Into the Lightless Dark

In the interests of pandering shamelessly for more hits...

Look, I'm a vampire!
Kids are into vampires nowadays aren't they?  Aren't they?
Wait, what?...sparkling? Really? No. Just no.

Okay, in all honesty I look way more queasy, washed-up rock star than vampire in that picture anyway.

Besides, everyone knows that the mainstream love of vampires is most often demonstrated in a context of financial and social excess - with the carnally-fixated bloodsuckers becoming more popular during times of prosperity, decadence and liberalism. Odd considering the origin of the vampire myth stems from fears about the transmission of disease and ignorance of the biological changes that occur in a human body post-mortem. 

So...in a shattered, post-Global Financial Crisis world people feel helpless; manipulated by the government that they elected; powerless in the face of forces greater than themselves. They fear being dehumanized, stripped of the attributes that make them something more than a shuffling, unthinking automaton acting mindlessly on primal impulses.

...so, zombies. We're talking about zombies.
Makes sense; after all zombies are just people robbed of all the things that made them people in the first place - they're reduced to a level less than animal. Zombies are chiefly frightening because of their emptiness; their lack of any form of intelligence and thought. Also, there's always masses of them. Who hasn't looked at a great heaving crowd of people pushing together (at a concert, in a crowded bar, in a mosh-pit, whatever) and seen not individuals but some huge, faceless, unthinking mass. Loads of people crowded too close together are scary, man. You could get crushed in those kind of situations. Folks have been killed.
Oh, and the biting; no one likes the biting.

Okay. I can do zombies.

Look, I'm a zombie!

Oh, screw it. I'm just going to blog about music.
And here we go, Ladies and Gentlemen; now for something truly, properly Gothic...

      
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I'm not sure what it is about the French. The artistic output of that country seems to be a series of opposites - light and dark, bright and bleak - with very few intermediate stages. There is the matter of their Operas. French Baroque is gilded, perfumed, opulent and decadent; dripping vibrancy and flamboyance - it conjures images of powdered wigs and rosebud lips, flittering eyelashes and fragranced, voluminous cleavage. But other French composers put forth pieces that storm and rage - rife with thunderous orchestral surges - the kind of music that people topple off cliffs to in silent movies. I'm mostly thinking of Massenet here, Gounod has his moments too. Hell, these pieces rival the Germans for sheer focused intensity.

And on the subject of movies. If you want a frivolous farce or a frothy sex romp - the French are your best bet. If you want something dense and artistic, stylish and cynical - you'll find French flicks that scratch that itch. And if you want a churning, relentless horror film; smeared with blood and steeped in a bleak, voyeuristic atmosphere - yup, The French deliver it.

So there is that odd juxtaposition, almost an oxymoron; effervescent or ominous. Glittering or grinding. Giddy with perfume or smothered in ash.

I have always been drawn to dark ideas. This is why I exposed myself to 'Martyrs'; a French horror film that explored the transcendent nature of suffering. It was a savage experience and revealed Eli Roth and the rest of the Gore-nography crowd for the shallow adolescents they are. It was not an enjoyable film - I witnessed it rather than watched it - and I doubt I will ever repeat the viewing.
Anyway, it was dark, man, is what I'm saying.

And so to this French dark-wave/neo-Classical band:

 Elend 'Lecons de Tenebres' (Holy Records, 1994)

This was their debut album - at the time they were a trio; with all three contributing vocals. I came in much later, checking out the  Orphika re-issue (2008) of their darkest and most intimidating album: 'The Umbersun' (originally released in 1998 by Music for Nations). That latter disc was a black-souled maelstrom, an abyss of an album - it was the closest I've come to witnessing pure darkness in a musical medium. The only reference point I can figure for it is if one were to take Dead Can Dance at their absolute darkest, combine that with the score from 'The Omen' ('Ave Satani' in particular, obviously) and then blend that with the music that plays every time the obelisk manifests in '2001: A Space Odyssey', you would still only have a vague idea of what 'The Umbersun' sounds like.

That disc used choirs extensively but deliberately had the different vocal parts combine in a jarring, dis-harmonic way (and often lapsing into outright screams, albeit note-perfect ones), this coupled with the swirling and surging orchestral arrangements (which would often fall back to a delicate whisper only to suddenly stab forwards in a rushing knife-blade of sound) created a profoundly unsettling and immersive atmosphere. And then there were the extreme vocals... This wasn't the more common grunting or shrieking of death- or black metal bands, this was something else entirely. These vocals were soul-ravaging howls - full of anguish and intensity, startlingly unhinged. I'd never heard that replicated in any metal band until I stumbled upon 'A Forest of Stars' - their vocalist, Mr Curse, employs a very similar technique; presumably the result of listening to Elend.

'The Umbersun' was the final part of a trilogy depicting Lucifer's rebellion and fall. In 'The Umbersun' the Light-Bringer takes his throne in Hell. 'Lecons de Tenebres' is the first installment.
It cannot match 'The Umbersun' for sheer intensity and its presumably small recording budget is somewhat evident. It is, nonetheless, a challenging and fascinating release.

There is a single soprano on this album; Eve-Gabrielle Siskind - one of the trio. Her voice is a fleeting and fragile thing; youthful to the point of sounding childlike, naïve. She is Julee Cruise bathed in blue light, standing before wine-red curtains. Her voice is used to gild the music rather than carry it and she dances upon the seething electronic orchestrations. The bulk of the vocal duties goes to the two male vocalists; Alexandre Iskander Hasnaoui and Renaud Tschirner. One favours dark, ominous mumbling and a thick, bone-numbing baritone that recalls DCD's Brendan Perry. The other howls and shrieks, gibbers and roars. The music is almost entirely synthesized - lush, deep piano chords marking a path through a swirling fog of synths. Here and there the scraping and keening of an electric violin is utilized. Most of the songs begin quietly, hushed, before the shadows swarm in once again. Many tracks veer from delicate, melancholy melody to writhing atonal dissonance.
This is orchestral Black Metal (sans guitars, sans bass, mostly sans drums - there are some timpani-style patches employed late in the album). It is music made to communicate fear. And grandeur.

