Moëvöt

What would the work of Jean Rollin have sound like, if he had had not been a cinematographer but a Black Metal fan?

Perhaps something like the shadowy French band Moëvöt.

In the sixties and seventies, French filmmaker Jean Rollin directed a series of obscure and odd art-horror films. Most of Rollin's films are charmingly amateurish, largely improvised, poetic vampire films. His aesthetic predilections ran counter to the Nouvelle Vague movement that dominated the French arthouse cinema of the era, as he was always more attracted to 'outmoded' traditional French cinema. The films are a strange amalgam of on the one hand an anachronistic form of Black Romanticism and and on the other hand exploitation cinema: his films feature declamatory speeches, 'theatrical' acting and 'poetic' tropes, as well as (sometimes crude) sex and violence. Jean Rollin's films are not successful as horror films (they are never truly frightening), but they succeed as filmic explorations of a Surreal, almost mythological and very personal iconography.

From the chapter on Rollin in Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs 1994 book Immoral Tales. Sex and Horror Cinema in Europe 1956-1984:

"In the guise of a 'horror' film a series of unconnected images was being shown: women drinking from a huge jar of blood, a game of skittles played by a blind woman, a vampire queen emerging from the sea, a marriage of vampires taking place in the old Grand Guignol theatre, two lover being sealed inside a coffin... and so on, up to the final image of the hero, cradling his lover's body in his arms in the deserted Place de la Bastille, and reciting from ancient pulp author Gaston Leroux. To cap it all, the film was laced with splashes of nudity, ridiculous dialogue that seemed to be made up as the actors spoke, and had a cast who were killed off at the end of the first half hour and then came back to life for the final fifty-minute play-out. (...)

[Rollin's] films are based around images and sequences of images, not around the logical, point-by-point exposition of a screenplay. The genesis of many of is films is a particular place that catches his attention or a specific image. Other images then follow, and often the screenplay is an exercise in linking the pictures that come almost ready formed to his mind. (...) His ideal is to find images that are strong enough in themselves to need no final explanation. To him, the need to explain takes away the power of the images."

Moëvöt is the work of a French musician known only under the pseudonym Vordb Dréagvor Uèzréèvb. Very little is known about Vordb. Possibly his name was Stéphane Z, possibly he hailed from the (rather provincial) town of Bergerac in the Dordogne. What seems certain is that Vordb was one of the leading figures of a collective of Black Metal bands called 'Les Légions Noires' ('The Black Legions'). Moëvöt is likely to have been only one of Vordb's many projects, others being Brenoritvrezorkre, Dzlvarv, Susvourtre, Torgeist, Vzaeurvbtre, Dvnaèbkre and (the best-known) Belkètre.

It cannot be said with certainty how many demos Moëvöt brought out. Some internet sites list up to twelve demos, but only two demos can definitely be attributed to this project: Voryathre (1993) and the impossibly named Ézléýfbdréhtr Vépréùb Zùérfl Màzàgvàtre Érbbédréà (1994).

Why do I associate Jean Rollin's films with Moëvöt's music?

Certainly there's more to the association than the mere fact that both artists are French.

Perhaps it seems odd to compare Rollin's poetic, highly intertextual films to the extreme and sometimes primitive genre of Black Metal. But even if Vorbd was part of the Black Metal scene, the music on the Moëvöt demos is not Black Metal in strictu sensu. Grimly buzzing guitars and blast-beating drums are conspicuous in their absence. Underlining this absence, we find choir-like singing, melancholic acoustic guitar chords, macabre Carnival of Souls-like organ playing, and extremely cinematic 'found sounds' of footsteps, children, church bells, birdsong. The only Black Metal element in the music are the agonized, rasping vocals, which are used only sparsely. If Rollin's films were explorations of a Surreal and very personal iconography, Moëvöt's music travels into the intimacy of Vordb's idiosyncratic musical-mental landscape.

One of the reasons I associate Rollin's films with Moëvöt's music is that there is something anachronistic about Moëvöt's Black Romanticist music. Both Rollins films and Moëvöt's music tap into "... the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded' - in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them." (Benjamin). The sex and violence in Rollin's films relate to their outmoded context as the Black Metal vocals relate to the other elements of Moëvöt's music.

Both Rollin and Moëvöt worked under severe budgetary constrains, but manage to turn this to their advantage: Rollin by harnessing the energies that emerge in the 'outmoded', Moëvöt by using the primitivity of the recording technology to explicitly introduce "...the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content." (K-Punk)

Like the films of Jean Rollin, the music of Moëvöt is charmingly amateurish and largely improvised. The music lacks rhythm, structure, development. The music is based around musical motifs and sequences of motifs, and not based on a logical composition. One senses that for Moëvöt, the power of the motifs would be taken away if they were to be integrated into a conceptual construction.

I end this post with the juxtaposition of two YouTube videos of Moëvöt's music with the same number of trailers for Rollin's films. This collocation of videos is strong enough in itself to obviate the need for any further rationalization.

It is time to sleep, perchance to dream.



In einem Friedhof - Errance (Moëvöt)





Le Frisson Des Vampires (Jean Rollin, 1971)




Zurghtapre-Chant d'Eternité I (Moëvöt)




La Rose De Fer (Jean Rollin, 1973)





Post scriptum

This is the 400th post of this blog. The very first post was published on August 14th, 2006. It announced: 'This blog has been inspired by my visit to the exhibition "Undercover Surrealism" at the Hayward Gallery in London. The blog is intended to contain doctrines, fine arts, ethnography, variety. Expect dusty things, ethnographies of one-man-Cthulhu Cults, confused concepts, black and blackened musics, untruths.'

