Heathen Dawn

We Gotta Hold a Bake Sale to Benefit the Hessian Army...

2008-09-26T01:52:00Z

...because I fully expect to see these babies to be up on eBay by the end of the week. I can see the ads now...

"Two companies worth of reasonably modern heavy armor. Spare parts included. New in box. (Reserve has not been met)"

Pool some funds, ladies and gentlemen: let's put together a bid. The Hessian state will need some reasonable means of defense, and that is the better part of the tank complement for an armored battalion (and totally jacked by pirates: lulz and kill, global commerce, lulz and kill). I mean, it wouldn't slow down the US military that long, but it should be more than sufficient to keep our stereos safe from marauding Negros on D+3 of the Race War. Besides, "has tanks" is an unspoken - but fundamental - criteria of autonomous nation-state status.

Friends Don't Let Friends Take Bad Psychiatric Drugs

2008-09-09T05:20:47Z

Extroverted Like Me

Of course, if your goal in life is to gain weight and become a borderline alcoholic asshole with limited impulse control and no orgasms, SSRI drugs might be for you. But don't worry, the Healthcare Industrial Complex is just here to help...

(I'm sure there's someone out there who has been saved by these things, but I just got home from an evening with a friend who recently became a drunk, irritable asshole for reasons that I suspect have a lot to do with going on the meds. She was obviously sort of hung up and depressed before, but the drinking problem coincidentally started showing up about the time her personality shifted to talkative and erratic right after going on Paxil [which I can't believe is still being prescribed, given it's well-documented problems].)

Music of the Southern Highlands: Old-Time Stringbands

2008-02-21T23:53:48Z

When commercial recording technology became available in the 1920s, Appalachian performers emerged as some of America's first recording stars. Playing a stylized version of the folk music of the Southern Highlands now typically called 'old-time' (but was often called 'Hillbilly' music at the time), performers like Uncle Dave Mason, Fiddlin' John Carson Kelly Harrell, Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett, backed by the characteristic string bands of the time (typically consisting of two fiddles, banjo played in the finger picking, frailing or clawhammer styles, mandolin, guitar and bass) brought Appalachian music to America. The appearance of the stringbands, and especially, the move to recorded music represented a distinct break in the tradition of mountain music. No longer a primarily oral tradition in which strong regional variation played an important role, the stringbands served as the key evolutionary bridge between the fluid, community-oriented cultural practice of 19th century Appalachian folk music and the homogenized and performer-centric practice of the emerging country music industry. Still, this is the medium through which the vast bulk of the folk music of the earlier period has been preserved, and, unlike most subsequent generations of commercially produced country music, the old-time stringbands of the 1920s and 30s were deeply rooted in the Appalachian tradition from which they sprung, and accordingly, played music with a degree of sincerity and authenticity that has really not been matched since.

The following compilation consists of a series of early recordings (1927-1931) made by several (mostly) lesser-known stringbands hailing from North Carolina's "Lost Provinces" (Ashe, Avery, Alleghany, Watauga and Wilkes counties in the northwest corner of the state), a region that remained one of the most isolated parts of the continental US well into the 20th century. Of the artists included on this recording, by far the most popular (and historically significant) were Grayson & Whitter. This duo was responsible for popularizing several of the most enduringly loved tunes from the Appalachian tradition, most notably "Train 45," "The Banks of the Ohio," "Handsome Molly" and probably the greatest of all the American murder ballads, "Tom Dooley" (G.B. Grayson was, incidentally, the grand-nephew of the Sheriff Grayson who tracked and apprehended the real-life Tom Dula). Those familiar with similar vintage blues recordings will note strong stylistic parallels between several of these songs (notably "Short Life of Trouble" and "Don't Get Trouble in Your Mind") and many early blues recordings, despite a distinctly different musical idiom, showing just how indebted to the Appalachian folk tradition the blues really were.

Music From the Lost Provinces: Old-Time Stringbands from Ashe County, North Carolina & Vicinity, 1927-1931

The Music of the Southern Highlands: Jean Ritchie

2008-02-15T16:45:39Z

Jean Ritchie

Sometimes called the "Mother of Folk," Jean Ritchie is a Kentucky folk singer known for her pure, lyrical voice, her skill with the Appalachian ('mountain' or 'lap') dulcimer, and her vast repertoire of traditional ballads culled from the Southern Appalachian folk tradition. Most of her songs, like those represented here, originated in the balladic traditions of the British Isles, and as such, are often relics of the late medieval and early modern eras (the earliest variants of "False Sir John" seem to have appeared in England and Scandinavia as early as the 10th or 11th centuries).

