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Echoes From Kali Yuga

An ominous atmosphere of impending ruin pervaded the sound of many Death Metal bands, whose worldview afforded them an acute awareness of declining modernity. These artists understood that the course of civilization is subject to decay as much as any organic matter, despite the prevailing belief that human constructs are entirely seperate to the natural world that they operate within. Ancient Indo-European peoples predicted the nature of this downfall with great accuracy, as they believed in a cycle of creation and dissolution in which the same ego-principles slowly manifest time and time again. The 3000 year old Vedic text known as the Srimad Bhagavatam provides one of the more detailed explanations of how the last age of the cycle – the Kali Yuga – reaches it’s apex; extracts from which the Death Metal music in the video accompanies as inheritors to this cosmic vision of the world.

USBM: trailer trash or Western mystery school?

When black metal became in popular perception “the next big thing”, around 1992, it was rightly considered an European phenomenon which contained a cultural bias based on tradition, arts and society impossible to spiritually clone in the American way of life, even in the underground which had spawned death metal. Bands like Profanatica and VON showed that it is possible to create the blasphemy spewing minimalistic barbaro-black metal in USA as well as anywhere else, but the Romanticist type of black metal bands from USA were for a decade, if not more, the laughing stock of even American BM maniacs themselves. There was something wholeheartedly absurd about Sumerian sorcerers from Texas, druids from Minnesota and vampires from California. David “Blackmoon” Parland of the insipid Dark Funeral waged verbal war in zines against Proscriptor of Absu, who cast curses and spells in return. Judas Iscariot printed Nietzschean statements in German and moustached overweight pro-wrestling fans took pictures of themselves corpsepainted in suburban woods. Whereas musical quality grew through the times, so did the amount of excess people circulating in the American BM underground, leading to the explosion of “bedroom black metal” in the turn of the millennium, while black metal messageboards became populated with people whose IQ would be statistically rather rare in Norway and Sweden.

The dilemma seems to lie in the artificial distance between the sophisticated intellectual and man of the street which characterizes also the separation between the art and entertainment of 20th century America. Whereas the Oslo or Bergen black metaller would have been raised with equal awareness of Ibsen’s plays, American movies and classical music as well as punk, the US black metaller often came from the background of very little cultural perception besides TV, baseball, horror movies and aggressive competitive values. The obsession with social standing is such that looking or behaving different would easily be seen as gay or the sign of a wimp or nerd, but what fan of black metal would want to represent normality in every piece of action? Scandinavian, Austrian or even Polish metalhead did not and does not share this pressure of having to be a regular conservative guy because there are more different roles and stereotypes available in the society to identify with. Thus most of the US youth involved in black metal came to view themselves as either depressive, perverted losers or occult maniacs oriented to conjure the otherworld dressed in robes and armed with litanies of every available ancient magick tradition and spellcasting culture.

As case studies, take for example Crimson Moon from San Diego and Night Conquers Day from New York. Both are bands with respectable instrumental skill, dedication to the black metal arts beyond the normal “scene kid” wannabe interest and an intuitive grasp of the Romantic and Faustian in black metal. Yet, both are bands hard to take seriously at face value, because there is so much absurdity, alienation from reality and bad aesthetic choices involved. Crimson Moon presented themselves as a magical collective of energy vampires but the music was often a too simplistic rip off of influences from Cradle of Filth to Ancient, damaging the beauty, while their reputation suffered a blow from public arguments on online messageboards not at all fitting for the sorceric image – even splitting the band in two factions, Gorgoroth-style. Night Conquers Day posed in full daylight near a storage building with one of the members wearing corpsepaint (and the infamous moustache!) and the personal history of the members included getting into headlines for stealing gravestones and a keyboard player who disappeared but returns now and then to play a piece over the phone (I think I would go that way too if I had to live in the American society) and the 10-15 minute epic songs quoting several eras of metal from Mercyful Fate to Burzum remained unmemorable because of sounding like too many parts had been stitched together with no spiritual theme arching to wrap up its diverse aspects into a continuous whole.

