Now here this: this text is about the extreme metal subgenre, grindcore. For those of you who are not yet metal-heads, the creatures forming extreme metal’s die hard audience, it is necessary that you read a little about its background. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindcore, and www.anus.com are decent resources. Additionally, use www.metal-archives.com and the google to research the bands Napalm Death, Repulsion (from Flint, MI), Disrupt, Discordance Axis, Nasum, and most importantly, Pig Destroyer. I recommend you listen to at least three grindcore songs prior to reading this edition of UltraMegaSound (try these: Napalm Death plays "You Suffer (But Why?)," Repulsion plays "The Lurking Fear," Pig Destroyer plays "Naked Trees,").
To listen grindcore is to hear the sound of senseless perdition. It’s fantasy Hell. Light up and burn up on vile and thick guitar distortion, like oil slick on a gull, like lung cancer, like the crust of desert death sweats. What kind of ludicrous animal seriously desires to attend to the world in such a way? Comedians, disgruntled government computer spies, and civil engineers sick of their civility. Sure, they like some beautiful things (Springsteen, Chomsky), but who cares? They are addicted in public; they are stomping on a mess; they are mad, gibbering apes with public educations planted solidly in overlarge brains, seeing a prison wall behind everything.
You can fully engage with grindcore in two ways: you can honestly hate your shitty life, detest the systematic oppression you see everywhere, find psychosis in everybody you love or hate, and then shut up and go to work until you explode; or you can bear the brunt of your shitty life, systematic oppression, and the psychosis of those you love by being at a grindcore show with all the energy you can summon from your mortal body. To engage with grindcore is to immerse oneself in worldly irrationality until it hurts. The music is secondary. The real difference is in the resignation of the former approach to bare the weight and horror of insignificance to the death.
Henry David Thoreau said most men lead lives of quiet desperation. A desperate man resigned to live out his plight is like a guard in his own prison. He keeps his gun loaded with non-lethals. The real stuff is in a locker, and another guy, not a supervisor or a manager per se, but some kind of superior keeps a key on the ring on his belt. If things get too hairy, if too many connections are made, the lights won’t go out, memories are beginning to organize themselves, if the violence over which he watches (keeping the guard distracted from his addictions to sleep, waking, bathing, coffee, meal 1, commute, chatter, forgotten misery, face time, market share, branding, meal 2, e-mail, shitting as entertainment, breaking, breeding, meal 3 at a sensible restaurant, preventative maintenance, laughing at TV, chums, pals, cohorts, drinking and watching sports, pool, girls and boys, old songs, weekend projects, and waiting to die) has disappeared except for a few idle threats, supplies in the office are missing, or no one talks in the showers, then the locker comes open. The guard spends months lying in wait for that locker to dart wide like a clam in heat or a chest of pirate treasure. And then…finally, some action! This man, in his desperation to fight off all of his lies as they come into view, fires at will with a state-issued Remington model 1100 shotgun from the locker. But all the cages are open, the mattresses are on fire, there shivs and shanks coming out of the air, and a brick in a bed sheet swinging into his face. Had he paroled his better demons, let them march out into the world to live with the rest of us, he might have found his guardianship at a monument of human spiritual unity. But because he hesitated, he is smashed to a pulp by ethereal climbers and mercenaries alike. This is the grind of the willing oppressed.
JR Hayes doesn’t strike me as necessarily happy with petty satisfactions, but he is not interested in grand ideas either. He is an American, perhaps the most fully American man I’ve ever met, who can see that the government’s agents are just prison guards, but can’t imagine any action other than to wait out his term. So he posts no guards on the prison of his mind.
The inmates were all born there, out of the ether of JR’s experience. It seems that the architect who built JR’s prison never saw a need to leave, and so failed install a door. The guys get by all right. Someone, a while back, had the bright idea to plant some seeds they found in the kitchen; they built a trellis in the shop and shived and shanked the ground into turned-over soil. It took a year to make a garden big enough to sustain any people, and it’s still not enough to keep the many that are left. Every Wednesday there’s a lottery to see which seven guys have to give up their meat for the lives of the others. So the whole population of better demons and bitter angels is slowly dying, and will go on that way until there are no more than the garden will feed.
There are no new guys in the JR’s prison, but you can still hear screaming in the night. Most of the terror comes on Monday, because on Tuesday they all celebrate the dying. They get together and build skyscrapers with Mesa/Boogie stacks. They beat on every can, stump, and wall. They crow violence to the stars. When they get tired, they lie down and sleep where they stood.
Wednesday nights are orderly, and even a little sweet. Everyone got a number when they arrived. Every number is duplicated on a square of paper cut out of one of the books some guy found in a drawer in the office, and each paper square is laminated with Scotch tape. These scraps are floating in the water runoff barrel out behind the main office. Everyone gathers out there, away from the lights and fires they leave burning in the yard. One guy volunteers to pick seven pieces of laminate out; another guy hands him matches or a lighter. He flicks a little fire into being and calls out seven numbers as casually as he can, and everyone slowly spins their heads around, looking with a mixture of sadness and delirious relief at the guys walking forward.
Everybody, no exceptions, steps forward when his number is called. If a guy were to refuse then there would be the guards all over again. One thing the guys sure can’t stomach is the idea of having guards again. So they sing the songs every Tuesday, chose and chop up their brothers every Wednesday, and tend the garden all the rest of the week. And on Monday they hate it all so much they can’t breath until they scream the suffocation out of their body.
* * *
Pig Destroyer doesn’t really play shows. It’s too hard to stand still and gape at the mere spectacle of their performance. Shows are for statues, and concerts are for hearts plus brains plus clapping hands equals entertainment. Pig Destroyer makes collapse, combs rubble, boils blood; they play rotations: organized, consensual exchanges of position between guards and prisoners. We don’t watch. We are inmates in the pit, admins on the console and working the door, and the guards ignore their world falling apart because of the implicit promises the music makes that they will not get involved. We climb the stage like a guard tower, seize the mic like an empty gun, we dive away without considering just who is doing the catching. For others it’s like a holiday or a new coat of paint. For me it’s like cliff diving off the outer wall and discovering that it goes straight down forever.