Skinny Puppy - Last Rights

I've always regarded Canadian Industrial band Skinny Puppy's 1992 album 'Last Rights' as a failure - a bloated album. If the band's 1990 album 'Too Dark Park' already teetered on the edge of the swollen, the 1992 album certainly was overdone. Nivek Ogre's vocals had devolved from anguish into kitsch sentimentality; the music was "... a scribble effacing all lines, a scramble effacing all sounds ..." (Deleuze & Guattari), a "statistical heap" of samples; the album as a whole somehow smacked of puerile Hollywood Gothic.

It was the last Skinny Puppy album I bought. In fact, the album was one of the reasons I abandoned the Industrial aesthetic and crossed over to the nascent IDM scene, a scene which I would abandon for Black and Doom Metal when IDM became too complacent and anodyne. To experience once more something filthy, something guilty! Writing my post on South Korean Black Metal band Pyha's 2008 album 'The Haunted House', made me go back to the Skinny Puppy album.

I must say the sixteen years which have passed since 'Last Rights' was released, have been kind to the album. It is as if time has assembled the scribble, the scramble that I used to hear into a consistency; as if time has simplified, creatively limited, selected the album's overabundance of sounds. The hands of the clock have achieved what the hands of the musicians could not.

By what means has the clock done this?

In 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Walter Benjamin writes that "Within major historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of being of the human collective, there are also changes in the manner of its sense perception." Certainly, my manner of sense perception has changed in the last sixteen years.

In part, this change is due to technological advances: the stereo equipment I own is much better than the one I had when the album came out, the acoustic spatiality of my Elac speakers making the disparate elements that constitute the album more clearly discernible. Furthermore, where the production style of 'Last Rights' seemed too rich, in fact downright Hollywoodesque at the time, now - in this age of compression and subsonics and 5.1 surround sound - it sounds quite restrained.

But my manner of sense perception has also been affected by changes in my personal mode of being. The passing years have expanded my musical horizon. Thus, 'Last Rights' has found a place in the procession of musical genres that I have liked. For example, the final track, 'Download', foreshadows the glitch music aesthetic by several years. My appreciation of chaotic music, pomposity and cartoonesque histrionics has grown through listening to Black Metal. And listening to Free Jazz has engendered an interest in (over-)ripe, late-style music in which complexity and chaos go hand in hand. The expansion of my musical repertoire has provided an enriching context for Skinny Puppy's album, and has allowed me when listening to select, capture and extract certain aspects of the album and thereby to effect a certain simplicity. Furthermore, my biographical aging has had an effect on my mode of perception. When I was young, I was more sectarian in my musical tastes than I am now; 'Last Rights' accords better with my current eclecticism than with my former purism. And in all probability, a barely-acknowledged nostalgia to the time when I was twenty-something plays a role also.

Finally, I like it that 'Last Rights' is completely outdated and utterly unfashionable. As noted by Walter Benjamin, the Surrealists had been "...the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded' - in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution - no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution - not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects - can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism."

'Last Rights': a dress of five years ago, slightly dusty, taken from its cupboard to contemplate for a few brief moments, and then put back.


Post scriptum

Here is the video for 'Killing Game'.



And here a (crappy-looking) live performance of 'Love in Vein'.

Marduk - Panzer Division Marduk

Swedish Black Metal band Marduk released the classic album 'Panzer Division Marduk' in 1999. It is a concept album dealing with themes of war and warfare.

Panzer Division Marduk presents us with a nostalgic view of warfare - the unlikely nostalgia of those living in the age of the information war, for the era of the industrial war. The album was released about eight years after the Gulf War, that turning point in military history in which a war of tanks, projectiles and missiles was enveloped and swallowed up by a war of electronic media. But even though Panzer Division Marduk came out after the Gulf War, the album's artwork and lyrics refer to the tanks, bunkers, bombardments and small-arms fire of the Second World War. On Marduk's battlefield, satellites play no role.

The nostalgic nature of Marduk's presentation of war becomes evident when it is compared to the presentation of war in Electronic Body Music (EBM), a musical genre which emerged roughly half a decade before Black Metal and which also thematized warfare. EBM bands like Front 242 and Front Line Assembly used sparse electronic rhythms to simulate a futuristic war, looking forward, extolling the beauty of cybernetic organisms, orbital tele-surveillance, satellite warfare, virtual reality, tele-piloted aerial reconnaisance and so on. Marduk on the other hand looks backward and adorns the album with the photograph of a Swedish tank used in World War II, while the internal sleeve pictures a Red Army tank column driving through a ruined Berlin in 1945.

Appropriately, the Black Metal on Panzer Division Marduk is one of breakneck speed, with rushing blast beats and hysterical riffing. This celebration of musical speed can be connected to the speed that was the dominant characteristic of the warfare in the Second World War: Blitzkrieg! This era of the Fast War ended with the Gulf War, in which speed became absolute and was thereby transformed into instantaneousness. The absolute immediacy of transmission of electronic data surpassed the relative (fast, but not immediate) speed of the driving and flying fortresses of industrial warfare. I understand the headlong rush of Marduk's Black Metal as a sign of nostalgia for a war of movement, felt in the age of the ubiquitous, instantaneous, omniscient and omnipresent war machine.

The lyrics to Panzer Division Marduk may present images of industrial warfare, but it frames these images in an archaic, pre-industrial context. There are two aspects to this archaic context: one religious, one erotic. The religious aspect is evident in the lyrics which portray an inverted Crusade, an Unholy War: "Panzer division Marduk continues its triumphant crusade / Against christianity and your worthless humanity" and "Baptism by fire / Feel the wrath of Satan's relentless flames / Ungodly desires / When god is lost and on his planet hellfire reigns". The second aspect is evident in a glorification of cruelty, which veers towards eroticism; this aspect is particularly evident in those songs which juxtapose (homo-erotic) sadism with the suffering of Christ. The religious and erotic character of Marduk's warfare point towards the wasteful, cruel, frenzied, transgressive character of archaic war, an aspect that was already almost lost in industrial warfare:

"Organized war with its efficient military operations based on discipline, which when all is said and done excludes the mass of combatants from the pleasure of transgressing the limits, has been caught up in a mechanism foreign to the impulses which set [archaic war] off in the first place; war today has only the remotest connections to [archaic, ritualized] war as I have described it; it is a dismal aberration geared to political ends" (Bataille, L'Erotisme).

