused together by the blazing heat of the word 'summer', becoming indeterminate and disoriented by the summer solstice sun.

Hototogisu is brilliant!








Post scripta

• The essay " The Noon Complex" is reproduced in "The Edge of Surrealism. A Roger Caillois Reader";
• Isn't the Frazer quote pure Cthulhu mythos?;
  
• More information on Japanese cuckoo symbolism here;
• Released as a cd-r, 'Spooked Summer' appears to be universally sold out - meaning that this review is in a way useless, having lost it's function in the economics of culture. To say that this review is so useless so as to become a Bataillan expenditure of opinions would be going a little too far, though: I know this white-hot album is still burning a hole in some internet forums, so you may be able to hunt it out;
• Direct Waves has some great out of print Skullflower albums for download (here);
  
• Here is a link to an interview with Hototogisu.