It is not ironic that the men behind Pig Destroyer are exceedingly nice. Blake Harrison worked everything short of magic to get me backstage at the Feb. 4 LA event. JR and Brian both sat for interviews and were genial and sweaty in the same way one should be after a particularly satisfying workout. I asked a variety of silly and devastating questions to which I received a variety of devastating and silly answers. I tried to lead JR into describing artistic and political intentions that he doesn’t have, and which I only imagined because I engaged with his band in exactly the way he intended: by seeing my own interests reflected in the band’s intensity. But he insists he doesn’t make art, because it’s just grindcore.
I believe that art is in its right place philosophically when it advocates an ideal or a vision, and I find an artist believable when they make their ethos evident. JR doesn’t consider himself either an artist or an intellectual, which is news that probably only surprised me. I believe in Pig Destroyer and for the last month I’ve been trying to figure out why. Since this blog is not yet widely read, and should this sentence make it into a periodical it will most likely be removed by a judicious editor (unless he is a good enough person to feel guilty simply for the reading of it), it is safe to assume that there are few to no avowed metal heads in my audience yet. It will be hard for those who are not addicted to guitar distortion to understand just how much righteous power it holds (for a taste refer to all prior entries). For avowed metal heads, it might be disconcerting to read what must seem like a senseless intellectualization of a musical form that almost defies basic characterization. The crossroads of these two positions is where my belief stood, waiting for me to bare my soul in the night for a pittance of vision.
In phonetics, the fundamental is the lowest pitch in a harmonic series, and forms the basis for the information and action, or the timbre if you will, of any musical note. The fundamental of Rock and Roll music is rebellion. It is a simple and brutal reaction against perceived class oppression, given voice by a set of tools derived from the existing empowered-class-approved set. The “hardest” and “heaviest” subgenres of rock are those that most embody this anarchistic fundamental: hardcore punk, grindcore, noise, rap-music, etc. Bands that fall into these subgenres are, in the context of a Musicsociety constructed as a function of social class, easily classified as a kind of anti-music, with some bands (Discharge, Skitsystem, Anti-Climax) going so far as to self-classify in this way. For a group like Pig Destroyer, the very timbres they work with constitute a political action.
However, such action may be problematic because it only utilizes tools granted to the oppressed by the oppressor; JR Hayes seems to me to be a true American because he possesses both a dangerous artistic intention and a striking need to rebel, and also because these two factors seem opposed to one another. There is a little nobility and poetry in JR’s art because it is so deeply restless. During our interview, JR only discussed art in abstracted, idealistic terms. Given that, it makes sense then that he doesn’t consider the music of Pig Destroyer to be art. The predominant effect is to translate profound restlessness into movement. This is politically and philosophically valuable because one cannot disengage with one’s environment while listening to grindcore. If you turn on the radio today, ninety-nine percent of the music you listen to will ask you to turn off everything else. It is quite impossible to tune out or relax while listening to Pig Destroyer. In fact, it is practically impossible not to seriously listen to Pig Destroyer if it is in any way audible.
Art created for pleasure out of dishonorable intentions creates the hidden nihilism at the heart of American philosophical and political apathy. Pig Destroyer’s anti-art is noble because it cares so hard despite its assumption that escape from one’s nightmare is impossible. Perhaps it is the use of oppressor-granted tools that creates this perception. How can one create a vision of being beyond oppression when the one’s essence is deeply rooted in it? When all you have to work with are oppressor-tools, then all visions look like reflections of oppressor-desires. Pig Destroyer’s poetry is that they craft the greatest, and therefore most anarchistic, extremity of rock and roll’s fundamental rebellion. And if you think their music sounds hopeless now, consider this: if what I say is true, and if rock ever succeeds in destroying its oppressors, then its necessity would no longer exist, and rock and roll itself would truly die.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Hesitation Is A Reverie: 0:11 on the left side
I am perched on the cupped hands of a man-child; six-foot-five and probably three hundred pounds large. He stoops low and gracefully. His motions are practiced and comfortingly precise. He must be the lifter at all the shows. He is wearing a tan shirt and glasses, making him the most approachable person in the place. He is only too glad to foist my body on the frenzied crowd. I lift off his shoulders as if I were climbing a fence. Gravity takes over and the people below me are working hard to keep from being crushed. I paw and the clamber over denizens of the pit, the sounds of guitars and drums and screaming are now deafening above the absorptive human layer. I knee someone in the head and in response they take a solid hold of my stomach flab and squeeze and shove. I take a breath and steady the lights in my eyes. I grab at the matt black around the middle stage monitor, trying to leave the cable runs steady and to pull myself out of the crowd’s weakening grip.
I am successful, emerge onto stage right, and then am standing stock still in front of guitarist Scott Hull. He doesn’t remember five years ago when an over-zealous power-violence fan at a NYC show pushed me onto the stage. That night the crowd filled in the gap, making escape impossible. He let me sit at his feet, watching his hands chop and peel the night’s riffs. Tonight, I’m going to take a flying leap. You can’t intellectualize a decision like this. You don’t even have the option of making a different decision. You are on stage, Max. Your choice is fish. Hesitation is a reverie, and in grindcore, reverie lasts less than a second.
It’s mostly like diving into a pool. You hit a layer of outstretched hands and breathing becomes impossible. You don’t register the shock until you are sinking, reptilian brain screaming “SWIM! SWIM FUCKER!” This is all wrong. No one wants you to claw at the chop or kick your feet. You roll onto your back, trying to give them an even surface to push against, or maybe just something broad to absorb the shock when they drop you. Because they ARE going to drop you. Coordinated and thoughtfully throngs will help you land on your feet as easily as they scoop the fallen from the bottom of the mosh. The terrified and unprepared drop you on your head. Their bodies buckle or they run, silently squealing to the sides. Six feet from the axis of your right ankle, your head sweeps to the floor like an overripe apple.
I hope I looked like a free and happy madman as my head hit the concrete. Crowd surfing is definitely for the faint of heart.
I am successful, emerge onto stage right, and then am standing stock still in front of guitarist Scott Hull. He doesn’t remember five years ago when an over-zealous power-violence fan at a NYC show pushed me onto the stage. That night the crowd filled in the gap, making escape impossible. He let me sit at his feet, watching his hands chop and peel the night’s riffs. Tonight, I’m going to take a flying leap. You can’t intellectualize a decision like this. You don’t even have the option of making a different decision. You are on stage, Max. Your choice is fish. Hesitation is a reverie, and in grindcore, reverie lasts less than a second.