These ballads are, by and large, songs concerned intimately with honor, kinship, death and violence. A student of modern music will be interested to find many of the characteristics of supposedly 'African' blues music (dialogue based lyrical structures, call and response, certain tonal and elaborative features, etc.). This is a Smithsonian Folkways recording made in 1961.

This music is near and dear to my heart, as I grew up with these songs as a part of my own family life. The variant of "The House Carpenter" included in this collection was one my mother sang when I was a child.

Jean Ritchie - Ballads From Her Appalachian Family Tradition

The Music of the Southern Highlands

2008-02-15T14:47:17Z

Mountain Music

The Southern half of the Appalachian mountain chain holds a unique place in American cultural history. In remote communities from the Alleghenies of West Virginia to the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains of Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, to the Ozarks of Alabama and Arkansas, physical and cultural isolation favored the persistence of Old World musical traditions brought by the regions early Celto-Germanic settlers.

Early white settlement in the Southern Appalachians was largely dominated by lowland Scots/Scots-Irish, but there were also strong leavenings of Highland Scots, English country folk (particularly from Northumberland and Cumbria), German Lutherans and Scandinavians, especially in Virginia and North Carolina.

These peoples brought a tradition of ballad singing and fiddle tunes dating back a millennium or more. Many of the characteristic ballads of the Southern Highlands - "The House Carpenter," "Little Musgrave," "Bonnie George Campbell," "St. James Infirmary" - are British songs dating to the late medieval and early modern periods. Some are even older: "False Sir John" (known more often in the Old World as "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight") is likely rooted in an Old Norse ballad from pre-Christian Norway. The archetypal 'Southern' fiddle tune - "Soldier's Joy" - likely goes back to a similar source.

This medieval repertoire persevered as part of a living oral tradition in the isolated fastness of mountain hollers long after they had essentially died out except as curiosities in their native countries (far more variants of the classic British Child ballads have been collected in the American South than in Britain). With their emphasis on instrumental improvisation within either a modal or a five tone harmonic framework, the Old World musical traditions of the Southern Highlands would become the bedrock on which virtually all future American music would be anchored.

The decades immediately preceding and following the American Civil War proved to be a turning point in the history not only of Southern Appalachia, but in the history of American music. During the 30 years between 1850 and 1880, the railroads pierced the Southern Highlands, finally bringing them in sustained contact with the rest of the country. Laying track through the rugged terrain of the Southern mountains was a herculean task requiring a massive labor force to complete.

Railroad work was always dangerous, but no work was more dangerous than that of tunneling through the Appalachian mountains. 450 million years of erosion had left the oldest mountains on earth as rounded nubs, but what remained was among the toughest rock on earth - the 3 billion year-old granite of the continental shield. The usual dangers of tunnel work prevailed - cave-ins, accidental explosions, pockets of poisonous gas - but the greatest threat was silicosis acquired from inhaling the dust left behind in the process of drilling blasting holes.

The mortality rates on many of the tunnel projects soon proved so high that only the most expendable of workers - poor local whites and blacks shipped in at bargain basement wages (or no wages at all, the use of prison work crews for rail projects being widespread through much of the South, with prison gangs often being sent hundreds of miles away, even across state lines). Thousands of white mountain folk worked and died alongside black workers and prisoners brought in to help complete projects like West Virginia's Great Bend Tunnel (around which the legends of John Henry swirl) and the Swannanoa Tunnel just east of Asheville, NC (the 20 year nightmare that spawned the classic work song "Swannanoa Tunnel," the direct ancestor of one of country music's first great hit songs, "Nine Pound Hammer (Roll on Buddy)")

The synthesis of African rhythms and North European harmonic and melodic principles that is so fundamental to all subsequent American music first emerged among the work crews digging tunnels and laying track through the mountains of the South. The blues were born here, country too. They were dispersed throughout the United States by the great population movements spurred on first by the railroads themselves, and then by great demographic shifts of the early 20th century, which saw blacks and mountain folk in the tens of thousands moving into the industrial cities of the North and Upper Midwest, as well as the emerging mill towns of the Piedmont South. They brought with them the hybridized musical sensibilities that first emerged among the hammer swingers of the Appalachian rail projects.

