Tomorrow is the International Women's Day and that's as good an excuse as any to share what are probably my favourite female vocals in sludge. Overmars are of course giants in the scene, and the kind of music they achieve in this album is just too fucking brilliant. What a great follow-up to the monolith that was Affliction, Endocrine... Vertigo, which was already a testimony of the best that sludge has to offer - and how devastating it can be.
Born Again drags the listener further into the depths, and where it loses in the anger that was characteristic of Affliction, it gains in doomy weight. Down is the way to go. I like that Born Again does not try to repeat the formula of its predecessor, and instead it carves its own path without losing the destructiveness of Overmars - in some ways, it's more of a different perspective.
Born Again came out in 2007 and you can stream it at the Overmars official bandcamp below. You can also browse it for other albums from that band.
Today's song is a promising track from a promising release by Pyrmide Noire's MEMNON SA. An ambient, droney, instrumental wandering that drew my attention for sure, let's see how the album plays out. Listen:
The French black metal scene has always been one of a
kind. During the nineties, we had the so-called “Légions Noires”, an
underground “organization” comprised of bands like Mütiilation or Vlad Tepes, the
French equivalent of Norway’s “Black Circle”. They were easily identified by
their decrepit, lo-fi, and drug-fuelled strain of vampyric black metal, by the
same time many of their notorious Scandinavian coreligionists were dead,
jailed, domesticated by the music industry or revelling in harmonious
orchestrations, singing paeans to their “native gods”, their “national culture”
and bullshit of the sort. But the Légions Noires didn’t thrive for long, as
Mütiilation was the only band surviving well into the 21st century.
Fortunately, there were others who took up the black torch and kept the flame
of putridness alive. Of course, we have renowned acts such as Hell Militia or
Peste Noire, who partially absorbed the rotten, sick sonority of their
predecessors. But these aren’t the ones to whom I devote these words.
I contemplate herein four Gallic bands which share a
set of specificities and the influence of an obscure musician known as Dunkel:
Sale Freux (formerly known as Saatkrähe), Voqkrre and Drakonhail. I’m not going
to delve into details concerning each one of these entities, since you can
evaluate their dreadful art by yourself through the samples embedded below. It
suffices to say that Sale Freux and Voqkrre display many common traits in their
sound, heavily influenced by the 1990’s wave of French black metal, with their
deranged vocals and the foul scent emanated by psychotic guitar riffs, while
Drakonhail lull us into the abyss with their ambient, slow and grievous
compositions.
These are some of the lesser known bands that make the
French black metal scene one of the most stimulating in the world. Here, the
genre has kept its primary murkiness and subversive attitude, keeping at bay
any commercial pressures whatsoever, although not becoming ridiculously ridden
with clichés or infected with the musical and aesthetical staleness conveyed by
many bands of the genre.
Sale Freux - "Edelweiss", from L'Exil (2012)
Voqkrre - "Monotone Funebre Orchestra", from Palans in Pestilens (2009)
Drakonhail - "Errance Monotone", from ...Des Ailes... (2011)
I've been reading an interesting book by Castro-supporter-turned-neoliberal Mario Vargas Llosa about what he calls the "Civilization of the Spectacle" (he reads an essay from the book here). Setting aside some glaring contradictions in the book - not the least of which being the gap between the author's political life and the book's main thesis - he paints a gloom picture of contemporary society: a world of acritical consumption, a global generation bent on destroying culture (high culture, he would point out) and reducing the heights of artistic achievement to the banality of everyday commodities. A state of affairs wherein price overtook value; form overtook content and representation overtook meaning.
In a society where Oprah dictates mass market trends in literature much more effectively than the whole body of academically informed literary critics in North America, we can understand why this might pose a problem. This crisis of meaning being replaced by its representation - the real being set aside in favour of the artificial - should not come as a surprise to anyone who has read Guy Debord (in fact, the book is not innocently named) or, for that matter, Marx. But Llosa's lament here is unique in that it reflects upon the soul of society and on a particular struggle - the artistic struggle - of mankind when facing its own smallness, its own mortality. Indeed, the Civilization of the Spectacle is not merely one who lost its way with its own entertainment, which replaces culture, it's one who lost its humanity, its life.
It's gazing at this collective drive to dystopia that I most appreciate the work of drone/doom bands like Earth and Sunn O))). In its own way, the abrazive, disharmonic sentiment of the drone act reflects to me the attempt to turn the toppling ship back on its track, to force meaning through the deafening white noise by disregarding musical form. The deep, low vibrations resonate with our very biological senses, in a way that's so real, it defies or even rejects explanation (which is one of the many reasons why I enjoy the absence of lyrics). At the same time, repetition is rebellion: if the repetitive motion of drone music is a sort of defining motif, it can also be seen as a resistance to a world of excess in stimuli, a call to reflection and pause when facing the constant barrage of commodities tailored to please, to amuse, to entertain.
Dissonance is bliss, and few do it so well and dig so deeply like Habsyll, our feature band for today. A first listen will rightly remind us of doom terrormancers Khanate, who have built a solid empire on this matter, but Habsyll stands on its own feet, a giant of heavy, powerful, destructive, bottom-of-the-well doom. If my textual pacing so far took us to understand "underground" metal as an artistic call-to-arms against the static of contemporary society - an argument, as it stands, that I've been making in my other blog posts -, Habsyll cranks it up to eleven with a blanket refusal of norm, pleasantry and harmony. NO-DOOM, anti-humanistic. To deny form is to enforce meaning. Here we are at the tipping point, where rejecting humanity is what makes us alive.