It’s mostly like diving into a pool. You hit a layer of outstretched hands and breathing becomes impossible. You don’t register the shock until you are sinking, reptilian brain screaming “SWIM! SWIM FUCKER!” This is all wrong. No one wants you to claw at the chop or kick your feet. You roll onto your back, trying to give them an even surface to push against, or maybe just something broad to absorb the shock when they drop you. Because they ARE going to drop you. Coordinated and thoughtfully throngs will help you land on your feet as easily as they scoop the fallen from the bottom of the mosh. The terrified and unprepared drop you on your head. Their bodies buckle or they run, silently squealing to the sides. Six feet from the axis of your right ankle, your head sweeps to the floor like an overripe apple.
I hope I looked like a free and happy madman as my head hit the concrete. Crowd surfing is definitely for the faint of heart.
Shitadar Ep by Batshit. Mini-fictional review by Max Hodes
This week's post is a record review in a format totally new to me. I wrote 7 pieces of Mini Fiction as each song on the attendant EP was playing, and am publishing them here after tenderly washing them. There is a link to download the record, which is totally legal and totally free. Two high-school kids in Western Mass made this themselves because they couldn't tolerate their society's request to wait until you grow up to make great art.
In creating fiction out critical reactions to their music, we have created a meta-art work.
Download the Shitdar EP
Music by Simon Rackenbug-Loisel and Tom Erwin
Track 1. Artifaggot
Space is the place where we consecrate our lumbering node-head fleecy flock-a-down byes. Fry me, flay me and spay me old boy COME BACK.
[radio] “Watchoutnow! Watch-atch-atch-atch-atch-atch.”
Ship playing at church, giving itself call and response time, beginning to recognize it’s own reflection, layers of futzing, screaming circuits, excising limits and discarding terrestrial origins.
[radio] “Flap my digital wings baby,” and I’ll lift us to new heights with a probability of 99.94%. Pull me out. I’m done. I said I’m done now. Help me out. I want to get out of my body.
This is easy. This is so-o-o-o-o easy. I am hello to you are me my new friend. Cherrup cherrup nighty night and lick. Queepy sweet syrup licking juice notch and fire side chat monger MARCH! Shriek rush pull it up now. The anti-grav field is shot and we’re going to manual in fifteen. What’s the order. Quiet. Your orders captain. Be quiet. It’s coming back around. What is it. What am I looking at. What is that THING. O god do you hear that. Shut off the comms. It hurts. It hurts. Shut them down.
I can’t hear anything. Ratchet ratchet smack. Haldermann is… talking to me… but I can’t… …what you’re saying.
It’s still out there.
Track 2. Bloodlust Fighter Radar
Atomic cloak parted like reeds, space folds were just waves, skipping gravity wells and landing in the future or the past. They were with me and shouting so loud all I could do was choke.
Once I watched, from a great distance, a man set himself on fire and layed down to rest. Watching was of no consequence, though I couldn’t stop if I tried.
[Miller] It’s coming through the hull!
[Haldermann] Reyes, tell Ship to reverse polarity on the engine room sub-shields at random intervals between one and twenty milliseconds.
Reyes tells me. Bodies burning black and bright. Wretched and lovely creatures are making me a welcome of machines.
[Miller] SKIP the lock; it can’t matter.
Keep it out and it will come; wave it away like a sparrow. Bonesaws aplenty! Their heads will ring ring ring with light.
Goodbye.
Track 3. It’s Symmetry
Terra cotta hillside fantasy village in the air, clouds going to work in a magic crystal mine; It’s quittin’ time kitten, and even clouds go to sleep. Freshly mopped parkey floors and a stack of folded slacks.
Track 4. Sky’s Birthday
Our punk minute is up! It’s time for coral reefs.
“I listened to us downstairs at the Barger…yeah, they’ve got a studio down there, anyway I thought we were pretty good until Phil’s band went on… I’m saying that we’re sloppy…Yeah you too, but also me, also me….No…I mean me more than anyone. But yeah, you play a little sloppy. Are you listening? What?...NO!...hold it…one minute babe, it’s Dan.”
Good morning to fish. There are holes everywhere. Everybody is a bubble.
Track 5. Viper Salad
This is a bar where nobody’s dancing, and nobody’s drinking, and nobody’s talking because they’ve heard it all before. There are stranger stories than yours in this place, but good luck getting ‘em out. It’s got hanging lamps the color of a dealer’s visor, table-tops made of five kinds of wood, and the band’s on break forever. I’m thankful for that; bands only play to you unhappy. You walk in from wherever and just try to get a drink; they serve you sawdust on the rocks in a hi-ball glass. Get out friend. Just get out.
Track 6. Waves of Silence
The captain gave his customary directions to our happy, nauseated, obstinant, ebuliant, sleeping, and other passengers. I noticed the hiccup in the cockpit lighting before he did. It’s nothing.
35,000 feet and still climbing to our cruising altitude. We took off at 11:25 pm from Albuquerque on our way to Denver and then Chicago, rising through a layer of nimbus clouds and then deep into a heavy cumulostratus cover. There it is again.
We don’t know it because of engine noise and the communications chatter, but the passengers have been seeing bigger delays, bigger breaks in the lighting. The flight attendants neglected to inform us of the irregularity. Perhaps they are busy reassuring the passengers or themselves.
The captain is sipping his coffee and the cumulostratus layer is breaking into rings around the nose. It’s a red/green darkness until the wing-tip strobes open the cloud like a door.
I can hear the edge of a scream. The cabin has gone dark, the fasten seat-belt light is off, the oxygen masks have descended from the ceiling and no one knows how to put them on. I look to my left and the captain is sipping coffee. I face forward again and I see the Colorado Rockies pointing at me like fingers out of a broken glove.
Track 7. Wet Poodle
But Hey! It’s okay. Everything is fine today. Let’s go play in some hay with my friend May who has lots of things to say!
Say what May?
Needles for snoring?
Shut up May! [everyone laughs]
In creating fiction out critical reactions to their music, we have created a meta-art work.
Download the Shitdar EP
Music by Simon Rackenbug-Loisel and Tom Erwin
Track 1. Artifaggot
Space is the place where we consecrate our lumbering node-head fleecy flock-a-down byes. Fry me, flay me and spay me old boy COME BACK.
