Spektr - Mescalyne

In 1963, author and poet Henri Michaux participated in the making of a documentary film on mescaline, "Images du monde visionnaire":





The film was produced by Laboratoires Sandoz, the company for which dr. Albert Hofmann worked when he discovered LSD by accident in 1938, and it was directed by Eric Duvivier. The film's intended audience was the medical profession. In an essay on that film ('Tempo de l'infini turbulence'), artist Jean-Jacques Lebel writes that Duvivier had never taken mescaline himself. Michaux felt the film did not adequately reflect the psychedelic experience, and created a spoken word introduction to the film which subtly undermines it.

Here, I translate part of that introduction.

"When it was proposed to make a film about mescaline hallucinations, I have declared, I have repeated and I repeat it again, that that is to attempt the impossible.
Even in a superior film, made with substantial means, with all one needs for an exceptional production, I must state beforehand the images will be insufficient. The images would have to be more dazzling, more instable, more subtle, more changeable, more ungraspable, more trembling, more tormenting, more writhing, infinitely more charged, more intensely beautiful, more frighteningly colored, more aggressive, more idiotic, more strange.
With regard to the film's speed, it should be so high that all scenes would have to fit in fifty seconds."

For the title track of their "Mescalyne" ep, French industrialized Black Metal band Spektr have sampled this very text. In using this specific sample, they raise the bar on themselves. Is their music "...more aggressive, more idiotic, more strange..." or is it "insufficient"?

In his writings on drugs Michaux writes that 'interruptions of consciousness' are characteristic of the mescaline experience. Such interruptions are echoed in the musical structure of Spektr's ep: Industrial Ambient and highly charged, aggressive and tormenting Black Metal alternate abruptly, as in the abrupt switching on and off of consciousness, as in sudden neuronic polarizations of depolarizations. The timing and dynamic of these alternations is irregular, prompting some reviewers to complain about a lack of composition. I do not agree: I believe the irregularities are intentional. I believe these irregularities purposefully mimic Michaux's description of the mescaline experience - or the mescaline experience itself.

Mescalyne is not "...more frighteningly colored...". Rather, it is a stark black and white, like their previous album "Near Death Experience". I had hoped that Mescalyne would continue down the path struck out by "Near Death Experience", which refers to musical idioms beyond Black Metal's narrow boundaries. I had hoped that - where "Near Death Experience" already incorporated funky, jazz-inflected drumming - Mescalyne would turn into a full-blown rhizomatic Black Metal, with Ambient, World Music, Jazz and Dubstep, mixed together with street noises, radio static and the sound of war into a blackened and surreal sound collage. It was not to be: Mescalyne is a little (though not much) more conventional than "Near Death Experience".

That is not to say that Mescalyne is "insufficient" - far from it! Spektr is a Sielwolf for the naughties and Mescalyne is "intensely beautiful". I especially love it's Ambient: it sounds as if Montague Rhodes James's chosen medium was music instead of story, and as if he had personally lived through the horrors of the 20th century instead of the genteel and sheltered world of 19th century King's College, Cambridge. "Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthly malice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distant screams', are all in place...". Recommended!








Post scriptum

Here is a post on the ever-excellent Ombres Blanches blog about "Images d'un monde visionnaire".

Some French Black Metal YouTube vids

Spektr - Near Death Experience



Deathspell Omega - Carnal Malefactor (from the cd 'Si Monumentum Requires Circumspice')



Antaeus - Blood War III



Mütiilation - My travels through sadness, hate & depression



Blut Aus Nord - Mort Chapter 5

Faces of Paris

Visiting Paris, it was one of my goals to buy three cd's:

'Presque Rien' by Luc Ferrari;

'Barbara Chante Brassens et Brel' by the eponymous chanteuse; and

'No Longer Human Senses - Et Fugit Interea Fugit Irreparabile Tempus'* by Spektr;

and write a post about it called 'Faces of Paris', the post's title being a riff on the notorious 'Faces Of Death' video nasties of the 1980's.

