Post-Zeitgeist

Psycroptic – Inherited Repression (Review)

2012-02-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

In my youth, one of my favourite things when listening to new music was “strike points”. My version of strike point here refers not to the musicological term but rather a moment in time where expectations are simultaneously met, denied and exploded. It can be as simple as a particular note in a lyrical phrase, a time or key change or much more complex and macro as when the meaning of a composition which proved elusive suddenly appears to be clear. One of my earliest strike points was watching Les Claypool whack his bass percussively to producing no melodic content but adding to the polyrhythmic lurch of “My Name is Mud”. Another were the natural harmonic notes picked between a detuned open E and its second on Machine Heads “Davidian”, or the double tap staccato snares that sound just after the phrase “Let freedom ring with a shotgun blast” sounding just like a pump action being primed before discharging, in this case into a groovy half time mosh out. In fact Burn My Eyes held multiple strike points for a boy raised on meat and potatoes metal, the lurching 6/8 rhythm of “Block” or the Oakland speed thrash insanity of “Blood for Blood”. Strike points are not unlike an affirmation of what you already know but have yet to hear, moments in which concepts and musicological hopes are ripped up out of the unconscious and explicated.

Psycroptic’s latest album, Inherited Repression, gifted me a number of strike points as I blasted it in the car the other morning. Less than midway into the first track there comes a melo-tech-death anti-melodic run that slides over the rhythm evoking a gnarly combination of Middle-Eastern and 8-bit video game tonal sensibilities. The rest of the album does not disappoint. Perhaps the biggest strike point on Repression is that as a tech-death album it favours songs with technicality over technicality with songs bolted on.

Repression is somewhat streamlined compared to its predecessors and song structures are brought into the foreground. Because of this there is somewhat more repetition of rhythmic and melodic ideas, but rather than sounding repetitive they contribute to a more cohesive, listenable sound. Even so, there is enough progression within the various ideas they are just not as extreme in their juxtaposition against each other. Psycroptic manage a brilliant balance between prog, heavy and accessibility and successfully beckon the listener back for repeated engagement.

Let me invoke a tr00-er than thou, elitist, kvltist, br00tal-est nerdrage tempest: Repression is absolutely fucking groovy. Tantrums will be thrown, tears shed and pointless blood will be spilt across the landscape of the Metal Archives, but I say fuck ‘em. Repression, with its taut guitar sound, relentless rhythms, multi-meters, deranged yet melodic harmonies and groovy post-re-thrash swagger like a royal rumble between Anata, latter day Death, Obscura, Meshuggah, Slayer and Pantera (sound the nerdrage alarums!). Strike me down, Repression is rad. Now if only they would put it out on vinyl. Sigh.

Survival of the sickest: An essay on Pestilence.

2012-02-06T23:54:00.000-08:00

Evolution is an odd concept. It is not that hard to grasp: things in nature and culture are optimised over time to allow flourish under prevailing conditions. The problem is that it is impossible to see. Evolution, of the sort that Darwin prescribed, occurs on a temporal scale unfathomable to human perception. If a human life is eighty to ninety years and a new variation on a higher order bird, mammal or reptile takes at a conservative estimate ten thousand years to evolve, then a single human life represents less than one one-hundredth of the time taken. In other words, it would take a hundred humans living to a hundred years one after the other to be able to observe this new creature come into being. To make matters worse, a day in the life of said human represents 1/3,650,000^th of the time taken. Now given that we rarely stay focused for more than ten minutes at a time, we could subdivide even further. But we won’t. Suffice to say the temporal scales of evolution and of humanity are at best, grossly mismatched. What makes this worse is that bacteria, viruses, micro-organisms and bugs outbreed and therefore out-evolve us at factors frequently exceeding 10,000, even millions to one. It is just not fair. However, there is consolation. A place where we can witness evolution on a far kinder, gentler scale: heavy metal.

As with Death and Cynic (have I still not written a review for Focus? For shame), I came to the Pestilence party late. Not only did I come late, but I started at the present, jumped to the future and then stealthily snuck back to the past. What is worse, Spheres is my favourite album. Pesteilence’s evolutionary course is an odd one. Starting out in the same period and aesthetic as Possessed, Sepultura and Slayer, they played hard, fast, grimy and mean proto-death, thrash metal. On Consuming Impulse the Netherlanders’ sound possessed enough viciousness and momentum to allow them to stand out from their peers. Then there were van Drunen’s psychotic vocals, an unfixed back alley knife stabbing between what had been thrash and what would become death metal.

Much of the short rhythmic phrasing that characterised Impulse was carried over to Testimony of the Ancients, but the dangerous whirlwind of sound was cleaned up in terms of production. Meanwhile Mameli and Uterwijk began to move away from solos based on divebomb chromaticism and instead toward Allan Holdsworth influenced minimalist, modal, liquid runs.

However, it was Spheres which caused the most controversy. Again, short-phrase rhythmic based riffing was brought to the fore but the guitars were starved and sickened through the fledgling zeitgeist guitar synth systems appearing at the time. Washes of atmospheric sounds, timbral experiments and subtle yet constantly evolving syncopated drum lines were brought into relief at the expense of savagery. What is most compelling about Spheres is that it is such a short musical statement and had it not sunk the band, pointed to an unexplored evolutionary side track.

Then comes the ill-fated Resurrection Macabre. After a sixteen year hiatus comes this curious, highly self conscious return to savagery. In some ways it sounds like a continuation of Consuming after the brief flirtation with prog on Testimony. In many respects, it totally ignores Spheres and literally blast beats the listener throughout. What underpins Macabre’s sound is Mameli’s flirtation with groove via his one off album as C-187 (that’s an album worthy of further reflection, perhaps Mameli’s most disliked work – ahead of even Spheres). The groove and hip hop lurch is subtle but evident and combined with the “old-man-doing-young-man’s-metal” re-acquaintance with speed caused a wave of bad feelings. As for me, I have loved Pantera since way back and frankly I cannot understand the widespread, predominantly malice to do with groove. Naturally, I consider Macabre to be a great ride.

2011 saw the release of Doctrine which recombined the new-found savagery of Macabre and softly serenaded the modal adventures of Testimony and Spheres while making use of super low, 8-string tunings to create sickening bass clef harmonies. Holdsworth was back but in a register he could never have imagined.

Pestilence’s evolutionary path was neither singular nor easy. They tripped, fell, broke bones, hid in the corner and even hibernated. Even after they gave up the band, they returned with new, adult sensibilities to continue making engaging and inspired metal. Perhaps that is what Slayer and Metallica need? Just shut up, go away and do something entirely different. Given the state of the music industry, I can see that it might be hard for Mameli and co to rationalise continuing on. I sympathise. However, if only next time they could take another wrong turn and end up in Spheres territory before hanging up their hats, I would be most happy. Here are fingers crossed.

Discombobulated Gaijin: Serial Extrapolatahs!

2012-02-06T23:46:00.000-08:00

A recent encounter with immigration control at Narita Airport in Japan saw so-called journalist Chris Johnson lose his mind and his credibility in an online reputation feeding frenzy. Johnson’s claim was that Japanese immigration, staffed with foreigners improperly detained him, at gunpoint at one point, forced him to buy a ticket back home and impugned upon his human rights. What was fascinating about this whole affair was the degree to which he publicized his encounter with enough hyperbole, exaggeration and slippery almost-truths and somehow believed in this day in age that people would not notice. The usual suspects noticed, of course, the one time activist, now one sided crusader Debito did. So too did the Asian branch of The Economist online. They furthered his cause, consoled his burnt soul and cried against the injustice perpetrated against him. A circle of “gaijin” news watching friends and allies tightened around him and lent moral support. And then a few skeptics dared to chime in. Writers at Tepido and Fucked Gaijin and later again at Japan Probe noticed some inconsistencies, a number of the almost truths alluded to above and fatally, a number of outright lies that might at best be called distortions and obfuscations of the truth. Johnson did not help matters by creating multiple user handles at at least two different comment sections on different websites and exacerbated matters by embarking on a stunning self-censorship campaign: re-calibrating facts, removing claims and deleting tweets in order to smooth out a very lumpy, malodorous narrative.

As it stands, whatever the truth of his encounter at Narita, his multithreaded online exposition made very liberal use of a very broad definition of truth as what appears to be an exercise in self promotion. But I want to talk about something different.

Dipping back into the online “gaijin” world for the first time in years was a troubling experience. But first some context. There are numerous expatriate type support sites throughout the internet and each presents its own uniquely configured take on the reality of life in Japan for the foreigner. In the past this writer had daily frequented some of them and has cast an eye on many more. In addition to a wealth of information pertaining to daily life, these forums and blogs often have areas for venting, where expats have a chance to express their frustrations with cultural difference, linguistic isolation and in some cases, their first experience of being an ethnic/cultural/religious club member.

What has happened over the years is that some locations have come and gone, yet whether in presence or absence, the knowledge created within their boundaries has congealed into what I call “gaijin gospel”. Gaijin gospel refers to the body of knowledge created predominantly by non-Japanese speaking, most frequently Anglosphere, foreigners.

You will notice that I did not use the more formal or “correct” Japanese term for foreigner, gaikokujin. That is because the more informal, exclusive version gaijin, meaning “outsider” more accurately gels with the perspective that has been created over time. While not exactly on par with the word “nigger”Gaijin gospel is a peculiar phenomenon in that many of its proponents are transient, yet as a knowledge it continues to live on, quoted, ricocheted and tossed around the internet. Long after the gaijin gospeller has packed up and gone home his (usually male) perspective lives on and shapes future gaijin mindsets in the bodies of real, live, actual humans coming to Japan. Wave after wave of similarly inscribed or soon to be inscribed gaijin turn up every year to experience a particular version of Japanese culture which they then bring home with them. Rinse and repeat.

What I particularly want to touch on is the gaijin propensity for unproblematic transfer of uncritical universalism to a foreign cultural context. Put your knives away, modernists and post- haters, I’ll have none of that here, thank you. Accusations of relativism will not be permitted. You’re gonna need more than slogans around here.

What I mean is that there is a tendency for the gaijin to bring his (yes, him again) concepts of Law and Justice (admire those uppercase initials!) to Japan, as universal givens. That’s right, the West is best and to hell with the rest, right? No, wrong. You see, while elements of Japanese law and justice may well draw on Western tradition, the law and more importantly its application in the Japanese context could not be further from the truth. So when a gaijin finds himself on the wrong side of the law, for whatever reason, he (yeah, that guy) frequently appeals to the system/logic that he knows best: his own. The only problem is that his own, wherever it may be from and in spite of its protestations of universality, simply ain’t the law of the land. His usual range of responses, from bickering, violent confrontation, physical threats just do not work. Not only do they not work in a legal sense (try getting into a street/bar fight in Japan and just see who gets into the most trouble, regardless of “who started it”), they are also culturally inappropriate and serve only to land him in deeper trouble.

Distilled? You lose your cool, you lose.

Gaijin do not like to have their rights to liberty infringed. They can be very vocal (in English of course) in spite of remaining for the most part ignorant of the whole context. Remember when you were a child and in a dark room you could convince yourself of seeing a ghost if you tried hard enough? Just like that.

Occasionally you see signs like “Japanese Only” or “No Foreigners” in Japan. To the gaijin, these are red flags, a profound experience of segregation and discrimination on par with what happened in the lead up to the civil rights movement in the US and Aborigines being classified as human in Australia. He is outraged and emboldened to act, he steams, rants, boycotts and challenges the owner. Growl! Roar! But if he is sensitive enough, he might just notice context burbling up from a manhole nearby. Context is the history of action and actors in space and time. And context says that surely, there must be a reason for this sign. In fact, that reason can be most effectively summed up by a term found in the urban dictionary: gaijin smash.

Indulge me some cut and paste (edited for spelling).

Gaijin Smash

A technique used by foreigners, or gaijin, in Japan in order to impose their will on the Japanese.

"he upgraded himself to a first-class seat by using the Gaijin Smash"

The willful breaking of Japanese convention rules by one who is not Japanese (a foreigner cf. a gaijin)

I know its a red light, but I'm going to cross the road anyway, gaijin smash style.

I'm going to gaijin smash that red light.

To art of getting away with douchebaggery in Japan and being an ignorant obnoxious foreigner by simply pulling a gaijin smash on their Japanese asses when the shit hits the fan

"I was supposed to give up my priority seat on the train to that old bag but I totally gaijin smashed her ass and acted like I didn't know what the fuck she was bitching at me about"

The gaijin smash, coming to a bar, restaurant, convenience store, rented apartment, car dealership, school, workplace and even MacDonald’s near you. When you have one gaijin do his smash in a bar of twenty people once. That is an unpleasant evening. Then another one or even the same one does it again next week. Ninety-five percent or more of your paying customers are Japanese who have never once in your ten years of operation felt the need to do a “smash” of some sort, no matter how inebriated. They pay your bills, feed you, put the kids through school. That loud-ass gaijin on the other hand? Fuck ‘im. More trouble than he is worth. Let’s just ban them, then?

The sentiment is understandable. Unfair, but not impossible, even for the most ardent, pig-headed gaijin to accept. Now, if said smashing gaijin were to speak Japanese, return to the scene of the crime and sincerely apologise, the ban might well be lifted. After all, it was just a big misunderstanding. Who knows? But it is context that matters, not random events in a vacuum interpreted through a lens of universalism.

Indeed, it is this appreciation of context that endears me to living in Japan. So too the wiggle room in the law which places more emphasis on out of court reconciliation and less on minute encodings of acceptable practices into legal precedent. Japan might appear a very orderly society and that is because it is. But what the gaijin has failed to realize is that while social convention in Japan is overcoded, the law is not. This writer is not saying that Japan is problem free, or that it is some kind of utopia. This writer does, however, argue that a different concept of human rights and discrimination operates that differs from that created by the West for the rest.

So next time you get all red faced and angry, go home and study some kanji. Talk to the neighbour and take some knitting lessons at the community centre. You just might find that there is more to life in Japan than getting your rage on.

Here it is again, as an equation:

Engagement at a distance utilizing exclusive universalism demeans the recipient and diminishes the actor.

What wave? Time for a rethink?

2012-02-06T23:37:00.000-08:00

It has started. With the capture and arrest of millionaire Kim DotCom, and the shutdown of Megaupload, shockwaves have been tearing through the contemporary (illegal) filesharing world. A large number of sites have started nuking links, revoking accounts and cancelling user subscriptions while simultaneously re-writing the terms of service agreements. It all smells a bit like Nazis in the basement shredding documents even as the end of the war crashes down around them.

The current post-P2P (Napster, WinMX, DC++, Kaaza, Emule, Winny etc), IP based filesharing trend always inhabited a legal grey zone while brashly flaunting its services. It was as simple as upload content and post links to friends, on blogs and on forums. Entry level use, that is for the casual day-to-day pirate, was in most cases free and bandwidth limited but not so much as to be overly inconvenient. Serious pirates for whom warez as well as popular cultural media (movies, music, text), could pay a small fee and receive unlimited access to these services including multiple, parallel downloads and no bandwidth or data usage caps. Essentially a subscription-based, in-browser P2P piracy experience.

This large scale, enforced as well as self imposed shutdown comes amid debate about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) and the arrest of Kim DotCom in his luxury mansion in New Zealand this last weekend. Both acts appear to have lost much of their original support after a flood of online protest and have shown to be disproportionately huge in their power to prosecute a situation which requires finesse rather than fire-bombing. SOPA/PIPA have (had?) the potential to change the very shape of the internet and how it works. Indeed, the reason I write is a reflection of the effects already set in motion. Hundreds of thousands, millions even have already come out in opposition of these acts but there is an important question that goes unsaid. Would it really be that bad if the way the internet works was changed? Would it be so terrible if there were greater potential for legal recourse against those who under the guise of “free information” have ingrained theft as a primary component of contemporary internet use?

Many people are worried that these types of acts could censor and silence broad swathes of opinion and significantly stymie the flow of all kinds of information, knowledge and news. They are right. But there remain questions worthy of further debate: if law is actually capable of changing how things work online and the internet becomes highly regulated, would this be such a bad thing anyway? In other words, the internet while still relatively new did not always exist. It has not been in place for most of human history. And while it has facilitated an explosion of knowledge and creativity, it has also allowed a similar scale of hate, violence, depravity and wasted time. Second, again, although relatively young yet somewhat mature, people on the net have shown time and again that restrictions lead to workarounds. Frequently, it is these workarounds that lead to new ways of doing work, lead to innovation and foster the development of engineering and programming communities. I believe that the response to this wave of shutdowns had contingencies in place well before all of this happened, after all, invisible, grey zone, legal limbo communities have to think quickly, constantly.

Are we seeing a reconfiguring of the filesharing landscape and the movement toward new technologies and methods or is this merely a minor glitch with a workaround patch to be deployed in a few days or so? What is my position? I have benefited from the free flow of information and media on the internet. I have had the opportunity to engage with artisitic works at an intimate level that would have been impossible if not for community based filesharing. That said, I have also lost to this byte-swarm. I have lost time and depth of contact, of sustained engagement. The data-blizzard has increased my knowledge of complexity at the expense of my experience of considered meditation on fewer objects of knowledge. Stimulation versus contemplation.

Whatever the outcome, I do not believe this is the end of filesharing. Broswer based filesharing brought piracy to the mainstream, it made things easy for the anyone, anywhere, curious user. But usenet, dedicated P2P clients, bitorrent and FTP exchange were there first and will likely live on regardless. Or maybe they won’t. Caution, interesting times ahead. Now if only there was law enacted against the vile sputum endlessly issued on social network platforms, the world would be a much better place!

Postscript...

It has been more than two weeks since the above was written. In that time the inventories of several major filesharing servers were wiped, effectively rendering a vast network of shared links almost completely redundant. However, in the hours and days following the Kim DotCom implosion, filesharing proceeds, “business-as-usual”. Media/copyright owning “won” at best a temporary victory against what seems to be an unstoppable tide of theft. Certainly, a number of casual filesharers have been scared off but for the regular, hardcore and enthusiastic pirate nothing much has changed, what has gone is steadily being replaced. No doubt it will all be washed away again, bigger waves, smaller waves, new harbours and concrete substituted for sand, I’ll leave the last words to Hendrix:

And so castles made of sand fall into the sea, eventually...

Sherlock (BBC) (Review)

2012-01-12T21:46:00.000-08:00

Way back in 2002 I came to Japan for the first time. Before popping over I had become acquainted with the excellent Nero Wolf detective series by Rex Stout. These wonderful stories distinguish themselves from the crowd with superior, economic, well wrought writing. Nero Wolf somehow led to the wonderfully incompetent, immoral Jewish Texan cowboy detective, Kinky Freidman. Two very different takes on America grounded in skilful takes on the genre. After quickly exhausting my stock of books and a brief dalliance with Anne Rice (kisses to you, New Orleans, go and crush those west coast hippies this weekend, will ya?) I found myself in front of a void. I was still hungry for crime but living in a country with limited access to English language books. And so one day, quite by accident I turned to the past. A massive tome of Sherlock Holmes (part one of two) practically fell off the bookshelf as I squirmed through the crowded aisle of the foreign language section in Mei-eki’s Sanseido. Ravenous for mystery I tore open the paper bag and started drinking it in on the train ride back home.

Of course it was all over far too soon and I had to go back and buy the second volume. By the end of it I was sad to leave behind Holmes and Watson but uplifted by the fact that I had actually read every single story. This latter fact allowed me to enjoy television and film adaptations much more thoroughly and critically. Then in 2010 I had the opportunity of seeing the BBC’s modernised take on Conan’s canon. This first series, part reboot, part interpretation, part remix simultaneously played with and respected the content and feel of the original stories. It felt both new and familiar. Holmes and Watson still made sense in present day London’s Baker Street yet still retained an air of fantastic other-worldness. Some of the visual innovations, such as onscreen text, ran close to being overdone but the quality of the stories, the wit of script and the very British vibe of the acting was enough to counter-balance any concerns.

