0))) Presents... Pentemple

I

Pentemple: a minotauric music, a composite of the modernist and the archaic, an unholy assemblage of droning Minimalism and blackened Doom Metal.

As if Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings of imaginary dungeons had been re-imagined by Brutalist architects: the Baroque intricacies of the stairs and arches, beams, wheels, cables and grates, replaced by colour-depleted and crumbling concrete textures and depressively repetitive angular geometries.

As if the noxious smog that hangs over Throbbing Gristle's desolate, sickly late-1970s-England had descended upon the serene pastoral scenery of Ernst Jünger's Auf den Marmörklippen: fog mixed with industrial smoke and fumes suffocating the bucolic composite landscape that Jünger assembled from the rocks around the Capo Gallo lighthouse at Mondello, from Corfu, from the Rodino valley of Rhodes, from a road which runs along Lake Constance, from the Acropolis and from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro.

As if Theodor Kittelsen's 1896 illustration "Musstad" ("Decrepitude"; reproduced in the interior sleeve art of Burzum's 1996 album Filosofem) wasn't a naive, Neo-Romantic illustration of a fairytale but a sickening premonition of the extermination camps of the twentieth century.

As if an nth generation washed-out Betamax videocassette tape of Mario Bava's 1961 Viking epic Gli Invasori was restructured by Jack Smith as a trashadelic film experiment: filtered long shots of faux-Norwegian landscapes, medium shots of Viking Flaming Creatures applying corpse paint, flickering shapes and formless cathode tube static, overexposed into fogginess, pulsing and throbbing, spinning and shifting.


II

Pentemple documents two Sunn 0))) concerts in Australia, which were part of their May 2007 Pacific Rim tour. The collective was made up from disparate elements: besides Californians Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, the line-up included Dutchman Thomas Nieuwenhuizen (Moog-fiddling Punk), the Australian Oren Ambarchi (Jewish mystic turned sonic investigator), the Hungarian Attila Csihar (onetime heir to the throne of Dead in Mayhem), and finally the Australian Sin Nanna (misanthropic dweller of the Tasmanian rainforest, demented genius behind outsider Black Metal band Striborg).

From this Unholy gathering a collective, simultaneously improvised music emerged: an immense rumbling cloud-like drone, constantly churned up by Csihar's growls, chants, and whispers, and by Sin Nanna's almost Free Jazz drumming. Listening to the musicians communicate musically, one hears delirious concentration, brutal sensitivity and blind imagination. The resultant raw material (raw in all senses of the word) was recorded live to a 24-track/multi-track, and it was subsequently operated into consistency or consolidation by Ambarchi.

Mysterious and electrifying, Pentemple has been in semi-constant rotation ever since I bought it five days ago. It works much better than Gravetemple's "The Holy Down", a live album which documents a July 2006 collaboration of O'Malley, Anderson and Ambarchi in Tel Aviv, Israel. Compared to that album, Pentemple is more varied: it arranges decades of Doom and Black Metal and (Un-)Holy Minimalism into a single moonsick landscape of dissonance. The interior of the sound is an interior environment which an intrepid listener may explore at his own peril.

In fact, one might call Pentemple's music an aural form of Land Art. Like Land Art, Pentemple offers simplicity of form and concentrates on the (sonic) materials themselves. Both Land Art and Pentemple have an affinity with Minimalism. Land Art and Pentemple employ cthonic materials, abject materials traditionally considered "un-artistic" or "worthless" (earth and Metal). The fact that nearly all of the first wave of Land Artists were male, and worked in a manner that was both invasive and transformative, gave the art form a reputation for being driven by testosterone; likewise, Metal is strongly associated with masculinity. Land Art combines the archaic and the modern by raising paleolithic monuments to adress the very contemporary issue of an environment destroyed by technology; Pentemple harnesses the power of electricity to make an image flash up of the archaic past as a maze in which one would lose one's way.

"In the heart of the labyrinth, Theseus has no thought of return, he is not worried about getting out, he anxiously desires the Minotaur." (sourced here).


III

Here are three YouTube videos of the Pentemple concert at the HiFi Bar in Melbourne on May 9, 2007. The poor sound of the videos in no way reflects the aural majesty of the album.






*

Black Metal Mashups (pt 1)

At the break in "Winter's Apathy", from Embittered Animal's feral, sentimental Sung Darkness, when the guitar picks up and Sin Tear and Nanna Bear's voices flail like children who know they're about to die, it occurs to me that sickness and pain isn't always wasted on the young.