The nexus of the post would have been Pierre Klossowski's 'Sade - My Neighbour', more specifically the chapter of that book on the Divine Marquis' relation to the French revolution, where Klossowski describes regicide as the killing of God by proxy. The post would have linked the three cd's thematically through:

• the violent, sadomarxist, even selfdestructive aspect of existentialism, that philosophical movement of which Barbara was one of the figureheads (didn't Sartre write in his preface to Frantz Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth' that ".... by their mad fury, (...) by their ever-present desire to kill us, (...) have [the oppressed] become men"?);
• the violent, regicidal aspect of the may 1968 Paris uprising, where 'Soyons cruels!' was one of the slogans and where De Gaulle was to play the role of sacrificial king; the uprising of which Luc Ferrari's 'Music Promenade' is a music concrete collage of field-recorded sounds; and
• the sadean aspect of Black Metal, which needs no commentary here. "Les Hordes Noires", cruel deicides par excellence, would have been presented as the heirs of the Sadean regicidal revolutionaries.
  

However, as I came down with the flue during the visit to Paris, I only bought Ferrari's cd, so this post will never be written. It is up to you, dear reader, to imagine it's shape from these contours.





*The title of Spektr's cd is a paraphrase of Virgilius "Fast flies meanwhile the irreparable hour".

Spektr - Near Death Experience

A few posts ago, in a review of Xasthur's 'Subliminal Genocide', I called out for some "Striborg meets Stockhausen" music. Sometimes, such calls are answered: the sound of French Black Metal band Spektrs cd "Near Death Experience" roared back at my call, out of the dark abyss.

The French Black Metal scene is a very active one: bands Blut aus Nord, Haemoth, Deathspell Omega, Mütiilation and their ilk have spilled a blot of the blackest ink on the map of Europe, centered on Paris.

One of the salient features of many French Black metal bands is their comparatively intellectual orientation: where most black metal bands share metal's general anti-intellectualism, French black metal bands casually inject quotes of Georges Bataille into their interviews, and use obscure philosophical, occult and theological terms in their communications. Of course, the French have a reputation to keep up: 'Les Fleurs Du Mal', Baudelaire's towering floral hymn to Satan, still casts a shadow over these modern acolytes of the Dark One - not to speak of Baudelaire's progeny, from Lautreamont and Gérard de Nerval to Artaud and Bataille.

Another salient feature of French Black Metal is it's orthodox satanism. With regards to Satanism it is interesting to see that recently Satanist Black Metal has started to use the language of fundamentalism. For example, from the website of Swedish Black Metal band Ondskapt: "To worship him is to obey a holy will, immortal in its very fundaments. Ondskapt make no compromise when it comes to religiousness. Our music is completely dependant on the beliefs of the band. The music and lyrics exist solely through our faith and NEVER vice versa!". Many Black Metal bands have started to call themselves 'Orthodox', a term that generally refers to conservative dogmatism and is often used for those strains of Islam that are connected to fundamentalist violence. Of course, that one of the most heretic and apostatic musical genres has started to call itself 'orthodox' is deeply ironic. Without doubt, this fundamentalist language is used because since it has become transgressive to use it, as fundamentalist religion has become identified with terrorism, violence and evil; and Black Metal absorbs everything that is transgressive into it's culture. Thus, the consequences of Osama Bin Laden's actions have reached even as far as Black Metal; and it might be said that the western romantic nihilism that has influenced the Al-Qaeda ideology (see Buruma & Margalits 'Occidentalism') has come full circle. Perhaps, if more terrorist attacks occur in the coming years and the identification of fundamentalism and evil grows stronger, the language of satanic religious orthodoxy will eclipse the language of fascism in black metal.

Yesterday I bought French Black metal band Spektr's cd 'Near Death Experience', their second release.

It is not in itself the guitar playing or the vocals that make 'Near Death Experience' one of the most interesting recent albums in the Black metal genre: though somewhat slower, these resemble that of Haemoth on the Kontamination cd: cold, tinny, brittle yet fierce, harsh, trancelike (in fact, Haemoth is supposedly part of this band and in any case responsible for the vague but macabre black and white artwork of the Spektr cd cover).