Hvis Lyset Tour Oss

Successfully premiering last year at the AFI Film Festival in decadent Los Angeles following high anticipation and mixed expectations, Norwegian Black Metal documentary ‘Until The Light Takes Us‘ is now on tour around the United States, with the upcoming screenings scheduled below:

Early July – Carmike Cinema, Nashville, TN (being rescheduled)
09-11/07/2009 (9th, 7:30pm. 10th – 11th, 7:30pm and 9:30pm) – Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA
11/07/2009 (6:30pm) – as220 Arts Center, Providence, RI
25/07/2009 (8:00pm) – Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL
01/08/2009 (7:30pm) – The Brattle Theater, Boston, MA
07/08/2009 (8:30pm) – Domy Books, Houston, TX
13/08/2009 (7:30pm) – Plaza Theater, Atlanta, GA
14-15/08/2009 (10:30pm) – Guild Cinema, Albuquerque, NM
20/08/2009 (9:30pm) – Nightlight Arts Space, Chapel Hill, NC
26/08/2009 (8:00pm) – The Loft Cinema, Tucson, AZ
02/09/2009 (7:30pm) – Ibrahim Theater at International House, Philadelphia, PA

The directors, Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites, will also be bringing the documentary movie back to Europe in the Autumn. London’s Raindance Film Festival that runs from the 30th September through to the 11th of October will be cursed by a screening, and a date later in October is planned for that infarcted heart of Europe: Belgium. The tour coincides well with the recent release of creative dissident Varg Vikernes from the very prison that he was interviewed in for this movie. Visit your local screening for a less sensationalist, but most inquisitve look of its kind into the infamous second wave since Moynihan’s Lords of Chaos.

Vi døde ikke
Vi har aldri levd

Clips
Trailer
Varg interview #1
Varg interview #2
Fenriz interview

Cynic – 1991 Demo

There is no denying the magnitude of Cynic as a historical phenomenon, as last year’s release of their comeback album has reminded us. 1993′s ‘Focus’, of which ‘Traced In Air’ is an approximate, contemporary rehash, was viewed by many as a revolutionary and progressive work that took Metal beyond its confines into a more liberal musical world. Others were suspicious of this sound. For them it was an attack on the vital, hard-hitting spirit of underground Metal – an outward promise of endless bliss if one renounces the sword and chants peaceful mantras; inwardly possessing characteristics of the herd. For the cynical, then, the 1991 demo recording may be a more palatable listen. It is what ‘Focus’ and Death’s ‘Human’ should have been conclusions to. Two songs from the full-length to follow and one exclusive to the demo (although parts were included in the album) are, rather than stripped down versions in the stages of infancy, more mature compositions than what would later be heard. The sound is technical and precise but the demo-quality rawness and vibrancy of musicianship illuminates the composition as it unfolds. There is a constant, cosmic sense of drama in the music, describing the world of flux in relation to unconditioned reality. Abrupt riff and tempo changes have a more satisfying and lasting effect, being underlined by subtle rhythmic patterns. This creates a layered dynamic culminating in moments of realisation which are characterised by lead guitar work that is, at better times, more adherent and logically conclusive than later works. The work of the guitars here is closer to Classical music, vaguely reminiscent of Robert Schumann and the up-tempo passages of his earlier symphonies in particular. There are no vocoded vocals on the demo; aggresive and restless open-throated growls typical of later Speed Metal bands make this recording truer to the original canon of Cynic’s career. Tony Choy’s masterful bass adds a skeletal and complex level of structural depth to the sound that Reinert’s percussion drives into light-speed, rendering Zeno’s paradox of motion. Cynic’s 1991 demo is a technical Death Metal masterpiece – perhaps only surpassed by Atheist’s unquestionably classic second album. It still challenges the conventions of Death Metal, but it bears the hallmarks that all great underground recordings possess, as an honest and brutally direct communication of the reality beyond our futile ways.

Dawn of Demonaic Possession, London Will Burn

Following a performance over at the Maryland Deathfest that had several generations of Metalheads mesmerised by their energy and pervasive, irreligious spirit, the enduring Immolation will be voyaging across the Atlantic to headline the London Deathfest later this month. The line-up should be turned on it’s head by the veterans at the end of the night. I recommend any morbid souls in the area to get a ticket soon and pay their respects to one of the most dedicated bands in Death Metal history.

27/06/2009 – London Deathfest, Camden Underworld, London UK

Clips
Into Everlasting Fire
Harnessing Ruin

Late July, and the height of Summer will bring to London one of the southern hemisphere’s most legendary Satanic Death Metal bands, Pentagram. Not to be confused with the band from Virginia, Chile’s Pentagram are representatives of the raw and uncompromising South American old school, contemporaneous to the likes of Sarcofago, Vulcano, Mortem and Sepultura. The band have re-united for several shows, apparently leading up to Wacken, so this appearance in London will be something of a preview and a chance to be possessed by your primal self before the dark altar of the Underworld.