Already weakened by the utilitarianism of industrial and fascist war, the transgressive character of archaic war is eclipsed definitively in the cool-headed, programmed, screened, techno-scientific Gulf War. Created in the age of the cool war, Marduk is nostalgic for war as a hot experience.

Listening to Panzer Division Marduk can be compared to watching a war movie. To paraphrase Bataille, these films "... are usually about the misfortunes of the hero and the violence which besieges him. Without his difficulties and his fears there would be nothing in his life to hold and excite the [moviegoer] and make him identify with the hero as he peruses his adventures. The gratuitous nature of the [movies] and the fact that the [moviegoer] is anyway safe from danger prevents him from seeing this very clearly, but we live vicariously in a way that our lack of energy forbids us in real life. Without too much personal discomfort we experience the feeling of losing or being in danger that somebody else's adventures supply." Like war movies, Panzer Division Marduk allows the listener to transgress his scruples and vicariously experience the warfare of the past. But it is not a realistic experience: on the contrary, Panzer Division Marduk aims for an artificial intensification of that experience through the Baroque repetition of childish clichés of warfare. Panzer Division Marduk promotes an aesthetic of the unbalanced and irregular, of the ostentatious and exaggerated, of the affected and theatrical.

This vicarious experience of intensified warfare resists simplistic reduction to the political in the limited sense of the word: Marduk band members have publicly said that Marduk has no political goal in their lyrics, and that the band has nothing to do with Nazi ideology. Marduk's warfare is, to quote Susan Sontag's essay on Jack Smith's film Flaming Creatures, "strictly a treat for the senses".

As his friend Theodor Adorno noted, Walter Benjamin was "drawn to the petrified, frozen or obsolete elements of civilization . . . Small glass balls containing a landscape upon which snow fell when shook were among his favorite things." Panzer Division Marduk is like a snow globe of war: the album is a trinket that allows us to contemplate a miniature version of industrialized archaic warfare. The nostalgic, almost kitsch relation of the album to contemporary information warfare gives it a souvenir-like quality. Sentimental in its bloodlust, the warfare Panzer Division Marduk presents is outdated, obsolete; it is a petrified, frozen exhibit, already covered with a ‘grey coating of dust’ at the time it came out. It is this ‘grey coating of dust’ which distances the album from pristine fascist aestheticizations of violence; the music's harshness on the other hand prevents assimilation to an frivolous, 'lite' Camp aesthetic.

Panzer Division Marduk is a bauble with para-oneiric powers, like the mysterious-looking World War I helmet André Breton found in 1934 in the flea markets of Paris. The album is both clichéd and profound, trivial, but also strangely marvelous.

Shake up Panzer Division Marduk's snow globe, and watch fire rain down from Heaven.

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.

Possession (pt. 6)

In the post about artists as men possessed, which inspired this series of posts, Mark K-Punk wrote about Joy Division:

"The most disquieting section of the Joy Division documentary is the cassette recording of Curtis being hypnotised. It's disturbing, in part because you suspect that it is many ways the key to Curtis's art of performance: his capacity to evacuate his self, to "travel far and wide through many different times". You don't have to believe that he has been regressed into a past life in order to recognise that he is not there, that he has gone somewhere else: you can hear the absence in Curtis's comatoned voice, stripped of familiar emotional textures. He has gone to some ur-zone where Law is written, the Land Of The Dead. Hence another take on the old 'death of the author' riff: the real author is the one who can break the connection with his lifeworld self, become a shell and a conduit which other voices, outside forces, can temporarily occupy."

The Law of Curtis

K-Punk: "He has gone to some ur-zone where Law is written, the Land Of The Dead."

The lyrics of Shadowplay open with the image of a crossroads, which in many cultures is an Interzone, a location "between the worlds", a place where spirits can be contacted, a dangerously sacred place, "No place to stop, no place to go".

Hecate, 'Queen of the Night', who sometimes traveled with a following of ghosts and other social outcasts, was the goddess of crossroads in ancient Greece. Oedipus met his father at the crossroads and killed him there. In Voodoo, crossroads are regarded as a favorite haunt of evil spirits and propitious to magic devices. At crossroads, the most powerful Voodoo divinity, Papa Legba, receives the homages of sorcerers and presides over their incantations and spells. Many magic formulae of Voodoo begin with the words: 'By the power, Master of the Crossroads.' The bluesman Robert Johnson reputedly sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.

Crossroads are a locality where two directions touch and annihilate each other, a directionless place ("...so plain to see..."), a nowhere, a no-man's land. In anthropological terms, crossroads are a liminal place, a "threshold" of or between two different existential planes, a place characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy.

This non-place, which is a non-time as well, is where Curtis receives his stone tablets with his bitter Law.

However, Curtis does not bring back Ten Commandments from the wilderness, from his personal Mount Sinai. The Law he brings back from the Wilderness (Curtis' shamanic Otherworld), it is primarily a descriptive law, not a presciptive law. Curtis' vision quest in the Wilderness aim to describe, understand and predict the cruelties of social life: travelling "...far and wide to many different times...", Curtis brings back visions which underline his proposition that social life invariably, unchangingly is cruel. In Wilderness, the laws of Curtis are statical (not dynamical) laws of social existence.

In Wilderness, prescriptive law plays only an indirect role, showing through in his feelings of indignation, guilt, and shame at seeing moral laws transgressed. Nevertheless, the fact that these feelings show through so strongly indicate that the relation between the two types of law is highly relevant in understanding Curtis' situation. For Curtis descriptive law (the cruel laws governing social life) and prescriptive law are fundamentally incongruous, conflicting: the laws of social life ordain that the laws of morality will always be trampled underfoot.