Unfortunately, the synth-pads date the album slightly - the production mix is somewhat unforgiving and those electronics sometimes sound a little cheap. On later releases - specifically the 'Winds' trilogy ('Winds Devouring Men', 'Sunwar the Dead' and 'a World in Their Screams') - Elend were able to utilize a full orchestra and choir; though the budget demands of this vision proved crippling and Elend ended their sonic experiment altogether after 'A World...' (said trilogy was originally intended to be a five-album series).

'Lecons de Tenebres' is a stunning release - ambitious beyond what any other artists were doing at the time.  It is singularly, utterly Gothic - and not in the PVC-pouting-and-eyeliner kind of way either. It is gorgeous, haunting and bleakly beautiful (and, if you can get past the shrieking, markedly more accessible than some of their other releases). There is a shortage of other bands to whom comparisons can be made; Daargard and Die Verbannten Kinder Evas spring to mind but I find Elend somewhat more successful in their ambitions than those other bands (well, 'duos' actually). Though they too, are well worth checking out, if that's your bag.

If you always thought Cradle of Filth's atmospheric, orchestral interludes were among their finest moments (yup, I did), or if you loved My Dying Bride for their mellower, more lavish numbers like 'Black God' or 'For My Fallen Angel'; Elend will definitely hold a great deal of appeal. As an aside, what Elend succeed at so stunningly is clearly what MDB were aiming for with their special release 'Evinta' (an album I am extremely fond of but which suffers from too much negative space in each track).

I would definitely recommend anyone interested in grand, orchestral darkness to check out Elend; though be aware, their albums utilize dissonance as much as melody - in truth, probably a little more. This isn't the music of the spheres - this is the music of the void.

Nostalgic for the Nineties?

I call it 'A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man Wearing a Cat'. Yup, that's me, like a hundred years ago. I look like a frigging chipmunk with those cheeks. That was back when I was planning my first band - a duo with my sister. We'd borrowed a Casio-tone keyboard from the school's music room and worked out how to work the pre-programmed drumbeat on it. We were both quite into metal then and had selected the 'heaviest' beat and then jacked the tempo up as high as it would go. I didn't have either a bass or a guitar but I figured if I blew onto a piece of wax paper wrapped around an old comb I could make a sound that roughly approximated an electric guitar. I figured wrong - what that sounds like is a kazoo. We quickly abandoned the idea - thus denying the world it's first and only brother/sister kazoo & Casio-keyboard metal duo. Society's loss, I guess.

The cat's name was Comet. He was the biggest, sweetest, most chilled cat I've ever known. He was not, however, terribly bright. My father once allegedly referred to him as an amiable boof-head.
I loved that cat.

But all that is years before the content of this blog takes place, so onwards...


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The faded plaid, the jeans with the knees worn out to ragged tangles. The hair rendered into unnatural colours with cheap dyes and then left to grow out, always darker for a full inch at the root. Combat boots and summer dresses bought from some op shop or other. Laces dragging and tattered. Hair hanging across unsmiling faces. The slacker chic. The carefully-crafted cynicism masking a kind of frail naiveté. Weird rambling films about dis-spirited kids working in fast food joints or convenience stores; drifting abstractedly through the world. 'So fucking what?' becoming a catch-phrase. I loved the flick 'Heathers' man. I adored Winona Ryder's brittle assertivness. I totally longed for Christian Slater's coat and world-weary humour. With lines like: 'Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a body-count'. Jeez, that stuff is legendary.
And okay, I'm aware that 'Heathers' was actually released in 1988. I just forever associate it with the very early Nineties - when I first saw it myself.
The Nineties had grunge; they had that old perennial favourite androgyny; they had a bitter laugh and a slightly knowing wink.

Man, I miss that shit.

That Nineties-specific nihilism seems almost innocent now: like kids play-acting the end of the world. Now we've got sexts and rampant narcissism. A different, shallower kind of hopelessness. This era feels vacuous, hyper-materialistic, vapid. The Nineties had a whiff of that too, but every generation pushes that vibe deeper. God, am I ever sounding old and cranky.

Still at least we've got hipsters now. I adore hipsters.
I didn't really work the grunge aesthetic. I mean, I wore the knees out of every pair of jeans I owned but that wasn't deliberate, wasn't some kind of statement - I just have really bony knees and that's hard on fabric. I had a hint of plaid, though. And then, as now, I was always in need of a haircut. But I did as pretty much every other kid my age did - I went to school, I watched 'Friends'.
Then in the last year of highschool I started working the Goth shtick a little harder.

None of the albums that really changed my world during the Nineties were grunge. I had the required copy of Nirvana's Nevermind (on cassette no less), sure. But I can't say it really impacted.

So here's a scrawled list of the discs (or cassettes, dubbed tapes with photocopied covers, or whatever) that meant something to me then. These are the albums that linger with me still even though I haven't listened to any of them in well over a decade. Forgive me then, for these will only be fragments - broken shards of memory. They will only be what those albums meant to me, or the traces of them that linger with me still. Doubtless, all of them deserve more than that but they are almost all lost to me now - packed away in boxes, left in other cities, given away (or in the cases of the tapes - simply rotted down to white noise).
So here goes...

PJ Harvey 'To Bring You My Love'.
Hell, I loved this album. The primal, almost feral urgency in her voice. The percussion - sometimes delicate, sometimes near-tribal, the heavy mood of the guitars. The open-hearted need there, something almost carnal. I still fondly think of the desperately whispered playground chant - taunting: 'little fish, big fish, swimming in the water.' She is an amazing artist - is Polly Jean Harvey. A damn fine songwriter and musician, blessed with a thick, powerful voice. Her shamanic delivery - a punk poetess and a fitting heir to the throne of Patti Smith. Not that Smith is herself ready to secede that throne just yet.

Throwing Muses 'University'.
A tape copy of this. Bought quick and cheap from a record shop. Back when there were record shops. I loved her voice - Kristin Hersh. The naked vulnerability of it, the wounded energy. This album was all hooks. Rich, fat walls of guitar. Melodic as anything. I didn't think I knew any of the songs until I put the thing on. Bam...I'd heard damn near every one on RDU: the student-run radio station. I just never knew what they were. This album was less of a taster for Throwing Muses for me than it was a gateway drug to...