This New Year’s just like my original bookstore accident I was greeted with a surprise: a second series! And what a series it is. The first episode takes what made the first series so compelling, amps up the wit, humour and style, tones down some of the visual excess (but thankfully retains enough of it) and injects enough twists, turns and convolutions to make even the most jaded mystery critic happy. There are a number of questionable plot holes or inconsistencies but the pace of the show and the charisma of the leads is enough to pull one back into the realm of suspended disbelief. Well done. The producers have chosen to play with Holmes and Watson’s relationship making explicit what has always been implicit yet not being sensational. It is an elegant exposition and frames male friendship in an interesting and innovative fashion.

Moonshiners (Discovery Channel) (Review).

2012-01-12T21:44:00.000-08:00

To quote Mr Seth Romatelli of the consistently listenable Uhhyeahdude:

“This shit is my jam.”

You got that Sethro. Moonshiners, like Good Hair and The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia is quintessential America. Basically another Discovery Channel documentary series that distinguishes itself from the field through the way it allows its subjects to speak. Moonshining, the illegal production of distilled alcohol is an American tradition as strongly associated with the Appalachians as crystal meth is these days. From the earliest colonies through to prohibition and the present, the image of the American moonshiner stands proud among a cast of cowboys, Indians, gangsters and other heroes of the New World. On Moonshiners we get access to this world in detail through the ABC (alcoholic beverage control a uniquely American institution) and the producers (said access is limited naturally by the ‘shiners themselves for legal reasons). We are introduced to a world of risk, high danger and high rewards, shotguns and car chases, police raids, forest romps and bleary eyed recounts of history.

Like the fictional drama of the biker gang drama of Sons of Anarchy, Moonshiners presents a unique ambivalence at the heart of American society. On one hand is the spirit of creation, where strength and conviction are held in each hand and with perseverance come to forge new societies both within and outside of the dominant social, legal and political cultures. This harkens back to the earliest days of the New World’s switch from colony to independence. Meanwhile it also sheds light on the extent to which a country so apparently enamoured with freedom and opposed to over-regulation is in a state of total paradox and collapse. The poor Shiners, living in poor America live life at standards well below the imagined society seen on TV. Their poverty and education levels see them excluded from this fantasy world. Yet even as they struggle to determine the means of survival in their lives their communities are controlled by archaic religiously inspired taxation and prohibition laws.

But let me be clear, I do not justify or excuse the individuals and the communities they create in Moonshiners. Nor do I romanticise them. For me, these people fall into a similar conceptual framework as Housos. Living in the margins in a state of moral, legal and ethical complexity, pushed and pulled by poverty, violence, history and geography. Yet what I do respect is their conviction, strength and gall to forge ahead in a world where they no longer belong. A world of neuroses, of endlessly bifurcating virtualities and sensations. They do a lot with a little and while that lot may be questionable, they do it with focus passion and a connection to landscape. Shine on.

Spawn (Comic)(Review)

2012-01-12T21:43:00.000-08:00

Every Wednesday, after “school sport” (which I naturally chose to be in a location downtown rather than near school), I would slip into a main street newsagency and head straight for the comics. I had loved comics since my father bought me my first two: an issue of Transformers in which Optimus Prime’s head is on life support and issue 320 of The Incredible Hulk taking place in the Banner/Hulk post separation anxiety arc. Over the years I dipped into comics as I could. Given my family’s lack of wealth most of my comic reading took place next to display racks or the incomplete collections of friends. Spawn was no exception. I had heard about it from friends, it had even been on TV, it was bloody, gruesome and satanic they all cried (not long after a similar controversy would arise around Cannibal Corpse’s breakout album, Tomb of the Mutilated). To a social outsider as myself there could have been no better hook. A year later my taste was justified when I learned that the homeless kid with a coat and pet rat at school was also into the same comic! So when I found that comic on the shelf, I had to have it. With what money I had, I paid the over-inflated, gouge worthy Australian markup price, got it home and read it. A true moment of dreams coming true.

I collected Spawn for a while, largely ignorant of the significance of guest writers and artists yet fascinated by MacFarlane’s caricature meets hyper-real art style (which I had first encountered in Spiderman). Being a youth, my interests turned elsewhere and I lost touch with Spawn and comics in general. It would not be until late last year that I had an opportunity to lay my hands on a complete stash of Spawn and go back to the beginning.

The happy reality is that twenty years later, Spawn still holds up. Given it is such a long series this review will only touch on the key points which I believe are worth exploring. That said, Spawn as a series would make an excellent visual/graphic arts dissertation subject. Onward then.

I think when MacFarlane made Al Simmons, aka Spawn an African American he did not realise the significance of this decision. While there are still too few non-white protagonists in mainstream comics now, there were fewer still back in 1992. From an artistic point of view, MacFarlane was able to experiment with black aesthetics: bodies, faces, colouring. In this regard, I am reminded of the earliest days of colour film where there emphasis on lighting and colouring was on white subjects resulting in a greening of black skin tones where and when they appeared. MacFarlane’s eye for detail and his colourists’ skills were a spit in the eye of mainstream comic logic as he made liberal use of browns, blacks, purples, reds and greens to great effect. While somewhat of a stretch and I can certainly not vouch for the veracity of the connection, Spawn functions aesthetically, visually as a response to Toni Morrison’s critique of “darkness” as “evil”, eventually turning the whole logic of evil on its head and repositioning these conceptual locations. While Simmons is of hell and inhabits a world of darkness, death and decay, the series eventually locates these concepts as fundamental to the very nature of reality. Total mega-Buddha, dude! Of course there is more too it than this and a sustained critical reading would unpick some of the underlying assumptions of fear, the unknown and their relationship to blackness. What is worthy of significant praise, however, is the deliberate embrace of darkness, aesthetically and conceptually in an original and engaged fashion.

Although the emphasis on religious critique shifts over the course of the comic it remains a core concept in Spawn. What is so refreshing is the Krishnamurti style rejection of dominant concepts and dominant oppositions. God is mortal-ised, as is Satan, they are also re-placed in a pantheon and revealed as bit players in a universe much greater than even their reckoning. Spawn takes them all on and beats them. In this way, again deliberate or not, Spawn reflects a Japanese conceptual aesthetic in which multiplicity is a given. Japanese story telling makes frequent use of ghosts, demons, angels, gods and devils but rarely assumes the arrogance of Western storytelling where monotheism lies at the core. Whether conscious decision or parallel development this critically distinguishes Spawn from the pack.

Spawn has been consistently great and frequently excellent over its twenty year run and is worth reading from the start. I can only be thankful to small-minded current affairs TV for introducing me to the image of Billy Kincaid’s ice-cream scoop stabbed body strung up with chains with a popsicle protruding from his mouth. I am also thankful for the many artists and writers who have worked on MacFarlane’s creation to date. Now, onto Endgame!

Vektor – Outer Isolation (Review)

2012-01-12T21:42:00.001-08:00

Vektor’s 2009 album, Black Future came along at precisely the right time to gain recognition. The whole re-thrash phenomenon was building, spearheaded by groups such as Municipal Waste and a zeitgeist led wave of nostalgia saw net critics, professional and semi-literate alike turn their gaze back to the raucous cacophony of 80s and 90s thrash. Suddenly names that had not appeared in public memory since that time, Kreator, Exodus, Testament, Possessed and a whole slew of others took on a Vaseline smudged, midday soap opera, soul food like sheen. Everyone loved thrash again. And why not? Thrash is rad. The deeper you dig in, the more you find. The remnants of punk melody and recklessness, the beginnings of technicality, origins of “brutality” can be peeled back and rearranged, repositioned in an attempt to either design or discover musicological and genre cohesion. Historic thrash is a Lego playground, endlessly splintering the further you go in time and geography. Re-thrash became “let’s trash re-hashed thrash”, the bubble burst, survivors continued onward and Vektor’s latest album, Outer Isolation, quickly and quietly slipped under everyone’s radar in an oddly timed year end release.

Outer Isolation is essentially an updated Twenty-First Century take on prog-period Voivod (Dimension Hatross, Nothingface). Isolation twists and turns, throwing out new riffs and time changes and is sewn together by interesting chord voicings and an overall Hawkwind (in spacey concept, certainly not sound) vibe. Normally this kind of aggressively scattershot approach is not my cup of tea but unlike a lot of highly technical metal its heart lies in an accessible place: gnarly, inventive thrash. What is worth special mention is the way jarring clean guitar tones are used to accent and emphasise riffs and provide a sense of both clarity and expansiveness to the tightly compressed galloping, grooving and twisting thrash riffs. With a cover as cool as it has, Outer Isolation demands a vinyl release. Here’s hoping!

Battle of the Undead: True Blood vs The Walking Dead

2012-01-12T21:38:00.000-08:00

What follows is a tightly parsed reconstructed article written before New Year that disappeared when Windows decided it could no longer read my user profile. That’ll learn me to save in a folder on the desktop.

True Blood and The Walking Dead (hereafter abbreviated to TB and TWD) have a lot in common: the undead, the south, desperate situations, religion and high quality source material (novel and comic book series respectively). So then why is it that one is so much better than the other? I’ll tell you.

The Undead

TB’s undead are cool, nutso, sexy and diverse. TWD’s have great make-up but no personality. TB is set in Lousiana which means swamps, forests, weeping willows on river banks, plantation mountains, Cajun twang, great food and sweat. TWD is supposedly set (well, it was) in Alabama which means it should have really cool rednecks, great music and lots of guns. Instead it has sweat and long grass lining freeways.

Desperation

TB has desperate situations that in spite of their fantastical nature are believable and shed light on both the peaks and depths of human emotional experience. TWD settles for over-wrought, ham-fisted, very vanilla human interactions based on every other survival movie/show ever. It also has an interpersonal logic not unlike the terminal time waster with no payoff, Lost (glad I bailed on that midway through the second season – hey producers, give me my time back, assholes).

Religion

Certain forms of Catholicism and Baptism underpin TB making even the most trite utterances of “God bless you” and “Jesus have mercy” ring with a truth and conviction consistent with the multicultural colonial historic flavour of the South. It has voodoo, too! TWD uses the same lexicon but instead it rings of mediocre, middle American, fat free fatuousness. I mean really, post apocalypse wouldn’t your view of god have changed somewhat?

Source Material

TB’s source material is great. The production and direction of the show takes it in interesting directions. TWD’s is great as well (even if it is eerily similar to Vince Locke’s totally depraved, off the hinges Deadworld), the show fails to capitalise on this and instead of innovation offers up plot retreads and scene recreations lacking originality and punch. How did that happen.

Verdict

The Walking Dead should have been brilliant. It could have been so much more. It was supposed to be a human drama but instead feels like Lost with zombies and implausibly worse pacing. True Blood has fun, enjoys its medium and shows how it is possible to make a midday melodrama, complete with heaving bosoms, pecs, biceps, gory violence and kinky sex (help, I’m being gang-raped by female werepanthers!) just work. You be the judge.

Chuck Schuldiner: Ten Years Gone

2011-12-13T23:41:00.000-08:00

Go there. Go now. 1990s Florida, extravagance, waste, sunshine, suntans, age, oil, alligators and death metal. What was in the water, the air? Why did the revolution happen there? Why did Long Island, New York guitarist Chuck Schuldiner transform from a pivotal death metal guitarist into a crucial founding father of expanding death metal’s harmonic and melodic palette?

Schuldiner’s contribution to death metal and metal generally cannot be understated. As an individual he was enthusiastic, forward thinking, opinionated and I believe to some extent troubled by his own sexuality. Indeed in this regard both Schuldiner and his family were adamant in ascribing the illness which led to his death as a brain tumour in the face of accusations of AIDS. Now like many Death fans out there, I am saddened to recall his passing. That said one of the burning issues I have had with metal for a long time is sex, gender and sexuality. But since I do not know anything new, is there anything new to say on this matter? Read on.

Several months ago I was chasing leads down rabbit holes and found that when viewed from a distance, this elaborate warren cohered around a number of key points: That Paul Masvidal of Cynic was not only a visionary musician and composer but had spent significant time performing volunteer work with AIDS patients in San Francisco. The implications of these findings point to certain conclusions. When viewing photos of Masvidal, I noticed that not only is he rather handsome but that he dresses well and is not overweight or boorish as is common among metal musicians post-twenties. Finally, I came across an interview in which it was implied but never declared that Masvidal and Cynic drummer Sean Reinert were in all likelihood a couple. On following up some of these leads and examining the lyrics of Masvidal’s other well known project, the indie-rock sounding Aeon Spoke, I came across multiple examples of references to objects of love using the male personal pronoun. As Masvidal is Buddhist and not Christian I am fairly confident that he is not referring to Jesus.

Then there is the tie that binds: Masvidal and Reinert both played on Death’s breakout album, Human. What is interesting here is that Schuldiner had previously sung about mutilating a “faggot” on Death’s debut Scream Bloody Gore and now he was playing with “faggots”. In 1987 Schuldiner was twenty years old and composing music in a hyper-masculine, frequently misogynist and homophobic context. To me in this pre-PC age the use of the term “faggot” is neither particularly surprising or shocking. After all the zeitgeist was about shock value, obscenity and offense. A “faggot” was a widely disliked, foreign and quite probably terrifying identity in metal during the 80s. It was a way of distancing extreme metal genres from hair metal popular at the time. This is not to justify Schuldiner’s homophobia, rather it is to contextualise it. As a youth “faggot” and “gay” were terms of derision that I did not fully understand even as I used them. It was not until much later that I learned of their true potential to cause, spread and maintain harm.

Over time Death came to be less about terror and more about examining and rejecting social concepts and conventions. Schuldiner has even expressed embarrassment over the conceptual and musical superficiality of pre-Human Death. No doubt like the rest of us, as Schuldiner aged he came to reflect on his statements made as a younger man in an age which when compared to our own at present was information poor. Whether or not Schuldiner died from AIDS related complications and/or was homosexual is an internet meme that may well never be proved in the affirmative or negative. The fact is that his collaboration with Masvidal and Reinert (who had been recording Cynic demos in the period 87-91) on Human helped bring about personal and musical changes which led to a four album string of creative, engaging and original death metal quite different to what he made as a younger man.

Truth and myth will live on as we choose to inhabit them, whatever secrets were or were not in Schuldiner’s life may well never be known but at the very least Schuldiner dared to question himself and his worldview in public and transferred this to his music. In this regard, in the face of whatever and any other faults that he bore as a man he had the courage to change. Right on.

Vegetarian Me Part 2 – Nutrition, Tradition and Nonsense

2011-12-12T23:15:00.000-08:00

This morning I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (yuck, right?) with the title: “Easy on the spuds...” (snipped for brevity). This article draws on a newly released report from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council entitled: Providing the scientific evidence for healthier Australian diets (again snipped for brevity) which yours truly took himself over to read.

The draft Australian Dietary Guidelines 2011 contains a number of points I would like to unpack a little. First the guidelines have been prepared based on a “whole” food approach. What this means is that it recommends nutrition based on actual foods rather than abstract vitamin and mineral intake values. To me this is a huge step forward from the pseudo-objectivity of RDI tables and fortified/augmented soft drinks.

Second is the concept of “adherence” to guidelines. Although exceptionally and deeply analysed (research was analysed from a wide variety of local and international sources from the period 2003-2009) the information on hand does not really tell us anything we do not already know: in spite of affluence both economic and educational, Australians seem for the most part unable to adequately incorporate sufficient whole foods into their lifestyles. The guidelines go on to report the following harrowing information:

(a) Australian children (2-18 years old) consume 41% of their caloric intake in the form of nutritionally unsound saturated fat sources.

(b) Australians overall consume 35% of their caloric intake in the form of nutritionally unsound sugar sources.

In other words for many Australian children (adults as well), junk food outside of meals constitutes up to a staggering 76% of their daily caloric intake. Even if you were a highly active person, if you were eating 176% of your calories daily you would have your work cut out for you trying not to gain weight. But in our current couch potato age where the caloric intake of a significant proportion of the population likely exceeds this 176%, the answer is weight gain, ill-health and death.

Third, what is especially interesting is the Herald’s misleading article title. It is also a point with which I disagree. Although the guidelines do advocate for a 40% reduction in potato consumption, this reduction is explicitly to do with potato as a “vegetable”. What this means is that within the spectrum of different vegetables required for optimum nutrition, the quantity of potatoes should be reduced. However, I would argue that when considered as a source of calorie rich carbohydrates potatoes function as an excellent option in themselves or as an adjunct to other grains (the quantity of each is adjusted accordingly. Indeed the sweet potato rich traditional diet of Okinawans (southern-most prefecture of Japan) is frequently pointed to as the reason for their longevity (hey, warm weather year round doesn’t exactly hurt either!).

I would go on to say that the Australian diet by and large contains a sizeable hole relative to root vegetables. In Japan, root vegetables are considered integral to the cuisine and range from potatoes, onions and carrots familiar to most Australians to more (so-called yet easily cultivated) exotic roots such as sweet potato (especially purple skinned yellow/white fleshed satsuma and to a lesser extent the purple/red fleshed beni-imo), taro (in the form of sato-imo), burdock (gobo), yam (known locally as yama-imo, which unlike many kinds of yam is non-toxic and is frequently eaten raw), daikon radish, turnip (kabu) and lotus root (renkon which may also be eaten raw). Almost all of these root vegetables could be substituted for potato in order to decrease caloric intake and increase fibre, vitamin and mineral intake. I would argue that the dearth of root-vegetables in Australian diets and the over-reliance on “colourful” and “leafy” vegetables is in need of a serious re-think.

Finally, under the grains section the emphasis is on “whole” grains. This I will leave short and sweet and can fully attest to the veracity and benefit of switching from white to brown. Recently, I received a 10kg bag of genmai (brown/whole Japanese rice) from an uncle who would/could not eat it. Although supplemented from time to time with plain white rice (like making fried rice), every meal at which I eat rice, I eat genmai. Since I started this pattern I not only lost a small amount of weight (a stubborn mini-pot belly) but become clockwork-like regular and felt lighter and more vital as a result!

So what does my opinion have to do with anything? Nothing really, but it is my view that Australians need to take more pride in local agriculture, and let me say that again: local. By actively supporting local agricultural industry in increasing demand, Australians could:

1. Improve health through increased consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

2. Significantly reduce the environmental burden created by monocropping, over reliance on pesticides and herbicides for both local and export oriented markets.

3. Take pride in an increased national self-sufficiency production rate

4. Encourage the introduction and development of new and new varieties of fruits, vegetables and grains through selective breeding etc.

Or at least that is how it has worked here in Japan. C’mon Aussie, come o-o-o-n!

Church of Misery – Houses of the Unholy (Review)

2011-12-12T23:13:00.000-08:00

May we all one day be fortunate enough to come to face doom.

When I was a boy the word “doom” solely referred to the iron masked, green hooded scientist-king of an obscure and fictional central European kingdom. Now to this writer, doom refers to the direct line of ancestors from Black Sabbath, Lord Baltimore, Witchery and to some extent Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin. While modern doomsters draw liberally from their holy prophets their font of inspiration is the same: a louder, whiter version of the blues.

The blues have long been steeped in the occult. Take a journey down the Mississippi through swamps and out to the delta and you will find that history is sign posted with numerous examples of musicians who sold their souls to Satan, who died before their time and whose lyrics directly and indirectly equally reference murder, dislocation and evil deeds along with laments on love, poverty and longing. A half century later Black Sabbath, doom’s ground zero, reached through time and electrified the blues in a way at once familiar and yet much darker. Thus doom was created.