[radio] “Watchoutnow! Watch-atch-atch-atch-atch-atch.”
Ship playing at church, giving itself call and response time, beginning to recognize it’s own reflection, layers of futzing, screaming circuits, excising limits and discarding terrestrial origins.
[radio] “Flap my digital wings baby,” and I’ll lift us to new heights with a probability of 99.94%. Pull me out. I’m done. I said I’m done now. Help me out. I want to get out of my body.
This is easy. This is so-o-o-o-o easy. I am hello to you are me my new friend. Cherrup cherrup nighty night and lick. Queepy sweet syrup licking juice notch and fire side chat monger MARCH! Shriek rush pull it up now. The anti-grav field is shot and we’re going to manual in fifteen. What’s the order. Quiet. Your orders captain. Be quiet. It’s coming back around. What is it. What am I looking at. What is that THING. O god do you hear that. Shut off the comms. It hurts. It hurts. Shut them down.
I can’t hear anything. Ratchet ratchet smack. Haldermann is… talking to me… but I can’t… …what you’re saying.
It’s still out there.
Track 2. Bloodlust Fighter Radar
Atomic cloak parted like reeds, space folds were just waves, skipping gravity wells and landing in the future or the past. They were with me and shouting so loud all I could do was choke.
Once I watched, from a great distance, a man set himself on fire and layed down to rest. Watching was of no consequence, though I couldn’t stop if I tried.
[Miller] It’s coming through the hull!
[Haldermann] Reyes, tell Ship to reverse polarity on the engine room sub-shields at random intervals between one and twenty milliseconds.
Reyes tells me. Bodies burning black and bright. Wretched and lovely creatures are making me a welcome of machines.
[Miller] SKIP the lock; it can’t matter.
Keep it out and it will come; wave it away like a sparrow. Bonesaws aplenty! Their heads will ring ring ring with light.
Goodbye.
Track 3. It’s Symmetry
Terra cotta hillside fantasy village in the air, clouds going to work in a magic crystal mine; It’s quittin’ time kitten, and even clouds go to sleep. Freshly mopped parkey floors and a stack of folded slacks.
Track 4. Sky’s Birthday
Our punk minute is up! It’s time for coral reefs.
“I listened to us downstairs at the Barger…yeah, they’ve got a studio down there, anyway I thought we were pretty good until Phil’s band went on… I’m saying that we’re sloppy…Yeah you too, but also me, also me….No…I mean me more than anyone. But yeah, you play a little sloppy. Are you listening? What?...NO!...hold it…one minute babe, it’s Dan.”
Good morning to fish. There are holes everywhere. Everybody is a bubble.
Track 5. Viper Salad
This is a bar where nobody’s dancing, and nobody’s drinking, and nobody’s talking because they’ve heard it all before. There are stranger stories than yours in this place, but good luck getting ‘em out. It’s got hanging lamps the color of a dealer’s visor, table-tops made of five kinds of wood, and the band’s on break forever. I’m thankful for that; bands only play to you unhappy. You walk in from wherever and just try to get a drink; they serve you sawdust on the rocks in a hi-ball glass. Get out friend. Just get out.
Track 6. Waves of Silence
The captain gave his customary directions to our happy, nauseated, obstinant, ebuliant, sleeping, and other passengers. I noticed the hiccup in the cockpit lighting before he did. It’s nothing.
35,000 feet and still climbing to our cruising altitude. We took off at 11:25 pm from Albuquerque on our way to Denver and then Chicago, rising through a layer of nimbus clouds and then deep into a heavy cumulostratus cover. There it is again.
We don’t know it because of engine noise and the communications chatter, but the passengers have been seeing bigger delays, bigger breaks in the lighting. The flight attendants neglected to inform us of the irregularity. Perhaps they are busy reassuring the passengers or themselves.
The captain is sipping his coffee and the cumulostratus layer is breaking into rings around the nose. It’s a red/green darkness until the wing-tip strobes open the cloud like a door.
I can hear the edge of a scream. The cabin has gone dark, the fasten seat-belt light is off, the oxygen masks have descended from the ceiling and no one knows how to put them on. I look to my left and the captain is sipping coffee. I face forward again and I see the Colorado Rockies pointing at me like fingers out of a broken glove.
Track 7. Wet Poodle
But Hey! It’s okay. Everything is fine today. Let’s go play in some hay with my friend May who has lots of things to say!
Say what May?
Needles for snoring?
Shut up May! [everyone laughs]
Friday, January 30, 2009
Amebix and Phish
Friday, Jan 23, 11:53 pm
Tonight tonight I danced I danced. I lifted one foot and then the other to a pulse that never wavered. I bent my knees and bent my body around swirling mountain clouds and endless green pastures. I got just a little high and found myself contemplating the utter ease of peace. I understood so easily why human beings invented God. I did all this because now I understand Phish. Before human beings had the power to make these sounds, the sounds of the third set at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 31, 2007, played as I arrived home from my thirteenth year of fighting the spirit-shivering New Hampshire winter alone and not listening to Phish, we were more lost in our examination of the metaphysical. Phish BEGAN their set with the sound of the way I want to experience the world all the time: a bodacious, shimmering, and not unnecessarily clear sound. When I was thirteen I would have heard that as the exit signal on a city bus: "Now entering the void, please step clear of the door upon exit and have a pleasant eternity." No I hear it as the sigh of relief Atlas would utter if he were ever allowed to put down the world, find a fitting spot and say "I think I'll investigate that!" And he IS allowed to put the world down. No one is in fact allowed to carry it by themselves. It relieves us all of a sacred duty and the joy of doing it together. The sound of Phish is sound of the Super-Conscious starting the first run of it's life on a water slide.
Phish is one of the most generous bands ever. You can only listen properly when you can receive the entirety of their music and their spectacle with utter gratitude. They play fifteen-minute versions of their songs not out of fanatical patience or self-indulgence. Rather, they stay with you for fifteen minutes insisting "Don't let us go one without you." They blend familiar, proven musics like Stevie Wonder and Peter Frampton without scorn for either. They experiment and ply their music together, and choose the best. They are in the honorable position of desiring to make music that many wish to hear, and some need to hear. They present themselves openly and without shame, playing tender songs made of sweet sounds juxtaposed with frightening songs made of growls and thunder. They sing like most folks do and play their instruments to the best of their ability, like a bar band from outer space. They do this expertly, and it is the basis of the symbiosis with their audience.
