On Dead / Live in Leipzig Review

 

Black metal found its most fervent practitioner in Per Yngve Ohlin, better known as "Dead." Dead's was an extremely morbid personality who embodied everything on the 'left hand path' that black metal had embarked on, although he did so not for the sake of mere transgressivism, but as a practice of a malefic form of mysticism centered around death. For unlike previous metal exhibitionists, his extreme behavior wasn't so much directed out towards the world, but inwards, for the sake of a inner transformation. To this end, he would paint his skin as a corpse, mutilate himself, collect the cadavers of animals, and wear rotting clothing; these and other anti-social behaviors were encouraged by the scene's instigator, Euronymous, who plays the guitar on this album. It was said that Dead did not even perceive himself as a human, but as a corpse, or as a being from another world. His diabolical practices and obsessive fascinations spilled out onto the stage where he would, like a necromancer, unleash infernal forces upon the audience.

These shows were more like rituals than concerts, with Dead slicing open his arms on stage and throwing bloody pig's heads into the crowd. These bloody spectacles are a reason we can compare the black metal concert to an inverted initiation or sacrament, as only the the true would persevere through such a hellish experience. Seeing Dead perform with Mayhem was not only about the music, but really it was about engaging in a worship of the sublime in a malefic aspect: this is what black metal is in its essence, and is what Dead embodied in himself to a greater degree than any other. Predictably, however, Dead's living distillation of the black metal essence ended with his suicide at the age of 22.

The most significant recordings with Dead are the live albums Live in Leipzig and the bootleged Dawn of the Black Hearts (which famously has a photograph of Dead's corpse serve as its cover art). Live in Leipzig is a prime example of classic black metal, succeeding both in atmosphere and composition. The tracks are mix of Mayhem's earlier thrash inspired songs found on Deathcrush, and their more mature, icier compositions, that found their way onto De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. The latter pieces are where the band really shines, and set the pattern that would be followed and expanded upon by later bands. Funeral Fog, Freezing Moon, Buried by Time and Dust, and Pagan Fears are gothic masterpieces which form the heart of this performance. These lengthy songs are at the same time extremely heavy and airy, the tremolo picked riffs envelope like a thick mist. Take for instance Funeral Fog: on this frantic track the band is so tight that the music makes you feel like you’re floating in the air.

Mayhem are at their best when they are channeling the gothic: ancient stones shrouded in mist, haunted castles, and stalking terrors of the night are the kind of images that the band evokes most strongly, and the dark poems that make up the lyrics of their more gothic tracks are superior to the grisly lyrics of the Deathcrush era songs. Deathcrush, Necrolust, Carnage, Chainsaw Gutsfuck, and Pure Fucking Armegeddon are perfectly respectable pieces, but fail to reach the aesthetic heights of the others.

Mayhem’s brutal yet light instrumental palette gives Dead the perfect backdrop to shine, and he haunts the music like a specter whose screams periodically break through musical fog. Unlike the more typical shrieked black metal vocals, Dead operates in a lower register, and this gives his performance a more personal and aggressive feeling. Dead’s dramatic manner and vocal capabilities reach their peak on the song The Freezing Moon which turn out to be his masterpiece. The other performer on here that deserves special mention is Euronymous who plays the lone guitar on the record. It is quite impressive that he was the only guitarist during this show, as his sound is so full that a second guitar would be completely unnecessary. He uses the entire range of his instrument, seamlessly switching from crushing low riffs to blistering solos with a dexterity reminiscent of a great like Hendrix.

Mayhem were not just controversial exhibitionists, but very fine musicians who created a vivid and compelling aesthetic portrait. Live in Leipzig is both a collection of black metal classics and a look into the pseudo-mysticism and religiosity that animated the most dedicated extreme metal musicians of this period. The same material can be found on the album Dawn of the Black Hearts but in a far more lo-fi recording, that album is mainly of interest for its graphic cover, but for the music, Live in Leipzig is the superior choice.

The Wall Review

Pink Floyd's The Wall is the most miserable album ever produced. This sad collection of music is at its heart Roger Waters' attack on the world; it is an act of musical violence that is conducted spitefully and without love of music. It is a record of personal resentment that has gone beyond the individual, and spawned an entire mythos of the fall of rock music and its musicians, which has become inseparable from the music itself.