Over the weekend, I dusted off, put needle to groove and cranked the volume on my copy of Church of Misery’s Houses of the Unholy. I cannot remember the last time I listened to this album yet its excellence in genre mastery still rang out as clear (in spite of an ear infection currently oppressing this writer’s hearing – boo hiss!) as the first time. Houses is the perfect balance of Japanese (they are from Tokyo after all, not that you would know it) and Anglo-American sensibilities. Where Japanese rock and metal can tend towards shrill extremity (think grindcore with the treble maxed), Church of Misery temper this with a fat bottom end groove provided by sole original member and main songwriter, bassist Tatsu Mikami. Everything sounds as though it is on the verge of collapse not unlike the bombast of Blue Cheer flying off the rails in an improvised jam… but it never does thanks to Mikami’s chops.

Church of Misery’s assault on American Christian dominated monotheism differs from many of their peers. Mikami draws on infamous serial killers for inspiration. When asked about the why of drawing inspiration from this source he replied:

Psychedelic "Weed" trip etc.... It's ordinary and our band name "Church Of Misery" expresses it. Church [is a] symbol of Christianity, and Christianity is the base of the western world. Misery.....Church Of Misery means miserable Western world or [the] decline of Western World / sick of America, so I use serial killers as a symbol.

Quote taken from interview found at Metal Chaos

The album as a package is completed by an eight page booklet featuring various famous photos of serial killers referenced throughout. The photos are colourised and overlaid with text that openly refuses to draw a line between the utterings of the protagonists and the album lyrics. If you can find this on vinyl, get it. The booklet at twelve inch scale and the cool band pic which stretches vertically across the gatefold inside are worth the price alone – even for the non-doomster!

May we all one day be fortunate enough to come to face doom.

Amen.

Stop asking! You can never know: Jazz for Metal Part 1

2011-12-12T23:09:00.000-08:00

I have previously referred to the complex and convoluted interrelationship between the blues, jazz, hip hop, reggae and most other musical genres originating from African cultural practices and the mostly white (yet ever increasingly diverse if Metal Hammer’s Planet Metal compilations have any stake in definition) music known as metal. Reflecting on the common roots of these very (extremely) different genres and the paths they have taken through time, space and culture is a frequent personal custom. That said, for every open-minded, musically switched on metal head there seems to be an equivalent cellar-dwelling “tr00-er than you” version. This feature is not about why metal heads should listen to jazz. We tend to listen always with an agenda anyway. Instead I want to take a moment to give respect that the jazz that I have listened to which has recalibrated or otherwise changed my metal ears for the better. In this way I hope to draw more explicit lines of cultural connection that have occurred over time yet been neglected in print. While highly unlikely that I will never be “of” an African American cultural and musical context, I can investigate and connect with the myriad common historical points by better understanding the music. No hard answers, no permanence and no promises.

Miles Davis – On the Corner

Miles Davis was never square and his path quite crooked but his musical talent, his feel for his form was extraordinary, from tribute, to sideman, from interpreter to innovator Davis’ influence looms large over modern, popular expressions of jazz. However, for me, his key album was his least popular and widely disliked On the Corner. Breaking from genre confines and embracing technological advances (a truly cu and paste album if there ever was one) Davis’ 1971 masterpiece takes a very laid back, deep swinging rhythm section and plonks a tough, electrified funk, rock and blaxploitation informed aesthetic right over the top. Though the casual listener might not notice the whole affair was meticulously constructed from a number of samples/loops taken from straight sessions and then arranged for a new aesthetic. An exorbitantly priced 6 CD box set exists out there which contains the original non-edited master takes of the On the Corner sessions. Listening to the unedited versions helps to remind the listener of the classic/traditional grounding of the sound and make the edited versions sound so unique and interesting, demonstrating how cut and paste melodic and harmonic juxtaposition can create something so familiar and yet so strange and new.

Stuff I slept on (hence that “post” in the title)

2011-12-07T04:20:00.000-08:00

Every year (every week these days) there is too much music released to hear it all let alone give it the time and energy required to fully appreciate it. Naturally for whatever reasons a number of great releases can fly under one’s personal music radar and remain undiscovered for long periods of time. It is then with true graciousness that the seasonal event of “year end” lists has arrived. As I read through the many lists made by contributors over at Metal Sucks, I kept an eye out diamonds among the rough. While some potential diamonds turned out to be uninteresting to me, the number of actual diamonds was far higher than I had anticipated. Here are some capsule reviews…

Decapitated – Carnival is Forever

I not only slept on this album but have slept on Poland’s Decapitated since always. Their latest album is an extraordinarily confident summation and perfection of death metal from its genre inception to the present. Guitars have girth and precision, the drumming is technical yet creative and restrained and the songs themselves are made up of ferocious riffs, gnarly solos and a plethora of unpredictable turns. An up and coming death metal band could choose far worse role models than these gents to equip them with a template for taking the genre to the next level. Shame on my remiss!

Leviathan – True Traitor, True Whore

I am not quite sure how to take this album. On one hand it is a brilliant update of the contemporary black metal sound with an array of intriguing and at times unsettling timbres. The whole album is somewhat frightening,claustrophobic and eerily misogynist. Yet on the other hand, the real life events surrounding this album including the alleged sexual assault (rape with tattoo tools?) perpetrated by Wrest against his former partner unsettle me in ways rather different to the music. A very important black metal album until context and ethics intrude. And after that? That is a push-pull issue I have yet to resolve.

The Atlas Moth – An Ache for the Distance

It is doom but of the likes never heard before. If it has peers then perhaps Zoroaster, Yob and Om fit the bill. This album sees the band transfer the ethereal atmosphere of black metal and overlay it on the sludge and thump of doom. What this equates to is groovy Sabbathian riffs tempered by frequently two or more additional counter-melodies, drones and rhythmic figures. Vocals are intelligible and at least half of the time melodic/plain sung. How on earth did I miss this release? I know, the demise of Sludge Swamp.

Glorior Belli – The Great Southern Darkness

A while back I wrote about how Americans seem to be trumping Europeans in the black metal originality stakes. In this game, Glorior Belli are not unlike an interception and 99 yard return in NFL. These Frenchmen show how it is done: not only do they incorporate the ill-suited genre aesthetic of Southern Metal into their sound, but they do so in a way which is more American than American. The pairing of southern and black metals sounds so natural, so deep and considered as to trick the listener into thinking it has always been this way. Some southern-ness is more pronounced and at other times subtle and requiring interpretation. This has to be one of the coolest black metal albums of the twenty-first century.

What would Jesus choose?

2011-12-07T04:16:00.000-08:00

What follows is the first in a series of questions entitled “What would Jesus do?”. Only tangentially to do with religion, this series asks the hard question: “If you can only choose between A and B, which would you choose”. The first question:

Beneath the Remains or Arise?

As a young metal head it took me years to get around to listening to Sepultura’s Arise. It would be many more years later until I heard Beneath the Remains, and longer still until it “clicked” for me. My Sepulchral inroad was 1994’s Chaos AD. From the loose tribal drumming, propulsive riffing and a spit in the face of the first world defiant swagger, I was hooked. By contrast the seamless death/thrash blend of Arise appeared dated and regressive to a younger me. But after multiple listens, Arise started to gel and I began to appreciate the fine line it walked between two extreme musical genres. Arise’s strong points are its precision and focus, it is a tightly structured, well paced and balanced album, certainly worthy of the praise heaped upon it. So then comes my belated engagement with Beneath the Remains. Where Arise straddled genres, Remains inhabited the interstice between period aesthetics. Maintaining a heft dose of primitive early thrash yet pushing forward towards exacting sonic devastation, Remains functions as a kind of a portal into possible proto-alternative futures for thrash and death metal. Lyrically, Arise is the stronger of the two and likely reflects the length of time after the band’s shift to a North American context. However, while Arise might be stronger and more consistent lyrically, stylistically, Remains takes more risks, sounding like a band still trying to find its sound. This nascent version of the still young band simply doesn’t give a damn one way or the other about external stylistic conventions.

Judgement: I must admit, I have never been a fan of either/or binaries but when presented with one (even if the presenter and presentee are the same) I cannot shy away from participating whether to undermine the prevailing logic or to simply broadcast my terrible taste. As for the question at hand, while I have a lot of affection and a nostalgic soft spot for Arise, it is Beneath the Remains which helps improve this grandpa’s blood flow. Remains holds looseness and unpredictability against Arise’s exacting sounds and that spirit of experimentation is what wins me over to this day.

Lost in Translation/Translating Culture

2011-11-16T22:26:00.000-08:00

About a year ago I received my first translation contract (Japanese to English, computer software GUI and 600 page manual). While I have never formally trained as a translator nor studied Japanese language in any official capacity, I have however lived, worked and loved in Japan for close to eight years. When I had free time at work, I studied kanji (Chinese characters), when I had a day off, I would do grammar drills, endlessly writing out example sentences and my own variations. Although my mother was bilingual (English, Slovenian), home-life was all English. I grew up monolingual and made myself bilingual.

Recently, I came across Mattie Brice’s story on Popmatters about English language voice acting in games originating from Japan. Brice’s article in many ways mirrors and clearly articulates a few thoughts I have had rumbling about in my mind over the last few years. Several years ago, I came across a news story (which, despite searching around has failed to reappear) about translation of Toni Morrison into Japanese. I cannot comment on neither the veracity of the argument nor the accuracy of my memory, but I distinctly remember mention of the use of Japanese regional dialects (particularly the well known/stigmatised Aomori and Tohoku dialects) as substitutes for regional and African American dialects. However, I was able to find reference to this phenomenon in Mie Hiramoto’s essay on the Japanese translation of Margaret Mitchell’s well known 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind (Hiramoto, 2009):

While it is certain that the minority characters’ use of non-Standard Japanese – which

strongly resembles the stigmatized Toohoku dialect, or Toohoku-ben (TB) – is a

translation of the original non-Standard English (SE), the assignment to them of

something resembling a particular regional Japanese dialect reinforces linguistic

inferiorization of the slaves and poor whites, as well as TB speakers. The use of

this pseudo-dialect is an important element in the linguistic representation of

marginal characters and likewise underscores the salient marginality of TB in

Japanese language ideology.

Dialect is notoriously hard to translate, with feeling. That is, while the basic meaning of a regional non-standard utterance can be easily translated, translating the context of that dialect is much more difficult. For example, when at home with my family, I often use Owari-ben (a north-west variation on Nagoya-ben). In Owari-ben the existence verb –iru (English: is/am/are) is substituted with oru (a humble form of -iru). This usage most frequently appears when talking about the location of people and animals as well as in the present continuous verb conjugations.

Is 6810 around?

Yeah he is.

６８１０、おる？

うんおるよ。

6810, oru?

Un, oru yo.

That was easy enough, right? Well, yes and no. You see, what is absent from this translation is the reasoning behind usage of non-standard Japanese. In other words, when I use oru instead of iru, what else am I trying to say?

I refer you back to my earlier posts on where I am from, my “people” so to speak. I spent my childhood in a poverty prison known as a housing commission estate. As a result, there are certain forms of intonation, word choice and word order which resonate with me almost twenty years later. To use my own English dialect in Japan would make me quite difficult to understand. This is because the cultural gap between Australia and Japan in terms of public housing, wealth distribution and poverty is more like a chasm. If I choose to speak such English, I choose to foreground an aspect of my identity which if I am brutally honest has little to do with the life I currently lead (even if does, as I said earlier, still resonate). However, when I reminisce with my brother, the poor, rural dialect peppered with Bundjalung (Northern NSW Aboriginal cultural/linguistic group) feels much closer to and more capable of accurately representing our experience. So when I choose oru over iru, again I am making a decision to foreground my sense of belonging to the area I have called home for the past eight years. I stand up and say, “Hey, I’m from Owari, by the Kiso river. I might be a foreigner, but I’m kind of local now”.

Similarly, Japanese television, cinema, literature and music often (though not often enough, there is still in many cases a stigma attached to non-standard Japanese dialect) makes use of dialect in order to place people. People placed in a geography and a history are given an identity, most likely foreign to that of the reader (the opposite situation, where literary dialect speaks directly to the same regional identity of the reader is worthy of further thought, another day perhaps?). The result is infers difference and otherness.

If this is too difficult to grasp (especially for the mono-lingual reader), then let me try to briefly explain it in reverse. Take Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The difference in dialects of black characters, poor white and wealthy southerners, young and old is obvious even to a reader unfamiliar with them. Each dialect depicts a different identity based on race, age, location and wealth. So how do we then translate these subtle and not-so-subtle linguistic differences, replete with idioms and other expressions contemporary to the period setting? Do we go for the “meaning” approach in which we render the basic meaning of the various expressions? Do we make the language less temporally foreign and find equivalent contemporary, more now expressions in order to connect with a reader unfamiliar with the original cultural context of the novel? But in doing so, we run the risk of erasing the specific historical and cultural identities of characters and prevent their language play from ringing out clearly. Yet again, do we attempt to match the languages or literary conventions of the period and emulate them (the American south in the 1880s with Meiji era Japan)? It would appear then that dialect, however imperfect, is the way to go. Since dialects are living (though as a result of specifically targeted Meiji Era policies, many are rapidly disappearing) and effortlessly convey a sense of place, time and culture they have a function which modernisation and emulation cannot approximate. That said, we ought to take note of Hiramoto’s warning against implicit discrimination when matching dialects of different languages to convey specific meaning.

But what does all of this have to do with video games? As you may know, Japan is video game Mecca. With a few notable exceptions, global gaming culture has been undeniably shaped by Japanese language, culture, and identity. Almost every charismatic video game character is of Japanese invention. During the heyday of the original video game boom, the regional North American branch of Nintendo was responsible for both the language and cultural translation of Japanese games for the American (and in fact European and Pacific) market. Both Lvls and Legends of Localization have thoroughly dug into the peril and humor of translating games across language and culture. Nintendo of America is infamous for substituting or otherwise editing out themes and characters, especially those concerned with sexuality or the occult. Whole stories have even been retrofitted to English language versions of games, erasing their cultural specificity and updating language to what was perceived as hip at the time. Meanwhile, in the current age, voice acting has taken on a much greater role in modern games. What struck Popmatter’s Brice as odd, also rubs me the wrong way. While understandable (after all the primary market is the US) the translation from Japanese to (American) English, recalling Gone With the Wind sees a similar use of dialect and accent to represent (and marginalise) difference and otherness. In this scenario, a supposedly generic standard American accent is used to represent the American consumer and others, whether human or otherwise are spoken with different accents and dialects. This is a problem of awareness.

For a multilingual consumer, it is possible to read with nuance and affection the contours and limits of linguistic variation. Meanwhile, for the (majority) monolingual player, dialect choice runs a serious and likely risk of compounding stereotypes via unreconstructed repetition. Translation is rarely perfect, indeed there are good and bad translations. How we judge the merits of translation, like anything else is directly related to our expectations, experience and intent. For instance, as a metal head I have seen both “literal” and poetic translations of death metal lyrics. Perhaps it reveals my age in saying so, however, I prefer the poetic to the literal. If you asked me five years ago, my answer would have been the opposite, for at that time “literal” was about all I could handle and it helped consolidate my Japanese language knowledge and skills. And here we arrive at the very simple thing I wanted to say from the beginning: when we translate language and culture, how do we decide, calculate just how much complexity and difference the end user can “handle”?

Hiramoto’s 2009 article, “Slaves Speak Pseudo Toohoku-ben: The Representation of Minorities in the Japanese Translation of Gone With the Wind”, originally published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (13/2, 249-263) can be found here.

Hang on... was that Lars Ulrich?

2011-11-16T22:23:00.000-08:00

When I got my first internet connection at home, I was overjoyed. Can you imagine how it felt to be able to finally download that song? At a capped download rate and 56k, things took a while. I gazed with wonder at the DSL and cable connections my American friends were using on Napster, WinMX and later DC+. During that period, hundreds of individuals were singled out and faced litigation and fines. Metallica’s Lars Ulrich stood up for mega-corporate interests and aided in prosecuting illegal downloads.

These days it is possible to argue that the entire landscape of the internet has been shaped by file-sharing and illegal downloading. File-sharing, once arcane and somewhat tantalising in a naughty way is now mainstream. When reading a topic on an internet forum relating to “best” download sites, my only reply was “google”. Certainly, P2P (peer to peer) file sharing software still exists. The bit torrent method of downloading simply built on the scaffolding of earlier sharing software. However, currently, the potential pirate needs little more than browser software and a little knowledge of commonly shared file types and search parameters. File storage sites such as Mediafire, Megaupload, Fileserve, Filesonic and Rapidshare emulate the good old days of Usenet, only now with short, month long contracts and incredible download speeds.

Just today I read an article in the Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. The article proudly trumpeted the death of the torrent search site Diwana.org. What made Diwana special was its focus on Australian and New Zealand television content. From Neighbours to A Current Affair to Funniest Home Videos, from the banal to the innovative, it was all available at Diwana. If a criticism can be made of the site, it is that Diwana used and enforced a rather outdated seed/peer sharing ratio system. In some contexts, such a system works well, especially where there is a large user base and constant data traffic. However, the potential audience for Australian and New Zealand TV outside of these areas is obviously small. After all, even in Australia, many programs are available to download or stream free of charge: provided the viewer accesses these services from an Australian IP address. What this means is that potential downloaders are mostly Australians, outside of Australia and those in Australia without access to HDD/Blu-Ray recording devices. In other words a very small number. So once an uploader (seed) has lost interest in a particular file, said file becomes impossible to download.

In a move reminiscent of a late nineties, short haired Metallica, producers of ABC1’s well received drama The Slap (due for DVD release in December 2011), recently targeted and instigated a shutdown of Diwana for having Slap torrent files available for download. Naturally, one cannot help but to feel sympathy for the plight of the producers. After all, they are responsible for fronting the money required to produce a drama for TV. If their product fails to break even, let alone make a profit they will at best receive far less money for future productions and be unable to produce either follow up or new series. So congratulations and shame upon the producers for stymieing illegal downloads...

That is right. I said shame. More than anything, what there actions demonstrate is that the producers (or those in legal acting on their behalf) have a very narrow, limited concept of what the internet is and the extent of file-sharing. As the article notes, while Diwana has been shut down, the series remains widely available on any number of torrent sites. A single completed download, the creation of a torrent file and uploading that file to multiple torrent search sites can take anywhere from ten minutes to a few hours. Hey, ABC1? The cat is out of the bag. Not only is the series available on multiple torrent sites, it is also available via file storage sites. Furthermore, when the DVD is released in a few weeks (if not before as a result of employee sleight of hand thievery), it will be ripped, encoded and uploaded within minutes.

The Slap’s producers have effectively shut down one of the most important, specifically Australian oriented content sites. Although imperfect, Diwana offered humour and critique through a number of TV shows to a small number of Australians across the world. They may have prevented a single torrent file from eating into their profits but they have also gained a greater number of pirates who now not only want to see the show because of the publicity as well as those pirates who will copy and distribute out of spite. Did they adjust for these losses as well? Who can know? Lars Ulrich has entered the building.

Vegetarian Me – Part 1

2011-11-16T22:22:00.000-08:00

I have been vegetarian (meaning I eat eggs and dairy) for about fifteen years. In that time I have probably heard just about every criticism of vegetarianism that can be made. In the past I have assuaged such negativity by retreating into the world of knowledge and counter-arguments accumulated over the years. But the 60s, the 70s? They are no more. The zeal of that time, the zeitgeist has well and truly subsided. An inspired, environmental curiosity relegated to Woodstock documentaries and middle aged regret. The current age is one dominated by information, regardless of whether or not it is “true”. Indeed, much more important than truth is truth’s analog: the rhythm and distribution of repetition. If the same thing is said, over and over and in so many places then it cannot be anything other than truth. Such agglomerations of contemporary neurosis do not merely litter the internet, rather, they define it.