21/07/2009 – Pentagram, Camden Underworld, London, UK

Clips
Fatal Predictions
Demonaic Possession

The Yoga of Death Metal

The morbid and occult obsession of Death Metal is not merely an headbanging soundtrack to some slasher movie-induced escapist fantasy. Here, we present the juxtaposition of Morbid Angel‘s music with Vedic and Tantric imagery to illustrate the same spirit that both are an expression of, only in a different time and space.

Risen from the past, Finland’s memory

On this windy, half-lit day, I resurrected memories by bicycling off to the countryside to visit Tusby’s archaeological sites, including the stone covered grave of an unknown archaic warrior. The histories of the cultures and tribes of this area have been lost to the sands of time. Pieces of archaic weaponry and tools are all that is left. Mythology tells of shamans commanding the forces of air and underworld by their feats of poetry and chant, while the Germanic tribes feared the power of Lappish witchcraft. No real civilization seems to have existed before the Viking age, Sweden and the crusades. Yet recent work by astronomers and archaeologists shows that Bothnia’s mysterious “giant’s churches” bear imposing similarity to Stonehenge’s pre-Celtic cromlech and Peru’s ancient citadels – observatory of the cult of Sun worship, orientations marking the times for the solstices and other nights of power when the wheel of Time turns and the cold hands of the ancestors reach out from the netherworlds, witnessed by the eye of the sorcerer who performs the animalistic rites again.

Mysterious planets and the maze of metal

Who hasn’t dreamt of life on another planet? While humanity still has not reached the possibilities of interstellar travel, artists, magicians and scientists find ways to connect with the vast reaches of space and strands of existence separate from our earthly reality. The latest discoveries of astronomers include exotic planets in distant star systems of our galaxy, such as freezing spheres of rock that orbit white dwarfs, remnants of a stellar apocalypse. Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant and other modern warlocks described archaic methods of tantric ritual that can be used to access divinities and commune with strange forces beyond the limits of human perception. The most vital strands of modern black metal have merged with ambient and cosmic music to create hyper-spheres of ancient, droning sound that have only fleeting similarity with rock structures and methods. As if weaving all these strands together, the famous heavy metal warrior John Cyriis (ex-Agent Steel) has reformed his psychedelic heavy metal band Stellar Seed in the form of SETI, in collaboration with Dr. Shuichi Oni who has promised to release essays on cosmology and astronomy in addition to “velocity guitar”. It’s interesting to live in a time when Cosmos and Chaos meet.

If God lived on Earth, we would break his windows

Just about two weeks ago, Tromsø prison released possibly the most well-known church arsonist in history, Varg Vikernes of Burzum, on parole. One week later, one of the famous churches of Norway still untouched by him, Våler church in Hedmark, went down in flames cast by an unknown force of retaliation. Gravestones have been toppled in various regions and the infamous “666″ in graffiti adorns suburbs and outskirts of holy places again. Coincidence or not, Norway should be thankful to these scoundrels that they continue to remind the social-democratic society that not everyone is happy to conform to pseudo-values, lies and hypocrisy. A beautiful European church might not deserve destruction, but it is among the least valuable things anyway that will be destroyed if things turn out much darker… and they are turning darker, in political, social and ecological worlds, one instrument of decay and wrath feeding another.

red hot embers
dreaming of becoming
a fizzling crackling fire
once more

Clips
Burzum – Dunkelheit
The church of Våler in fire

Unsilent Storms in the Texas Abyss

From the arid deserts infested with scorpions and snakes to the liberal cities and more conservative rural ranches, Texas carries the memory of the American frontier, the spirit of man against overwhelming odds; an age when harmony with nature determined survival. In the 80′s groundbreaking bands such as DRI, Helstar, Watchtower, Ripper and Necrovore created both musical and aggressive anti-normal metal that gave foundations for genres such as progressive metal, thrash and death metal. In the 90′s, the sceptre was mostly carried by death metal influenced black metal bands Absu, Averse Sefira and Thornspawn. Just as the Texas scene seemed to have quieted down in keeping with the hipsterization of metal, the last two years have shown many new promising acts to arise: the occult metal of Dagon, the hyperactive metal/punk crossover of Birth A.D. and the demonic and subliminal Blaspherian. While all of these are formally very much crafted according to the rules of subgenres established by the previous degenerations, their no-nonsense attitude and direct, perceptual spirit in the creation of insistent, spontaneous and un-commercial metal artifacts deserves nothing but applause.

Reviews
Birth A.D. – Stillbirth of a Nation
Blaspherian – Allegiance to the Will of Damnation
Dagon – In Desolationem per Nefandum