Kristin Hersh 'Hips and Makers'.
A solo album in the truest sense of the word. For the most part it was just her aching, bee-sting voice and her own acoustic guitar accompaniment. Every now and again there was a sighing of cello -  courtesy of Jane Scarpantoni, if I recall. This album was so fragile and so brave, strong in its own delicate way. The songs hung around inside of me for days, weeks, months afterwards. There was such courage on display here. To listen felt almost voyeuristic. The lyrics were impenetrable: 'never was a Baritone till you walked in', 'we have hips and makers, we have a good time'. But it felt like they spoke of things too personal, locked too deeply within Hersh herself that you couldn't hope to understand them without first living inside her head. The album sparkled and glimmered; a thousand beautiful, broken shards winking in the sunlight.

Cop Shoot Cop 'Release'.
A five-dollar used CD bought from a store that always smelt of feet and stale cheese, old glue. The disc was all beat-up; fingerprints and scratches. Someone had listened the hell out of it before me. It had a freaking anvil on the cover. This was the album that snatched me away from metal and opened up a whole knew world of possibilities to me. Without this disc I would never have fallen for the music of Nick Cave or Tom Waits. Frontman Tod A had a cynical swagger of a voice. The music was all dissonant no-wave, noise rock shot through with primal jazz and blues DNA. Dissonant frigging horns, man. The lyrics were exquisite - bitter, bruised and perfect.
'Well it's 4:30 in the morning and the vacuum sucks you in. The tell-tale trace of lies upon you face; the sidewalk feels just like your skin.' CSC are gone now. Disbanded, all the back catalogue out of print. Tod Ashley is still rolling though, man; got himself another gig, been running it for many years now. Called Firewater - they play wild Circus/World Music/Klezmer/Surf/Garage/Punk. They're something special.

Mazzy Star 'Among My Swan'.
Those hazy sun-shattered guitars, rolling out like the way the air shimmers over a heated road. The aching drawl of Hope Sandoval's voice. They sounded like a dream on a sweating afternoon. If David Lynch had set Twin Peaks in warmer climes it should have been these guys on the soundtrack in place of Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. There was always a darkness beneath the melody here. They'd draw you away from the everyday, but there'd be an unspoken threat. Underneath.

Portishead 'Portishead'
Though I adored the crisp drums, Isaac Hayes samples and dark matter of the debut - it seemed almost too graceful, too penetrable. I preferred the sneering guitar rolls here; on the sophomore album. The half-choked drumbeats - booming and echoing but buried deeply, weirdly muffled. Hip hop at half the speed - crawling endlessly forward. I loved the biting black wall of brass; the Morricone influences; the fact that on a couple of tracks Beth Gibbons seemed to be channeling an evil Shirley Bassey. It sounded like the soundtrack to an infinitely darker, more dangerous and deviant Bond flick. I heard once that the strings and brass sections were recorded separately for this one - pressed onto vinyl and then sampled back into the final mix - so that they could be scratched and chopped into place, just like on the debut. I heard they blew out their studio budget. 'Half-Day Closing' sounds like a psychedelic rock band dissolving into the ocean. 'Cowboys' looms up full of swagger, bitterness and very sharp teeth. 'Only You' will break your heart with its yearning and devotion.

Mercury Rev 'Deserter's Songs'.
The bruised heart of New Weird Americana. This album was written while locked away in a cabin, despairing that they'd never break though, never shift enough units to become a viable act (they'd hung their hopes on the divine 'See You on the Other Side' and it'd sank without a trace). This album is beyond sublime. It's a lavish disc - so densely layered it's positively orchestral. It soars, it sweeps, it burns its way into your heart. Jonathan Donahue's voice is a fragile tenor, peculiar and achingly beautiful (like a choirboy Neil Young). I had a bit of a crush on him for a while there (but y'know; in a totally masculine, heterosexual way). It introduced me to mellotron and the idea that music can create this vast rippling panorama. 'Holes' sounds like flying. As a song it simply yearns. 'The Funny Bird' is a hurricane in an abyss - the My Bloody Valentine-style waves of melodic feedback, the treated vocals - full of desperation and hope.  This album was pastoral and wistful, full of joy and sorrow...and beneath it all, a woozy, tripped-out darkness. It sounds deeply odd. Queasy and surreal; a 3am phone-call of an album. And again, positively Lynchian.

Tricky 'Angels With Dirty Faces'

This album suffocates, it strangles, it chokes and unsettles. From the cover onwards it confronts you, unblinking and unrelenting. Tricky's hash-fogged rasp playing a ghoulish call-and-response with the achingly sweet yet utterly mournful tones of Martina Topley-Bird. She sounds like the ghost of Billie Holliday singing 'God Bless the Child' from a locked room while Tricky's shadow of a voice haunts the corners. 'Broken Homes' is crippled gospel. PJ Harvey lends her voice to that one and it is a magnificent performance but this is Tricky's show and he leans crookedly into every dark place. The beats skitter and warp, spurring the album forwards but never resolving into anything as cohesive as a hook. Dissonant blues guitar tangles across a bunch of the tracks; Marc Ribot within the void. Most of the songs seem to develop in spirals, in whirlpools. This album is full of smoke and whispers - it is thick and pungent and psychedelic. It's a smoked-out hip-hop headtrip, man. And it doesn't want you for a friend.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 'Let Love In'.
This almost feels the male counterpoint to PJ Harvey's 'To Bring You My Love'. It's occasionally raw, powerful, even savage and snarling. Other times it has a dark, mythical swagger - Cave as the black-hearted preacher-man with a red right hand and a heart full of dark and terrible things. This album is all about the legend of Cave - the performance, the act. I never cared for his later honesty; I have no real love for 'The Boatman's Call'. I wanted Nick Cave the actor; the tall, looming figure cut out of shadows and crooked lines. Still other times it's almost crushingly beautiful, rich with need and urgency. 'Do You Love Me Part II' remains one of the most hauntingly lovely and utterly disturbing songs I've ever been a witness to.

