The Morning After

Reading back yesterday's "Lack of posts"...

1. OK, Metal and me was more than a flirtation, it was an obsession, a pretty bad obsession, comparable only to the one I experienced when discovering Coil's second wave of releases (i.e. the Equinox series and after).

2. Only after confessing to feeling somewhat intimidated by K-Punk and Blissblogs excellent ruminations on Metal, I checked the Technorati thingamajick and discovered that they actually link to my blog! I felt elated, having been an avid Reynolds reader for a long time. And K-Punk actually described my inelegantly written, stumbling, fumbling, wavering line of thought on Xasthur and Hauntology as 'fascinating'!

3. Intersections: Don Cherry, another Pandit Pran Nath disciple, performs Malkauns with jazz instrumentation on his 'Brown Rice' album, of which the title song was used in Kevin (The Bug; Techno Animal; God; Ice) Martin's epochal collector "Jazz Satellites"

Ragas To Play In The Dark

Currently, I am listening a lot to Pandit Pran Nath's "Midnight - Raga Malkauns": truly Musick To Play In The Dark.

It is a double cd of Indian classical music recorded in the United States in 1971 and 1976, the raga chants slowly, carefully, deliberately and sometimes fiercely intoned by Pran Nath himself. He is acccompanied on tablas and tamburas amongst others by minimalists Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Marion Zazeela.

Traditionally, Raga Malkauns is sung late at night: it is a raga for the witching hour. According to The Raga Guide, superstitious musicians describe it as a raga with supernatural powers, and some believe that it can attract evil spirits. In Pran Nath's performance, it certainly has a hypnotic, menacing quality, his vocalizations and the drones that accompany it a dark and consuming fire.

Little wonder Sunn 0)))'s blackened doom guru Stephen O'Malley has repeatedly namechecked Pran Nath on his blog as well as on his myspace page. Listening to Raga Malkauns, a Sunn 0))) vs. Pran Nath sound clash isn't too hard to imagine.

The voice of Pandit Pran Nath seems to work as a Coilean Time Machine, removing the listener from "temporal reality", facilitating time travel. Terry Riley, in a tribute to his musical guru, writes on Pran Nath's uncanny ability to manipulate time: "He was also able to create spaces in time which seemed to go against the laws of time's passing, in that he would get many, many more notes into a phrase than should be allowed to happen in the amount of time allotted to them".

But Pran Nath's music isn't all phantasmagoria: listening to his chants is also hearing a human body intimately, hearing how that very physical body resonates with sound, hearing hair, flesh and bones, hearing breath itself.

Lack of posts

A frantic pace at work due to understaffing, the flue and weekends spent in preparation for the imminent birth of my first child have kept me from posting the last few months ... as well as a feeling that - now the real blogerati have started writing about that axis of evil between Dubstep and Black Metal - I do not have much to add to what is being written and feel slightly intimidated by the quality of Blissblog's and K-Punk's posts on the matter.

Besides, my interest in Black Metal has diminished somewhat, due to buying some much-hyped but disappointing albums (Nachtmystium's "Instinct : Decay" being the very worst of them).

My lessened interest in the genre is probably also due to the discovery of some wonderful mp3-blogs that post late-seventies and early-eighties industrial and experimental c60-cassettes and lp's (find them here, here and here). I am drawn irresistably towards the musical black holes posted by these audioblogs: my collection of Throbbing Gristle albums has jumped from 1 to 9 in the space of a few weeks. I have yet to find a Black Metal track that is as revolting, as sickening as TG's 'Hamburger Lady' or 'Very Friendly'.

On the other hand, both much of TG's recordings and Black Metal share low sound quality, to which I seem to become addicted to, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend. Part of the fascination they exert on me is that of listening to their lo-fi (some of the c60-cassette rips sound as if mushrooms and other unspeakable things are growing on the tape) sound played back on my great-sounding Denon amplifier and my huge Elac speakers - perhaps it is an audiophile's variation on Bataille's notion of 'dépense' (expenditure)...

So perhaps not all hope is lost for my flirtation with Metal. I've recently ordered Sunn 0)))'s "La Mort Noir dans Esch/Alzette" and Wold's "Screech Owl" from Aurora Borealis; and I can't wait for KTL2.

Angakok

From the 2006 dramatic film 'The Journals of Knud Rasmussen' (IMDB link here) a very beautiful dialogue between the anthropologist Rasmussen and an Inuit Angakok (shaman), telling the story of a human life lives in a harsh yet beautiful environment.

Xasthurian Poetix

A Poetix post on Xasthur and Hauntology, bearing out similar lines of thought explored earlier in this blog.

The Tell Tale Heart

The "Tell Tale Heart": a very beautiful, short animation film based on EA Poe's eponymous story. Spot the bit of monologue Scorn sampled for the "Night Tide" track on their 1994 cd 'Evanescence': "...time slowed .... stopped ... ebbed out!'.