In cities like New Orleans, New York, Chicago and Kansas city, blues musicians, encountering early Modernist classical music became the first jazzmen. Bluegrass emerged from a similar process in the textile and coal centers of the Southern foothills and Piedmont regions. Rock 'n roll was born when the various musical offspring of those mountain railroad men merged yet again. Fittingly, the term itself originated in the idiom of the tunnel crews: "rock 'n roll" referred in the beginning to the movements of the man holding the metal rods that 'steel drivin' men' hammered into the unyielding rock of the Southern Highlands.

That historical digression aside, however, the purest and most authentic expression of Appalachian music remains its original guise, the ballads, dances, work songs and fiddle tunes passed down through an oral tradition that stretches all the way back to medieval Europe, so it is my intent to make as much of this music as I have in my collection available for your enjoyment and edification.

Cheers,
Laeth

_____________________________

For my first entry in what will hopefully be an ever expanding series, I give you Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Known as "The Minstrel of the Appalachians," Lunsford was born at Mars Hill College (Madison County) and grew up in the Turkey Creek district of my own hometown, Leicester, NC (just west of Asheville). Lunsford was a man of many hats, singer, songwriter (notably of the country standard "Old Mountain Dew"), folklorist, traveling salesman and schoolteacher. As a collector and preserver of the folk traditions of the North Carolina mountains, he had no peer. He should probably be considered the greatest of the 'songcatchers' who kept the tradition of Appalachian balladry alive in the early 20th century. His contributions to the "Memory Project" (for which the recordings on this album were made in 1949, when Lunsford was 67) of the library of Congress represent the largest collection of material provided by any single American - over 300 songs. Lunsford played both fiddle and banjo (in the traditional mountain clawhammer style), but it is his untrained and unaffected baritone voice that was his most endearing trait.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford Banjo Tunes, Ballads and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina

Punks Suck

2008-02-13T02:12:52Z

The bar was full of punks this evening, which always sucks. I mean, I try to be social, you can only put up with so many pretentious fuckwits telling you about the unholy shit they don't partake of. "I'm a vegan!" "I don't drink/smoke/fuck/get fucked/hang out with racists/hang with black people!" Whatever it is, every punk (hardcore kid/grind freak/skinhead) seems to have one at the very least. Usually more than one. It's like hanging out with angry monks: self-righteous asceticism masking a deranged and fanatical excess in some other department. It's all so...Christian.

Give me an honest Jewlatto hesher any day.

Jazz and Metal

2008-02-11T06:47:25Z

I had an interesting experience a couple of weeks ago. My girlfriend and I had a moment to relax - fairly rare of late - so I decided to put some music on. The first thing I slipped into the disc changer was Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come. By the time we'd hit the 45 second mark of "Eventually" (in the middle of a solo that sounds like every Kerry King lead played simultaneously on an alto sax), my girlfriend looked at me: "I'm sorry babe, but this is too much right now, can we listen to something a little more relaxing?"

It was an excellent reminder of just how violent this music really was and is. While metal has certainly borrowed some from jazz idiom, it has always seemed to me that there is a much more important point of intersection between metal and modal and free jazz, a certain shared honesty and a fearless conceptual selflessness that allows the engagement with reality to lead the music (and musicians) in violent, unsettling or (on the surface) unpleasant directions. It's not just the willingness to live dangerously though, it's that it's done with authentic sincerity, rather than the self-consciously ironic 'subversion' that is the two-belts-and-a-ballad currency of the hipster audition.

Wisdom

2008-01-23T23:32:32Z

All roads don't lead to Rome, nor all rivers to Memphis.

A B-day

2008-01-11T00:47:47Z

Happy birthday silverambz

The Bhutto Assassination

2007-12-28T10:23:28Z

This is one of the most worrying moments since the 'War on Terror' begun. The Bhutto assassination, which apparently involved a sniper attack as well as a suicide bombing, is part of a worrying string of increasingly professional 'hits' that have been placed on leading democratic figures in Pakistan. This professionalism is fairly worrying, because it indicates that the Musharraf government is actually behind the attacks on key opposition parties and leaders. Some of the methods used in recent attacks - snipers and multi-prong, coordinated attacks with built-in redundancy - are much more reminiscent of the work of professional special ops or intelligence operatives than the sort of haphazard plans more typical of the al Qaeda types. If this is the work of the government, it would only confirm what many of us already suspect: Pervez Musharraf is a violent, pragmatic autocrat, interested only in maintaining his own position of power (in other words, precisely the sort of man who will sell out his 'allies' in the 'War on Terror' the second it is in his own personal interest to do so).