One particular issue I find confounding is that of soy. It has been for quite a number of years now, quite fashionable to not only question the so-called health benefits of soy but also to outright deny the little beans. I am reminded of 9/11 deniers, climate change sceptics and Obama birthplace doubters. The lines, as if read from a script have been repeated enough times that their veracity is irrelevant. What is most frightening is that these themes have become tangible enough in the minds of people as to have become truth ipso facto. Meanwhile, what seems to elude the staunchest critics of soy (fermented or otherwise) is that hundreds of millions of people in North East Asia (especially China, Korea and Japan) have been eating soy for thousands of years with no problems. Because the reality of this apparently cut-and-dry historical, cultural, geographical, biological and culinary fact, is well outside the experience of most Americans (and indeed their proxies in Australia, Canada etc), it simply cannot be comprehended. Let us turn toward what I believe to be the two key arguments against soy: industrial production and oestrogen.

Industrial production of soy, is led mostly by US farmers being crushed under the cruel boot of debt, soil salination, erosion and fluctuating (if only downward) commodity prices. Soy beans along with corn were the golden crop of American agriculture, used to make everything from food manufacturing ingredients such as lecithin, oil, MSG and protein powder to plastics, and nutritional supplements. Such widespread farming of soy has seen biotech companies invest massive amounts of money in unwanted plant and animal control, fertilizers, breeding and genetic engineering. The result being that along with corn, soy has entered the American (and international) food chain so thoroughly as to be inextricable. The opposition to this over-supply and over-consumption of soy is understandable. After all, if beans grown on dead soil, fertilised and protected with chemicals originating from crude oil and then harvested and processed using a wide variety of chemical technological practices, they are hardly food anymore, instead, just another substance in an agro-industrial money making system. To this degree, criticisms relating to toxicity and over-consumption are wholly understandable. This soy scoffing vegetarian pretty much agrees with them. Let us take a look at the second argument.

Soy isoflavons have been variously defined/defamed as being oestrogen analogs. But what does this actually mean? Apparently, soy isoflavons found in “unfermented” soy products send signals to the body to produce oestrogen. The criticism here is that producing too much oestrogen can have negative effects on health. This is a malady perfectly suited to the uber-Christian, homophobic American mainstream. “My son’s a fucking faggot because we gave him too much soy as a child”. Amid all the hollering about the evils of soy, the feminisation of boys seems to attract the loudest, most vociferous voices. If the result of so-called feminisation via soy is the social and economic stability evident in Japan, then I say: “Bring it on!”. In fact, why don’t we revisit the second paragraph: hundreds of millions of people have been eating unfermented soy for thousands of years with few, if any, ill-effects.

If there is anything actually “wrong” with soy, then I would attribute it to mass agro-industrial production more so than anything in the beans themselves. So soy deniers, go back to rejecting night-shades (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, chillies and bell peppers), hating on carbohydrates and blaming obesity on genetics rather than lifestyle and leave that little bean alone.

Astomatous – The Beauty of Reason (Review)

2011-11-16T22:21:00.000-08:00

Fear Factory changed my life. As a teen, I had heard Soul of a New Machine and loved the attempts the band made at juxtaposing and cross breeding stylistic elements (new wave, techno, death metal). When Demanufacture dropped, the band’s sound had been streamlined and improved significantly. By the time Obsolete was released, much of the ferocity of the first album was lost. Obsolete is an excellent album but leans towards accessibility far more than its predecessors. Finally, with Digimortal the band demonstrated their ability to pick up and interpret the nu-metal zeitgeist and infuse elements of hip hop and groove. Fear Factories sound stayed fairly consistent (if somewhat anemic) over their next two Dino-less albums. Then with Mechanize, the ferocity had returned.

Over at Invisible Oranges, there was a feature on the role of disgust in death metal. Bands like Autopsy and much of the first wave of Swedish death metal possessed an ability to create dangerous, nasty sounding riffs that sounded equally vomited as roared. Continuing in this vein, I would argue that ferocity has a significant role to play, particularly in the more extreme metal genres. By ferocity, I do not mean “brutal”. But like the term brutal, ferocity is to a large degree a phenomenon defined by the individual listener. For me, ferocity can be both exciting as well as exhausting. When tempered by melody, groove or original/inspired song writing, ferocity becomes another musical emotional palette to draw from. However, untempered ferocity, for this listener requires too great of an emotional investment to appreciate. I can acknowledge the ferocity of hardcore and metal straddling groups such as Converge and The Dillinger Escape Plan. The problem is that I can only listen for a short time before the ferocity exceeds itself and becomes a repetition of a metal meme. This holds true for black metal as well, the cutting guitar tones, white noise, fast tempos and reverb eventually blur together to create a constant swelling and retreat of white noise.

Astomatous’ new album, The Beauty of Reason, has ferocity. Think death metal via the dissonance and goosestepping rhythmic lurch of Gorguts, the instrumental chops of Hate Eternal and the on the edge of the precipice of madness advocated by Australia’s psychedelic, death metal by way of black metal (and vice versa) of Stargazer all played by the rhythm section of one of the key proponents of American black metal, New York’s Krallice and you have The Beauty of Reason. This is a ferocious album. While it constituent parts may appear to resonate with my argument against excess ferocity above, the reality is the songs, while unquestionably death metal are well crafted, interesting, familiar without being predictable and exciting. There are different shades of ferocity squeezed into what is essentially a twenty first century update of the Florida tech-death sounds of the early and mid nineties. Ferocious and original. Now if only I had enough money to finance a vinyl release for these New Yorkians, then all would be well in the world! Alas, digital and compact disc versions are available on the band’s bandcamp page.

Black Metal – Old World vs New World

2011-11-16T22:18:00.000-08:00

I came very late to the world of black metal. In my mind the scene was dominated by Scandinavian, pseudo-pagan misanthropists (on re-reading, I have to wonder why that prevented me from listening). In fact, more than anything, it was the anti-Christian aspect of the genre which did not sit well with me. I am not Christian but neither am I necessarily “against” Christianity. Back in university I got neurologically rearranged by Derrida and Spivak. Poststructuralism and feminism exploded the concept of binary opposition. Put simply one is always defined by the other and therefore the non-other one can never be a pure, monolithic position. Basically, by opposing Christianity, one continues to utter its name and invoke its ghosts. Much like internet “haters” who vehemently criticise whatever it is that displeases them, oppositional positions simply reinforce existing hegemonies. If you hate the new Lou Reed and Metallica album Lulu, why spend your precious, limited energy on writing a treatise against it? Just like your mother always said, and truer even more so in this internet age: if you ignore it, it will go away. By contributing to the zeitgeist, even as negative output all we achieve is an ensuring of the hated object’s position at the top of a list of search results.

The same goes for black metal. For me, the greatest irony is that in supposedly post-Christian Europe, a certain type of European anti-Christian left over from the early 90s still predominates. Corpse paint and grainy monochrome photography, unreadable scribbly logos, the occasional appropriation of grotesque true crime photographs or otherwise staged scenes of shock, hand drawn sharpie artwork or else unreflexlive tributes to a bygone age are a persistent aesthetic.

Meanwhile in the hyper-Christian US, much black metal dispenses with anti-Christian sentiment and instead turns the focus to urban depression (Nachtmystium, Leviathan, Xasthur) and psychosis (Black Anvil), environmentalism (Wolves in the Throne Room), mysticism and the occult (Unearthly Trance, while perhaps more doom than black metal definitely share the strange/uncanny vibe of the latter) and contemporary wars (Cobalt).

Once black metal is dragged biting and shrieking out of the Old World and into the New World(s), it loses its preoccupation with nostalgia for an ancient, non-existent, impossible past and instead adapts to the environmental and cultural contours of its new place. A perfect example of this is Australia. The development of black metal in places such as Australia (Mournful Congregation, Striborg, Stargazer, Portal) shows how new conceptual vistas, incorporating local feeling and concerns into the music can draw both on the tightly defined historical origins of the genre and adapt it to place in order to create something original and exciting.

Thus if we look to Europe for orthodox black metal authenticity, it is in the non-Euro world that we find innovation, originality and risk.

Cops: “Watcha gonna do?”

2011-11-15T03:15:00.000-08:00

Not long after starting high school, my family moved to a not so new, rather familiar, indeed depressing town. But in those first six months of school before the move I made an excellent friend, his name is Wayne. Wayne and his family were the essence of modern multicultural Australia, one of six (seven?) kids he lived with his Aboriginal father and Jehova’s Witness mother. They had left the suburbs and gone bush. As the family home was being built, they lived in a rustic and equally awesome improvised dwelling made up of two caravans, corrugated iron, wood and nails. The whole thing was powered by generator and the time we spent playing video games at night was limited and therefore precious. I stayed at Wayne’s house many times over the next few years, taking the slow, XPT down through the no-man’s land between Casino and Grafton. One of my strongest memories (aside from the chicken we had to kill one day) is of watching TV in his older brother’s caravan: American football, David Letterman and Cops.

About a year ago, I jumped back on Cops to discover that while brand names and car models had changed, the desperation, fear, humour and duty remained constant. What can be learned about life from Cops cannot be underestimated. Aside from repeatedly showing the viewer how not to act in an encounter with police, it also humanises police, allowing them very brief and admittedly tightly limited opportunities to speak of the how, why, when and where of police work. Further, the featured police officers often express deep affection for the places, communities in which they work.

However, what I love most about Cops is the frequent subtle and overt ruptures of the fourth wall. The shadow of the boom microphone on a late afternoon concrete wall, the reflection of the camera light and camera operator in the window of the patrol car and the rare but exciting instances when a scene of arrest and pursuit scales out of control of the individual officer and results in intervention by the production crew.

Cops is not an easy program to watch, nor is it perfect. It frequently crosses the very fine line between documentary and exploitation. The same kinds of people (poor, mostly black, frequently white drug addicts and prostitutes) feature regularly and combined with the stereotypes surrounding them provide a certain kind of voyeuristic entertainment. What it does well, though, is showing in a not so flattering light the reality of poor, high crime neighbourhoods and the horror unleashed on communities that is crystal meth.

Now in its twenty-fourth season, Cops is going strong. Twenty-four seasons later though, and one would think that the perps would know enough to shut their mouths when placed under arrest!

Housos – “I Shouldn’t but I can’t not!”

2011-11-15T03:13:00.000-08:00

Paul Fenech’s new comedy centered around a housing commission block in fictional Sunnyvale started on SBS Australia a couple of weeks ago. Much like his other comedies, Fat Pizza and Swift and Shift, the emphasis is on slapstick and offensive humour. What makes this new program so appealing to me, even as a fan of his previous works is its location. Like the characters in the show, I too grew up on a commission estate. I am escapee houso. While a lot of the criticism in regard to the show focuses on the strong language and crude humour, this former Houso wonders if said critics have ever been to, let alone lived on a commission estate. Had they such experience they might not be so quick to attack.

Growing up as a houso I have seen first hand ethnic based violence, welfare scams, domestic violence, neighbourhood violence, robberies, beatings, vandalism and hopelessness. The world of housos is not uniform, there are decent enough areas, even if I have never had the experience in living in them. Fenech’s portrayal of this reality, if anything is far kinder and more affectionate than it should be. I believe may viewers/critics out there would find this the most disturbing.

While my own Sunnyvale was a hard lot to cop, just like Housos, there were moments of real joy and possibility. It is a world to which I do not desire to return, nor do I feel particularly nostalgic about it. Nevertheless, it rings true to me and although exaggerated in many respects it is great to see a self-reflexive, humorous depiction of a world I thought would never be seen outside of A Current Affair and Today Tonight.

Thanks Pauly!

Death – Sound of Perseverance (Review)

2011-11-15T03:08:00.000-08:00

I came quite late to the progressive death metal of the 1990s. In fact, were it not for the internet I may have come later still. The early to mid-90s gave birth to some wonderfully new re-imaginings of death metal. Incorporating the recklessness of thrash, the rhythmic complexity of jazz and demonstrating a penchant to experiment melodically and harmony, progressive metal of this time has been as much maligned and ignored as it has been praised. Atheist stormed onto the metal stage in 1989 with twisted rhythms, harmonized leads and swinging bass. Cynic changed all the rules in 1993 as they emphasized fluid, tribal rhythms, burbling fretless bass, alien sounding vocoded vocals and lead work that gave more than a nod to traditional jazz guitar filtered through a death metal aesthetic.

Death meanwhile, started out in the vein of early thrash flavoured death metal and grew to into something else entirely. Schuldiner’s leads and riffs became increasingly melodic and his solos adventurous. On the savage yet melancholy Sound of Perseverance, it is possible to hear Schuldiner’s frustration with the limits of metal as he explores new ideas. Indeed on first listen Perseverance’s compositions seem a bit jerky and incohesive. Multiple listens, however, reveal the purpose of these stop-start tendencies. What makes repeat listens enjoyable is that these fragments are held together by an unfailing commitment to melody and narrative. Songs twist, turn and surprise, as was no doubt, Schuldiner’s purpose. Equally challenging and enjoyable, the Sound of Perseverance was the perfect swan song for Death. Who knows where Schuldiner would have gone next? What would he have made of groups such as Dysrhythmia and Obscura who have taken his explorations to new heights.

Perseverance is reasonably widely available on vinyl (unlike Symbolic…).

I been tryin’ to get to New Orleans (Can’t you help me?) Part 2

2011-11-15T03:07:00.000-08:00

Blood, bones and wood.

Steel, stones and rope.

Flowed across the world and into the river’s mouth.

Cut, burnt, buried, built.

Fields sweat, bleed and weep.

And so crops rose.

Out of these fluids, these lives

A bittersweet melody rose.

A longing for home with no chance of arrival.

First, flat third, fourth, flat fifth and back to first.

Different soils, different bloods, different times.

Knitted to past, present and future.

I been tryin’ to get to New Orleans (Can’t you help me?).

2011-10-17T00:35:00.000-07:00

Part 1

Growing up beside rivers and creeks, inland water has always held a special attraction. Willows, stinging nettles, river cane and blade grass have lifted me up, stung, hidden and cut me. I have been pricked by flailing dog fish, bitten by mosquitoes and chased off by snakes. Rivers have sated my hunger and my thirst, they have dragged me and cooled me. Wherever I go in this world, wherever I meet a river, I am taken back home. And in this way, though I have never been, the Mississippi calls me.

When I was a boy, I played a computer game with my friends, North South. In this game the player chooses to be Union or Confederate and leads her side to victory. As a child I knew that the north won and that it was the side to choose. Yet the nation of factories, railroads and industry I would defend seemed so alien when compared to the agrarian south.

In high school a friend of mine played me his copy of Down’s first album, Nola. While it would be several years until I could fathom this slice of southern heavy metal, the hazy psyche-out artwork collages of mansions, rivers, swamps and trees articulated an aesthetic to me which I carry to this day. In the centre of the CD booklet is a photo of the band members walking bearded, tattooed, shirted and shirtless through a cemetery under a bright blue sky. They walked with such strength, purpose and pride. Not rednecks but proud to be from the South.

Earlier this year I watched the excellent HBO series, Treme. The story of Treme is told from multiple perspectives and successfully explains via demonstration the very kernel of New Orleans’ jazz, joy and sorrow. Scenes of flooded streets, receding floodwaters, flood damage struck a chord with me, transporting me once more to my birthplace, the frequently flooded Northern New South Wales city of Lismore.

Now it seems as though everywhere and every way I turn, parallels between the Crescent City and my own continue to multiply. And that is why I want to go, that is why I am trying to get to New Orleans. Somehow even though I have never been there, I belong there. The rivers of my childhood flowed into the ocean and surely at least an atom or two of that flow whether as rain or as the ocean made it to the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve been tryin’ to get to New Orleans… can’t you help me?

Pestilence - Spheres (Review)

2011-10-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

In 1993 Morbid Angel, Cynic, Type O Negative, Life of Agony, Tool, Carcass, Monster Magnet, Death, Sepultura, Entombed and Coroner all released high selling, classic or else genre defining albums. Also among these releases was Pestilence’s particularly malignant ugly duckling, Spheres. Spheres is an album which is wrong in so many senses: it is a major stylistic break, there is an abundance of guitar synthesis experimentation and the highly compressed, treble heavy production is a curiosity. Yet it is also these maladies which elevate Spheres to classic status.

Spheres is not an easy listen. In addition to the problems mentioned above, song structure and dynamics are fairly uniform from first to last. Similarly, the riffs are rather repetitive and not very adventurous rhythmically. Even the solos with their nod toward atonality and modern jazz modal theory are not very easy to “get”. Repeated listens of Spheres, however, yields interesting results.

When I first heard Spheres, I knew I was listening to something different and original. The problem was that I simply could not find the “groove” on this album. After repeated listens, I began to identify the subtle rhythmic tweaks and the swinging push and pull between bass and drums. After further listening, I was able to tune my ears to the different guitar synth timbres snaking throughout the album. Every time I listened to Spheres whether in the background or with intent, I continued to find new musical elements such as the interplay between metal riffing and harmonic/atmospheric ambiance underneath the music. It was on about my tenth listen that it all knitted together for me.

Unlike other jazz informed metal bands such as Cynic where the focus is on a fluid, jazz melody informed metal or Atheist where rhythmic bombast and ferocity or even Meshuggah’s emphasis on 4/4 superimposed onto complex time signatures, Pestilence focused on modal harmonic interplay. This is not an easy aspect of music to comprehend and enjoy, after all subtle shifts in counterpoint melodies and solos which start in one key and end in another yet are modally coherent amid a thick sonic stew of diverse sounds are not as attractive as pentatonic/chromatic shredding, breakdowns and giant riffs. The songs themselves are best conceptualized as frameworks around which a deeply considered harmonic and melodic sensibility is placed.

Although almost twenty years old, Pestilence’s Spheres is one of the most engaging, interesting, confounding and exciting albums I have heard in a very long time.

Intensity, velocity and ennui.

2011-09-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

I have just come off summer vacation. Back at work, back into the maelstrom. One of the things I like about extreme weather, hot or cold, is the slow down effect it has on daily life. Hot weather creates an abundance of flora and fauna, it also imposes limits on our physicality: struggle too hard against summer and the net result is heat exhaustion, migraines and dehydration. The beauty of slow down is that it gives us an opportunity to reflect. Life is way too fast and as a species we seem to be obsessed with cramming as much as possible into the shortest period of time. We are addicted to multitasking, we are so proficient that we carry it into the most intimate areas of our lives. We sleep in front of TVs, have a smart phone under the pillow, maintain twitter, facebook and email accounts, simultaneously. Various human pleasures (listening, watching, reading, writing) are consolidated into discrete, private devices which increasingly map our use patterns and determine future use patterns and products. And then, along comes summer.

We retreat into air-conditioned bliss, jealously inhabit cool, sterile spaces conducive to our private reveries of consumption. And amid this electric, electronic cacophony we find myriad ways of avoiding long and deep engagement. Digital society, it seems to me, encourages us to graze without memory or responsibility, we are herded by whatever zeitgeist toward certain conclusions and forget to exercise the talents our forebears developed for generations before us: skilled orality, memory, attentiveness and reflection. While the “convenience” (now there’s a weasel word) of a digitally encoded society cannot be denied, in our full and unquestioning embrace of it we are substituting our wetware for corporate produced software/hardware combinations.

It seems as though digital society requires an ambivalence which in turn requires insensitivity and callousness. This is because we are overwhelmed by information, there is simply too much for us to process. Take it or leave it. And even if we had all the time in the world, we would be unable to process it all. And yet it is always there, we can always reach out, access it on a whim.

Previous patterns of cultural appreciation favored depth. Current patterns emphasize speed, intensity and ennui. We are taught that being on the frontier is the place to be. We are discoverers, adventurers, colonizers. We want to go there, be there and do there first. Or as close to first as possible. Then in the shortest possible period of time we are required to develop a deep knowledge of the product, even if we only fake it. And then, as the tidal wave of zeitgeist catches up we must abandon the product before the crest reaches us. For there is a shame, it seems in not being there first and not abandoning first. End. Repeat. So the pleasure of appreciation is in fact divorced from the object of appreciation and instead aligned with the principles of intensity, velocity and ennui favored by the digital realm. It is the movement we take pleasure in rather than the stillness.