In fact, I am reminded somewhat of the Marquis De Sade's 1787 novel 'Justine (or The Misfortunes of Virtue)'. In this novel too the descriptive and prescriptive laws are at odds. Justine's morals, the virtuous protagonist's prescriptive laws are confronted with the descriptive (metaphysical) law which makes those who live a life of evil and vice prosper, whilst the morally pure suffer. A Sadean reading of Joy Division - perverse pleasure at Curtis' dejection - is entirely possible, though in all probability quite rare.

Curtis takes an intermediate position between Marquis De Sade and Justine. Justine, though confronted with wickedness, perversions and crimes at every turn, blindly clings to her moral laws, remaining unaware of the evil character of Nature. Marquis De Sade on the other hand is conscious of the monstrosity of Nature, and this consciousness leads him to embrace all evil. Curtis, unlike Justine and like De Sade, is painfully aware of the corrupt nature of social life; but like Justine and unlike De Sade, he does not reject prescriptive law.

What strikes me about the lyrics of Wilderness is that they employ imagery of a Christian nature - surprising for a band which has a nihilist reputation. The lyrics mention saints, the Cross, sin, the blood of Christ, and martyrs. In this context, the 'one-sided trials' seem to refer to Pontius Pilate's trial of Jesus and subsequent trials of Christian martyrs.

In fact, there is something Christian about Joy Division's lyrics, which insistently extol suffering, which present us with a "mortification of the mind". Furthermore, Pilate's executioners may have nailed Christ to the Cross, but the crucifixion was a sacrifice of God. In the sacrifice of Christ the position of the victim is sanctified, while the position of the sacrificer is disavowed. If I examine Curtis' lyrics with the scheme of sacrifice in my mind, Curtis presents himself primarily as the victim, not as the sacrificer. The sacrificers are generally external agents: the leaders of men, the architects of law, the conquistadors who took their share, the figures from the past, the people who pay to see inside asylums with doors open wide, the 'you' in whom 'I put my trust', the 'you' who 'treats me like this'. Like Christian thought, Curtis disavows the sacrifiers.

However, unlike Christian suffering, Curtis' suffering brings him no interior peace, no spiritual joy, no salvation. Curtis is like Benjamin's Angel of History, who also looks backwards and not towards a future redemption: 'His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet.' 'No future' means 'No Redemption', means 'No Kingdom Come'; teleology and salvation have slipped from our grasp.

Furthermore, in some lyrics the conflict of prescriptive and descriptive law rages even within Curtis himself. In these lyrics, Curtis no longer disavows the sacrificer, but experiences himself as guilty. Humanity's guilt of killing Jesus Christ assumes an unlimited nature. The leaders of men, the conquistadors who took their share, and all the others are no longer the only actors in the drama of sacrifice, since the fault devolves on all humans. In the end, even Curtis, even Christ himself, is tainted. In these lyrics, Curtis' torment takes on a tragic dimension.

Mother, I tried, please believe me
I'm doing the best that I can
I'm ashamed of the things
I've been put through
I'm ashamed of the person I am

Isolation (3)

But if you could just see the beauty
These things I could never describe
Pleasures and wayward distraction
Is this my wonderful prize?

Isolation (5)

Possession (pt. 4)

I

It might seem bizarre to write, as I did in the previous installment of this series of posts, that Mark Stewart was a man possessed by the spirit of the Thatcherite Great Britain of the 1980s, a man communing with the military-industrial entertainment complex, a man in communion with the capitalist, proto-fascist, paranoid, surveillance-obsessed oppressor, a man in unio mystica with Babylon, with the enemy. Bizarre: wasn't Stewart an anti-fascist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist activist?

But there is an interesting antecedent: the West-African Hauka movement. From Michael Taussig's "Mimesis and Alterity":

"Those involved in this rapidly growing movement, begun among the Songhay people in 1925, would dance and become possessed by the spirit of the French major who had first taken the offensive against him, who imprisoned those who had begun the movement, who slapped them around until they said there was no such thing as Hauka. Thus deified as "the wicked major," his spirit got into the first floor of the Hauka pantheon as one of its most violent spirits. Thus possessed, the Hauka would mimic the white men (and sometimes their wives, too) and acquire strange powers.

(...)

But in addition to the conscious play-acting mimicking of the European, conducted with wit and verve, there is bodily possession - which is what makes the mimicry possible yet generally works at a less than conscious level with special, even disturbing, bodily effects: frothing at the mouth, bulging of the eyes, contorted limb movements, inability to feel pain. Strange "Europeans" indeed. And surely that's the point - they so clearly are and are not Europeans. It's the ability to become possessed, the ability that signifies to Europeans awesome Otherness, if not downright savagery, which allows them to assume the identity of the European and, at the same time, stand clearly and irrevocably eye-bulgingly apart from it."

In the Hauka cult, the Europeans discovered "... the presence of an open dissidence, a society the members of which openly defied the social, political and religious order. It his here that we discover the most original aspect of the Hauka movement: their total refusal of the system put in place by the French." In embodying the enemy the Hauka appropriated his power. In this case, possession was anthropophagy.

Like the Hauka, Stewart embodied the enemy: in his case, the enemy was not the colonial authorities but the grey and hopeless Great Britain of the 1980s, the Babylon that Rastamen denounce, the "wicked major" Margaret Thatcher. And like the Hauka, the fact that Stewart embodied the enemy didn't keep him from refusing all cooperation with the authorities.