Bjork 'Homogenic'.
The break-up album. Or something. Full of dark, bone-trembling bass and beats; dense, almost Russian-sounding Classical influences. At other points it's achingly lovely and exquisitely ripe with a sense of awe and hope. 'Bachelorette' remains one of the most extraordinary songs ever written. The rhythm is so urgent, so powerful, so infectious. Bjork's voice is always an astonishment: from childlike wonderment to flirtatious coo; from vulnerable verismo to snarling barely-restrained hostility; and ultimately, to banshee howl. Hers is a passionate, full-bodied delivery - utterly emotive, devoid of any of the clinically-detached ennui of most electronica artists. The lyrics are still a delight (even the odd bit about killer whales). 'I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl'. Her finest album, probably, from a lifetime of stunning releases. It has a strength, a quality that her previous releases were a little light on: for all the ground it breaks it remains a deeply cohesive album. There is a narrative logic to the structure - a coherence. It is an immersive experience. In this dude's opinion at least.

Tori Amos 'From the Choirgirl Hotel'
A voice as rich and sultry as sun-baked earth, as the steam rising from that scorched dirt. Petrichor. I always loved the way Amos' voice had a slightly fractured hoarseness to it, like it was scalded just below the surface. This is a huge album. Denser and more lavish than her others. Amos treats us to her trademark Bosendorfer here - working the lower notes, the ones that hit you in the meat and marrow. But there are other instrumental layers aplenty (very little sparseness here); rich keyboard swathes, marimbas, strings, and (in a possible first for her) blood-stirring dance beats. 'Raspberry Swirl' rides a propulsive rhythm. Infectious and urgent; panting, hungry and powerful - all quite appropriate given the subject matter. There's a darkness to it too - almost a witchy Goth-club vibe. 'Playboy Mommy' seems lightweight, playful in a melancholy way, a jazzy strut. Until you realise it depicts a miscarriage. Elsewhere Amos bewitches and beguiles. I've flirted with her other releases; but this album won my heart from the very first listen.

Acid Bath 'When the Kite String Pops'.
Sludge. Stoner Doom. Psychedelic Blues Metal. Shit, call it whatever you want. All I know is this deranged, drug-influenced band from Louisiana had hit upon something complex and strange and maddeningly addictive. The lyrics are a stream-of-consciousness nightmare - all terrifying imagery about insects and planets and oceans and death. Frontman Dax Riggs delivered them all in either a ravaged, throat-scraping bellow or a smoke-glazed and weirdly melodic voice. Oh, he could be beautiful when he needed to be and one only had to witness the delicate semi-classical acoustic guitar interplay of 'The Bones of Baby Dolls' or the finger-painted scrawl that was 'Scream of the Butterfly' (it was years before I got the Jim Morrison reference) to know that this was a band of rare and corrupt majesty. Man, look at those titles - where do you think I got my writing style from?

Marilyn Manson 'Antichrist Superstar'
Oh, he may seem like a worn-out joke now - for all that his most recent album was a fierce beast indeed. But nothing changes the sense of awe and amazement that washed over me when I first heard 'Sweet Dreams'. I'd never heard acoustic guitar creepy-crawl like that before. This album was like that times a-hundred. It was caustic, poignant, vicious, triumphant and had such a sense of weirdly-joyous anarchy to it. The grinding bass; the bleeding electronic loops and sniggers; the thin, oddly buzzing guitars; and Manson's fractured baritone howl. He could sound so furious at one instant and so wounded, even oddly emotive the next. It was a massive album that made you want to fling up your fist and shout along. 'I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.' They just don't make rage sound that infectiously thrilling any more. 'Man That You Fear' haunts me still - poisonous and sour-sweet with its calliopes and its lurching rhythm; a funhouse mirror of a song.

Mr Bungle.
This album changed the world for me. Just a little bit. There was a DJ that worked the late-night shift on Mondays at RDU; called herself Mighty Mouse. Every time she was on she would throw down a track from this album. It was deranged, wild, a freefall on a rollercoaster ride. Mike Patton's first band - improbably signed to a major label (Warner Bros!) after the success of Faith No More. The songs leapt from ska to funk to punk to metal to jazz to dub to circus music. Often within the same track - sometimes within the same verse. Patton sounded snotty and self-possessed, spitting and sneering and smirking his way through the mire of their lyrics. Those lyrics were skatalogical, pornographic, hilarious and disturbing. Explosions of brass and seasick organs drove most of the tracks. It was madness sculpted into music. It pushed the limits of what a band was capable of. Years later they eclipsed even their debut with the phenomenal, exotica-tinged 'California'.

Massive Attack 'Mezzanine'
Their first two albums - which still sound to me like critically-acclaimed muzak for cocktail parties - served only to introduce me to the sublime, hash-scorched rasp of Tricky (by 'Mezzanine' he was gone). But this disc is a very different beast altogether, and for me this remains one of the most glorious and opulently dark releases of the Nineties. 'Mezzanine' saw their sound roughen, deepen - the crawling hip-hop beats and dub rumblings now cloaked in squalls and shivers of hefty post-rock guitar & bass. Here the urgent whispers of 3D and the deep, threatening interjections of Daddy G combine exquisitely with Horace Andy's rich, reggae-soaked voice and the gossamer-glitter of ex-Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. Each track feels carefully and intricately constructed - layer laid upon layer; complex enough that each listen reveals new elements - yet the listener is instantly drawn in, thrilled, seduced... and intimidated. It is an essential album.

Type O Negative 'Bloody Kisses'
The late and lamented Peter Steele - 6'9" tall and apparently hewn entirely from muscle and cheekbones. Possessed of arguably the deepest 'clean' voice in metal. There was the striking image of him wearing a freaking double bass slung on a chain across his shoulders, gripped as one would a guitar. Type O Negative's sound spliced the blues swagger & doom-laden crush of Black Sabbath with a Beatles-esque sense of melody and the gossamer keyboard-and-reverb fog of the Cocteau Twins. All graced with the stentorian bass-baritone chants of Mr Steele (and the more traditional metal rasps of Kenny Hickey). 'Bloody Kisses' was the album that introduced me to them, to their grim and gleeful vision of the world, and to this day I cannot pick a weak track on it (I dig the supposed 'filler' and instrumental tracks too). It is an immense album - intense, grand, beautiful and heavy as all goddamn. This is Gothic metal delivered with a knowing wink and a thick Brooklyn accent.