But there's a second possibility that I find even more frightening. In this scenario, Musharraf is innocent of any complicity in the attacks, and the increasing professionalism of the jihadists' tactics is instead the result of defections to militants by members (or former members) of the Pakistani military or intelligence services. Now that is a real nightmare, because it would indicate that Musharraf is losing control of Pakistan's security apparatus. I can't think of anything more terrifying right now than a rogue military with jihadist ties in a nuclear armed state. Congratulations Dubs, while you were concentrating on Iran's non-existent nuclear program and breaking the US military on the rock of Iraqi resistance (instead of, you know, hunting down and destroying bin Laden and the Taliban holdouts, many of whom are unquestionably providing key leadership support to Pakistani militants), a country that already has nukes is slowly (or is that rapidly?) slipping into the hands of al-Qaeda. Great job, Brownie!

Another School Shooting, Another Reminder That Democracy = FAIL

2007-11-08T23:12:00Z

The basic problem is that we've got this alienating disconnect between the institutions of liberal democracy and the basic structure of reality. Nowhere is that disconnect more blatant than in our educational institutions. From an early age, we shortchange our best and brightest. We cram them in overcrowded classrooms with assorted mediocrities and failures, holding back their educational progress to the snail's pace that can be maintained by whichever stupid nigger or 'mainstreamed' mongoloid is the dumbest fucker in the class. By the time they reach the later years of their secondary education, they might get the opportunity to participate in 'advanced' classes, free of the most malign of the idiots, perhaps, but only marginally better off because they're still being warehoused and still saddled with 'peers' who lack anything like their own capabilities. Our 'democratic' educational institutions are a sick joke, designed to 'level the playing field' between the truly intelligent elite and the merely industrious mediocrities who have advanced on the strength of 'participation' grades and other devices designed to cover up the fact that they lack the ability to achieve actual excellence.

The intelligent are, well, intelligent, and, as a result, they know they're getting screwed. Worse, they get to experience a childhood of torment at the hands of every high-level cretin whose claim to fame is an ability to manipulate a ball (you know, something that a fucking seal can do), egged on by those busy, overachieving beavers who resent the ease with which the truly intelligent excel at things they have to bust their inadequate asses (and churn out the b.s. 'extra credit' assignments) just to get by in.

We've created whole generations of intelligent, alienated, tormented youths, so why are we surprised when, every year, one or two of them turn out to be emotionally unstable and have access to firearms, with predictable results? The tragedy isn't that some ball-toters/beavers/future-shit-shovelers eat a parabellum, the tragedy is that we've built a society that makes it pretty much inevitable.

The Thinking White Man's Approach to Jihad

2007-07-27T01:53:24Z

We support the actions of Islamic freedom fighters acting within their own lands and among their own peoples in resistance to technocratic global liberalism. And, if they want to come here, well, that's why the gods gave us gas chambers.

Point to Ponder

2007-07-22T21:17:11Z

Any moral system in which Mother Teresa is seen as a saint and Adolf Hitler as a monster is a moral system that has failed.

Marijuana and Messageboards

2007-07-18T04:32:11Z

You ever burn a couple down, get on the 'nerd and write out what seemed at the time like a masterclass in messageboard tactics, only to come down a little and realized your glorious attempt was just high-ku? Yeah, well, andway, check this 'beaut out...

________________________

Step away, for a moment, from your impulse toward reverse snobbery, and think about Shakespeare. Not the 'Shakespeare' of dry and dusty folios, and concordances, and indices of every kind, nor, certainly, the 'Shakespeare' of English class, the skinny one with a bee-colored jacket, mind you. I mean the real Shakespeare, the Shakespeare that Shakespeare himself would want you to experience when you experience Shakespeare.

I mean Shakespeare heard aloud:

in a theater

and seen on a stage

with actors

and costumes

and props and scenery

like in a play?

and stuff

Shakespeare without glosses, or helpful hints in the margin, or even the ability to flip back to Act II.

Shakespeare experienced as direct experience, and not mediated from word to mind and back again.