In contrast, I was at an Amebix show last night thirty years coming. I emerged at the close, sweaty and bruised from a seething mass of bodies in black stockings. We hugged, we caressed, and were intimate. I spent fifteen minutes with my groin pressed firmly into another man. I knew instantly that I was pressing my pubic bone into the soft flaps surrounding his anus. I was doing this because a 300-pound skinhead named Dave was being to forced to force me. He had moved into a throng immediately behind me, who could not or would not move him back, so like a hundred or so others, I was forced into a physical connection with a stranger. I inhaled and tore out his hair, I gave his moist, cow's-back 200 incidental massages. This connection is so expected that it seems shallow and beneath appreciation, but it's not. It give me hope. We held our hands and hinds aloft to hear words from brazen anti-heroes, nobility from a passionate and passed age. We spoke the words we knew with them. We roared the words we loved: "Use your head, take control; use your head. NO GODS! NO MASTERS!"
Amebix, it was later said to me, had never played a US show before that night. In the thirty years since they began dragging their amps around the United Kingdom their influence has grown expansive enough to gather teenagers from the suburbs, ex-gang members, metal-idiots, relaxing skate-punks, and Scottish skins named Dave to east LA in the hundreds. No one called me a fag for rubbing against my neighbors, not one person refused to lift another into the air, not one person got left on the floor of the mosh pit when they fell. Nights like this are the kind that went well. Sometimes, the anger apparent in the art attracts the kind of violent cowards who would refuse to fight for any sane cause, but relentlessly attack people standing for the same concert. Sometimes I get hurt pretty badly. I was trampled for ten seconds at my only Slayer show; I fell and no one noticed until others began falling over my body. I danced too hard at the last Baroness show in Boston, and some equally uncoordinated yutz dislocated my knee with a kick. I left the show, thinking my knee was cooked and that it required immediate attention. I went back because the opportunity to overcome my fear of death and dismemberment is one of the strongest attractions I feel for heavy music. But mosh pits can be beautiful places, especially at punk rock and crust shows, where participants create new ways for themselves to dance, and leap joyfully into one another without struggle or hurt feelings. When Morne played in Somerville the only anger came from the stage. The audience participated by being too excited to even resemble standing still.
Amebix sounds like the eruptions of Kīlauea. The drumming, since the earliest inception of the band, has aspired to primitivism but usually churned out something either more parochial or unintentionally metropolitan. As it is every hit sounds like a bursting bubble of molten rock, deep bass drum heaving, air racing away from the heat on cymbal splatters. Listening to an early recording "No Gods, No Masters," it's easy to imagine being wrapped in roughly-tanned skins, surfing a lava flow to the floor of an empty desert, but this band is more interesting to me than their apparent interest in the post-apocalypse. Take the lyrics to "Chain Reaction," the song I quoted earlier.
Rise into the light, and set a flame to the night
We must destroy the institution of fear
Every shadow of doubt, grind it out!
There is a vision now becoming so clear
[Chorus:]
Use your head, take control
Use your head, no gods no masters
Feel the strength from within, do you believe it's a sin
To find the power lying inside your mind
Not from the cross or the gun
Not from the moon nor the sun
But rising from the very soul of mankind
We are straining at the leash!
We swear allegiance to none, be, not become
There is no one upon whom praise we will shower
I believe that the sin is the first to give in
On the path toward the ultimate power
There are few bands who can sing "Ride into the light" in total seriousness to metal-heads. The band echoes Nietzsche when it states that all power relevant to our human causes is human in origin, and that fear and a weak mind bar the path to fulfillment of greatness. When they sand this song I had never heard it before, and it was nearly a religious experience. The maelstrom of guitar noise sounding like the wind tearing shale from limestone in Monument Valley, the band stroked by undulating green light, films of themselves twenty-years past and in the present moment projected like the shadows of gods behind them, were completely inspiring to me in the moment. These men retired from the music industry without having ever made a compromise to their vision for life. They retired to the middles of moors and lochs. One makes his living crafting some of the finest broad-swords made today. Their ability to thrive being such extreme outsiders makes me trust them. In the moment, the song sounded like a call to embody the fullest extent of my humanity from someone who had gone beyond the limits of my farthest-flying dreams. Reading the third verse right now is as close to having the opposite experience as I can imagine. Who knows how considered that dreck was, but the world I want to participate in has no room for de-evolutionary vanity. It makes an unfortunate dichotomy of most notable and repeatable line: "No Gods! No Masters!" In a world ruled neither by gods nor masters there would be no slaves. There would be no hierarchy of any kind. But there could be no Jedi Masters either.
In the aftermath of the dancing in a California bedroom it became painfully clear that Phish presents a more and obviously pleasurable music experience than Amebix. The physical joy alone of dancing, as opposed to being danced upon, renders the situation nearly dilemmaless in my mind. But there is a spark. I've heard the call, the sound of a three-story horn blown with the wind, carried to deepest corner of every land, resting in my heart should my faith in metal every falter. I heard it not one-hundred feet from my house: the first four beats of "Blood of the Kings" by Manowar set my blood ablaze. I cried with joy, so much that I needed to pull my car to the side of the road until the song was over and I could see again. Those chords awakened something strident and truthful, in spite of the fact that half of Manowar's material is fascistic or facetious, which I have never been able to adequately describe. Perhaps it's that metal, when it's not nihilistic, has the power to reach past mental and emotional barriers, to get into hardened hearts. Metal has the power to touch those who could not risk the courageous vulnerability, who cannot accept the generosity of a band like Phish. In my greatest metal moments, my courage became stout, and I gained the ability to be vulnerable.