And it is not in itself the fact that Spektr uses sampling and programming as part of their Black Metal palette, that make me call 'Near Death Experience' a powerful experience of transnormal anguish: ever since Burzum's 'Filosofem', electronica has been part and parcel of the genre's instrumentarium.

"What is it then? What is it? Tell us, Valter!"

It is the sound design, those weird droney waves of sub-bass sound that haunt my subwoofer, making it walk trough the living room as if possessed. It is the fact that Hth's 'rythm anomalies' incorporate technically proficient and sometimes even funky jazz drumming: such an unusual combination of black and blackened musics. It is fact that Spektr lets film noir (very noir) ambience collide with the harshest and most icy of black metal blizzards in an unique way. It is the way "clicks and cuts", digital glitches, are treated with reverb and echo, making them sound as if they are overgrown with sickening, whitish fluffy mildew. It is the ectoplasmic ambient drone of short wave radio static ... the samples of voices which seem to have been weathered by the ages ... Basinski-like rotting tape loops, the aural exquivalent of old Victorian ghost photographs ... dusty and dirty ... grainy ... blurred, faded ... scratched, torn ... a Sadean Stockhausen's 'Aus Den Sieben Tagen'... Need I go on? Must I?

It seems appropriate to end this post with a long samples of the first Chant de Maldoror:

"Alors les chiens, rendus furieux, brisent leurs chaînes, s'échappent des fermes lointaines ; ils courent dans la campagne, ça et là, en proie à la folie. Tout à coup ils s'arrêtent, regardent de tous côtés avec une inquiétude farouche, l'œil en feu ; et, de même que les éléphants avant de mourir, jettent dans le désert un dernier regard au ciel, élevant désespérément leur trompe, laissant leurs oreilles inertes, de même les chiens baissent leurs oreilles inertes, élèvent la tête, gonflent le cou terrible, et se mettent à aboyer, tour à tour soit comme un enfant qui crie de faim, soit comme un chat blessé au ventre au-dessus d'un toit, soit comme une femme qui va enfanter, soit comme un moribond atteint de la peste à l'hôpital, soit comme une jeune fille qui chante un air sublime, contre les étoiles au nord, contre les étoiles à l'est, contre les étoiles au sud, contre les étoiles à l'ouest ; contre la lune ; contre les montagnes semblables au loin à des roches géantes, gisantes dans l'obscurité ; contre l'air froid qu'ils aspirent à pleins poumons, qui rend l'intérieur de leur narine rouge, brûlant ; contre le silence de la nuit ; contre les chouettes dont le vol oblique leur rase le museau, emportant un rat ou une grenouille dans le bec, nourriture vivante, douce pour les petits ; contre les lièvres qui disparaissent en un clin-d'œil ; contre le voleur qui s'enfuit au galop de son cheval après avoir commis un crime ; contre les serpents remuant les bruyères, qui leur font trembler la peau, grincer les dents ; contre leurs propres aboiements qui leur font peur à eux-mêmes ; contre les crapauds qu'ils broient d'un coup sec de mâchoire (pourquoi se sont-ils éloignés du marais ?) ; contre les arbres dont les feuilles mollement bercées sont autant de mystères qu'ils ne comprennent pas, qu'ils veulent découvrir avec leurs yeux fixes, intelligents ; contre les araignées suspendues entre leurs longues pattes, qui grimpent sur les arbres pour se sauver ; contre les corbeaux qui n'ont pas trouvé de quoi manger pendant la journée, et qui s'en reviennent au gîte l'aile fatiguée ; contre les rochers du rivage ; contre les feux qui paraissent aux mâts des navires invisibles ; contre le bruit sourd des vagues ; contre les grands poissons, qui, nageant, montrent leur dos noir, puis s'enfoncent dans l'abîme ; et contre l'homme qui les rend esclaves".