Recently I have been working with software engineers and programmers and so I have of course taken an interest in their labor. Growing up with the primitive early days of digital society taught me that even the simplest looking software applications require painstaking effort and attention to detail. Superior, excellent software code does not just appear out of the ether, it is not merely the result of cut and paste (aka script kiddies), but instead the culmination of years of study, practice and writing. And while the result of that writing may not be literary in the sense of a novel or a poem, at its best, code is poetic. When I was younger I often played video/computer games. In fact as a child of the dawning of the digital age, games are never particularly far from my life. In my youth, it was enough to play the game, finish the game and move on. But often, money, availability and time constraints caused me to engage with certain games over a protracted period, discovering their limitations (Pacman’s legendary level 256, Pokemon’s non-game world navigation glitch, finishing Super Mario Bros in less than ten minutes etc) and the very edges of programming elegance and incompetence. Discovering limitations, glitches and secrets required perseverance and sustained engagement. However, in the present climate there are three factors which inhibit a late eighties to mid nineties level of intimacy with a game: (1) Difficulty level, (2) Over-abundance of information (FAQs/Walkthroughs) and (3) in game tutorials. Games today are much easier than games from two decades ago. Just last week, I fired up the original NES Zelda only to be reduced to the game over screen in around five minutes. The next time was within a minute! It took time to reacquaint myself with the play logic and level of difficulty circa 1986. Given how epic and convoluted the game is I could not help but to check online for maps. I found them. What made me look online? The lack of in game tutorial. The only advice you get early in the game is that it is dangerous to run around without a weapon, so your character is given one. The learning curve is steep and the game is hard. But unlike modern games where the feeling is one of being babied through the first half a dozen levels as all of the in game material is explained, Zelda throws you into the action. So, not only is it necessary to make sense of what the game is but also what the overall quest is.

This is not a rant on modern games. Modern games are perfectly fine and deeply entertaining, but they are less puzzle/mind based and geared more toward stimulation through simulation. Rich with light sources, shading, polygon counts and texture maps in the millions modern games can render an imaginative world so thoroughly and completely. They guide us through their worlds, envelop us with sensation and provide lasting images. At the same time though, the Western obsession with realism has resulted in a genre homogenization. Apparently gamers want certain games and that is what their given. So we see clones of first person shooters, clones of those clones, the same again for MMO games such as WOW etc. Yet the abstraction and symbolism of older games still holds an allure that is not only to do with nostalgia. The minimalism of older games lends them to active re-imagination and reformulation in the players mind whether in-game or away from the game.

The same applies to music. Just when I think I have finally wrapped my mind and ears around the new Autopsy album, I discover Disma. Then Morbus Chron. And I have to make a decision: do I listen to this variety of new music, or just let my knowledge of it subside and fade and listen to what I have? But even if I let the zeitgeist fade, that music is always there. Just how am I supposed to listen to it all, let alone buy even a fraction of it? Do I really need the new Sepultura album, as good as it is, or should I just go listen to Arise again? Does Entombed really need to release a new album or should they just re-release their seminal albums on vinyl? Everyone is scrambling to be in the limelight, yet fame is perhaps more fickle now than ever before. Amid all the clamor of self promotion what we choose to like seems almost arbitrary. And even as we might click that dreaded “Like” button along with 13,000 other users our appreciation remains private, isolated and lonely. And even when, even if we were with it, the moment passes, our investment of intensity and velocity crushed under ennui.

Wild Fermentation – Sandor Katz (Review)

2011-09-01T23:59:00.001-07:00

It is hard for me to say which is true: do I hate or love Sandor Katz? Starting with an interest in cheese several years ago I have worked my way through yogurt, labna, cottage cheese, butter-milk, nukazuke, sauerkraut, kimchee, dosai, beer and wine. Although my ambition started small after witnessing the alchemy of fermentation first hand, synapses were ignited and before I knew it my very concept of nature and the world was transformed. I went from being a timid beginner, following recipes closely equally for authenticity as for hygiene. With more practice and more research I soon learned that both former and latter were much more fluid concepts than my beginner’s mind was able to accept. I learned of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of “good” versus “bad” microorganisms and the conditions favorable to their abundance. This was a valuable lesson, after all, it taught me that cause and effect are not as simple as isolated phenomena and that they are part of a larger active environment. Fermentation can teach us all one very important lesson: that single-mindedness results in disaster.

So along comes Sandor Katz with his excellent book, Wild Fermentation. Essentially a more refined, detailed and articulate version of my experience, Wild Fermentation is a DIY textbook. It does not require obtaining special equipment, ingredients or chemicals. It eschews industrial production logic and reconnects with tradition as living practice and not frozen knowledge. It even presents an ethical, ecologically responsible perspective and rationale for why we should all be fermenting. My only problem with Katz’s book is that he wrote it first. And that I did not.

The Buffy Factor

2011-09-01T23:54:00.000-07:00

There are certain scents, sounds and tastes which transport us. Whether we want to or not, they drag us into different places, different times, different selves. Television is exceedingly good at taking us back, we trust it to guide us to memories and feelings in a time and a place. It is no wonder reruns of certain zeitgeist shows are so popular, they help to reconstitute bridges between us in the past and us in the present.

While much has been written both during and after the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer phenomenon, there is one dimension left largely untouched and that is Buffy as an interstitial window. Starting in 1997 and finishing in 2003, Buffy spans the pop culture landscape of: the complete loss of metal to grunge, the rise of Generation X aesthetic, the celebration of self-reference, pastiche, tribute and juxtaposition due to the rapid development and expansion of postmodernism from the halls of the academy to the mainstream. We witnessed the fall of an American president to a sex scandal and the subsequent ascension of a war mongering good-time boy to the presidency. War was waged on the US and revenge extracted/inflicted upon two third world cultural others. And during this, words like terror, justice and even America itself as a signifier took on new, deadly meanings. Postmodern playfulness took back seat to the seriousness of tragedy and war and a backlash to the anti-discrimination gains through “political correctness” assumed the volume of a roar.

Buffy’s aesthetic was self-reflexivity, it took well worn tropes and injected them into the present, it then gave those tropes a self-awareness. Buffy used stereotypes to eat away at the stereotypes, destabilizing their edges, spreading doubt. But this was not necessarily as negative as the narrative suggests. Although most of the time we pride stability as a virtue, we as frequently forget the power and delight of contradiction, dis-ease and fluidity.

In addition to this conceptual and visual aesthetic, Buffy also played with music zeitgeisting at the time. The grunge aesthetic, the rise of American college radio as a genre and other self aware Gen-X resulted in a melodic stew of melody, prettiness, grit and darkness. This is a genre aesthetic naturally not confined to the Buffy-verse, it happens elsewhere too.

For example, while Galactic Cowboys were never featured on Buffy and their most relevant album (self titled debut, 1991) predates the show by six years, their melodic and harmonic commitments, reminiscent of a pre-Napster pop world yet to be dominated by a specific and very limited type of hip hop, combined with a thrashiness yet to recede in the imminent face of a Seattle onslaught. Like Mindfunk and Tumbleweed, Galactic Cowboys married a plaintiveness to roughness, rode between the genre landscapes and created something new, engaging and very much of the time. The irony being that in all three cases, the capture of nuance was perhaps too subtle for the time and now they are all but forgotten.

To me, Buffy captured the spirit of the times with subtlety, grace and originality. Its spanning of the period pre/post terror, from democrat to republican, domestic to global, analog to digital is most effectively captured in its narrative, its dialogs, its ethics as much as fashion, music and intent. Although fiction, Buffy may well tell us more of a certain time than any other more traditional historical resource.

Mastodon - Best stoner since Kyuss?

2011-08-16T15:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, like most of you, I heard Mastodon's first single (they still do that?) from forthcoming LP "The Hunter". This is the second track to be released from the album, it is also the second, swinging, mid paced, melodic, stoner-y song. "The Hunter" is shaping up to be (a) probably the best stoner rock released on a major label since Kyuss and (b) likely to be one of the most succinct, committed, adventurous and playful psyche released in the last twenty years (c) the album to finally lose the "Wish they'd go back to Remission" crowd. Bring on September 29!

Watch "Curl of the Burl".

Why metal rules.

2011-07-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Phyte Club’s K8Y – Reply to a reply.

Thank you for the undeserved kind words. I really appreciate what you are doing. It took me a long time to come back to metal as proud and unreserved. Metal had been a guilty pleasure. But as you wrote, there is an essence, a vibe, a something to metal that a lot of music simply does not have. Predictably enough then, I have decided to write about just why that might be so. Here goes.

Why metal rules.

What is it that keeps the metal head transfixed? What is it that keeps us coming back for more? Why does metal hold the allure that it does? After thinking this through on the walks to and from work the other day I identified a number of elements I believe to be vital to my enjoyment of heavy metal. Naturally your enjoyment may be very different to mine, I do not mind. Go ahead, tell me, comments are enabled after all.

1. Rhythmic Intensity.

Rhythmic pleasure in metal can be divided into three categories: overall intensity, push-pull and swing. These categories are not isolated from each other and can be present simultaneously even within a single song, yet I would argue each offers a distinct form of listening pleasure.

Overall intensity refers to the stage of metal’s development at the present moment. That is a complex barrage of kick drums, busy cymbal work, rolling toms and blast beats. Drummers in extreme metal tend to be highly proficient, their rhythms complex, convoluted and lyrical. On the other hand, it can all sound a bit too “busy” and I find it at times exhausting. Metal has always relied on strong rhythms and as recording technology has improved, rhythm sections have become tighter and tighter and for some listeners, sterile as there is no timbrel diversity and all the sounds are quantised lock-step with a metronome.

The second category I call push-pull. This describes tempo and timing changes, Suffocation style from blast beat to breakdown, or an Obituary style death march tumbling into a poisonous swamp made from the syrup of zombies. And back again. More classically, the bridge of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” giving way to the recalibrated main riff. Push-pull tears the listener out of their comfort zone, giving him/her a song within a song, a derive into something else, somewhere else.

The final category is swing. Swing in metal often sounds as it does in jazz. A little lag here, a slight gallop ahead there. Especially evident in the bluesy shuffle of seventies metal and sixties proto-metal, swing originally embodied the spirit of the times, the apple had yet to rot and roll far from the tree where it had fallen. A great contemporary articulation of this is Clutch, who combine blues, jazz and funk with a form of hard rock which grooves as much as it roars.

Some of my favourite swing is that which appears in the punky “don’t give a damn” aesthetic of Swedish D-beat and early death metal. Without metronomes and post production studio wizardry the music of bands such as Dismember and Entombed relies on attitude and swagger instead of technicality for maximum rhythmic “brutality”.

Sometimes, as is the case with nu-metal, swing arises as a result of an adaptation of hip hop genre elements. The jazz and soul backbone of hip hop is mutated into a lurching funk which often takes the form of non 4/4 meters (6/8, 7/8 etc). Rage Against The Machine, Rollins Band and Living Color all matched the looseness of punk with the taught bounce of funk to excellent effect.

There is yet another version of swing, however, that I notice functions in metal. I call this distinct version “aural drag”. Aural drag, while not strictly musicological (though it certainly can be instigated by performers) is a definite rhythmic phenomenon. I use the term to refer to when the attack of the drums and bite of the guitar articulate a rhythmic phrase and continue to develop it while the rest of the sounds, particularly low frequencies and sludgy reverb lag just slightly behind the leading sounds. A great example of this is early High On Fire. The tempos often reach close to thrash levels yet there is a bassy meatiness to the production which means that great slabs of sludge are constantly hauled behind the galloping beats. Another version of this can be found where a riff is triple-picked/kicked and repeated several times so that the low frequencies again lag behind the click-attack of the kicks creating swing via subsonic rumble. Neat!

Finally, there is the hyper-calculated swing of strike points a la Meshuggah (conceptual borrowing and gratitude to Jonathan Pieslak). This is where rhythmic payloads are introduced but not completed until a specified point where the various meters, time signatures within a piece simultaneously intersect. In this case the “swing” is massive, each repetition within the larger macro-structure accelerates the listener toward the strike point creating an unmistakable tension resolved only through concerted engagement with the compositions.

2. The Riff (repetition)

Most music is based on repetition. Ostinatos, riffs and phrases are key to defining various genres. Yet ask any metal head what s/he love about metal and the discussion will turn to “the riffs”. But what makes metal riffs different to riffs in other contexts? My argument is that it is not just the riff, but it is the riff as it is amplified and augmented with distortion. Through distorting a guitar tone in various ways various tones in the frequency spectrum are amplified to audibility to an extent virtually impossible in a non-amplified context. The tones most frequently amplified correspond to roughly the octave and the fifth of the note played (that said, some wonderful effects such as the Boss Hyper Fuzz can be driven to such extremes that overtones are amplified and reamplified and begin to modulate making anything but single note runs impossible). To me, that octave and fifth, the very basis of the power chord, doubly enhanced through amplification resonates in the air, with the body in a very pleasing way. Listen to some of the amplifier worship of bands such as Boris and Sunn 0))). The sound saturates the body to such an extent that it feels as though ones very atoms are humming.

This distortion applied to a musical phrase, welded to a powerful rhythm and repeated over and over stimulates a most primal reaction to music, the trance at the same time that it conveys a vibrational pleasure. To what degree this is confirmed by actual research, I cannot say, and I must admit, I only describe my own experience here. Nevertheless, a gateway to such rhythmic/vibrational pleasure can be found in the music of Om and especially the pre-Om Sleep album, “Dopesmoker”.

3. Mortality Paradox

This is a topic I mulled over since I started writing this article a few days ago. Being that there is so much to think about, it is after all, life and death, I decided to put the bulk of said thinking into another article. For now it is suffice to say that because metal deals so explicitly with death it is life affirming.

Moving away from the musicological points outlined above and more into the realm of thematic interpretation for a moment that death plays an undeniable part in metal cannot be understated. This engagement with death takes many forms and there are as many paths leading into conceptual and philosophical depths that we are seldom able to face, let alone contemplate. Sometimes metal takes us there and back, other times it leaves us stranded. Walking with Autopsy or Cannibal Corpse can be a harrowing experience of gruesome sights and depraved reasoning, which I believe is far more successful than film because it allows us to imagine fears built from the materials of our own psychologies.

Chris Lilley, Angry Boys: Uneasy Parody, Subtlety, Reflection

2011-07-14T05:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we laugh at things we should not. The misfortune of others, badly timed bodily functions, taboo thoughts and words. The line between funny and offensive is never so clear as those around us would claim. In fact a shift in context, a different audience on a different day can change the extent to which something is perceived as funny. Years ago my brother and I were riding alongside a busy road in a rural city in the north of NSW, Australia. I was on a rather dilapidated old thing and he on a new and brilliant mountain back. He turned around to talk to me and ploughed into a parked four wheel drive. He ricocheted off of the vehicle, together with his bike and flew onto the road. Aside from finding this beyond horrifying and funny, for some reason my concern was more for his bike than it was his life. We were poor after all and car-less, so to be plunged into a world of no transport was a fear greater than I was willing to face. I yelled to him “Better get you bike”. And he did just that. But those four words would come to haunt me over the next decade, any poke at his misfortune would result in a verbatim recitation: “Better get your bike”. It was funny and painful all at the same time.

Years later, longboard skating here in Japan, we were first-time zooming down a viaduct hill with just a rail between us, a three foot drop and a semi-permanent parade of cars. Speed wobbles set in at about halfway down, I had to do everything possible to maintain my line and turn my body to rubber so as to wobble with the board and not against it. For to do so would create greater force and I would be bucked. And it took all of my concentration, I could not dare to speak and warn my ill fated brother. My brother, a new skater not aware of this went down hard and fast, his brand new, almost two meter board flying off the path and onto the road. I leapt off of my board, checked he was okay, jumped onto the road and whipped his gargantuan board out of the way just in time as cars rushed down through the dark. From his mouth: “This makes up for the bike”. Vindicated, forgiven at last. Scary as it had been, it was still funny.

Chris Lilley is the creative force, actor and writer behind the ABC/HBO collaboration “Angry Boys”. A mockumentary centred around the lives of several boys in Australia (Juvenile detention centre, surfing legend, country twins), the US (S.Mouse!), and Japan (gay skater). It is examination of what makes boys angry. The delivery is realistic, deadpan and sincere. There is no laugh track, no ironic camera winking and a significant amount of “dangerous” non-PC language. While not always laugh-out-loud, “Angry Boys” does expertly straddle the divide between not-funny and offensive. The sincerity of its articulation coupled with participation of real children somewhat masks its satirical dimension. The satire is always present but I wonder that without an awareness of humour in the Australian would an audience necessarily “get” what is meant to be funny, ironic and scathing. Personally, I like to be made uncomfortable through engagement. I do not mean like in “Jackass” for example where physical extremity is used for “gross out” effect. No, I prefer conceptual discomfort, watching something that makes me laugh, that I resonate with, that speaks truth of my context but also undermines an easy appreciation.

Edit

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald featured a range of opinions from American hip hop artists and critics with regard to the “blackface” character of S.Mouse! (LINK). The consensus among opinions coalesced around two key themes (1) There is an uneasy tension when actors of one ethnicity attempt to play the role of a character from another ethnicity and (2) The version of hip hop being parodied is somewhat over simplistic and even outdated.

(1) “Becoming” an other is risky. No matter how hard we try, how good our performance, evidence that we are not that always remains. This is not to say that somehow identities are fixed and that we only over belong to one culture or ethnic group. It is just not that simple. So, on the mechanical level of becoming other there is the danger that our knowledge of the other is incomplete or based only within the realm of stereotypes. When you place this technical danger into complex cultural situations in which being other and becoming other are informed by histories of colonisation, slavery, unequal power relations and violence things start to get very dangerous.

Chris Lilley’s S.Mouse! character comes not so long after the now infamous “Hey, Hey It’s Saturday” “blackface” performance incident. One does wonder what Lilley was thinking when he created and acted this character. Lilley seems a rather astute observer of culture and expert in translating his observations into the kind of uneasy, “too close to home” satire outlined above. One would think that Lilley is also astute enough to have considered the effects of playing a black youth rapper in this age of global media visibility.

If I were to conjecture an answer to this, I would say that Lilley has an obvious aim of deconstructing and critiquing the cultural phenomenon of hip hop with regard to its context of male youth. By exposing S.Mouse! as a selfish, spoiled, out of touch character who himself equally trades on the tropes of gangster hip hop culture, I believe that Lilley is making a simple point: that the apparent criminal/ghetto/gangster reality bought and sold in hip hop is as much cynical pretence and artifice as it is reality. Thus the problem is that the real, unquestionable suffering of a large number of black Americans is routinely packaged into a product (music, fashion, liquor, film etc) eventually consumed not only widely within the US but also globally. Hence the S.Mouse! posters on the bedroom walls of the twins from Dunt, two white boys who could not be further from the reality of African-American poverty, yet identify with its cultural milieu.

Although I am not interested in defending Lilley perse (I do share the critique that his concept of hip hop is deeply dated and shows little nuance, discussed below), it is clear that given his shtick is that as a single actor he plays multiple roles (that in itself if a topic worthy of further investigation), in the context of S.Mouse!, that there was no other existing character he could have played without ethical dilemma. To play a black woman (mother, girlfriend) would invite a storm of controversy even greater than that which has already arisen. To play the father would mean a white man in blackface speaks as an authority to his son, routinely criticising the whole context of hip hop would be equally problematic.