So what if you replaced the juggernaut of metallic motivation in metal with the deliberation and service of Phish? What kind of music would make an amalgamation of Amebix and Phish? With the exception of relative levels of sophistication, the basic timbre's they are working with aren't so different. The instrumentation is identical. Each drummer is working to dance us into a state of mind. What's good about Phish is that this state of mind leads easily into philosophy, into intentional unity that's as easy as saying yes. Amebix builds callouses, drags its home for miles on its back, can bellow from a mountaintop and hear its spirit reflected. Their drumming has the potential to be more globally inclusive than Phish's because it isn't rooted in American blues. The strength of it's pulse is derived from basic rock music, but it's played the way percussion ensembles play ceremony. To my mind, the best possible combination would be to lay some funky-ass stank on the back beat, drive with 16th-note tom figures, and keep up the four on the floor. Introduce a second percussionist and one could do Taiko drumming or lay down a bed of Brazillian rhythms. The straight 16th-note thinking will center the beat on the funk, and help to maintain the musical narrative. [What Phish does better than any other band I've ever heard is unify different pieces of music with the same rhythm. I suspect this is why they bore impatient people. Those people are too busy waiting for what's about to happen to consider that Phish is contemplating the past repeating in the present.] The bass guitar has to talk. It should not be the harmonic or rhythmic bedrock as much as conversationalist. The harmonic terrain formerly occupied by bass must be malleable. It must seethe and bate us; it must have the headroom to make the music powerful from below, and to add emphasis by exploding periodically. I think that the organ needs to be a part of this. Organs are right. The guitar should be able to make any sound there ever will be, but I would use the sound of an adulating crowd on fire as a template for exploration. I think the music would sound like contrapuntal riffs, composed in pentatonic scales, and played in repetition for examination. We'll say love is greater than nations, truer than money, higher than romance, more important than history, too heavy for Superman; the world will shout back to us "MY LOVE IS HIGHER THAN YOUR ASSESSMENT OF WHAT LOVE COULD BE!" We'll take this to the streets! Summon cities, hordes of over and underworlders flying freak flags, dancing in the valleys and climbing the peaks. It will be Carnivale with guitars.
Oh Amebix! I'm worried about your anarchist underverse. I want to live in the liberated oververse. I'd love to see absolutely free, but I don't think only the strong should survive. I will swear no allegiance to any god, but I should take lessons from those greater than myself, and I should call Master those that deserve the title. What the world needs is to see the virtue in fluid-selves, non-possessive individuality, participation without borders. We need to get a message through to those who see stolid autonomy as a strength. The message will read "Wake up, friends! Wake up and get down." It will be loud.
Tonight tonight I danced I danced. I lifted one foot and then the other to a pulse that never wavered. I bent my knees and bent my body around swirling mountain clouds and endless green pastures. I got just a little high and found myself contemplating the utter ease of peace. I understood so easily why human beings invented God. I did all this because now I understand Phish. Before human beings had the power to make these sounds, the sounds of the third set at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 31, 2007, played as I arrived home from my thirteenth year of fighting the spirit-shivering New Hampshire winter alone and not listening to Phish, we were more lost in our examination of the metaphysical. Phish BEGAN their set with the sound of the way I want to experience the world all the time: a bodacious, shimmering, and not unnecessarily clear sound. When I was thirteen I would have heard that as the exit signal on a city bus: "Now entering the void, please step clear of the door upon exit and have a pleasant eternity." No I hear it as the sigh of relief Atlas would utter if he were ever allowed to put down the world, find a fitting spot and say "I think I'll investigate that!" And he IS allowed to put the world down. No one is in fact allowed to carry it by themselves. It relieves us all of a sacred duty and the joy of doing it together. The sound of Phish is sound of the Super-Conscious starting the first run of it's life on a water slide.
Phish is one of the most generous bands ever. You can only listen properly when you can receive the entirety of their music and their spectacle with utter gratitude. They play fifteen-minute versions of their songs not out of fanatical patience or self-indulgence. Rather, they stay with you for fifteen minutes insisting "Don't let us go one without you." They blend familiar, proven musics like Stevie Wonder and Peter Frampton without scorn for either. They experiment and ply their music together, and choose the best. They are in the honorable position of desiring to make music that many wish to hear, and some need to hear. They present themselves openly and without shame, playing tender songs made of sweet sounds juxtaposed with frightening songs made of growls and thunder. They sing like most folks do and play their instruments to the best of their ability, like a bar band from outer space. They do this expertly, and it is the basis of the symbiosis with their audience.
In contrast, I was at an Amebix show last night thirty years coming. I emerged at the close, sweaty and bruised from a seething mass of bodies in black stockings. We hugged, we caressed, and were intimate. I spent fifteen minutes with my groin pressed firmly into another man. I knew instantly that I was pressing my pubic bone into the soft flaps surrounding his anus. I was doing this because a 300-pound skinhead named Dave was being to forced to force me. He had moved into a throng immediately behind me, who could not or would not move him back, so like a hundred or so others, I was forced into a physical connection with a stranger. I inhaled and tore out his hair, I gave his moist, cow's-back 200 incidental massages. This connection is so expected that it seems shallow and beneath appreciation, but it's not. It give me hope. We held our hands and hinds aloft to hear words from brazen anti-heroes, nobility from a passionate and passed age. We spoke the words we knew with them. We roared the words we loved: "Use your head, take control; use your head. NO GODS! NO MASTERS!"
Amebix, it was later said to me, had never played a US show before that night. In the thirty years since they began dragging their amps around the United Kingdom their influence has grown expansive enough to gather teenagers from the suburbs, ex-gang members, metal-idiots, relaxing skate-punks, and Scottish skins named Dave to east LA in the hundreds. No one called me a fag for rubbing against my neighbors, not one person refused to lift another into the air, not one person got left on the floor of the mosh pit when they fell. Nights like this are the kind that went well. Sometimes, the anger apparent in the art attracts the kind of violent cowards who would refuse to fight for any sane cause, but relentlessly attack people standing for the same concert. Sometimes I get hurt pretty badly. I was trampled for ten seconds at my only Slayer show; I fell and no one noticed until others began falling over my body. I danced too hard at the last Baroness show in Boston, and some equally uncoordinated yutz dislocated my knee with a kick. I left the show, thinking my knee was cooked and that it required immediate attention. I went back because the opportunity to overcome my fear of death and dismemberment is one of the strongest attractions I feel for heavy music. But mosh pits can be beautiful places, especially at punk rock and crust shows, where participants create new ways for themselves to dance, and leap joyfully into one another without struggle or hurt feelings. When Morne played in Somerville the only anger came from the stage. The audience participated by being too excited to even resemble standing still.