II

Reflecting on a specific moment in "Les Maîtres Fous" ("The Mad Masters"), a 1955 ethnographic film by Jean Rouch (1917-2004), Taussig writes:

"A man possessed by a Hauka spirit stoops and breaks an egg over the sculpted figure of the governor (a little statue not unlike the Mbari shrine of the white man) that presides over the day's events of Hauka possession. Cracked on the governor's head, the egg cascades in white and yellow rivulets. Then the film is abruptly cut. We are transported to a big military parade in the colonial city two hours away. The film hurls at us the cascading yellow and white plumes of the white governor's gorgeous hat as he reviews the black troops passing. Those of us watching the film in a university lecture hall in New York City gasp. There is something immensely powerful released at this moment, begging for interpretation."

Mark Stewart's version of William Blake's "Jerusalem" somehow parallels this moment in Rouch's film. Regarded as the high point of Stewart's career, the song was played on a regular basis by John Peel and constantly being asked for by listeners. Stewart's "Jerusalem" is more than a parody of the patriotic 1916 hymn, written by C. Hubert H. Parry: it is also an anthropophagic appropriation of the affective power of Brass band patriotism and militarism for anti-nationalist and anti-militarist purposes. But "Jerusalem" is even more than parody and appropration: the rough, almost Dadaist juxtaposition of incongruent sonic material (Industrial, Dub Reggae, Punk Rock, Brass Band, Song) mimics the tensions present in the British social and cultural life in the 1980s.

But Stewart's "Jerusalem" is yet more than a parody and an appropriation and mimesis: the song wrests Blake's poem "...away from a conformism that is about to overpower it". In "Jerusalem", Mark Stewart is a "...writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, [he] is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious" (Benjamin).

To paraphrase Taussig's analysis of Rouch's film: the deep Industrial Dub of "Jerusalem", with its ability to explore the sonic unconscious, to come close and enlarge, to frame and to montage, creates in this sudden juxtaposition a suffusion of mimetic poetry. Blake's poetry is allowed to flower in the grey Thatcherite Great Britain of the 1980s.

Mark Stewart's "Jerusalem" is to C. Hubert H. Parry "Jerusalem", what the rivulets of egg are to the governor's hat.


Post scriptum

I've posted Rouch's film before, but feel compelled to watch it. Even though I first saw it several years ago the film is still bending my mind into shapes that are "abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours" (Lovecraft). As Wizard Eibon commented on the earlier posting of the film: "a classic masterpiece you can't forget once you've seen it".









A fascinating review of Rouch's film: here.

Michael Taussig - Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing (pt. 2)

In my previous post about Michael Taussig's 1986 ethnography "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing", I wrote that Taussig's description of the montage-like (dis-)order of Indian healing rituals is very reminiscent of Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of the rhizome. It must be stressed though that where Deleuze and Guattari tend towards the obscurantist and the disembodied, Taussig's work remains in close contact with the filth and grime of the physical world.

Below I quote Taussig's description of yagé-intoxicated montage-like (dis-)order in full, as I found it beautiful and inspiring.


"Montage: alterations, cracks, displacements and swerves all evening long - the sudden interruptions, always interruptions to what at first appears the order of the ritual and later takes on little more than an excuse of order, and then dissolves into a battering of wave after wave of interruptedness into illusory order, mocked order, colonial order in the looking glass. Interruptions for shitting, for vomiting, for a cloth to wipe one's face, for going to the kitchen to gather coals for burning copal incense, for getting roots of magical chondur from where nobody can remember where they were last put, for telling and retelling a joke (especially for that), for stopping the song in mid-flight to yell at the dogs to stop barking ... and in the cracks and swerves, a universe opens out.

Montage: the manner of the interruptedness; the sudden scene changing which breaks up any attempt at narrative ordering and which trips up sensationalism. Between the swirling uncertainty of nausea and the abrupt certainty of the joke there lies little if any room for either the sensationalistic or the mysterious.

Montage: suddenly altering situations of the group withing the room and mood-slides associated with these changing situations, scenes, as it were, from the art of trompe-l'oeil, passing in a flash from night to day through ages of time from despair to joy and back again without any guarantee of happy endings.

Montage: flashing back and forth from self to group; not simply self-absorption broken up and scrambled by participation in the group or with one or two members of it, but also through such flashing back and forth from self to group and group to self a sort of playground or testing-ground is set up for comparing hallucinations with the social field from which they spring. Hence the very grounds of representation itself are raked over.

(...)

Montage: the 'interior" scenes of dots and dashes of color and of phantasms, coming and going, death scenes, above all fragments of things - shiny blades of grass quivering under the rain, a tiny feathered segment of intricate pattern (the edge of a bird's wing, perhaps?), the quavering of yagé songs butting into the river's rush - all metamorphosing into memory images as the past gains force in its rush into the present "now-time" of the Jetztzeiten where time stands still as an image in which past and future converge explosively.

Montage: oscillating in and out off oneself; feeling sensations so intensely that you become the stuff sensed. But then you are standing outside the experience and coldly analyzing it as Bertolt Brecht so wanted from his "alienation effects" in his epic theater. Only here, in the theater of yagé nights in the Putumayo foothills, the A-effect, standing outside of one's own defamiliarized experience and analyzing that experience, is inconstant and constantly so, flickering, alternating with absorption in the events and their magic. Perhaps that is the formula for the profoundest possible A-effect, standing within and standing without in quick oscillation."

Michael Taussig - Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing (pt. 1)

Michael Taussig's 1986 ethnography "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing" examines the origins of the extraordinary cruelties inflicted by colonial rubber traders upon Colombian Indians and those of the shamanic healing rituals of the Colombian Indians living in the Putumayo foothills.

In Taussig's view, both the cruelties and the healing rituals are motivated by a view of the Indian as a Wild Man, that savage from medieval and Renaissance legend, Europe's version of Bigfoot.