Perhaps the problem is with choosing hip hop as the source context? What I mean is that had he chosen to portray a character within a country music context (Christian country, even), which I feel is ripe for satire, although the issues at stake may differ from what he wants to make as his main point, it could have been viable. That said, he could have easily gone down the Justin Beiber bubblegum pop route for an expose into artifice and image marketing. Yet, neither of these examples have the same cultural currency as hip hop across a broad range of adolescent male cultural contexts. Country music may revel in ignorance and tradition and Beiber-pop may well be merely cynical marketing exercise, but neither speaks to the context of young men growing up in hyper-masculine, violent and self-destructive contexts as does hip hop.

So which is it? Did Lilley have no choice or did he paint himself into a conceptual corner?

(2) I have noticed that when Lilley appears on TV, such as Good News Week, as Chris Lilley he not only appears to lack confidence but seems to be paralysed to the extent that he is unable to transfer his humour to the chaotic context of a live event. This leads me to think two things, one slightly more “out there” than the other.

First, his demeanour suggests that he is a meticulous artist and that his art is deeply calculated. If this is indeed true, then perhaps his art’s greatest strength is its greatest flaw: that it is calculated to be so close to the line between homage and parody that the inevitable audience reaction is ambivalence.

Second, perhaps Chris Lilley, as he appears before the public is another “character”. As I mentioned, he frequently appears nervous and uneasy in a live context, but is this too, shtick? Perhaps it is his take on the longer history of Norman Gunston, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson type Australian comedy. If this is so then it is a remarkable curiosity, since Lilley’s work is obviously targeted at a savvy younger audience to which I believe have only vaguely experienced said personalities. Maybe, Lilley is swimming against the tide of a retreating comedic era? Who then, is the real Chris Lilley?

Whomever he may be, he is certainly not sufficiently engaged with US hip hop culture. Lilley’s portrayal of hip hop is not only out of date, musically speaking, but also fails to adequately connect itself with the greater history of hip hop satire in the tradition of “Friday”, “Don’t Be A Menace To South Central When You’re Drinking Your Juice In The Hood” and “Fear of a Black Planet”. These works (and a number of others) demonstrate with affection and critique possibilities, contradictions and humour in hip hop as a music and also broadly as a cultural expression cutting across numerous ethnic and youth demographics.

Hip hop culture, predominantly from the US continues to exert enormous cultural power within America and around the world. Even white Australian teenagers from “out the back of buggery” are plugged into this cultural matrix, constructing their worldviews using hip hop as a referent. That this requires comment and critique is obvious, the problem is, however, how to execute such critique within the complex reality of capitalism, cultural expression, cultural colonisation, discrimination, inequality and poverty which are all key elements in the construction of contemporary hip hop. Lilley has tried? Has he failed? It is too early to say. I for one would like to hear his side of the story.

Premonition 13 – 13 (Review)

2011-07-14T05:56:00.000-07:00

As a lay Buddhist my world view is informed by principles which sometimes need a little explanation. One of these is the concept of permanence. Naturally, I do not impose to speak on behalf of all Buddhists, indeed as Buddhism has spread across as many cultures and territories such a feat would be impossible. Further, some of my explanation may not even gel with or be counter to the received orthodoxy. Nevertheless, I continue to dare to speak from this position. At the heart of Buddhism is a principle of impermanence. That is to say, the only permanency in this world is impermanency. This is neatly captured in the Western context when Benjamin Franklin uttered “Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” In other words, everything changes, everything passes, we all exist, we all bear the suffering of existence and then we no longer exist.

Nevertheless, we strive for permanency. Look around at the buildings, monuments, cultures, languages we create, watch the fervour with which we defend certain traditions because to not do so would loose uncertainty upon our lives. We struggle to attain and then maintain wealth, position and knowledge. Although only in my thirties myself, I cannot help but to flash forward sometimes to an imagined death bed, to think upon whether I really need to do something, have something and so on. From the perspective of death, or impermanence, what we have and what we want have their significance redistributed.

Is there a flipside to this? An optimistic rendering? Although a full discussion lies outside of this entry, I would say, “Yes”. I would call the best that we can do at permanency, consistency. Consistency is no silver bullet possessing some kind of immutable goodness. After all we can be consistently bad, consistently abusive, consistently violent and consistently incompetent. However, consistency can be one of our great virtues as human, even as it is underscored by uncertainty. To be consistent requires deep reflection, compassion and an awareness of context, a sensitivity to the subtlety of the world around.

To me Scott Weinrich (St Vitus, The Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, etc) represents musical consistency. From an opening note, that one is listening to Wino is a certainty. His guitar tone, so warm and distorted and his style from lethargic doom to psychedelic dreamscapes and white hot burning lead freak outs are unmistakable. That is all there is to say, really about a new Wino release. If you like what he does, you will like this. This new opus is more a return to the direction of Spirit Caravan, albeit with a little more melodic psyche and sonic space between the instruments, than anything he has done recently. One can only hope for more of the psyched out optimism and mysticism of the caravan. So here is me waiting for the second Premonition 13 album.

Evan Brewer – “Alone” (review).

2011-07-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

About six years ago I got back into playing bass guitar. After a long absence the instrument and I began a long period of re-acquaintance, reconciliation and shared growth. My ever suffering partner bought me a clunky little short-scale Pignose four-string with a built in mini-amp and speaker. Pulling the single volume knob on that little creature engages the amp and lets her sing. Turning the volume further up causes the little amp to overload and the speaker would rattle if it had the room, but it does not so the whole body resonates with the nasal, high mid-frequency sounds. In other words, it is less the little pink pig of its namesake and closer to something like a runty but tough and wily warthog.

Stanley Clarke once said something along the lines that it takes about ten years or two hundred gigs before one truly knows his/her instrument. Well, six years (and no gigs) later, her speaker works only intermittently and her strings have been changed but only once. Yet her single bridge humbucker and way too hot output are able to express my playing more exactly than instruments ten times her value. The key here is intimacy. I am certainly only a barely competent player, but my knowledge - harmonic, muscular, visual, tactile – which has developed over time with her has made me better able to express myself at the same time as her inherent beauty. A perfect match?

Evan Brewer’s first solo album, “Alone” is a showpiece of his excellent playing skills and more so his ability as a harmonically sophisticated composer. Coming to this album is not easy and it is hard to know just who it is intended for. After all, even for a bass player, locating the bass in the metal mix is not always easy (see list at bottom for some recommendations) and solo albums tend to somewhat dreary affairs, especially by bassists. Bass players have this knack for falling into an inescapable rut wherein the entire world is compressed and distilled into jazz-fusion fuelled by super high fidelity, out of context session musicians who lend little character to the proceedings and a few covers of “classics”. Thankfully, Brewer avoids all of the above.

Everything on “Alone” is composed by Brewer himself and again everything is bass. Perhaps there is somewhat of an over-abundance of “slappity-plank” sounds (personally, I love the more subdued legato runs and reversed chordal swell over-dubs on this album) but the compositions themselves are what save this from being a timbre driven Armageddon. Subtle harmonic variations on repetitions make not only for a pleasant listen but an engaging one as Brewer modulates a note here or there, changing the feel. The other stand out feature of this album is that the melodic and harmonic progressions are more classically, or classic metal oriented which lend the compositions a freshness somewhat reminiscent of distortion-less Cliff Burton via Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets. Finally, clocking in at under half an hour and without excursions into jamming, this is a very listenable album. Go Brewer!

Extreme Metal (With Bass)

Metal albums where bass players (a) tear up the joint with amazing playing/technique and/or (b) have fully gnarled totally audible recorded tones.

Suffocation – Pierced From Within

Atheist – Unquestionable Presence

Cynic - Focus

Death – Individual Thought Patterns, Sound of Perseverance

Pestilence – Spheres, Doctrine

Sepultura – Chaos A.D.

Obscura – Cosmogenesis

Krallice – Diotima

The Black Dahlia Murder - Ritual (Review)

2011-07-04T01:11:00.000-07:00

Cosmo over at Invisible Oranges wrote on why people choose not to listen to new music anymore. Comments combined with the original article yielded a number of common points. First, that as listeners graduate from learning institutions and begin to grapple with the work required for serious adult life, time and energy for listening for music tends to diminish. Furthermore, once listeners start building relationships and families, their commitments increase and time available for musical appreciation is further eroded as getting to concerts or finding a chance to really let rip at high volume some life affirming death metal becomes increasingly difficult. Second, as time decreases expenditures seem to increase, so everything said with regard to the above also applies for funds available to actually buy music. Third, the way we find metal in the present has changed dramatically over the past twenty years. Even if one is to stay abreast of the latest social networking phenomena, Bandcamps and Myspace-alikes, this keeping in touch itself further contributes to time drain.

Nevertheless, many metal heads like myself continue to look for albums which inspire them, which transmit a thrill similar to when they were younger. Part of this is obviously nostalgia. Reliving excitement seems to be as almost as popular recreation as finding ways to do said reliving. Part of it too is that having lived so long with metal, we have seen it change, develop and evolve over the decades and these changes are always compelling . Not unlike jazz, metal means differently to whomever is asked, and so when we hear something new, something inventive, something radical that is sustained over the course of a whole album and not just a song or a soundbite the result is religious experience.

Enter, “Ritual”. Just like everyone else who pressed play on the first track, I thought, “cool, a new BDM record”. And then the second track started, then the third and fourth… These much maligned short-haired metallers show how it is done. The speed, ferocity and rhythmic devastation are all present. TBDM both “do” the zeitgeist and transcend it with their Faith No More-like ability to mesh genre. Witness the seamless segue into a Nachtmystium-esque black metal pre-chorus on “Moonlight Equilibrium” or the twisted rhythmic contortions and brutality on the Meshuggah-meets-Suffocation-meets-Morbid Angel sounding “On Stirring Seas of Salted Blood”. Then there is the exquisite reprise of the opening strings refrain on “Blood in the Ink”, the way the forlorn melody blends with the rhythm and melds and informs the vocal line is truly modern metal. In fact it is the relentless incorporation of melody, memorable interludes and simply flat out consciousness-raising solos are interwoven throughout, that make this album probably the metal album of 2011. There may be “more” brutal acts out there, more “progressive” and more “melodic” ones too, but no one is putting it all together and coming up with the songs as well as TBDM.

“Ritual” is out and has an entry level priced vinyl pressing $17 or less, including postage – depending on where you live. And since it has that very groovy, Valnoir Mortsonge designed satanic/occult-tastic cover art, try giving me one reason why you should not own ritual on wax!

Critique – 2 Too old, too outside, too little, too late.

2011-07-01T00:14:00.001-07:00

Not so long ago I worked with a chap about the same age as my younger brother. He had a quick, sharp mind and was quite good at programming computers. What he struggled with, however, was the simple act of drawing a straight line. Of course, I do not mean this literally, I mean it in the sense that his solutions to problems were often ineloquent convolutions designed to highlight playfulness and whim of utility. On the surface, there is no real problem with this, I am after all a champion of imagination, deconstruction, absurdity, parody and lateral thought. For me though, as long as simplicity is the underpinning principle then I believe we might call this innovation. His style was not unlike a web browser adorned with numerous plug ins to achieve every possible outcome but requires constant maintenance. His engineering style was akin to a Jack-of-all-trades.

Jaron Lanier’s half-excellent “You Are Not A Gadget” is successful when it critiques such phenomena as group-think/hive mind and the large scale disempowerment through the homogenisation of diversity and flattening of contours through rigid yet ever bifurcation of defining categories in social networking software paradigms. However it is at points such as when discussing musical genre and alternative paradigms/solutions to the devaluing of creative industries that he starts to falter.

When it comes to music, it reads as though Lanier is too old and too outside of the contemporary to sufficiently judge the state of things. He riffs on how jazz is identifiable according to decade and that so is a lot of pop music up until internet saturation. But then, suddenly, according to Lanier a flattening occurs and his peccadillo, indie music, comes to a creative stasis. He claims that even good friends could not tell the difference between groups over the two decades from the nineties until now. However, I would argue that this is because he has placed himself outside of this context and that he is no longer sensitive the subtleties and creative diversity in his chosen genre. To say that the Arctic Monkeys sound Like Primal Scream who sound like Franz Ferdinand who sound like Blur who sound like the Kaiser Chiefs who sound like Bloc Party all within a frozen temporal quagmire speaks more of the author’s personal and cultural context more than it does of a perceived lack of creativity in indie music.

Following this is a brief encounter with hip hop’s post-digital development where he reveals himself to be not only too old and too outside but just plain too American. To ignore the incredible development of hip hop (a) the world over and (b) as an English speaker, the UK in particular is either lazy or ignorant. While it is permissible to say that the splintering and reincorporation of dance genres from jungle to drum and bass to grime, dubstep and so on has seen a certain degree of flattening, the creative forces required for their composition cannot be underestimated. Taking both rhythmic and melodic ideas to completely new extremes, these genres have not only evolved with developments in digital music making but have caused new tools to be required in order to articulate them.

My second critique follows the first. Laniers chosen position as “outside” the complex mainstream of technological development strikes this writer as somewhat naive. The same can be said for his overly optimistic, overly nostalgic appraisal of alternative technological developments suitable for financial compensation of artists. I have found for one reason or another (usually work!) I am forced to sit on and contribute to and at the very least ponder on “leading edge technologies”. The problem with this is that in my gut, I feel as though a prefer a more analog, more real reality to the digital simulacrum that continues to diversify before me. This irreconcilable paradox is actually a blessing. For it reminds me that falling into the binary trap is ever so inelegant and foolish. Either/Or. Click “like”. Just like death metal: old school versus new school? Which do you choose? I do not choose. I can not choose. I will not choose. For to me, what is most enriching and valuable is not pie in the sky suggestions of utopia that lack the cooperation of my peers. What is nourishing for the soul is to keep these so-called binaries, these contradictions, paradoxes under consideration, in dialog, since if while time passes we are actively and reflexively contemplating these square pegs and round holes, it becomes possible to see the infinite complexity surrounding them, the myriad interrelationships and interdependencies.

And it is through this reflection that we are able to, while offline begin to transform what happens online.

Critique – 1 Monotheists, outsiders and proclamations of doom.

2011-07-01T00:13:00.001-07:00

Time for a confession. I am a recovering cultural studies junkie. Do not let the lack of capitalisation fool you with regards to my seriousness, there are times when I relapse. An article, an argument, a picture, a person. That is all it takes to send me back into the spiral of contemplating power relations, self-reflexivity (and its absence), creative, pragmatic applications of theory and scholarly excellence. Confession completed before turning toward the issue at stake, some contextualisation is required.

Currently I live in Japan. I have done so for a total of about eight years. I have both weathered and inflicted culture shock. I have reflected on belonging and being foreign. I have learned to send out tender green shoots into the earth, to begin to be of this place. I have turned my expectations inside-out, rejected assumptions both explicit and implicit and to some degree started to “turn Japanese”. Almost the whole of my context is linguistically dominated by Japanese, from the moment I wake up, through to my place of employment, and most importantly the realm of love. That said, I am certainly no “expert” on Japan, I am hardly even an expert on myself (though age has proven to be of some help in that regard).

To be an expert on a place, a people, a complex living context of incredible diversity, seems to me, at this stage in the game at the very least bordering on contemptible arrogance. Sure, I do believe that one can be an expert on existing knowledges, social, economic, religious and so on. Such expertise is valuable, the problem arises when such knowledge is applied unreflexively, thus compounding and enforcing existing hegemonies, conceptual prisons and ignorance. This kind of so-called scholarship persists even to this day, legitimated by countless institutions committed to knowledge production as their reason for existence. This is unfortunate because to me, scholarship should ultimately be about liberation: acquisition of knowledge for understanding and reflection on such knowledge for creativity.

So it is with great interest and curiosity that I engage with scholarship on Japan. I am always looking to increase the depth of my knowledge so that my understanding can become more subtle, refined and respectful of the complexity inherent in culture and society. A recent posting of a scholarly article by scholar on Japan, MG Shetfall on Debito’s civic activist website caught my eye.

This article, a meditation on the loss of a Japanese “cosmology” in the post-Meiji, post-Pacific War Japan is rather engaging, the field work with kamikaze survivors, while not explicitly included, deeply informs his analysis. However, there are a number of tired tropes wheeled out throughout the article based on a specific kind of scholarship on Japan, a kind of scholarship that has persisted since the bubble. This includes an over-reliance on English language scholarship and especially North American-centric engagement with Japan. This is to be expected, the author is/was after all an American. We all write where we are from all of the time. From yakuza to pachinko, right-wing black trucks to the apparently problematic entrenched, unreconstructed sexism, and mindless consumerism to emperor worship. It is all present. While this in itself is worthy of rebuff (in addition to his overly positive, incongruous conclusion) there are two other profoundly interrelated issues which trouble this scholarly teetotaller.

The first is the lack of contextual reflexivity. The shattering of cosmology he describes with regard to Japan could easily apply his birthplace. Around the world, we stand witness to the death of the American dream, the wholesale plunge into income discrepancy, increasing poverty and political/religious extremism in the modern United States. Even as things have fallen apart as gods, icons and saints have been shattered at home, Shetfall fails to acknowledge this global phenomenon in his analysis. From China to post-apartheid South Africa to most of Europe, historically important drivers of activity, sources of community and reasons for progress give way to apathy, technological change, redistribution of wealth and the questioning of self and national identities within such a context. Certainly if one is to comment on the phenomenon in Japan that it would do well to acknowledge its broader context. Is this just an unreflexive, self-policing adoption of disciplinary borderlands? Or is it something else, is it yet another “foreigner looking in” fetishisation of a culture that takes place within a longer history of outdated anthropological study?

The second issue for me is one commonly found in the sociology/anthropology literature on Japan from the West: an unquestioned belief in the alliance between monotheism and Freud. Although I do not have the space for a full detailing of my arguments against monotheism I will give a brief overview. The unreconstructed, unreflexive monotheist thinker is limited binary violence. S/he always proceeds from the point of rigid, presumed, enforceable totality. Everything which is good must fit within the framework. Any thought which contradicts of falls outside of the monotheist worldview is relegated as “less than”. However, when applied to cultural contexts with Buddhist histories (note the plurals?) monotheism starts to look not only shaky but somewhat primitive, unrefined and limited. This is not to say that monotheist “believers” are those things, indeed, first and foremost I believe as humans we are capable of extraordinary subtlety and clarity both in spite of and because of our overarching intellectual developmental contexts. People are people. Nevertheless when the monotheist encounters a poly-, a- or non-theist context the exchange always begins with the imposition of authority. Meanwhile, if we take the previously mentioned Buddhism as the starting point we arrive at a brilliant piece of classically Zen paradox. For the Buddhist has no problem with recognising monotheism, as monotheism is simply an expression of human action. It is not and can not be a totality. Even though it has become so. But in the end, it is merely human thought. Buddhism can acknowledge both the sincerity and artifice of monotheism – simultaneously. What might cultural studies, sociology or anthropology informed by Buddhism look like? Perhaps when I experience a full relapse, I will let you know.

Further to this second point is the reliance of Freud. Long time readers (I know you are out there) will know that I have an affinity for Deleuze. To read Deleuze, to dig in deep and to meditate on his thought brings one to an interesting destination. That Freudian thought is unmistakably violence, perhaps second only to Christianity in the mind rapes conducted upon the human species. Freudian desire is trapped within a peculiar Germanic Christian mode of expression which has been legitimated through scholarship for a century. Deleuze is like a little trickster here, he says that while a certain desire, pathos or fetish may exist (although it may not and it may altogether be something else) it is forced into being a specific mode under Freud. For Deleuze, desire is multiple, it arises in response to myriad contexts and it is not necessarily “wrong” or destructive.