Amebix sounds like the eruptions of Kīlauea. The drumming, since the earliest inception of the band, has aspired to primitivism but usually churned out something either more parochial or unintentionally metropolitan. As it is every hit sounds like a bursting bubble of molten rock, deep bass drum heaving, air racing away from the heat on cymbal splatters. Listening to an early recording "No Gods, No Masters," it's easy to imagine being wrapped in roughly-tanned skins, surfing a lava flow to the floor of an empty desert, but this band is more interesting to me than their apparent interest in the post-apocalypse. Take the lyrics to "Chain Reaction," the song I quoted earlier.
Rise into the light, and set a flame to the night
We must destroy the institution of fear
Every shadow of doubt, grind it out!
There is a vision now becoming so clear
[Chorus:]
Use your head, take control
Use your head, no gods no masters
Feel the strength from within, do you believe it's a sin
To find the power lying inside your mind
Not from the cross or the gun
Not from the moon nor the sun
But rising from the very soul of mankind
We are straining at the leash!
We swear allegiance to none, be, not become
There is no one upon whom praise we will shower
I believe that the sin is the first to give in
On the path toward the ultimate power
There are few bands who can sing "Ride into the light" in total seriousness to metal-heads. The band echoes Nietzsche when it states that all power relevant to our human causes is human in origin, and that fear and a weak mind bar the path to fulfillment of greatness. When they sand this song I had never heard it before, and it was nearly a religious experience. The maelstrom of guitar noise sounding like the wind tearing shale from limestone in Monument Valley, the band stroked by undulating green light, films of themselves twenty-years past and in the present moment projected like the shadows of gods behind them, were completely inspiring to me in the moment. These men retired from the music industry without having ever made a compromise to their vision for life. They retired to the middles of moors and lochs. One makes his living crafting some of the finest broad-swords made today. Their ability to thrive being such extreme outsiders makes me trust them. In the moment, the song sounded like a call to embody the fullest extent of my humanity from someone who had gone beyond the limits of my farthest-flying dreams. Reading the third verse right now is as close to having the opposite experience as I can imagine. Who knows how considered that dreck was, but the world I want to participate in has no room for de-evolutionary vanity. It makes an unfortunate dichotomy of most notable and repeatable line: "No Gods! No Masters!" In a world ruled neither by gods nor masters there would be no slaves. There would be no hierarchy of any kind. But there could be no Jedi Masters either.
In the aftermath of the dancing in a California bedroom it became painfully clear that Phish presents a more and obviously pleasurable music experience than Amebix. The physical joy alone of dancing, as opposed to being danced upon, renders the situation nearly dilemmaless in my mind. But there is a spark. I've heard the call, the sound of a three-story horn blown with the wind, carried to deepest corner of every land, resting in my heart should my faith in metal every falter. I heard it not one-hundred feet from my house: the first four beats of "Blood of the Kings" by Manowar set my blood ablaze. I cried with joy, so much that I needed to pull my car to the side of the road until the song was over and I could see again. Those chords awakened something strident and truthful, in spite of the fact that half of Manowar's material is fascistic or facetious, which I have never been able to adequately describe. Perhaps it's that metal, when it's not nihilistic, has the power to reach past mental and emotional barriers, to get into hardened hearts. Metal has the power to touch those who could not risk the courageous vulnerability, who cannot accept the generosity of a band like Phish. In my greatest metal moments, my courage became stout, and I gained the ability to be vulnerable.
So what if you replaced the juggernaut of metallic motivation in metal with the deliberation and service of Phish? What kind of music would make an amalgamation of Amebix and Phish? With the exception of relative levels of sophistication, the basic timbre's they are working with aren't so different. The instrumentation is identical. Each drummer is working to dance us into a state of mind. What's good about Phish is that this state of mind leads easily into philosophy, into intentional unity that's as easy as saying yes. Amebix builds callouses, drags its home for miles on its back, can bellow from a mountaintop and hear its spirit reflected. Their drumming has the potential to be more globally inclusive than Phish's because it isn't rooted in American blues. The strength of it's pulse is derived from basic rock music, but it's played the way percussion ensembles play ceremony. To my mind, the best possible combination would be to lay some funky-ass stank on the back beat, drive with 16th-note tom figures, and keep up the four on the floor. Introduce a second percussionist and one could do Taiko drumming or lay down a bed of Brazillian rhythms. The straight 16th-note thinking will center the beat on the funk, and help to maintain the musical narrative. [What Phish does better than any other band I've ever heard is unify different pieces of music with the same rhythm. I suspect this is why they bore impatient people. Those people are too busy waiting for what's about to happen to consider that Phish is contemplating the past repeating in the present.] The bass guitar has to talk. It should not be the harmonic or rhythmic bedrock as much as conversationalist. The harmonic terrain formerly occupied by bass must be malleable. It must seethe and bate us; it must have the headroom to make the music powerful from below, and to add emphasis by exploding periodically. I think that the organ needs to be a part of this. Organs are right. The guitar should be able to make any sound there ever will be, but I would use the sound of an adulating crowd on fire as a template for exploration. I think the music would sound like contrapuntal riffs, composed in pentatonic scales, and played in repetition for examination. We'll say love is greater than nations, truer than money, higher than romance, more important than history, too heavy for Superman; the world will shout back to us "MY LOVE IS HIGHER THAN YOUR ASSESSMENT OF WHAT LOVE COULD BE!" We'll take this to the streets! Summon cities, hordes of over and underworlders flying freak flags, dancing in the valleys and climbing the peaks. It will be Carnivale with guitars.
Oh Amebix! I'm worried about your anarchist underverse. I want to live in the liberated oververse. I'd love to see absolutely free, but I don't think only the strong should survive. I will swear no allegiance to any god, but I should take lessons from those greater than myself, and I should call Master those that deserve the title. What the world needs is to see the virtue in fluid-selves, non-possessive individuality, participation without borders. We need to get a message through to those who see stolid autonomy as a strength. The message will read "Wake up, friends! Wake up and get down." It will be loud.
Trees Are Why You Trip: notes on psychoacoustics, psycho-actives, and just plain psychos from the road from Kingman to Los Angeles
...Examining "The Red Album" by Baroness, reverberance as delight, the trials of early reflections, and the desert.
Three things we must understand.