The cruelties visited upon the Indians in the 19th and early 20th century by the colonial rubber industry were extreme. This terror was bloodthirstier by far than could be explained by rational, economic motives: in fact, the terror went against business interests as it destroyed scarce labor power. Taussig views the terror as an abreaction against the Wild Man, a construction of the Indian as a savage anti-self of the colonist, an anti-self which necessitated violence as savage as the 'savage' it was directed against. This anti-self was not well-defined and clear-cut, but was swathed in what Taussig calls 'epistemic murk': the colonists worried incessantly about the Wild Man, and this worry infected their imagination with terrible nightmares of Indian attacks, conspiracies, uprising, treachery, etc. It was the unclear, murky nature of the wildness ascribed to Indians in colonial fabulation that gave this wildness such a powerful, obsessing hold on the imagination of the colonists.

Quoting Alfred Métraux's 1958 book 'Voodoo In Haiti', Taussig notes that "Man is never cruel and unjust with impunity: the anxiety which grows in the minds of those who abuse power takes the form of imaginary terrors and demented obsessions. The master maltreated his slave, but feared his hatred. He treated him like a beast of burden but dreaded the magical powers imputed to him."

White colonists visit Indian shamans to be cured of the sorcery. The sorcery is either of human origin, perpetrated because of Invidia (envy, a capitalist affect par excellence), or the result of mal aires (literally 'bad winds'; for Taussig, memories about Indians killed in colonial conquest coming back to haunt colonists). The colonists believe that the 'wilder', the more mysterious the Indian is, the more powerful his healing capabilities are. Thus, in the healing rituals of Indian shamans, the healers use the view of the Indian as a Wild Man. The terrific magical powers imputed to the shamans by the white colonists are a colonial construction appropriated and used by the colonized. Taussig: "So it has been through the sweep of colonial history where the colonizers provided the colonized with the left-handed gift of the image of the wild man--a gift whose powers the colonizers would be blind to, were it not for the reciprocation of the colonized, bringing together in the dialogical imagination of colonization an image that wrests from civilization its demonic power.” It is Exotica used as a healing power by those deemed Exotic by the colonists.

The shamans use yagé, a hallucinogenic drink made from the Banisteriopsis spp. vine, native to the Amazon Rainforest, in their healing rituals. The psychological effects of yagé, the montage-like (dis-)order of the healing rituals and the symbolic wildness create an 'epistemic murk' which heals by unraveling colonial, capitalist culture: "Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage. (...) Wildness is the death space of signification.”

Some critical remarks:
- Taussig's book is about yagé ceremonies and the symbolic efficacy of montage and cut-ups. Yet Burrough's and Ginzberg's book 1963 "The Yagé Latters" is only given passing mention. Isn't it likely that Taussig's book is more deeply indebted to Burrough's conceptual apparatus than he acknowledges?
- Taussig's description of the montage-like (dis-)order of the healing rituals is also very reminiscent of Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of the rhizome. Another unacknowledged inspiration?
- In one of the final chapters of the book, Taussig almost calls Victor Turner a fascist, in short because he feels Turner's (Durkheim- and Mauss-inspired) attention to the community-forming effect of ritual and symbols is totalitarian. I disagree with Taussig on this point. Not only does Taussig fail to acknowledge the roots of Durkheim's and Mauss's thought in left wing (albeit non-Marxist) activism, and the continued relevance of that thought for issues of social solidarity. But if one denies the continued importance of community and solidarity, one plays into the hands of neoliberalism and its spurious, atomizing individualism. Furthermore, isn't Taussig's unwarranted attack on Turner the type of theoretical intolerance which will ultimately lead to a left wing divided against itself, to left wing paralysis? Finally, Taussig misrepresents the dynamic nature of Turner's analytic framework, which is directed not towards legitimizing stable hegemonies but towards change, towards "social structure in action".

Despite these criticisms 'Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing' is rightly regarded as Taussig's major work. Where Taussig's 1980 book 'The devil and commodity fetishism in South America' suffered from a heavy-handed Marxist approach, the orthodoxies had been shaken off by Taussig when he wrote this book six years later. While retaining a strong left wing political focus, Taussig's approach to his subject matter had become much more free (in an almost Free Jazz sense of the word). Walter Benjamin's work had clearly begun to inspire Taussig. But the book is not only highly interesting not only from a theoretical standpoint. It is also very well written, the theoretical content informing the literary structure of the book: the text is riddled by alterations, cracks, displacements and swerves, making it a work of hallucinatory montage. Recommended!

Leviathan - Massive Conspiracy Against All Life

Californian Black Metal band Leviathan's music has been called 'depressive Black Metal', but that is something of a misnomer. Far from a emotional monochrome, Leviathan's music is a veritable kaleidoscope of - admittedly, mostly dysphoric - emotions. On Leviathan's latest album, 'Massive Conspiracy Against All Life', the affect shifts, modulates, transforms continually: agression, lust, elation, triumph, fury, anxiety, resignation, depression and anger. Emotionally, Leviathan's music is richer than ever.

The integrating power of Leviathan's musicianship ensures that the sum of these disparate emotions does not become a jumble of moods and sounds. Far from a confusion effacing all affect and a scramble effacing all sounds, the dissimilar element are aggregated into an demonic whole. Leviathan accomplishes this by means of a certain simplicity: heavily-layered, haze-filled noise, sputtering blast beats, half-smothered melodies and cryptic sound effects are opened onto something luxuriously evil by means of the austerity of riffs.

I must admit I was a little disappointed with the album at the first two, three listens.

I had hoped, and perhaps expected a little, that Wrest (the mastermind behind Leviathan) would continue further in the mind-expanding direction he had taken as 'Lurker Of Chalice', and dare to traverse many genres in a single bound. In my mind's ear, I anticipated Wrest evolving into a Black Metal reincarnation of early The Third Eye Foundation (the early, sinister one, not the later weepy PC one!): I could almost hear a Jazz-orbiting Black Metal; a Black Metal that was more ink-noir than stereotypically grim; a dusty, scratched, junk-shop Black Metal; a Black Metal that is not nostalgic for an archaic consciousness but that reuses the dystopian fears of successive generations (to paraphrase and invert Walter Benjamin).