In other words, Shetfall’s “letting off steam” metaphor with regard to Japanese development is incredibly limited and demonstrates perhaps more the author’s age, alien-ness in context and disjunct from the complex, optimistic, micro-level inspiration occurring all over Japan than it does any kind of objective reality. Shetfall’s reality, I contend, is confined to a particular set of Anglo-American-Japanese disciplinary coordinates. This is not to say his reflection is wholly incorrect. Indeed although his tropes may be worn, stereotypes often have their origins in some kind of reality, even if removed from and not created by those they are meant to represent. His Japan certainly does exist but it does not necessarily ring true with my experience and therefore likely several... million... others.

Phyte Club: Metal and Nature

2011-06-29T00:38:00.000-07:00

Once again, Invisible Oranges speaks to me. I would love one day to have the
opportunity to meet a certain Cosmo Lee to thank him for the daily doses of insight
from within a metal matrix. Since we may never meet, my only recourse is to write and
hopefully do so well.
Gardening was a balm which soothed my soul. Digging in the earth, inhaling
the scent of flowers, carefully planting seeds, tying up, tying down, pruning,
transplanting all taught me about the paradoxical, simultaneity of life’s fragility and
robustness. Sometimes it is due care that leads to vigour and success and other times
it is neglect and abuse. Much like how kids from good families go bad and vice versa,
plants do well often because of our efforts but frequently do so in spite of them.
True success in gardening cannot really be measured by the abundance of a
certain crop, the size of a tree or the sweetness of fruit alone. These are all worthy
indicators of success but their value corresponds to the aims of the gardener alone.
Instead, I would argue in consonance with Masanobu Fukuoka that observation and
reflection lie at the very heart of what we might call success for the gardener. In other
words where the cash crop farmer may measure his/her success by yield, the reflective
gardener measures his/her success as an ongoing relationship with an ego dwarfing
whole.
When Phyte Club’s Katie was asked about metal plants, she gave some great
examples. From the rotting flesh scented raffelsia to carnivorous plants she painted a
brilliant if somewhat limited image. If asked about the metal-ity of plants I, however,
would borrow from both Fukuoka and Lovelocke and utilize a version of the Gaia
hypothesis. This is where we take the world as a living organism. While for purposes of
culture and survival we have categorized various plants the reality is that they are a
part of a massive living organism. Everything we do to them, every destruction, they
come back. Watch as weeds and grasses take over unused dirt, witness moss inflicting
its slow revenge upon concrete, marvel at the way roots twist, pull down and push up
buildings. Plants live for the purpose of being alive. No matter what, no matter the
poisons and labour expended to tame them, they spring back, evolve harder and faster
than we do they prosper under the most extreme conditions. Plants as a whole are
totally fucking metal!
Katie brings up another very interesting point when it comes to metal and
plants. This is around paradox. After all, most metal requires an extraordinary amount
of energy to be performed. A metal concert is fueled by juice, dirt and stones of dead
plants and animals (strictly speaking, so is virtually all of modern life but metal in
particular in a primary sense is a musical innovation dependent on electricity… or is it?
). Katie’s take on this is eloquent: we live in a time of conceptual war where we are told
that certain consumption choices via branding are better than other choices. Even
though certain items are marketed as ecologically friendly or ethical or organic the reality behind their production, distribution and ownership may be in stark opposition to
what they are supposed to represent. She goes so far as to say that consumer choice
results more in the individual feeling better about a purchase more than that purchase
having some positive effect on an already catastrophic ecological situation. I would add
to this that observation and reflection on our actions are the only ways in which our
consumer choices can have any meaning beyond the superficial. Simply buying a
branded product means little. But reflecting on why such a product exists, questioning
the necessity for such and item and observing how and why we use what we do, we
start to bring about real lasting transformation in our own communities.

So what does this have to do with metal? I would risk heresy, but since that
model of religiosity holds no quarter with me and also since orthodoxy and its opposite
are essentially of the same mold, I will simply say it: metal no longer needs electricity.
Pick up your shot out eyeballs and gather up your senses, I am not saying metal needs
to go “unplugged”. I am saying that after forty odd years of existence, metal has
transcended its technological origins. Metal is something felt, articulated, experienced
it is reflexive, robust and passionate. It exists as a spirit a force of motivation within its
practitioners and whether screamed, sung or whispered it imbues us with strength,
confidence and courage. Indeed, if my recent revisit of Sepultura and Soulfly has
taught me anything it is that sometimes when the guitars drop out that things are both
simultaneously heavy and uplifting. Stand as an aural witness to the twisted, loping,
lumbering forward march of the post-solo “Endangered Species” or the booming
percussion of “Bumba”. In fact, while sometimes overcooked, it is the pathos of groups
such as Sepultura and Soulfly which demonstrates the metal spirit more so than riffs
and tempo.

Repetition, Appreciation… Nostalgia?

2011-06-29T00:37:00.000-07:00

Over at Invisible Oranges, Cosmo wrote about the phenomenon of friends who “don’t
keep up with music anymore”. So did I. And I keep thinking about it.
Yesterday I listened to Sepultura’s “Roots” for the first time in several months.
Compared to what I have been listening to lately and with said band’s own back
catalog, “Roots” is only scarcely metal. What I mean is, that in spite there being an
abundance of loud, distorted guitars, shouted vocals and heavy drumming, the tempo
is actually quite slow overall and the emphasis seems to be on rhythmic diversity,
complexity and subtlety and emotional atmosphere than pummeling. As I listened I
discerned, to my ears a number of nuances I had not yet heard, out of phase vocal and
guitar overdubs, the way the high toms floated on top of the miasma of distortion and
thick torpor beneath and how Max Cavalera’s vocals strained, cracked and broke.
Some albums we exhaust and continue to like (Faith No More’s “The Real
Thing”), others we exhaust and acknowledge their significance and move on
(everything by Nirvana). Then there are others that rightly should have been already
exhausted but for some reason they possess a magnetism, an allure that beckons us
back time and time again. As we age and accumulate greater responsibilities, finding
the time to deeply appreciate music becomes increasingly difficult. For those of us who
found refuge in the mainstream, this listening can happen everyday, in supermarkets,
taxis, as muzak and in cafes and restaurants. For metal heads though, appreciation is
a deliberate, active process, an event.
Every time I listen to an album such as “Roots” I listen for a number of reasons:
familiarity, affinity, curiosity and sometimes when trying to remember something,
nostalgia. I can never forget the context of listening to “Roots” when I first heard it in
1996. It gelled with my adolescent frustration, awoke my awareness of the third world
and switched on my ethics. But what does it do now? I am now 32 years old. My age
has almost doubled since that album came out so of what use could “Roots” possibly
be to me now?
I have listened to a lot of metal since then. I have discovered innumerable
connections between bands, albums, people, places, songs and concepts. And
yet, “Roots” still speaks to me. Whereas previously the rhythmic flourishes and timbres
were new and vaguely “tribal” or “ethnic” in my mind, now they are everything. I
struggle to grasp their eloquence, their composition, their instrumentation and also the
tension between effortless integration and genre contradiction. I try to hear the Brazil in
the music and reconcile it with popular imagery and with the reality of Brazilians here in
Japan. Thanks to Melvin Gibbs, I am also mindful to listen to how this album swings.
All of that from a single album released fifteen years ago. An album I have
heard at least a hundred times and an album I am not done with yet. Which leads to a
single, simple thought: if I am new with each listen and can hear my newness and
increased worldliness in each listen, then can I ever be done with an album?
If there are albums that we are never fully “done” with, then what role does
new music play? Personally, feel as though I have just scratched the surface of
Omnivium’s “Cosmogenesis” yet the thin spine of my “Omnivium” LP frequently
whispers - a la C.S. Lewis - “play me”. Then there is the new Weedeater album. A
dense, blues inflected sludge cloud clocking in at just over thirty minutes it should be
easy enough to absorb and yet, I still feel as though I am only just starting to “get” the
flow of the album.
And maybe this is the core of the phenomenon. I love music, like the sky,
like reading, it is integral to my life. It is a simple thing, a divine thing that informs

my every movement. I refer you to an earlier conversation on Deleuze. If music is
rhythm, repetition and variation, then life is music. The daily habits, from waking to
eating, working to sleeping, loving to breathing, we do it all again and again. Life has
frequency, articulation, accents, composition, improvisation. The world to me is music
and so is the semantic reversal. Therefore I am always interested in learning how to
incorporate more music, deeply into my explicitly musical lived life. The fact is that
for many, music is mere adornment, a superfluous decoration, a set of coordinates to
orient memory and nostalgia. That “friends” give up on music should not be a surprise.
That people remain interested should be.

Get (back) into.

2011-06-29T00:24:00.001-07:00

A good friend, and it would appear my only reader, recently asked me about getting
back into metal. Aside from being rather pleasurably shocked from a request for advice
on a topic so dear to my heart I could not help but to think about the timeliness of
this question (see: Repetition, appreciation, nostalgia). Invisible Orange’s ongoing
series, “Heavy Metal Be-Bop” recently featured an interview with Melvin Gibbs (most
known for his role as bass player on Rollins Band’s “Weight”) who spoke on (among
other things) coming to metal from different perspectives and traditions as well as
swing.

Gibbs rightly pointed out that in his context as a youth, metal heads were racist losers
and so he found it difficult to engage with Black Sabbath. He also never really “got”
Zepplin. So when he came to metal, he came via funk, Sly and the Family Stone and
jazz. He said what I have been saying for years after reading Stearns’ “The Story of
Jazz”: that metal is all about tracing a certain lineage of blues and that lineage can
be traced from the US, from Brazil, from Cuba and so on. In other words although
contemporary metal is a predominantly “white” phenomenon (though it is changing,
the internet has opened up whole new vistas of metal from India and the Middle-East
as well as increasingly successful stoner and psyche movements from Chile and
Argentina) its forebears are inextricably African. The minor third, the fifth, non-standard
intervals perceived as dissonance, tonal slurring and total rhythmic devastation – all
African. Metal frequently moves away from the blues, indeed many cite Judas Priest as
the first metal band to explicitly move away from blues based song-writing. Metal also
moves away from Western harmonic and melodic conventions, using said conventions
as a base again to create dissonance and mysterious new harmonies suitable for
complex rhythmic explorations.

As a youth I was sold on metal’s image of aggression and anger. I have written about
that elsewhere. It took a long time for me to loosen and eventually discard the shackles
of the listening habits of others, to move beyond popular lingua franca and listen to
metal from my own place. This of course produces a conundrum to the question at the
top of this entry, “how to get (back) into metal”.

Metal in its extreme forms, not unlike jazz can be an exercise in stamina. It
takes time to build up a level of aural strength capable of adequately appreciating the
rhythmic intensity that can be found in metal. Many new listeners may be initially
turned away because of this intensity, I know I have. But as friends and family will
attest, I am stubborn and when it comes to music, especially so. One listen is never
enough but I am not daft enough to go and recommend Napalm Death to the virginal
metal head. To paraphrase Gill and Beez (may he find happiness elsewhere) on the
Metal Hammer podcast, any metal head who claims his entry point was Napalm Death
or Deicide or similar is a liar who probably has to convince him/herself every night
before going to bed that Mustaine-era Metallica was the tr00est they will ever be. In
other words, they are just big fat liars.

The point is that starting in the deep end may not always be the best place.
After all we are conditioned from birth to focus on and internalize certain melodic and
harmonic conventions, our entire musical world is streamlined into a limited number of
sounds for a limited number of circumstances. Starting with melody, with something
familiar then is probably best.

Nader Sadek – In the Flesh (Review)

2011-06-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

It can be too easy to write about the internet. Negativity, over-inflated egos and self-
importance are in abundance, truly shooting fish in a barrel. I try to steer clear of snark
and inject a degree of positivity into my writing (Morbid Angel review aside) to make
this blog a site of interest, engagement and maybe even insight.
This is a story about being wrong. I recently read over at Invisible Oranges an
entry on the obsolescence of the music review. As you might have seen, writing about music is whatI do here.

That said, the purpose is not about star-ify and run. The purpose has been
and is to engage with music, to show the music from a different angle, specifically, my
angle. So while I agree that in essence the review is dead, it is only a certain kind of
review rendered cadaver. Indeed as I said over at IO, the thing I like about reading
reviews is that after I have read a certain number I feel as though I have got to know
the writer, his/her preferences, favoured adjectives, comparison references and so on.
In spite of this literary love affair, it is easy to find oneself feeling jaded or just
over-saturated with the endless content. It can take a week, a day or an hour but the
ceaseless march of useful information can trample one into a blubbering mess of
blunted ignorance. This is all a round about way of saying: I read the reviews, I saw in
comments sections, everyone said it – the Nader Sadek album is not only what the
new Morbid Angel album should have been, it is plain excellent. I dragged my feet for
too long on this album and am not too prideful to admit: I got it wrong.
Back in high school when I first listened to Brujeria, I felt disturbed. The
Mexican gangster photo on the back cover of Raza Odiada, the low-tuned riffs, the
gruff unhinged Spanish language vocals were pure menace. Let me sound a familiar
toll: before-the-internet, just how OG these gangsters were was essentially
unknowable. When I finally got my hands on it, the severed head, the Satanism and
gore of the previous album, Matando Gueros was almost too much. I was unable to
look at the cover or even listen to the music without feeling complicit in occult flavoured
Mexican drug murders. But Brujeria was only the second time that I had been so
deeply menaced by music. The first time was on one of my earliest owned albums,
Faith No More’s “The Real Thing”.

Everything about Faith No More at that time, the juxtaposition of ugliness and
beauty, the gonzo-esque, grotesque visual aesthetic left over from their early eighties
context and Patton’s mysterious, ambiguous lyrics. I spent hours thinking about
what “Underwater love” was about and trying to reconcile the post-hangover wake up
of “The Morning After” with the movie of the same name. The most troubling song for
me, however, was their cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”. From the opening air raid
siren to the sincere and non-ironic, expertly inflected lyrics to Jim Martin’s authentic
tribute to Iommi balanced by Gould’s improvised bass soloing, this song caused
goosebumps on every listen. The generals, their war, Satan laughing, spreading his
wings. Terrifying.

Nader Sadek’s “In the Flesh” is the first album in a long while to open up the
doors of darkness, to show the horror and not have to spell it out in zeitgeist memes.
Rather, darkness is allowed to breathe, encoded alchemically with relentless
drumming, razor sharp riffing and monstrous vocals. The riffing, soloing, drumming and
singing is exactly what you would expect from former Morbid Angel frontman Steve
Tucker, Ava Inferi/former Mayhem riff-machine Rune Eriksen, session bassist Nicholas
McMaster (Krallice/Gorguts), Cryptopsy drummer Flo Mounier. It smashes. Riffs are
piled on top of each other, inventive percussion abounds and the vocals sound as
though spawned from hell itself. The soloing is technically astounding but more than
that it is melodic, dynamic and exciting.

“In the Flesh” is an album in dire need of a vinyl release!

Machine Head – “Locust” (Review)

2011-06-25T18:09:00.000-07:00

One of the key difficulties faced by any writer reviewing music during the zeitgeist is the abundance of jargon at the time. By the mid-point of the first decade of the twenty-first century what came to known as “metalcore” become a defining stream in heavy music. Essentially a hybrid of melodic metal riffing and hard core’s breakdowns and sentiments it also combined the theatricality of metal’s melodicism with hard core’s motivational pathos. Naturally, purists from either camp opposed and derided the innovation, metal heads jaded by new metal found something to put their faith in and by natural consequence this new sound occupied public metal perception as the successor to nu-metal. Countless copy cat bands arose and aided by the speed of social networking this new sound permeated every last bastion of metal genre geography. So much so that it possibly represents one of the earliest articulations of a new idea burning itself out via rapid achievement of fame: the sound spread so far and wide across the community, so prominently that it verged on non-ironic self parody. That said, metalcore - much like the ailing deathcore of the present - injected a substantial amount of inspirational energy into middle ground metal. Gone were the techno and hip hop pretensions, the bandwagoners and pretenders and welcomed back were the double kicks, guitar solos and progressive risk taking.

However, even now an anti metalcore sentiment remains, indeed, with regard to describing one’s feelings toward particular albums or bands, metalcore has taken on connotation and function not unlike the playground epithet, “gay”.

In 2007, Machine Head released their second comeback album “The Blackening”. Filled with dueling leads, extended melodic passages and just flat out gnarly Machine Mead style post-thrash riffing, “The Blackening” is arguably the mainstream metal revival album. Thus, hopes are high for the follow up due to be released this September, metal heads the world over are collectively lurching over their computers, smart phones and other devices waiting to catch an aural glimpse of any offering from the new album. Well, we are in luck as Machine Head released a non-final mix of the album track “Locust”.

Frankly, this new track may leave more than a few Machine Head fans scratching their heads. More than a few will be screaming “metalcore”. This is not to say that the new track somehow comes to us via a Morbid Angel alternative-reality matrix where 90s industrial is cool again. Rather the sound is somewhat familiar and yet very new at the same time. Elements of “Locust” recall the widely disliked yet actually rather good left of centre “The Burning Red”. Personally, I am pleased that they have decided to revisit this sound. “The Burning Red”, while mostly definitely a zeitgeist album has a vulnerable, teeth gnashing melodic sensibility at its core, a sensibility that has been toned down somewhat and made to conform to modern metal standards. Even the twisted, slightly odd-metered main riff does not sound like the way metal should be at the moment. It is bouncy, elastic and dare I say it, loose. The rest of the track, including an excellent dueling guitars solo reminiscent of “The Blackening’s” “Aesthetics of Hate” (but I would argue, even better), slow rhythmic crushing at the end and Flynn’s impassioned vocal delivery.

What is incongruous about this new track and hopefully the whole album is that Machine Head seem to be able to read the wind of the times. In an era of perfectly, processed production, exactitude as a substitute for compositional precision and genre streamlining to the point of pointlessness, on “Locust” Flynn and co seem to have moved in a different direction, drawing on a diverse palette of sounds first hinted at on “The Burning Red”, played out on “Supercharger” and finally abandoned or otherwise reshaped on “Through the Ashes of Empires”. They have then applied this to the modern Head template. Too soon? Not a moment, I only hope that similar chances are taken throughout the rest of the album.

Sepultura – Kairos (Review).

2011-06-25T18:02:00.000-07:00

Extraneous. A one word definition of what school was like for me as a youth. Working now as I do in a junior high school I see that it is a definition which still fits. That feeling of painful irrelevance coupled with know-it-all perspective endemic to the age bracket results in far too many under-achievers. Those who choose to just disengage, to wing it or just do the very least required for academic survival. I was one of those students who frequently received the non-accolade “Could do better with effort” on report cards. Occasionally, interest piqued I would turn in an (almost) excellent report or get an (almost) perfect score on a test. I made it through school and I am sure that many students like me will also survive this system. It is a shame though, that the system and why not just say it, society broadly, seems incapable of the best practices for realizing the innate excellence of our youth.

Post “Roots” Sepultura is like one of the above mentioned students. After the widely under appreciated “Against” (which yours truly thinks is actually a rather excellent album), from “Nation” to “A-Lex”, these once A-list-ers produced predominantly unremarkable albums which always had a few good songs and occasionally excellent ones. The problem has never been with sound, nor musical progression. In fact, the sum of post-Max Cavalera Sepultura parts – circular riffs, Derrick Green, powerful rhythmic elements, tribal drumming, guitar solo freak-outs and sinister psychedelia – is a rather listenable brew. The problem has been that the songs have been on the whole not particularly memorable.

Enter Kairos. I held no expectations for this new platter. I have gone through the motions each time, read the reviews, battled my inner self over whether or not to drop the cash on an LP version. After listening, I can only say that this is Kisser and co.’s finest album in fourteen years. It is evocative of past eras of the band and just when it feels as though they are about to settle into a rut, they make a left turn.

Out soon. Vinyl release scheduled, but being on a European label, be prepared to take it like a man (or just be tough or whatever) and suck up the VAT, postage and currency inflation. Currently priced at between $36-50 locally here in Japan, you would have to be hard core supporter to get this on wax (after all, the same loot could buy the new Black Dahlia Murder, Pestilence and Premonition 13 albums combined. Just sayin’). Is it worth it? Let your budget decide.