The Wall was created under the backdrop of misery that mirrored the musical output: bitterness in the band (which resulted in the firing of Richard Wright), a strained marriage, loss of friendship, financial anxiety, legal trouble, and grueling recording sessions. From the very start, the album was doomed to be an exceedingly dreary affair: the catalyst of the album was a famous incident in which an enraged Roger Waters spat on a fan during a concert in Montreal. He was disturbed by his action and wished that he could separate himself from the audience with a wall; thus, the concept was born. This incident presents the entire project in a microcosm: Roger Waters stands for the rockstar, his spit is the album, and the audience is the world (in particular, listeners of The Wall, but in general, the entire world without distinction). A concrete act of violence is transformed into an abstract violence of music. Being spat on is degrading, but it doesn't leave a lasting impact besides the painful memory; in this way, listening to The Wall is very much like being spat upon.

The concept of the album that was a result of Roger Waters' act is central to the music, so much so that the songs seem to only exist to advance the narrative. The story follows the pathetic life of the rockstar "Pink" as he comes to shut out the world by constructing his personal wall. This story hardly amounts to more than a litany of traumas: the psychosexual, violent, hedonistic, and adolescent.

In the golden age of rock, the vices of the rocker created a dark energy that the musician would wield like a shaman; he would call forth negative forces to hypnotise the masses. But now, on The Wall, these same forces turn the rocker inward and transform him into a withering heap, devoid of power and interest. The result is a portrayal of an unsympathetic character who is incapable of catharsis, tragedy, or development. This is the story of The Wall, which is really the story of the fall of rock music.�*

The songs that illustrate this portrait have no reason to exist outside supporting the plot. More properly speaking, this album is a collection of half-songs that sound like unfinished, partial ideas. The overall sound is anemic and lifeless. What is most offensive about them is their lazy and often embarrassingly bad melodies, which are sung in an annoying, grating tone by Waters: Goodbye Blue Sky, Is the Anybody out There?, and Nobody Home are three egregious offenders, and much of the album takes the same note. The monotonous Mother can be contrasted with the beautiful Wish You Were Here which serves a similar function as an emotional acoustic track. In this comparison, we can see how far the songwriting has fallen from only a few years prior. These poor songs are often interrupted on the album by sound collages and skits that describe the action of the plot, but, like the songs, these hardly have any merit of their own. These little interludes become increasingly infuriating as the album goes on.

The chief characteristic of the songs here is a complete lack of the love of music; every chord is played with a palpable hatred. The hard rock opening In the Flesh? is but a false start that quickly descends into the album's defining listlessness. When the group does ramp things up, it is done entirely without taste, like on the desperately melodramatic Don't Leave me Now and on the ridiculous musical theatre of The Trial. The only time the band plays with a discernible pulse is when they decide to imitate ZZ Top on the track Young Lust, which turns out to be the best song on the album. Other signs of life are channeled by David Gilmour who plays a pair of lovely solos on Comfortably Numb, and saves the childish melody of Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2 with a bold concluding solo. But these moments are but brief flashes on an album with a runtime of eighty minutes. The rest is so dull and monotonous that the white bricks that make up the cover art do a better job describing the music than I can with words.

The album ends with Outside the Wall, which fittingly concludes the story with a message of hollow sentimentalism delivered in a whimpering tone. The album's final lyrics are continued in the first line of the opening song, creating a circularity to the story that suggests that the entire exercise has been futile. Dismal and uninspired, The Wall casts a long shadow on the band's earlier releases.

August Sunday

 

Across the lawn to the church,

A troop of white laced veils

Atop bobbing ponytails

Haled by pealing bells that lurch

Through the late summer sun.