Probably, I had been anticipating this new album with a little too much impatience. My imagination had ran away with me. I had not prepared for the austerity of riffs. At first, the album seemed taciturn.

But listening to the album repeatedly, made an intimate understanding between the music and myself grow, made my appreciation of the subtleties of this album flower. Because it is a subtle album.

Not only are the disparate elements (riffs, rhythms, electronic sound effects, noise) sculptured in a masterful, subtle way; not only are these elements arranged subtly; but most of all, subtle is the way the pendulum of the music swings from focused and mature austerity to wailing, teeth-gnashing and lunatic miasma. In other words: most subtle is the way subtlety ebbs away and floods back in again.

'Massive Conspiracy Against All Life' is an album of cold and moonsick joy - highly recommended.



Post scriptum

Here is a very interesting post by mr. Reynolds which touches on some of the issues addressed in this post and references the same Deleuze/Guattari - passage I shoplifted for this review.

Unexpected 'web of significance': 'Massive Conspiracy Against All Life' was recorded and mixed by Dan Voss and mastered by Drew Webster ('Drucifer'), both of whom have been associated with two seminal albums by Portland Free Noise band Yellow Swans: 'Psychic Secession' and 'At All Ends'.

Euronymous as Kafka (pt. 3)

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

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

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

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

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

Euronymous as Kafka (pt. 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current 93 - Live at the Roadburn Festival

Last Sunday - April 20th 2008 - I saw Current 93 (David Tibet supported by no less than eleven musicians) live at 013 venue in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

Tibet's performance and its psychological effect on myself, reminded me strongly of the 1958 ethnography 'Voodoo In Haiti' by Alfred Métraux:

"The explanation of mystical trance given by disciples of Voodoo is simple: a loa moves into the head of an individual having first driven out the 'big good angel' (gros bon ange) - one of the two souls that everyone carries within himself. This eviction of the soul is responsible for the tremblings and convulsions which characterize the opening stages of trance. Once the good angel has gone the person possessed experiences a feeling of total emptiness as though he were fainting. His head whirls, the calves of his legs tremble; he now becomes not only the vessel but also the instrument of the god. From now on it is the god's personality and not his own which is expressed in his bearing and words. The play of his features, his gestures and even the tone of his voice all reflect the temperament and the character of the god who has descended upon him.

(...)

The preliminary crisis has a contagious effect, particularly upon people who are nervous or unstable. That is why the sight of a possession often has the effect of provoking others, not only among the hunsi who are ready to be ridden by the gods but also among the spectators who have come as visitors or out of curiosity.

(...)

Unlike an hysteric who shows his own misery and desires by means of a symptom - which is an entirely personal form of expression - the man who is ritually possessed must correspond to the traditional conception of some mythical personage."

And by which mythical personage is the man ritually possessed? By Walter Benjamin's angel of history:

"A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Post scriptum

I also met these very nice people (not familiar with their music, though).

Neonfolk

“What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says – but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.” Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, 1928.

For those who (like me) have no taste for militaristic totalitarianism, the fascination for fascist aesthetics so prevalent in Neofolk can perhaps relate to fascism as the fiery pool relates to what the moving red neon sign says - though Benjamin's thought couldn't be more out of place than in that particular context.

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.

Drudkh - Blood In Our Wells

Folk and Volk

In a recent post on Transpontine's excellent "History is made at night" blog Transpontine wrote some interesting observations on gender issues in folk music: "There is a fey element (cf Joanna Newsom) but this is not fey in the sense of vaguely ‘girly’ and lacking in presence. This is fey in its original meaning, as in like the fairies, but not fairies in their diminutive Victorian chocolate box version. (...) behind some of the fey melodies of folk old and new lie sentiments of passion, jealousy, murder and bewitching. This is feycore".

I appreciate Transpontine's attempt to counter the V-chipping or whitewashing of folk, by stressing the eldritch aspect rather than the "twee/mimsy" (Blissblog). There is a regrettable tendency in some folk music to shy away from viscerality, to erase all traces of transgressivity, to present a past as genteel, balmy and innocent with all erotic, obscene, sadistic, cruel and licentious features of the past bleached out. Folk as conformist nostalgia, not hauntology, as far away as possible from the convulsive beauty of The Wicker Man and Comus.

On the other hand, I feel that Transpontine comes close - too close, perhaps - to creating a false contradiction between the 'girly' and the 'feycore'. Isn't sacral transgression of gender barriers, isn't the ceremonial montage of the feminine and masculine, isn't the ritualized collapse of gender polarization traditionally one of the ways shamans practice the fey physically? And isn't it exactly this aspect of folk traditions which lends itself to contemporary reframing, isn't it exactly this aspect which can enter into effervescent relationships with the present - as Coil have shown? Certainly Coil aren't 'folk' on a superficial musical level, but Coil culture is thoroughly informed by (pagan) folk-lore. Coil is the 'feycore' band par excellence, showing a continuity between sentiments of passion, jealousy, murder and bewitching on the one hand and queer transgression of gender limits on the other hand...

Coil show that putting gender center stage doesn't necessarily degrade an artistic endeavor to the world of "law and speeches" (Bataille), doesn't make that endeavor a homogenising bureaucratic project directed at 'mainstreaming' gender. The UN defines mainstreaming as a practice which "...involves ensuring that gender perspectives and attention to the goal of gender equality are central to all activities - policy development, research, advocacy/ dialogue, legislation, resource allocation, and planning, implementation and monitoring of programmes and projects..." - is anything further removed than this from the delirious world of Coil, where eroticism must be "the darkest and most bloody part" (Bataille) of being human? Coil show by example that the most likely space where the sacred can be encountered today is in the obscene, the violent, the sacrilegious yet ritual bending of genders (cf 'The Pope Held Upside Down' and 'The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant') - and never in the bureaucratic world.