Morbid Angel - Illud Divinum Insanus (Review)

2011-06-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

When it comes to offense, where and when does one draw the line? Many times, retaliation is precisely the purpose of the offender. Offenders like to draw those they perceive as weaker into an unbalanced exchanged, a horrible one-sided beating with an inevitable outcome. In such a case, it often better to simply walk away. But there are other times, when an offender bites of more than s/he can chew, when they underestimate the offended where they presume an inevitable outcome but in reality are merely trapped in a self-fulfilling cycle of arrogance. Here again, it is often better to simply “turn the other cheek”.

But then there are times when offense is unjust. We might argue that all offense is harm and thus unjust. Rightly so, I believe. But the world is a complex place and most of us are rarely lucid enough during our waking hours to be aware of all the barbs and cuts we can unwittingly distribute and receive over the course of a day. Nevertheless there are times when we strongly feel that harm is not just damage from blunt, insensitive, ignorant or boorish fools, there are times when it just feels wrong. Like being called a “nigger”, or a “faggot”. Sometimes retaliation, verbal, physical, spiritual simply feels necessary.

That is how I feel about the new Morbid Angel album, “Illud Divinum Insanus”. I came late to the Morbid Angel party, for one reason or another their back catalogue eluded me, their tunes did not have the same grotesque allure as Cannibal Corpse, Autopsy or Obituary. It all seemed a bit “put on”, a little too pretentious. Years later though, I started to understand their position in the death metal hierarchy, I started to feel their “slimy riffs” and their drug addled, psycho-occultism began to take on a more legitimate and less strained vibe in an era of televised beheadings where nothing is shocking.

Everything about “Insanus” simply sounds out of place and out of time. Even in the heyday of the 1990s industro-metal such as Ministry, White Zombie and KMFDM, Morbid Angel’s new LP would have sounded as dated, clichéd and tired as the lyrics. The techno element of this album is plain embarrassing, Morbid Angel were never electronic, so to go down that road this late in their career they should have done something special. Perhaps they could have drawn on IDM, Drill and Bass, Drum and Bass, Dub Step for genre inspiration, after all even the most melodic content in these areas can be utterly crushing, if not in metal parlance: “brutal”. There is so much technological sonic brutality out there, Azagthoth and friends could have looked toward Sunn 0))) or Canadian dronseters Nadja, or even any of Justin Broadrick’s projects (Godflesh, Jesu, Final, God) for total wall of sound obliteration via guitars and computer. Instead, Morbid Angel seem to have not only willfully ignored the last fifteen years of metal and electronic musical development and just cracked the plastic on an industrial-metal sounds sample CD that arrived a decade late in the mail.

As for the metal on “Insanus”. It is not bad. Not great either. Had it been sandwiched between some truly excellent Morbid Angel it would probably sound better than it does.

Did Morbid Angel deliberately set out to offend everyone? Are they just out of touch? What were they thinking? The last word is best left to Hitler.

Nostalgia for what was not.

2011-06-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

It is too easy to know everything, as long as it was recorded. Rarely, I glimpse a past that never was, a past that tugs at my chest and flashes brightly from behind my eyes. And then, it is gone. An echo might remain, just long enough to be remembered and then recognised at the next occurrence. Familiarity, an unreality, and not-reality always just out of reach. Sometimes, the historians among us catalog the signs of that history. These historians are inevitably like us, the forever unfulfilled and their actions, their motivations are understandable. Yet whenever they complete their work, the results are not dissimilar to violation. Private longings, invested affections, splendid imaginings all laid bare for the purpose of objective posterity. Once rendered, they become banal, generic and even hostile. Such is nostalgia.

I do not wish to take you to my own nostalgia zone, after all should we meet - and we would - then we would both know where and when. And so that place that never was, will be and through being brought into existence, it will be lost. Rather, I want you to come with me so we might explore a technique for comprehending those non-places, non-times without destroying them. But let me warn you, should you learn a way to and then spend too long there, the result will and can only be one of such minor grief that it will soon be forgotten. And to reduce something so fleeting and magnificent to a something to sad and insignificant as to be forgotten is a crime against beauty itself.

Have you read Deleuze? I have. So many times in fact that I hardly know what I know about him any more, so many times that I wonder were the fetishes different, the proclivities slightly tweaked, would the writing be my own? I may be arrogant but not sufficiently so to claim his as my own. My point is that the continual resonance I experience while reading him suggests an affinity more than superficial. Undoubtedly, not being the most astute nor informed participant in philosophy there is much that I miss, mistake and simply cannot see in him. Yet, roaming upon the logic within his pages, I find that I dig up, put together, am dug up and reconstructed in ways both familiar and foreign. I trace this affinity to Zen. As a young boy, I loved the seeming paradoxes of Zen Buddhism, the way that explanation of even the simplest principle would take such a long, convoluted path leading back to the initial utterance. A thought, a moment that must be apprehended as it exists. The elegance of Deleuze and of Zen is that we are allowed moments to experience non-existence.

Deleuze’s legendary equation:

n-1

Where n is the multiple and one is the single, unified whole. In the same way, Zen urges us to consider existence without a self. To me this has never been about mediation, trances or drug taking. Rather, non-existence is a subtraction of the self. Now, while this is clearly impossible, this is also what makes it possible, for there are simply too many gaps and just too much infinity for our stubborn assemblages of culture, memory and language to categorise and cognise.

Thus, the rush toward and the flight away from our infinity realm nostalgia, the accompanying anticipation and loss is an integral part of the experience. It is an unpredictable recurring melody relying equally on the movement in space between as on the articulations themselves. The momentary fragment may not be inhabited for longer than the time taken to see it, but it may be recognised as always existing.

Skindred – Union Black (Review).

2011-06-11T05:27:00.000-07:00

In 1995, I went to exactly one half of the Brisbane date of the Alternative Nation festival. I would have gone to both days had I the money, but I did not and so I was forced to make a truly difficult decision. Headliner on one day was Faith No More, the other day, Nine Inch Nails. While both occupied too much of my then teenaged time, I went with the former, since they had walked with me through moving house, changing school and my father’s schizophrenia. Rather than stand in front of the stage, I found some great seats up high, since I had wanted to take it all in. Rain poured and I was soaked and freezing but it was worth it in this pre-internet age to see this band and its supposed piss drinking, shit eating maniac front-man. Faith No More came and went, on hiatus again, they will likely never release another album. I always felt that what FNM had above their peers was an excellent sense of song writing, their compositions so tight, so calculated without being calculating, their diversity within a single composition and their breadth across a whole album all felt effortless.

Although rather different in sound, Pop Will Eat Itself to me always had a similar vibe, eclecticism unified under an aesthetic known only in the minds of the key composers. PWIE offered lucid, ironic and zeitgeist relevant and transcendent lyrics across a splendid collage of sound.

Between then and now, few bands have caught my attention this way as Wales’ Skindred. Their new release “Union Black” is a complex of reggae, metal, punk, raga, drum and bass, dubstep and hip hop. All of this should not add up, and yet “Union Black” is about as coherent of a unit statement from a metal leaning rock band as is possible at this point in the Twenty First Century. Benji slides between voices as easily as the band mutate from genre to genre and back again never sounding forced. The songs are all expertly produced, repetitions always introduce something new and for every heaviness there is an abundance of melody. And while Mike Patton is irreplaceable, certainly Benji has the charisma and vocal chops to play in the same league. Someone just filled a gap in my life.

Cloud myths.

2011-06-11T05:25:00.000-07:00

If you are reading this, you are aware of the cloud. The cloud, that nebulous assemblage of interconnected servers, massive volumes of storage space and high bandwidth data transfer promises to make our world better by allowing us to “consume” our preferred media, however, whenever and wherever we want, provided we possess the required equipment and the financial/technological contracts required to operate this equipment. Of interest to me is the realm of music in this densely visible yet intangible cloud. Music lovers, metal heads like myself, reside on generational, technological, economic, philosophic and ethical lines fault lines, scrambling to get a sense of the whole, attempting to predict the future and rationalizing the disappearance of a culture of music appreciation being smothered by the cloud.

The battle lines are drawn thus: those who favour physical media as a tangible representation of their connection to and support for various artists are balanced by those who believe physical media is ostensibly obsolete in our present high volume, high bandwidth era. Naturally, reality is less polarized and there is a wide diversity of grey between either end. Indeed, perhaps it is my age, nostalgia or my own philosophical preference for the object, whatever the case, my preferred medium is the vinyl record

I simply adore vinyl. The sixty square centimetres of art both front and back, the visible, mechanical reproduction of the sound, the fact that it ages with me and that age can be heard, even the smell of vinyl, the cardboard, paper sleeves, plastic sleeves… and then there is the side a/side b factor, suites of music and not just a giant “blob” of music or a random collection. Sure, you can drop the needle at any point, but the linear nature of the record is so elegant in that it urges us to listen from start to finish, since a single side of even an awful record cannot overstay its welcome.

That said, there are downsides to vinyl, these are partly the reasons that led to the development of new media such as the cassette tape and the compact disc. Records are fragile, a little heat, a little mishandling, a dusty room with a blowing fan can all impair a session of musical appreciation. Moreover, some albums just don’t work as well with the record format, either because their logic of production excludes the record (and they ended up on the medium only by accident and not design) or because of the way a label has seen to distribute the compositions across the medium. In other words, Death’s “Individual Thought Patterns” works well, it has two sides. However, Schuldiner’s follow-up, “The Sound of Perseverance” is spread across two discs meaning it has four sides which makes listening to it in its entirety (well worth the effort) somewhat of a chore. This is what happened with Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell” and “Vulgar Display of Power”, awesome metal albums whose sequence and flow is shattered and re-distributed, they are just not fun anymore.

Sometimes, in cases like the above, compact disc or digital media are preferable at the level of pleasurable experience. Meanwhile, there is another myth, gaining currency as a result of its incessant iteration in message boards and comment sections across cyber-space: that vinyl sounds better. I wonder who is saying this, since the mean age of the internet seems a lot younger than I am and since the preferred methods of music consumption presently favour mobility over fixed context. If it is children, then when exactly are they listening to music on vinyl, since records force the listener to be in a particular space for a particular time, are not portable and require some (if not a lot of) effort to obtain in comparison to CDs and digital media files.

Does vinyl actually sound better? It depends on what better means. Do not let anyone fool you, digital media creation and playback technology has improved so much that in the end it is only a matter or personal opinion or preference when the playing field is level. Obviously a low bitrate compressed file will not sound as “good” as CD or vinyl, but that same song, encoded in a lossless format played back on a system designed for its use will be able to provide objectively verifiable sonic experience. There are also other factors for control: vinyl may well sound better because a turntable is usually paired with a stereo designed for a rapidly disappearing musical experience paradigm, so if you were to pair a high bitrate or lossless file with a high end stereo, you may not know the difference. Listening to the same song through ear-bud or in-ear ear-phones, on PC speakers, through a cell-phone speaker will result in different perceptions of quality.

The only reservations I have about the cloud when it comes to music are the same reservations I have with my non-ICT enabled ipod “classic”. So much music, so little time compressed into one tiny device. Ultimately, I end up grazing but never savouring, gulping but not feeding. Until they become unavailable, I will continue to buy records and the occasional CD where necessary. They might take up space, they may gather dust, but I can hold them, look at them and appreciate them and be disconnected from the ever increasing neurosis of full penetration communications technology.

What happens when they stop?

2011-05-20T06:37:00.001-07:00

The internet is a polluted place. Human tendency favours complaint over praise and what is more, anonymity offers both shield and distance for safe amplification of negativity. Long after the youth move on from their obsessions and coalesce into inevitable mediocrity, their garbage will live on. Indeed, the whole of the internet is becoming a vast encyclopedic catalog of irretractable over-reaction, thesaurus abuse and mixed metaphors. What interests me is how this figures with regard to metal heads. Metal heads are as opinionated as wine lovers, those who appreciate and debate Shakespeare and muscle car fanatics. Metal head opinions, like the music itself, tend to be extreme and the more marginal the head the more ferocious the voice.

None of this in itself is particularly problematic (as far as status quo goes, however, from other angles entirely, it is a mode of expression by which I cannot abide), but what is becoming apparent to this aging metal head is that the flattening of the literary landscape brought about by myriad discussion boards and their successors, social networking, has resulted in a deconstruction of review as a literary mode and subsequent reconstruction as published opinion. In other words, the whole of the searchable internet is an equal mix of syndicated writers and hobbyists balanced by fans (some of which might fall into the former category) and semi-literate children. Guess which is the majority.

As an isolated metal head, the internet is my main source of information. Add to this that my love of metal is tempered by my love of reading and the result is confusion. There are entire sites, simply massive in their scope, such as Metal Archives which catalog, review and provide a wealth of information on metal from all over the world. A search of the Archive’s band database often yields three or more bands of the same name, signed and unsigned, even from within the same country. However, it is once you navigate into the review section that vexation begins. Essentially hyper-wordy, over descriptive, superlative obese “likes” or “hates”. Reviewers (and the term is used loosely here) seek to “balance” an album’s score out of a hundred by posting overly inflated or almost zero scores. The most recent reviews are at the top of a page and sometimes the number of reviews is overwhelming. That said, after three or more high school level writing assignments any motivation one had at the start to devour and digest this apparent feast of information gives way to that sickening feeling not unlike when you eat too many corn chips.

This little essay comes with a caveat: it is the result of numerous negative and indifferent reviews circling like undead cyborg sharks around Pestilence’s new album Doctrine. If the reviewers were to have their writing assessed according to the criteria they themselves set, perhaps they might be a little more reluctant to dole out the tough love. As much as I would like to do so, fair critique of unpolished and vitriolic writing is outside of the time and interest I have on any given day.

So, when they lose interest, when they relegate metal to a “phase”, or to adolescence, their detritus will live on. What makes this debris more significant than its competitors is that its subject, metal, is marginal. Step into a time machine and search for metal and the results page will look not unlike it does today: quoting and re-quoting, trackbacks and a few fan pages echoing for years… Now if only someone could have written something about it.

Pestilence – Doctrine (Review).

2011-05-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

There are certain albums which come along at the right time, albums which just make sense, fit the personal or cultural zeitgeist, albums which for reasons beyond comprehension, the listener repeatedly returns. These are albums which you ”get” (indeed, sometimes “don’t get”, but that is a conversation for another time) on the first listen but continue to share their depths over years. However, as we age an accumulation of “taste”, habits, peculiarities and other listening idiosyncrasies occurs. We also get expedient, cleverly and evenly bluntly, brutally categorizing works into genre, falling back onto the zeitgeist instead of our ears and reducing ourselves to the oversaturated “like” button. Down’s first album Nola is one such album in my collection. Far more than the sum of its parts (Corrosion of Conformity/Crowbar/Pantera/Eyehategod), Nola is a work of love, life and the leaf. As tough as it is fluid and melodic as it is bleak, from the psychedelic cover art to the photo of the band members walking through a cemetery in the late afternoon. Even today, Nola continues to stir my musical fire as I misattribute certain melodies, phrases or rhythms to particular band members.

In this age of unprecedented and unnecessary speed even when a good album, let alone a great or even excellent one comes along, it is almost certainly superseded within moments. Before we have listened to the sample tracks available online our aural gaze is being pawed at, appealed to from another direction.

This month (April 24) Pestilence’s Doctrine went on sale and I have been trapped in its claws since. Aside from the miasma of F# riffer madness, clever but subtle syncopations, outright blast beat abandon, bass playing reminiscent of DiGiorgio with Death, Spheres era guitar synth atmospherics, uneasy low register (anti)harmony and vocals which menace equally with their tone as with their content, there is the production. Santura does for Pestilence what he did for Triptykon (huge guitar, powerful drums and audible bass) and should arguably be the standard across the genre. If you have yet to hear it, let me put it this way: On doctrine, there are two eight-string guitars tuned to low F# and a seven (not a misprint) string bass, tuned a whole octave below that. That dear reader is bass in your face. And yet, the bass guitar is always audible, clearly defined and an excellent contrapuntal harmonic foil to the churning guitars.

Amid the pastiche of the metal present, Doctrine is somewhat out of place. It is neither explicitly technical, nor “brutal” by the ever-shifting standards set by the nerd elite. Its compositional structures are of a space and time obviously not “now”. All of which make this album perfect.

Available now, on CD, or hang in there for a month or so for a reasonably priced vinyl release.

Krallice – Diotima (Review).

2011-05-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

I suffer from myopia. Suffer is perhaps a strong word, since I largely lead a normal, unimpaired life. I wear glasses, probably more than I should and I have no doubt that my impaired vision has influenced the kinds of physical activities I enjoy. On the other hand, having myopic eyes can lead to some unexpected events and insights. If I am swimming underwater, very occasionally an air bubble may find its way onto my eye. While it clings for the brief time of its life, this bubble acts as a natural lens, a miracle of nature. And then I can see, clearly, brilliantly, the liquid glass of the ocean, the fish around me and the shells and pebbles in full relief against the golden sand. On the other hand, when dreaming, I have experienced an almost “hyper-myopia”, where my vision is as clear or as blurred as the dream dictates, yet because of the timing of the sleep phase, I am unable to lock onto specific details. The whole can be comprehended imperfectly but at the moment I try focus on one element my eyes are pulled away somewhere else.

This morning I listened to a low bitrate copy of Krallice’s Diotima. Here is an album that combines the ocean, vision, comprehension and contradiction. From the opening track I was disoriented whenever I tried to apprehend the structure and forced back to bathe in the total texture. Essentially ritual, mantra like music, Diotima, is an exquisite meditation on twenty-first century post-metal. Whereas this term, much like its academic brethren (postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism) has been over-used, misused and inevitably maligned in this age focused yet superficial intensity, Diotima compels the listener to revisit the possibilities of post. Certainly, the tempo, timbre and rhythms are all “metal” in that they are fast, distorted and urgent, yet it is the structure and sentiment which separates Krallice from their contemporaries. Where another band might be moved to create traditional structures of evolving intensity, Krallice create a continually evolving, rhythmically and harmonically complex stream of it. Perhaps the closest analog is Om, who chose a vibe and “stuck to it” finding myriad new ways to evolve the sound through subtlety rather than bombast.

Diotima is available from Profound Lore and is currently out on CD (and download) only. Vinyl junkies hang in there, though it has yet to be confirmed, there is every chance an album like this will make it to twelve inch.

Twilight – Monument to time end (Review)

2011-05-20T01:48:00.000-07:00

I was fourteen years old when my step father bought me a copy of Faith No More’s Angel Dust. It was a cassette that I had anticipated for such a long time. I had stood reading about it in magazines at a local news agent. I scanned the cover for hints of the music, the delicate white curves of the heron on the rich blue background. When I played that cassette for the first time, somewhere during the first track, “Land of Sunshine”, I fell asleep. Upon waking I had memorized the whole of Side A. I rewound to listen again after dinner. On second listen, I was disturbed to learn that what I had listened to was a Faith No More album generated by my mind as I slept. Quite simply, a dream. And with each minute I listened while conscious, the dream version was erased until all that remained was a memory of something different. Angel Dust continues to be one of my favourite albums ever. However, every time I listen, I am reminded of the album I lost.

Sometimes I think that Twilight’s Monument to Time End is that album. Not that they sound the same but rather they are of the same dreamscape. Produced and performed by a veritable who’s who of American black metal and a step away from the debut and toward a more accessible direction, Monument is akin to being enveloped someone else’s dream. It is a vortex of incomprehensible anguish reverberating and swirling, a sonorous weeping and a guiltless mutilation of conceptual corpses. None of it is readily explainable yet it all makes sense, just as in a dream, where things simply are.

Monument has a vinyl release on Southern Lord for a reasonable price