Since their first release, Australia's Embittered Animal have soundtracked the surreal, manic experience of "immature" dysphoria. In fact, the Tear/Bear duo responsible for Sung Darkness is the same that issued 2000's Daemon They're Gone, Daemon They've Vanished, a singular, idiosyncratic take on fairy tale folk and moon-child Black Metal. Fairy tales and moon-children: these are impressions of 'the Beyond' for imaginative children, and it's this mentality that Embittered Animal explore and evoke.

Unlike last year's impressive Here Comes the Misanthrope, Sung Darkness opts for folky ambience and late-night, winter camp wailing to carry the weight (or weightlessness) of its strains. Coldfire Songs, which followed Here Comes the Misanthrope, suggested a similar kind of sprawling, communal minstrel-craft, but without much of Sung Darkness' flair for meandering atonality and nearly free-form drumming. As it happens, the last third of the new record does return to more of an open-ended, exploratory rote, but there it seems less a part of an endless riff than the come-down from scenes of a forest almost too fantastically malevolent to imagine. And despite its eclecticism and relatively Dadaist leanings, Sung Darkness is a depressive album; depressive in its mourning for lost innocence and in its nocturnal non-knowing, and in the bitter, baleful idea that everything will decay -- like it always has.

Musically, Embittered Animal sound less "Metal" here than they ever have, which is to say most of the songs have terribly out-of-tune broken chords that beg to be doubled and tripled by you or anyone else who cares to join. In songs like "Leaf Ditch", "Winter's Apathy" and "Throne", the duo stake a direct claim to Darkthrone's seminally non-produced "Transilvanian Hunger", as their harmonies are such a sprawling mess, that they suggest perfection. As Tear and Bear are filtered through a Radio Shack reverb unit in wordless counterpoint, I think about the damaged ambitions of "Cabinessence" and Smiley Smile. However, as Brian Wilson's visions were symphonies to an already-gone god, Embittered Animal drag the memories of his voice like a crowbar on concrete.

"Who Could Skin a Rabbit" revels in a thousand parts of some giant broken timepiece, as the pair of delirious children slide over screws into a grey den of gears. The acoustic guitar rings in the start of this race with a out-of-tune, minor chord strum, and just after the clattering drums cheer in pandemonium, fragmented croaking vocals spit out as many syllables as possible to describe who knows what sickroom. Sometimes their voices stumble, or trudge on in the unwashed fringes for stretches so long that what seems like pure laryngeal decay approaches intricate polyphony. Above all, a sense of overwhelming balefulness abounds, head hung downward at having discovered this strange place.

Elsewhere, the music is more reflective. "The Choking Voice" layers repetitive figures played through dated synth patches upon each other, as Tear and Bear whisper in dissonance above, as if singing to the vision peering back at them from the skin of a backwoods creek. The rustic, secretive manner of their voices and the barely disturbed forest around them suggests that whatever ghosts inhabit these woods are only too happy to oblige a lullaby or two. Likewise, the epic "Visiting Lords" gathers in faceless, mutated ghosts (i.e., oddly manipulated vocalizations from the duo) to hover over their dying fire in visage of nothing better than the tops of trees. The constant presence of tape hiss moves alongside the voices, helping to keep them afloat, but never suggesting they should organize themselves into anything recognizable or predictable. It's cold, and if it rains they'll get wet and continue to play.

The ritual dance "We Wolves", passing like a pagan baptism for children in war paint, gives way to a trilogy of almost formless ballads, beginning with the erratic hymn "Mouth Silenced Her". Here, Embittered Animal, no longer satisfied to keep their dysphoria in check via tribal drums or vertiginous, fuzzed-out guitar riffs, stumble through scenes with murky, atavistic malevolence. Wordless cries and howling darken the song, and the pair drags their narrative downwards into a sprawling harmonic mess of a guitar tone, hanging like a depressive grey pall, before running into each other headfirst and pouncing on their guitars like real savages. This is how Sung Darkness communicates; in place of organized chaos, there are chance meetings and reunions, and plenty of mournful dances and uncomfortable epiphanies. In truth, it may be too much for some people to take, especially if they're too far removed from this strange environment. For others, it's a unbelievable place, as these guides know only too well.



Epilogue

This was a mash-up of two reviews, Adam MacGregor's review of Striborg's 2006 album 'Embittered Darkness / Isle De Morts' and Dominique Leone's review of Animal Collective's 2004 album 'Sung Tongs'.