So that's my patchwork of memories - fragment stitched to fragment. It's been said that what you're drawn to between the ages of thirteen and nineteen (in terms of film, music, art, books etc) will shape your taste for the rest of your life - you will carry those with you forever and you will always be looking for echoes of what you loved then.
This is what shaped the world inside my head.

That doesn't mean that those are the only truly great albums that I recall from the Nineties - there are others that mean a lot to me; but I either didn't discover them until outside of that decade, or they didn't mean the same thing to me then that they do now. There are a couple of other bands that meant the world to me then but that I have grown to dislike or openly loathe in the years since (*cough* Radiohead *cough*). They too, have been omitted.

Music has changed a great deal since then - now it seems as if the musical world is a great, heaving mass - too vast and teeming to keep track of. Genres have spawned sub-genre after sub-genre. Televised 'talent' shows have drowned the pop music world in a wash of oversung, easy-listening effluent and it has all become so...complicated. In the days of Elvis Presley the sneakiest production trick they had was 'fattening' the voice; a process by which multiple identical copies of the vocal track were laid over one another to make the voice sound fuller and richer in the mix. Nowadays it takes up to sixty separate audio tracks and as many as forty different (synthesized) musical instruments to create a single Justin Bieber song - and after all that effort, production and unrelenting precision all you're left with is a Justin Bieber song.

It's not all bad though. There's just so much more of it, more of everything. Now you have to sift through the wreckage to find the treasures; but it's so freaking accessible now - everything is there and waiting at the end of a high speed internet connection. Waiting for the click of your mouse. But you have to be savvy and careful. You have to do the research.

But back to that list... Back to the meaning of that list.
Ultimately what these songs are is a key that unlocks our past. It is the soundtrack to our memories - to the whirling din of fragments that makes up a perfectly ordinary life. There are things for which there are no words, that is why we have always needed (and will always need) music.

After The Storm

A couple of weeks ago there was a night in Wellington when it felt like the world was going to end. A storm swept across much of New Zealand, descending upon this little sea-port city with wild winds and almost-horizontal rain. At 6:30pm that Thursday night I stood at a bus stop while the wind whipped the thick rainwater back and forth across the surface of the road. It looked strangely beautiful under the streetlights. By the time I made it back to my apartment the footpaths and driveways were a ruin of torn foliage, scattered ferns, and chunks of wet-blackened wood. Lines were brought down at various points across the city; leaving people without power in the darkness and cold. Some for days afterwards - and winter in New Zealand can be harsh indeed. Roofs were torn off, windows shattered inwards.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of the wind beating itself against my walls and windows. Where I live, we weren't hit so bad but the next day I saw footage of coastal neighbourhoods - places where the road had been simply ripped into chunks of scattered cement.

And in the wet, in the darkness; things from the very dawn of time were drawn upwards and into the drains - strange chittering creatures with multitudinous legs.
Oh, you think I'm kidding about that last part?
Let me introduce you to the velvet worm - onchophora.

 

 

Cute little critter, huh. Sort of looks like the lovechild of a caterpillar and a centipede. What my friend found in her sink didn't look too much like that any more. What she found was grey and slimy, long-dead and waterlogged. Those endearing wee legs had rotted down to barbs.

It's a living fossil - one of those rare creatures for whom evolution is just something that happens to other people. Millions of years unchanged. Someone she knows had also found one recently, to their delight - also flushed upwards by the storm. I like to picture a vast, teeming mass of them living below the surface of the earth - down in the dirt and darkness...waiting for the chance to reclaim the world they lost.

And now, the segue...

Atrocity feat. Yasmin: 'After the Storm' (Napalm Records, 2010).

Atrocity are a German metal band with a thrashy, melo-death sound thick with progressive and symphonic influences. They also often betray a keen love of 80's pop songs. I'm not a huge fan.
With the addition of the angelically-voiced Liv Kristine Espenaes-Krull (to whom Atrocity vocalist Alexander Krull is married) they become Leaves' Eyes (a German-Norwegian symphonic metal band with a strong folk influence; they are definitely one of my favourites).

But Atrocity feat. Yasmin is another entity again - the addition this time being vocalist and flautist Yasmin Krull (Alexander Krull's sister). As different as Leaves' Eyes sound to Atrocity; this other project sounds even further removed from their parent band - to the extent that coming up with another whole new name might have been better advised.
That is to say - a lot of Atrocity's hardline fans really hate this other venture.

Their music has been described as ethno-metal, fans of Canadian harpist and Celtic/Middle-Eastern folk artist Loreena McKennitt are advised to check them out - though to my ears the single strongest influence on their sound is Australian darkwave/world/ethno-fusion duo Dead Can Dance.
If you really want to hear Loreena Mckennitt-gone-doom-metal check out US band Todesbonden's album 'Sleep Now, Quiet Forest' - it's utterly lovely, but y'know - heavy too.

Atrocity feat. Yasmin have two albums under their belt now, released quite some distance apart. Their debut is 'Calling the Rain'. I listened to it when Wellington was seized by drought; the grass and bush scorched to straw beneath endless blue skies. "After the Storm' is a logical continuation of their sound on that one.

