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.

Three From Lucio Fulci

Ostia (the death of Pasolini)

Would anyone dare to describe Jhonn Balance's death as a tragedy in the literal sense of the word - as an organized expression which forms the logical end point of Coil's oeuvre?


In an article in the September 27, 2007 issue of The New York Review Of Books , called "The Passion Of Pasolini" Nathaniel Rich reviews several books on the Italian filmmaker and author. Among the books reviewed is a catalog for a 2005 exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, called "P.P.P.: Pier Paolo Pasolini And Death". One of the authors of the catalog, Giuseppe Zigaina, proposes the theory that Pasolini organized his own death as an artwork that would be the crown upon his entire oeuvre. Zagaina in fact proposes that Pasolini's death was an suicidal artwork.

Nathaniel Rich writes: "Zigaina is not the first writer to examine Pasolini's work for clues to his death. Just after it happened, Alberto Moravia, who had been Pasolini's close friend for more than thirty years and who wrote a book about his murder in 1977, said that he recognized the murder scene in Ostia from Pasolini's descriptions of several landscapes in his two novels, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi) and Una Vita Violenta (A Violent Life), and in an image from his first film, Accatone. (Pasolini had actually shot footage of the site a year earlier, for use in his film Il fiore delle mille e una notte [A Thousand And One Nights]). But Zigaina is the first to interpret these connections as anything more than poetic irony".

I think Alberto Moravia's book that Rich is referring to is the 1977 book "Pasolini: cronaca giudiziaria, persecuzione, morte" by Fernando Bandini and Laura Betti. The book has a preface by Moravia.

Moravia's account of an unnatural death announcing itself in an artist's work long before that death occurs, reminded me strongly of Coil muscian Jhonn Balance and his death. Like Pasolini, Balance's lyrics give the impression that he foresaw the circumstances of his own death - enough to make one fleetingly believe superstitious, irrational things. The Treshold House website states correctly that "...much of the work of Coil, Jhonn's Life's Work in fact, described or addressed that Very Moment" (meaning the moment of his death). What makes this parallel all the more uncanny, is that Coil wrote a song about Pasolini's death, "Ostia (the death of Pasolini)". The song is part of Coil's seminal 1987 album Horse Rotorvator; the lyrics are reproduced below. In the song, Balance identifies with Pasolini; and Balance seems to forecast his own death once more when he sings "Throw his bones over / The White Cliffs / of Dover": he died at home after drunkenly losing his balance and tipping over the banisters, falling down as one might fall from cliffs.

Would anyone dare to write an essay on Balance, which describes him as "the 'organizer' of his own death, which, conceived as a form of expression, was indented to give meaning to his entire oeuvre" - that is, the same way Zigaina describes Pasolini?




Ostia (the death of Pasolini)

There's honey in the
hollows
And the countours
of the body
A sluggish
golden river
A sickly golden trickle
A golden, sticky trickle
You can hear
the bones humming
And the car
reverses over
The body in the basin
In the shallow
sea-plane basin.
And the car
reverses over
And his body rolls over
Crushed
from the shoulder
You can hear the
Bones humming
Singing like
a puncture
Killed to keep
the world turning
Throw his bones over
The White Cliffs
of Dover
Into the sea
The Sea of Rome
And the bloodstained
coast
Of Ostia
Leon like a lion
Sleeping in
the sunshine.
Lion lies down.
"Out of the strong
Came forth sweetness."
Throw his bones over
The White Cliffs
of Dover
And murder me
In Ostia.
The Sea of Rome.
You can hear his
bones humming.
Throw his bones over
The White Cliffs
of Dover
And into the sea
The Sea of Rome
Then murder me,
In Ostia.


Post scriptum

Here is a link to a Guardian review of the exhibition on Pasolini.

You can purchase Rich's article here.

Below you'll see Moravia's eulogy at Pasolini's funeral.

Three From Aldo Lado

Secos E Molhados

As an anonymous commentator to yesterdays post pointed out, Arthur "I Am The God Of Hellfire" Brown is a possible antecedent to "Secos E Molhados" - and of course, to KISS. I deliberately avoided mentioning more likely forerunners of Black Metal's corpse-paint than "Secos E Molhados": Arthur Brown, KISS, Alice Cooper, the Misfits, King Diamond. After all, reading Black Metal against the grain is much more fun!

In 'The Pleasure of Text', Roland Barthes wrote: "The more decent, well-spoken, innocent and saccharine a story is told, the easier it is to invert it, the easier it is to blacken it, the easier it is to read it against the grain". The same goes the other way around: the more indecent, offensive, evil and foul-tasting a story is told, the easier it is to invert it, the easier it is to white-wash it. Thus, it is easy to invert the stories Black Metal tells - and it is fun too!

To read Secos E Molhados's influence into Black Metal's discourse is to inject a little bit of sensual, vitalistic, tropical, mixed-descent queerness into Black Metal's necro, frostbitten, all-too-often racist and homophobic veins and thereby drug the genre with some sweet poison.

Here is a little more of that poison... Enjoy!

Grim Tropicalia?

Corpse-paint has the most unexpected antecedents.

There is a school in anthropology which studies diffusion: the spread of cultural ideas and artefacts from one culture to another. Often the focus is on material culture: extensive studies have been made of the patterns of diffusion of certain patterns which adorn pottery. But the concept of diffusion can be applied to many thing: Black Metal corpse-paint, amongst others!

Yesterday I bought the cd "Brazil '70" which was recently released by Soul Jazz Records. The cd collects Brazilian music from the early seventies, music which was inspired by the Tropicalia movement. I can wholeheartedly recommend the album - perhaps I'll review it more extensively in another post.

The center page of the very informative booklet accompanying the cd features a wonderful photograph of the band "Secos E Molhados". About the outrageous costumes of the band, the booklet mentions that the group was a direct inspiration for the American rock band KISS.

And in it's turn, KISS was one of the influences on the ghoulish, black and white make-up worn by the members of the infamous Norwegian Black Metal band Mayhem, and their many imitators. Thus, Tropicalia indirectly influenced the frostbitten, dark world of Black Metal!

Interestingly, Moynihan and Søderlind's book "Lords Of Chaos" mentions another Brazilian inspiration for corpsepaint: the band Sarcófago, a Brazilian Trash Metal band. Jon "Metalion" Kristiansen, founder of legendary Norwegian metal magazine Slayer, is cited: "I think it was really from a band called Sarcofago from Brazil. A very extreme metal band, they released an album and Euronymous was totally obsessed by them because they wore lots of spikes and corpsepaint. He said he wanted every band to look like this, because he was so against the Death Metal trend from the USA and Sweden". I've been unable to ascertain whether Sarcófago's corpse-paint practice was in any way inspired by "Secos E Molhados". Perhaps Brazilian readers of this blog can enlighten me?