Striborg - Journey Of A Misanthrope

Here is a Youtube video with outtakes from the Striborg DVD "Journey Of A Misanthrope", released on Displeased Records: "STRIBORG has just finished the making of the one and only REAL BLACK METAL DVD. No flashy stage shows, no funny behind the scenes, no interviews. Only what Black Metal is all about; harsh raw music, eerie atmosphere and dark moody images. Sin Nanna made this video in the dark desolate forests of Tasmania".

Robert Frost - Design

An anonymous commentator to my posts on Striborg's album "Ghostwoodlands" (here and here) pointed me towards Robert Frost's poem "Design". I've reproduced it below.



Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Striborg - Ghostwoodlands (pt. 2)

I

"I wish I was a ghost", Sin Nanna, responsible for one-man Black Metal band Striborg's anomalous sound, states in a rare interview. Sin Nanna describes a nightly encounter with a ghost as a formative experience, and wants his music to have the same effect on the listener as that encounter had on him. In describing his own encounter with a ghost, Sin Nanna describes the haunt as a "glowing white head" which peered him at from an abandoned house. He also describes poltergeist-like disturbances, such as gushes of wind and a guitar string snapping by itself. Sin Nanna relates that he experienced strong emotions of dread, terror, panic and desolation. Furthermore, the experience made Sin Nanna feel sickened: "Whatever it was were trying to make me ill".


II

"I want to be a ghost": what a fascinating example of mimetic excess, what a mindbending play on mimesis and alterity! A ghost is an after-image of a living person: wanting to be a ghost means wanting to be an after-image of oneself, miming misesis, a ghostly mise-en-abyme, mimesis running amok. Yet at the same time, ghosts are "Other": as the undead, they declassify the categories of living and dead. The self dissolving into the fluidity of ectoplasm, Sin Nanna tries the incorporeal on for size - a costume for the theater of his Black Metal music.


III

How do ghosts and Striborg's music correspond? How do the experience of meeting a ghost and the musical form of Striborg's music relate?

Perhaps it is worthwhile to explore the thesis that the relation is mimetic in nature. Sin Nanna wants to transform himself into a ghost; is the music a mimetic transformation of the encounter with the ghost?

The production of the music echoes the image of the glowing white head. Interestingly, Sin Nanna does not use the usual trope of 'darkness' to describe his music. On the contrary, in an interview he describes the production as 'bright' - the unusual adjective the polar opposite of dark. "This is how I always produce music, bright, fuzzy, cold and distant. (...) I want my sound to be fuzzy and distant, like an audio version of literally the mist you encounter in everyday life". "Glowing white" and "fuzzy bright" - I feel these adjectives are largely interchangeable.

The emotions of dread, terror and panic - some of the emotions Sin Nanna felt during the ghost encounter - are all three closely related to that of fear. These emotions cause tension of the muscles, an increased heart rate, perspiration, dilation of the pupils and horripilation (gooseflesh and hair standing on end). I strongly feel these physical symptoms of fear are somehow bound up with features of Striborg's music, though I find it hard to put the correlation into words. Is there something gooseflesh-like in the ambient washes of Kosmische synthesizer sound that permeate the songs, the coagulations and swirls in the sound a transformation of the contraction of the muscles which elevates the hair follicles above the rest of the skin, when the skin crawls? Does the cold and thin guitar noise sound like cold sweat, like simultaneous perspiration and chill and cold moist skin? Is there something of the muscular tension and increased heart rate in the nervous, idiosyncratic percussion?

The emotion of desolation points towards feelings of loneliness and isolation, i.e. non-communication with fellow human beings. The same type of questions that I asked about fear, can be asked about these emotions. Cannot Striborg's musical style be called isolationist, in that it is seeking to be so idiosyncratic as to turn every listener away? The music is so primitive and so "totally fucking weirded out" that even many Black Metal aficionados are nauseated, sickened by it.

As for the poltergeist phenomena Sin Nanna describes: the word derives from the German verb 'poltern', meaning 'to rumble' or 'to make noise'. Thus, the phenomenon already points towards a ghost as an auditive experience. One theory with regards to poltergeists posits that these spirits are "recordings" of powerful emotions, which are believed to be engraved into the place they haunt. These recordings play themselves over and over again, like a locked-groove record. So a poltergeist is a recording that rumbles, that makes noise. And thus Striborg's music is a noisy recording that mimics a recording that makes noise - another eerie, animistic mise-en-abyme.

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph and thus of recorded sound, spread the rumor he was working on a machine that could make contact with the spirits of the dead. Audio recordings have since their infancy been associated with ghosts. And Sin Nanna wants the listener to relate to his music as he himself related to the ghost: a deeply ambivalent relation oscillating mixing attraction and repulsion. The ghost and the recording occupy an identical space in these formations.