Doing it for real, seeing it performed - with all the subtle nuances of emphasis (aural or visual), interpretation, and memory performance implies - can very often have the effect of rendering what reads in black an white upon the printed page a good bit greyer in reality.

Film Review

2007-06-27T03:52:37Z

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Werner Herzog has been called a madman, a dreamer and a maverick of cinema. An eccentric and driven filmmaker, his drive and eccentricity often crossed the border into obsession. Not surprisingly, his films have often been seen as explorations of the depths of obsession, and his masterpiece of masterpieces, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, is no exception.

Aguirre is a fairly accessible film, considering its pedigre, and one that eschews the temporally disjointed structures and arcane avant-garde-isms more typical of earlier German art cinema (including Herzog's own previous work). Instead, Herzog relies on simple narrative filmmaking to tell a story that is on one level a chronicle of a Quixotic yet doomed quest, on a second level, a meditation on the descent into madness and death, and on yet another level, a scathing rebuke of the cultural zeitgeist of Herzog's age.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God begins with one of the most visually stunning shots in cinematic history (and ends with another), as conquistadors under the command of Gonzalo Pizzaro (brother of the conqueror of the Inca), guided by Indian slaves, pick their way through the fog down an impossibly steep mountain terrace toward the jungle below. Soon, a small force leaves this main body to scout down a river in the search of the fabled city of El Dorado.

The rest of the film follows the course of this scouting party as it floats to its inevitable doom, done in by starvation, disease, the decidedly unfriendly attentions of the natives, and, most of all, by the madness and boundless ambition of the expedition's second-in-command, Don Lope de Aguirre (the incomparable Klaus Kinski).

In telling this story, Herzog makes use of a minimalistic cinematic style in which both dialogue and action are sparsely distributed. Instead, the plot unfolds primarily through a series of visual metaphors - the descent into the jungle, the river, a fully rigged sailing vessel somehow stranded in the forest canopy - which, combined with the brilliant soundtrack by ambient music pioneers Popol Vuh, help to create the trancelike dreamscapes for which Herzog is justifiably famous.

One of the highlights of Aguirre, the Wrath of God is the simply stunning cinematography of Thomas Mauch. The fluid, languid movements of Mauch's camera mirrors to the agonizingly slow progress of the expedition (shown to particularly brilliant effect in the film's opening shots), and serves to lend an epic sensibility to a film that clocks in at a spare 94 minutes. The supersaturated colors of the jungle backgrounds become at once beautiful and suffocating - a choking, endless emerald sea, swallowing all human presence and endeavor, rendering them futile and meaningless.

Special attention should also be paid to the Klaus Kinski's performance in the title role, which is not only magnificent, but must be counted among the greatest performances in film history. For a lesser actor, the sparseness of dialogue and plotting in Herzog's largely improvised script could have presented an insurmountable obstacle, but in the hands of a master like Kinski, that very lack of dialogue and action becomes an opportunity to fill the empty space with the edges of a character created from the fragments of gesture. Kinski renders the madness of Aguirre all the more frightening by cloaking it in mystery and only allowing us to view glimpses of the beast within. Instead, we are left to intuit his insanity from subtle cues of movement and expression: his curiously bent walk; the inhuman detachment he shows in the face of the suffering and fear of his men; the way he simply materializes in front of the camera, drifting in like fog (a feat he contrived through a contorted sort of pirouette); the calculating silence into which he frequently falls. That his madness is only hinted at makes the unnervingly whispered moments of rage even more terrifying.

On the surface, Aguirre is an exploration of the romance of the Impossible Dream, yet another sign of his obsession with obsessions, perhaps the central concern of Herzog's art. On a deeper level, it is perhaps best understood as a blistering critique of the 1960s counterculture. The Enlightenment conceit of the 'noble savage' which the hippie movement adopted as its central tenet is ruthlessly dissected, and the hollowness made manifest by the Summer of Love, Altamont and the Manson Family is given concrete expression in the form of the Indians. These, far from being the peaceful sages of hippie lore, appear in Aguirre as faceless demons of fear, invisible except for their handiwork, which is no less than death itself.

Herzog's Jungle, his emblem of Nature, reinforces this critique: Herzog's Jungle is not the counterculture's garden of delights, it is Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Here, the hippies' peaceful paradise is consumed by Kipling's 'nature, red in tooth and claw.' Though the Jungle teems with life and beauty, it is in the end a cradle of madness, and the triumph of the Jungle is a meditation on the triumph of Death.