At their core their music is based around the voices of the siblings. Yasmin has a rich, mid-range voice - thick and earthy with a wonderful keening/wailing quality reminiscent of the folk-singing in the more Eastern parts of Europe. At times she does recall a slightly raw-edged Lisa Gerrard. Alex steers largely clear of the extreme vocal style he favours for Atrocity - which is to his benefit as he has always struck me as an adequate rather than remarkable extreme vocalist - his growls and rasps have always sounded a little thin to my ears; lacking the basso, almost operatic cadence of Morten Veland (in his early works with Tristania); or the anguished intensity of Mr Curse (or Victorian black metal collective: A Forest of Stars). Here he utilizes a rough-tinged but largely melodic baritone style. I'm fairly certain he is working the Brendan Perry vibe in this, but his voice lacks the full-bodied richness of Perry - sounding slightly colder and coarser; it strongly recalls the 80's Gothic-baritone sound and occasionally evokes early-to-mid Nick Cave.
Either way it gives the ethno-metal concoction a definite post-punk vibe and must serve him very well in Atrocity's occasional 80's pop song covers.

Instrumentally the band fuses elements of Gothic metal with Eastern European and Celtic folk music, their sound is rich and well-traveled, but there is a looseness and roughness to their playing - this is not an overly-polished album. It is grandly atmospheric.

Rather than broadening their instrumental palette (via guest instrumentalists) to include a host of exotic and worldly instruments Atrocity feat. Yasmin have simply broadened the range of percussion instruments (adding hand drums, tribal percussion and shakers) and the rest falls to guitarist/bassist Thorsten Bauer. On the basis of this disc I'd say they've got themselves a real find in Bauer. The man is a genius. Throughout the album he utilizes delicate Classical-style guitar tapestries as well as a range of playing techniques and effects to make his instrument sound like a harp or a dulcimer. Heavier, more overtly-metallic playing is also in evidence. Keyboards are either wholly absent or so subtly utilized that they escaped my notice - though a few of the tracks add cello and violin to the mix.

Throughout the disc we are treated to Eastern-styled guitar strumming (that slightly recalls Canadian band The Tea Party) - 'As the Sun Kissed the Sky'; exquisite flute trills (most noticeable on the hooky 'Call of Yesteryear'); a Classical, Spanish-flavoured instrumental 'Flight of Abba Ibn Firnas'; heavier numbers (the ornate, heavy and musically complex 'Black Mountain' sees the return of Alex's guttural vocals); and even a slight 60's psych-folk vibe on 'Goddess of Fortune and Sorrow' - which finds Yasmin utilizing a softer, breathier approach to her typically dramatic, strident delivery.

Fans of fist-pumping, bone-cracking metal will likely go home hungry and that is the bit that makes this album kind of a hard sell. For myself, it's a fine and challenging disc and I would be delighted if Alex Krull and his conspirators continued with experiments in this vein.

Anxiety Always (Remastered and Reissued)

This isn't a new post. This is a remastered and re-released previous post; rather a personal one. I put it up a month or two ago and it got a pretty decent number of hits. A part of me freaked out at some point and went 'Hey, dude. You're oversharing on the internet'. I'm not really much for talking about myself - not in my everyday, normal human sort of life anyway. So, I hit delete and the post disappeared from my profile.
Obviously I didn't wipe it completely. I made a copy first. Otherwise this re-post wouldn't exist.

And that was that. Except, of course, that it wasn't.
I got a message sent to me on Facebook: a friend from long ago, someone I really should have kept in better contact with. She thanked me for my post. For this post. She told me I was brave.
Throughout the course of my thirty-five years on this ball of spinning rock and dirt I have been called a lot of things (granted, most of that was during primary school). But I cannot recall ever being called 'brave' before. It felt good.

When I first seriously began writing - during my sparrow-boned and narcissistic teenage years - I told myself (with the kind of self-obsessed hubris that is pretty much unique to teenagers) that I wrote because I wanted to make some kind of impact - to create something that echoed out wider and larger than myself (a bit like ripples spreading out from a stone cast into a pond, if you want to get all simile-happy about it). I guess in my strange little way I wanted to change the world.

Now, I have to be honest with you. I continue writing because I think I'm pretty great at it. I have a ton of words in me and they all clamor and shout to be heard and sometimes when I read them back I do think: 'Man, I've got something here.' I know that I'll never change the world or start a revolution or anything. I know that these words will never make me rich. Or famous. But I keep writing - even though I could be spending all this time doing something that I enjoy more: like reading, listening to music, watching a B-Grade horror flick (or an old episode of QI), or shouting obscenities at pigeons.
But deep down that arrogant teenager is still inside of me. I figure if I can write something, anything, that...I don't know...resonates with someone else, something that matters, even if only in a small, fleeting way. If I can manage that...
Then that is reason enough.

Also, by taking down the post I was chickening out; pure and simple. I would be once again hiding a part of myself that I have no business being ashamed of in the first damn place. I shouldn't feel guilty for my misfiring synapses and skewed brain chemicals.

I have a birthmark - a wide olive-brown stain on one the side of my neck. It looks kind of like the impression of a palm-print pressed into the skin. For a while there, as a kid, this caused me a bit of distress. When you're real young you don't want anything that marks you out as different; it potentially makes the whole weary business of school just that little bit harder. But as the years melted away I came to accept it. It became a part of me - something that helped define the sense of me that I had in my head. A few years ago I ran into a guy I'd known back in those days. He mentioned something I'd written about that birthmark, back in intermediate or whatever. He said he'd really admired me for that.

I should also mention that when my baby teeth finally fell out the new set that grew in boasted a strikingly prominent pair of canines. Thus, I was rumored to be a vampire for a while; teased a little for it (back then vampires were sadly neither cool nor sexy). But over the years those teeth have become my thing - something that separates me. I even resisted when my parents offered to get me corrective braces. So I'm still a vampire (though now also a vegetarian).

All these things, these imperfections - the birthmark, the fangs, the weird crafting, my struggles with a comparatively minor mental illness...
These flaws make me who I am. And I am not ashamed of who I am.

So there you go: I'm a vampiric, music-and-bad-movie-fixated, closet bogan/covert hippy/undercover Goth/frustrated novelist. With a mild case of OCD.
It doesn't really take courage for me to admit that now, I even feel a certain odd pride. Because if I can live with this then it means that, in some small way, I am strong.

                                                                           (...)