1. Reverberance, as it exists in human art, is a gift from a loving god and proof that we evolved from ocean-dwellers.
2. Early reflections, tough they may be part of a reverberant initiation, may be terrifying or disorienting when they can't give you immediately cogent information about your surroundings. For instance, hearing birds chirping and the scattered reflections bounding through a grove of trees can't effectively tell you where the individual birds or trees are; timbrel experience will tell you if the sounds you hear emanating from within and around the grove are made by familiar animals, and that information helps you determine whether to treat them as parts of a threat. The result is heightened emotional response coupled, and enhanced by spatial disorientation. In short: trees make you trip.
3. There are no trees in the Mojave Desert. The desert doesn't lend itself to the spastic joy and exultant sensationalism of a trip. The desert wants you to be an animal.
Capitalizing on these three notions, the "Red Album" by Baroness makes the drive from Needles to Barstow, a potentially turgid and frightening business, into a beautiful journey.
I was 36 miles west of the California/Arizona border. Past the first rest stop and the Desert Oasis gas station, home of a BLT famed among local truck-types, I descended into a wide valley, and climbed a high hill. I began playing the record when I neared the top.
The first notes sound like soft calls from nowhere, tiny sirens between the desert rocks. The song goes I, IV, I/iv, V. This is regal and portentous music that calls me forward rather than casting me aside. Clean guitars reflect themselves in echoes, the slow cousins of early reflections, leading and powering reverb, flying across the stereo spectrum which is lost inside a car. It's dry, comfortable warmth, with a hint of challenge to hear this and see the desert outside my car. The tones have the purity of feedback: distinctly guitars but no plucking. They make musical swells that sound like organ pipes breathing like people. The cadence at the end of this introduction goes I/vi, IV, I. The melody finishes on a third. I accidentally timed my trip such that I heard the last note of the introduction just after I crested the hill and the empty world of the Mojave spread itself for me. The only human presences were cars and the highway scar of their escape. In these opening minutes, before the thrust-poetry of drums took over, Baroness reminded taught me that I like the desert for the same reason I like reverb.
According to psychoacoustics guru David Moulton, humans shouldn't like reverb. We should have a biological imperative to fear perceptions of vast, open unclear spaces because they are more likely to be dangerous than smaller spaces, where our hearing will more accurately determine the possible location of a threat. However, reverberant occurrences delight us. I am frequently lifted into reverie of the world's grandeur when my ears describe it to me with reverb. The more the better, because I feel freer as the space around me sounds more infinite. There is no sound in infinity except that which the body makes. There are no reflections and no soothing wash in a free field. Such is the Mojave Desert: a tract of lifeless, useless grit. In such a place, I can meditate without distraction and imagine spirits growing like a body might if it weren't material. However, in my head the Mojave sounds like Baroness: cloying sounds with a little discordance for flavor. The drum thrust is like the ridges on the yellow line, potholes and cracks. The first riff plays like a sidewinder, the amps break up like highway mirages, and the singer shouts "Rays! On pinion!" Am I a pinion? Am I the smallest cog in massive clockwork? In the Mojave I am a cog without works, but the reverb tells me I am alive and I am somewhere. I exist and feel godly.
Three things we must understand.
1. Reverberance, as it exists in human art, is a gift from a loving god and proof that we evolved from ocean-dwellers.
2. Early reflections, tough they may be part of a reverberant initiation, may be terrifying or disorienting when they can't give you immediately cogent information about your surroundings. For instance, hearing birds chirping and the scattered reflections bounding through a grove of trees can't effectively tell you where the individual birds or trees are; timbrel experience will tell you if the sounds you hear emanating from within and around the grove are made by familiar animals, and that information helps you determine whether to treat them as parts of a threat. The result is heightened emotional response coupled, and enhanced by spatial disorientation. In short: trees make you trip.
3. There are no trees in the Mojave Desert. The desert doesn't lend itself to the spastic joy and exultant sensationalism of a trip. The desert wants you to be an animal.
Capitalizing on these three notions, the "Red Album" by Baroness makes the drive from Needles to Barstow, a potentially turgid and frightening business, into a beautiful journey.
I was 36 miles west of the California/Arizona border. Past the first rest stop and the Desert Oasis gas station, home of a BLT famed among local truck-types, I descended into a wide valley, and climbed a high hill. I began playing the record when I neared the top.
The first notes sound like soft calls from nowhere, tiny sirens between the desert rocks. The song goes I, IV, I/iv, V. This is regal and portentous music that calls me forward rather than casting me aside. Clean guitars reflect themselves in echoes, the slow cousins of early reflections, leading and powering reverb, flying across the stereo spectrum which is lost inside a car. It's dry, comfortable warmth, with a hint of challenge to hear this and see the desert outside my car. The tones have the purity of feedback: distinctly guitars but no plucking. They make musical swells that sound like organ pipes breathing like people. The cadence at the end of this introduction goes I/vi, IV, I. The melody finishes on a third. I accidentally timed my trip such that I heard the last note of the introduction just after I crested the hill and the empty world of the Mojave spread itself for me. The only human presences were cars and the highway scar of their escape. In these opening minutes, before the thrust-poetry of drums took over, Baroness reminded taught me that I like the desert for the same reason I like reverb.
According to psychoacoustics guru David Moulton, humans shouldn't like reverb. We should have a biological imperative to fear perceptions of vast, open unclear spaces because they are more likely to be dangerous than smaller spaces, where our hearing will more accurately determine the possible location of a threat. However, reverberant occurrences delight us. I am frequently lifted into reverie of the world's grandeur when my ears describe it to me with reverb. The more the better, because I feel freer as the space around me sounds more infinite. There is no sound in infinity except that which the body makes. There are no reflections and no soothing wash in a free field. Such is the Mojave Desert: a tract of lifeless, useless grit. In such a place, I can meditate without distraction and imagine spirits growing like a body might if it weren't material. However, in my head the Mojave sounds like Baroness: cloying sounds with a little discordance for flavor. The drum thrust is like the ridges on the yellow line, potholes and cracks. The first riff plays like a sidewinder, the amps break up like highway mirages, and the singer shouts "Rays! On pinion!" Am I a pinion? Am I the smallest cog in massive clockwork? In the Mojave I am a cog without works, but the reverb tells me I am alive and I am somewhere. I exist and feel godly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