Insights into Gregorian Chant

 

Insights into Gregorian Chant

Peregrinus

Introduction

Gregorian chant is at the heart of the Roman rite, it animates the prayer of the Church and beautifully adorns the texts of the Sacred Scriptures, the liturgy, and the sacraments. Because of its centrality in the life of the Church, these noble melodies have been passed on to us so that even now we can hear an echo of that obscure time when grace was poured abundantly on the early Church, when Rome ran red with the blood of the martyrs, and when knowledge illuminated the minds of our great doctors. Gregorian chant has been described as glowing “with living flame, with a clean, profound desire … deep beyond ordinary emotion,” and as “more inebriating than the imposing voices of the great waters of which the Scriptures speak.” Even those unacquainted with the mysteries that chant speaks of are moved by the beauty of this music. Albums which feature chant have often sold exceptionally well, and this ancient music receives heavy traffic on Youtube and Spotify daily. In one sense, this is a strange fact, as Gregorian chant is musically foreign to our ears and its spirit is alien to the modern experience: instead of harmony, there is pure melody; its scales are unfamiliar; the rhythm is free; and it flows from a sense of peace and repose rather than from action; and all of this is meant to adorn texts written in an ancient and clamorous language.

On Circumcision's Evening

On Circumcision's evening

The night's orbs bleed

On the compass line

With violence against

Their impetus to fall into one,

The dread inevitable recall

Written before all time.

The air suffused with a force

Gnawing at my bowels

 - At our cycle's close -

With my eyes upturned to see

The foreshadow of the final meridian.

There I saw the foreskin of Christ

Burning a hole in the sky,

Around which thousands of angel hosts

Hymn and circumambulate.

The Circumcision of the Lord 2023

The New Year is inaugurated with the feast of the Circumcision of Lord: a purifying wound, a cutting off, a pact made in blood with God. The beginnings of salvation start anew with the first drop of blood shed by Lord, and in such a way the end becomes a beginning. Few things make the cyclical nature of time as obvious as the movement of Christian calendar, everything is repeated and made present again, round each cycle tears still fall on Good Friday, and we stand in suspense at the doors of the Church on Holy Saturday night. Even the circular shape of the foreskin itself recalls this experience, and the accompanying blood presents us with an image of time as a wound: the process of becoming – as opposed to Real Being – always accompanied by pain.

The cyclical experience of time is now often described in its negative and futile aspect, which we can identify with the violent and bloody nature of circumcision, but certainly there is a positive aspect as well. Time is described in our tradition as an image of eternity – here we can see the significance of the foreskin being a cut-off, wounded portion of God – the continual re-presentation of events is then a function of time’s participation in eternity, and in a way, this lifts us out of process into a more stable realm where everything exists in perfect simultaneity. Under this aspect, the repetition of things only increases their power, and this can be experientially grasped if one lives for a few years with a mind properly attuned.

Whether or not the coincidence of this feast and the New Year is an accident of history is a matter of debate, but this has no bearing on this wonderful symbolism, and ultimately, all things are a matter of Providence.

Siloe

 A torrent runs

Silent - nameless

From which the lion

lifts his reddened jaws

Stained from the heads

Crushed in the land of many

Where fresh with echoes:

Of ring of steel

And shouts of men

Cut down in the plain

To lay like Buddhas

In quiet contemplation

With festered wounds

And perfect minds

Now clearly chanting

Where David plucks

His shining stones.

He goes forth from the brook

And back again

To drink and to listen

Alongside the lion

And the singing men.

Fall Fishing

To cast a hook

Into mirrored waters

To drag the lakebed

Clean against the sky

To feel the pulse of

Ancient vertebrae

Slip through my hands

Mangled on the shore

To trace the sun across the lake:

Ingathering solar pole

Reaching down, reaching down

Piercing even into the deep!

Easter 2022

O holy languid Dawn,

What ancient rest have you discovered?

What great sleep have you disturbed?

Hidden away in the bowels of the earth?

 

What light withers and returns

To vanish before the noontime?

To awaken the reeds and shatter the dew?

Greeted by birdsong and the weeping of women?

 

Now the cattails swing their heavy heads

Like drunken girls in a bathroom mirror,

While knots of snakes writhe between the grasses

Like half-conscious children on the floor of a kitchen.

 

And the raveled limbs of trees release their dormant cry

And cast off the muzzle of their frigid burden.

A spotted fawn glowing stands alert

To anticipate the arrival

 

Muted as an echo from distant time:

The world to come calling as a whisper

Of half heard forgotten language

From a mysterious dark and foreign tongue;

 

An image upon an image,

A promise clambered for in the half-light

Spreading leisurely across the canvas

To at last take its seat and be revealed in us.