Alright, first things first. This is a music blog and the title of today's post is lifted from the debut album of the electronica outfit Adult. ('and the award for least-Google-friendly band name goes to...'). A husband and wife duo that hail from...I'm going to say, Detroit; they seem like they ought to come from Detroit. Their sound is an abusive mix of abrasive, grimy electroclash scrawled across with dissonant no wave and post-punk influences; Ladytron with a mouthful of blood. The vocalist sounds like Siouxsie Sioux picking a fight. Nervous, tense and troubled; they have released a handful of albums and the titles are a dead giveaway for the uneasiness of the music pressed into those little polycarbonate discs: 'Anxiety Always', 'D.U.M.E' (Death Unto Mine Enemies, I believe), 'Gimmie Trouble' and 'Why Bother?' There is a great time to be had there, tons of fun for the maladjusted. I recommend them.

But they are not the subject of this post.

I've noticed that you get more hits on your post if you give away a piece of yourself; a little personal truth: the blog as confessional booth. So here's a little piece of me.

Since adolescence I've been living with a mild form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Now, a lot of folks will lay claim to this - often they'll smile apologetically and say something like 'I'm a bit OCD about that' or whatever. By this, they usually mean that they like the towels folded a certain way.

Nope.

That isn't OCD, I'm afraid. That's simple fussiness and that's totally cool; everyone is fussy about something. Unless you feel compelled, even forced, to perform certain (often quite time-consuming and seemingly meaningless) rituals in order to stave of the sense that something terrible will happen if you don't...

Well, you're probably not experiencing OCD.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is an anxiety disorder. Basically, at it's core the whole thing stems from some deep, pulsing sense of anxiety; of fretfulness; of something bad just waiting to happen. An archaic term for a troubling or worrying thought was a 'maggot', as in a 'maggot of doubt', or a 'maggot of uneasiness'. It is the best term I have ever heard applied. Picture it: something pallid and squirming, curling and gnawing away somewhere deep in you brain, writhing in the back of your mind. It's as good an illustration of how it feels as any I can imagine - that larval thought that simply won't. Go. Away. Sufferers develop the rituals as a means of banishing the thoughts and I have to say, from my own experience, that the rituals do genuinely help. After they are completed there is a weird sense of achievement, perversely it feels like something has been accomplished. The anxiety is allayed. But, crucially, never banished. Not for good.

I can't speak for those that feel they have to count the times they flick a light switch on and off, nor those who have to count the number of objects touched, in a certain way, in a certain pattern. I've never felt compelled to count anything (perhaps why I didn't do particularly well at mathematics) and my experience of living with this anxiety disorder has taken different forms throughout various phases. My condition is very mild, undiagnosed (well, except by me in an apparent bid to make my psychology degree worth something), and for the most part controllable.

For the most part.

Something is classified as a 'disorder' when it negatively impacts upon your life: professional, personal, whatever. Certainly my condition has never impacted upon my working life. My personal life, well, is perhaps a different story. It's something I've managed to keep hidden much of my life, except from those closest to me. It's also something that I've only recently become comfortable discussing. Shame is a big part of this, embarrassment as well. See, the thing with OCD is; sufferers are totally self-aware. They know that what they're doing is illogical, irrational and would make no sense to anyone else. That doesn't make it any easier to stop. The rules are the rules. So, I've hidden myself a bit in the past. I've withdrawn from circumstances that might either exacerbate or reveal my condition to others. It's my dirty little secret, y'know. This is less of a thing now than when I was younger and full of those raw chemical emotions of youth. As you get older you become...I don't want to say 'at peace with yourself', that sounds saccharine. You become more yourself, I guess; accepting that the way you are is okay and if other people have an issue with it, well, hell, that's their problem.

My condition was at it's peak when I was a teenager, probably.

It began with contamination phobias. It really latched on when I first learnt about the scabies mite. I have a number of tiny red dots in my skin. They look like tiny, blood-shedding pinpricks. They are the result of pigment or melanin or something gone a bit weird. They are nothing. I freaked out a bit when I first noticed them and asked a pharmacist. He told me they were probably scabies (despite the fact that they didn't itch), so I read about scabies.

I really frigging wish I'd hadn't done that. It really doesn't do for a paranoid to discover that there actually is a kind of insect (okay, arachnid, or mite...whatever) that lives under your skin and can be transferred by skin-to-skin contact. Things kind of escalated after that, the thought of some kind of contamination spread by touch stayed with me and became twisted, corrupted by the maggots in my mind. It got so I started to think other contaminations could be spread by contact, so I started keeping my stuff separate (though never food on my dinner plate, though I understand that is a bit of an OCD thing) and fretting about which objects I'd touched myself, and in which order.

It all got a bit strange. I would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time.

Then I went to a doctor. He took a look at my blood freckles, observed that there was one on my hairline (scabies mites never venture above the neck), that they didn't itch, or spread and concluded that they were....careful, big scientific term coming up - red dots.

The scabies fears faded after that, and eventually the contamination thing eased as well. I'm not weird about physical contact any more, though I still have a bit of a thing about blood-drinking, semi-parasitic insects. You might even call it a minor phobia. They freak me out.

Years later, I fell in love and began talking to the stars. Okay, there's no way to not make this sound odd, but you have to understand that I was a teenager: still a seething morass of violent hormones, wild romantic ideals and also burdened with a pretty deep-set inferiority complex. Basically, I figured I didn't deserve her and what began as a weird pseudo-romantic quirk turned into a ritual. Most nights after I'd seen her and spent time with her, I'd stand on my parent's back lawn and gaze up at the endless star-shattered sky. Now it might have sounded like a prayer, and really it's not all that different from kneeling down and murmuring your hopes and fears into your interlocked hands - palm pressed to palm. I prayed to the stars and the moon if it was there hanging golden and fat in the sky. Only it wasn't really a prayer because I am now - and was even moreso then - at best an agnostic. I knew nothing heard me, that there was no God hovering silently in the spaces between stars waiting attentively on my whispered words. It was the ritual that I thought brought me luck and staved off the inevitable, looming break-up.

It didn't work. The relationship ended. The world moved on and I stopped talking to the stars.