The notion of 'feycore' itself needs close examination. The suffix -core having strong connotations of speed, aggression and masculinity, the introduction of the term 'feycore' can be interpreted as masculinizing folk. Is this really what folk music needs?

A musical genre which uses folk music in the context of a pathologically masculine ideology is Pagan Black Metal, also known as Folk Black Metal. Viking Metal is variant of this subgenre. Black Metal which uses (elements of) folk music are often associated with National Socialist (i.e. Nazi) ideology - in fact, Pagan/Folk Black Metal is often a synonym for NSBM: National Socialist Black Metal. Here, effeminate folk music becomes testosterone-swollen Volk music.


Drudkh

Ukrainian Black Metal band 'Drudkh' are a case in point. Their acclaimed 2006 album "The Blood In Our Wells" presents a particularly proggy strain of Black Metal blended with traditional Ukrainian folk music to create a sense of the epic - or the pompous, bordering on the silly.

While there are no explicitly nazi themes on the album, it is very nationalistic. The band uses for it's lyrics poetry by Oleksandr Oles (1878-1944), to portray Ukraine as a body wounded by enemies, a body which must assert it's honour through violence (the poem is reproduced below). The violence is directed outwards, against those enemies, and death is regarded as an external pleasure - and as such the music couldn't be more different from Abruptum's Black Metal which affirms it's internal absurdity.

This wounded body of Ukrainian nationalism is decidedly gendered - male, of course - and has a strong aversion to queerness: this month, angry Ukrainian nationalists have held protests against the selection of a transvestite to represent Ukraine in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Interestingly, the folk music on the album is sampled from the Ukrainian film 'Mamay', a 2003 Oscar nominee. 'Mamay' a historical drama, is a Romeo-and-Juliet-type story abut the love between a cossack and a beautiful Tatar woman. The film is said to point towards a new cultural identity for Ukrainians, not through the definition by negation but through inclusion of other ethnicities. Thus, Mamay's political message apparently points in an very different direction than that of Drudkh - (inadvertently?) introducing a multivocality in Drudkh's music that would be interesting to investigate. Alas, Drudkh never allow interviews.

And this multivocality draws attention to the fact that Drudkh's music can be read against it's nationalist grain - that while Drudkh strive after ethnic homogenizing, Drudkh's music can be liked for the inclusion of samples of 'exotic' (i.e. heterological) or 'world' (multicultural / ethnically different) music: Ukrainian folk. Drudkh can be liked for unintended reasons.

Volk hauntology?

On Transpontine's blog post, he praises folk music for it's countercultural sensibilities: "Since Cecil Sharp began collecting songs in the early 20th century and defining a specific ‘folk music’ in opposition to other popular musics, folk revivals have invoked the spirits of gypsies, agricultural workers and miners against the evils of modernity or capitalism, depending on political perspective".

On Drudkh's record label, Supernal Music, Drudkh's sensibilities are described as "... nostalgic, anti-urban, conservative revolutionary. (...) Against the degenerate modern, liberal ideology of cosmopolitanism, urbanism, and secularism, and in favour of heroic, traditionalist values, living in harmony with nature rather than raping it".

Are these two really different? Let us not forget that Cecil Sharp's activities were directed towards a nationalist agenda!

For both Transpontine's folk and Drudkh's volk music, it can be said that "the ideology of authenticity disguised the fact the old songs were not simply a direct testimony from the past but were being reframed and understood according to contemporary needs". And perhaps one can even maintain that Drudkh use of crackly samples of Ukrainian folk music and half-forgotten poets means that the music "... employs certain strategies of disinternment - a disinternment of styles, sounds, even techniques and modes of production now abandoned, forgotten or erased by history" (Dissensus)? And doesn't the way Drudkh incorporates folk music samples in it's Black Metal music make dyschronia audible?

And doesn't this indicate that even the bewitching power of the hauntological can be harnessed for unsavoury purposes?

In the end, I hope and think the answer to these troubling questions can be found in the work of Walter Benjamin, whose oeuvre was obviously a major influence on the concept of the hauntological.

In his essay "On the Concept of History" Benjamin writes: "A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history music on the other: for truly ". Here, I feel, is one of the major differences between truly hauntological music on the one hand and Drudkh's on the other. For hauntological music no sound from the past is lost, whether major and heroic or minor and everyday... while Drudkh stresses only the major, the heroic, the pompous. For hauntological music, nothing should be regarded as lost for history, while Drudkh's nationalism can't wait to lose, to rid itself of, all that opposes a homogenized Ukrainian nation.



When The Flame Turns To Ashes
Oleksandr Oles

Formerly you seemed to me like a wounded eagle
That has been left in agony to die...
Your eyes are watching the damned enemy
Who wanted to trample you with their feet.

You're breathing with anger and burning, but not dying...
To dig you're shuffling ground with your claws,
With one wing you're beating off the rooks
And laying on the other one, thats' broken...

Formerly you seemed to me like a stately knight,
Who lay in steppe to rest on the stone...
You're hardly sleeping and delirious about the ruthless battle,
While your enemy is hissing like a snake...

My nation! And you - an eagle, that has been wounded at the night,
Why aren't you a knight, who has been captured?
Oh my eagle, my winged giant,
Oh my knight, who has been punished for the sleep!..

Why on earth, my eagle, don't you fly with eagles,
But dragging wings, as oars, by the ground?!
Why on earth, my knight, don't you go into action,
But such a wind, you're plaintively crying in the tillage?!

So what is an eagle, if his flock
Doesn't pluck from the earth into the blue of serene day,
And what kind of knight are you with smile of servant,
Without proud thoughts, without a honour and a name?!


Links

Here is a link to indepth information about the film Mamay, sampled by Drudkh.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia page on Ukraine.

Here is a link to a news article on neofascism in Ukraine, and here and here are some other links to far-right activism in that country.