Ghosts have 'Wiederholungszwang' and like a ghost, Striborg's recordings repeats themselves. Album after album, the basic concepts of his idiosyncratic brand of Black Metal are repeated: wafer-thin production, demented warbling vocals, blast beats sounding as if they are played on a cardboard shoe box, confusingly arrhythmic drumming and sinister, Tangerine Dream-like synthesis. Each new album mimes the ones that came before. But it is a poorly-made copy, resembling the original as much as a voodoo-doll resembles it's intended victim ... as much as a ghost resembles the human being it once was.


IV

The motto of Surrealist Roger Caillois famous article "Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia" is "Beware: whoever pretend to be a ghost will eventually turn into one". For Sin Nanna, it may already be too late.

Striborg - Ghostwoodlands

Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon, a French 18th century musician, musicologist and man of letters "...had an interest in spiders and played the violin for them to see what music they liked..." (quote sourced form Claude Lévi-Strauss's "Look, listen, read").

Alas, Lévi-Strauss's book does not tell us what music spiders did like.

For Georges Bataille, the spider was an almost formless creature, an invertebrate that is not like anything: "To declare (...) that the universe is not like anything, and is simply formless, is tantamount to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spittle" (Documents 7, 1929).

Certainly, Bataille's perspective on the spider is anthropocentric. Nonetheless, though highly sensitive to vibration, spiders have no ears. For that reason alone, the music spiders like would sound formless to us, unlike any music hitherto made by man, the audio equivalent of spittle.

Translating the music spiders like to human music is impossible. As Lévi-Strauss notes, translation "... is impossible in music, for lacking words it possesses as many languages as composers, and, ultimately, as compositions. Musical languages are, relative to each other, untranslatable, though conceivably they could be transformable - even if this has not, or has hardly been attempted".

In my imagination, if the music spiders like could be transformed to human terms, it might sound something like Tasmanian Black Metal band Striborg's latest album, the predatory and poisonous "Ghostwoodlands".

Striborg - Embittered Darkness / Isle Des Morts

With the notion of expenditure, Georges Bataille developed the idea that human activity cannot be completely be reduced to greed, useful production and conservation of (capital) goods. On the contrary, generosity, improductive squandering also has it's place in human life and keeps that life vital. As reckless waste, as ruinous gift-giving Georges Bataille mentions luxury, war, games, spectacles, sacrifice, art, death and eroticism. Goal-oriented rationality and expenditure are opposites: "An unproductive expenditure is nonsense, or even counter-sense".

Striborg's extremely strange Black Metal obliviously wastes high-end audio equipment, it squanders the aural quality of expensive cd-players, amplifiers and loudspeakers, it ruins their hi-fidelity, it ruins them, it ruins them: Striborg's music is audiophile expenditure.

Accuracy, warmth, tonal color, speed, timbre, size of sound stage, depth, clarity, pace, timing - on other words, all qualitative attributes of high end audio - are utterly squandered when such equipment is used for Striborg's music, which is fuzzed out, cold, hollow-sounding, thin, raw, completely blown out and in the red... The production of Striborgs cd 'Embittered Darkness / Isle Des Morts' presents "... the splendor of rags ..." (Bataille, The Accurse Share Volume 1), and ... and... and here doubt starts, here - dear reader - I loose my sure footing. Bataille continues the words I quoted with "... the somber challenge of indifference". Black Metal can certainly present a somber challenge, but is indifference Black Metal's strategy? Can it really be that desinterest is the strategy of that hysterical genre? No, Black Metal is not ever indifferent, it somberly yet gleefully sacrifices conspicuously accumulated audiophile high end gear.

Striborg relates to well-produced music as a slaughterhouse relates to a museum... one attracts and the other repels, one is proper and clean and the other improper and unclean... Reading some reviews of the 'Embittered Darkness / Isle Des Morts' and ' Nefaria' cds one is struck by the fact that even die-hard Black Metal fans are disgusted by the ugliness of Striborg's production, perhaps feeling it goes a little too far...

The last words of this post focus on Striborg's vocals. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" - and Satan is to God what Striborg's vocals are to the Word: a mockery. "Sin-Nanna growls and gurgles his obtuse black ravings in an impossibly creepy animalistic voice, somewhere between a rabid dog, a tiny demon, and a wicked old witch" (Aquarius Records) ... a list of voice-types to which a toad and Donald Duck with a sore throat might be added. Striborg's vocals mock, Striborg mocks. One cannot remain indifferent.