Two interesting asides from this little chapter of my psychosis. For a start, shooting stars aren't actually all that uncommon. I saw quite a few and they are pretty cool. Another intriguing occasion was when I startled an intruder. I was just out there star-gazing when the security light attached to the garage flicked on. For a second I didn't think much of it (a strong wind was usually enough to trigger the damn thing) and then a dude walked smartly around the corner and into my parent's backyard. He was solidly built and appeared to be wearing a camouflage-patterned jacket. The light was at his back so his face was just a silhouette.
I said hello.
He froze in a wholly gratifying fashion. Now, a couple of things. Firstly, he couldn't see me - I was well back in the shadows and he would have been night-blind from the suddenness of the security light, so he wouldn't have known that I was just a skinny kid hanging out in the dark. Secondly, I have a strikingly deep (I've been told it's 'big and booming') voice. So I wouldn't have just sounded like the jumble of bird-bones and coat-hangers that I resembled.

He mumbled something about looking for someone else and walked briskly away down the drive. I stood out in the dark for a little while longer - finishing my ritual - and then went inside. I didn't feel nervous at any point, which is odd. I didn't even feel startled when he first appeared. End story.

That was a long time ago. A lifetime ago, it feels like now. The me that existed then is now long gone; buried down deep in my bone and marrow, perhaps, but for the most part he is just a lingering phantom. When I stumble upon anything that I wrote or sculpted back then, in that time it is like looking at the work of a ghost: a 'me' that doesn't exist any more.

I don't miss him. He was, for the most part, a mixed up and frequently sullen kid that withdrew from those closest to him and said some terrible things. I didn't like being a teenager much. Everything got easier when I hit my twenties and my moods balanced out - the roar of my lunatic hormones quieting down to a soft buzzing. By my mid-twenties I'd balanced out, my neuroses kept carefully in check, so much so that much of the time I could pretend that there wasn't something in me - something strange and, I felt at the time, somehow shameful.

Now my OCD manifests in a very narrow and specific way. Perhaps fittingly for a music junkie (or music guru, if you prefer) I'm excruciatingly particular about the storage and handling of my discs. I grip them only by the edges of the disc. I never touch the playing surface. I keep the jewel cases in resealable plastic sleeves that I import from Japan because those ones are of a much higher quality (thicker plastic) than the US-made ones. I use compressed air to remove dust from the discs and the player. I do my best to protect them from humidity, mildew and bugs (I litter my CD storage drawers with those moisture-absorbing sachets you get in medicine bottles and new shoe-boxes). This is a legitimate concern in New Zealand; a country only recently embracing such 20th Century technological advances as air-conditioning and insulation. Thus humidity and damp are genuine issues here. I don't lend my CDs out to anyone...hell, I doubt I'd let anyone else touch them.

I really put the CD back into OCD.

Actually most of this just makes me sound like one of those really pedantic collectors (comics and original-release action figures see the same level of reverence applied to them by other fanatic dudes). I treat CDs like holy items, which isn't really surprising (and for the record, quite a few are out-of-print or otherwise irreplaceable) and perhaps that's really all this is now, not a symptom of OCD but a sign that I'm a bit of a fanatic and a fusspot. Actually, I do have a few graphic novels and such too. I'm quite protective of those as well - hell, they were expensive, man. All of this is relatively new. As a teenager and in my very early twenties I'd happily lend discs, would tote them around to other people's places and throw them on their stereos. Scratches and finger-prints didn't bother me so long as the discs kept playing. It was the music that was important, not the ephemera.

Anxiety is a moving target.

Sometimes it's an overheating fridge, a leaking washing machine, a landlord that suddenly decides they need to sell the property you've been inhabiting at a very reasonable weekly cost, or an infestation of fleas left over from a cat that doesn't live with you any more.

These things are all fixable and can be remedied either by hard-work, a lot of phone-calls, financial expense or, in the case of the fleas: a lot of vacuuming, insecticides and a trip to a laundromat to wash all the bedding. My response to these kind of stress-ors is to deal with them as rapidly and productively as possible. Being able to do nothing or being delayed from taking action is torturous for me.

This is partially a positive thing in that it makes me extremely motivated to fix things and means that I can be really quite productive at times (although it has also led to some rash decisions in the past as well). But with these anxieties there is no need for rituals of compulsive behaviour, because this is all stuff that can be worked through and sorted out: it is something concrete and real and identifiable.

In truth it is probably just perfectly normal anxiety; the kind everyone faces at some point.

A far worse kind of anxiety is the nameless dread that grows in all the empty spaces: in the feeling that something is going wrong. The anxiety that lies behind every unspoken word, every unvoiced concern. Knowing that something is wrong and being unable to talk about it or address it in any real form is terrible. That anxiety is a shapeless, amorphous thing and from my experience, it just pushes you (and by 'you', I mean 'me') deeper into the rituals and deeper into myself.

So where am I now?

I've tried different things: focused breathing techniques, relaxation methods, meditation, and recently hypnotherapy. The hypnotherapy thing was brilliant, man. I must write more about it at some point - it was hands-down one of the strangest experiences of my recent past. And it's not like just falling asleep and remembering nothing of what took place while you were in a hypnotic state. I remember everything. It was fascinating and deeply strange.

And it might actually have helped.

That same week I finally sat down with a GP and described the experience of being me. He prescribed me fluoxetine and lorazepam. Those little foil sheets of pills are sitting inside an ice-cream container in the cupboard. I haven't started taking them yet.

But they're waiting. They're waiting for if the maggot comes back. They're there in case it gets really bad.

For now, I'm okay. Good even. I currently have no rituals and no compulsions. I don't feel anxious. I've cut down on my alcohol intake. I'm walking a lot: the rhythm, the motion and the exercise all help to untangle my thoughts.

I've had an easy time of it, comparatively. My symptoms have always been at the milder, more controllable end of the spectrum, and I've never experienced true depression. I've never had to have everything in a certain imposed order, in a certain regimented place. I've never had to spend hours counting and recounting words or page numbers. I am, in truth, a fairly laid-back guy who just happens to have a few symptoms of OCD. For others, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a crippling thing; something that impacts deeply and constantly on their day to day life.