But it is in the character of Aguirre himself that Herzog's critique of the counterculture achieves its most complete form, for Don Lope de Aguirre can be fruitfully read as the film's hippie stand-in (he conveniently even sports long hair). It is Aguirre, conquistador, and ex officio, agent of civilization, who descends into the Jungle (and into madness), stripping away the last vestigial remnants of his own civilized veneer in his pursuit of the Impossible Dream of El Dorado. What emerges is, in a sense, the Natural Man. But the Natural Man is not a man at peace and harmony with other men and nature, but a man reduced to a state of madness and endless, unquenchable desire. In Aguirre, the great lie of the Enlightenment and counterculture is made manifest: divorced from any civilized impulse, he is only a savage, vicious, ruthless and subject only to his own impulses and wishes. Instead of Rousseau's Noble Savage, the Natural Man stands revealed as nothing more (or less) than Hobbes' Leviathan.

10/10

Apparently, I'm a Real Weirdo...

2007-06-07T23:51:08Z

So, laeth_maclaurie, your LiveJournal reveals...

You are... 0% unique and 4% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy poetry). When it comes to friends you are normal. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are wary of trusting strangers. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is intellectual.

Your overall weirdness is: 54

(The average level of weirdness is: 27.
You are weirder than 92% of other LJers.)

Find out what your weirdness level is!

I guess nothing demonstrates just how much I buck the trends as posting quizzes to my LJ...

At the Gates - The Red in the Sky is Ours

2007-05-28T08:56:17Z

Within the history of any artistic genre or movement it is often possible to discern a discreet and predictable developmental pattern. Its initial emergence is murky and indistinct, with multiple artists groping awkwardly around the edges of what it will later become. Soon, the inconsistent fumbling gives way to a second stage in which new artists emerge to consolidate and codify, emphasizing the essential and discarding the dead weight the genre founders had carried over from the previous generation. Finally, yet more artists arrive to build upon the now settled foundation, expanding upon it and ushering in a ‘golden age.’

In death metal these three eras correspond roughly to the years 1983-1986, 1987-1989 and 1990-1993, respectively. It was during the last of these periods that the overwhelming majority of death metal’s greatest albums were released. Bands like Deicide, Atheist, Incantation, Amorphis Demilich, Fleshcrawl, Dismember and Necrophobic emerged to push the genre to new heights, but perhaps no band pushed the limits further or faster than Sweden’s At the Gates did with The Red in the Sky is Ours.

At the Gates are often considered the ‘fathers’ of melodic death metal, and while the term itself may be of doubtful utility as a genre tag, it certainly provides a reasonable starting point for understanding The Red in the Sky is Ours. While its basic approach to instrumentation clearly marks it as a death metal album, there is an underlying awareness of the emerging black metal movement in the fluid tremolo picked melodies (sometimes consonant, sometime dissonant, sometimes built just from the fragments of the chromatic scale - always with the chill of the Void in their depths) that form that compositional backbone and chief vessel for meaning in these songs.

Often these melodies are accompanied or embellished with strings. In fact, The Red in the Sky is Ours frequently resembles nothing so much as string concerto emerging from the depths of the inferno. Here, the guitars evoke the demonic, lightning-fingered cadenzas of Paganini (the title track), there a melancholic adagio for cello and double bass (“City of Screaming Statues”). At other times, the melodic lines are juxtaposed disconcertingly with dissonant counterpoint (“Through Gardens of Grief”), bringing to the mind to dystopian visions of the darkest of Modernist nightmares.

Technically, The Red in the Sky is breathtaking. While it doesn’t aspire to the nth degree musicianship of, say, Cynic, the instrumentation is considerably more complex than one would find even among many technically accomplished bands like Deicide or Morbid Angel (and certainly far more advanced than the viscerally primitive bludgeoning of the then preeminent Stockholm scene).

But what really catches the ear is the vast array of techniques at the band’s disposal and the calculated precision of their employment. The Red in the Sky is Ours makes use of everything from keyless modalism to polyphony to radical dissonance to elements of serialism and set theory to construct, enhance and complement (and sometimes deconstruct) its central melodies. The Red in the Sky is Ours may very well be the most compositionally aware album in death metal history. Still, none of these techniques are applied indiscriminately, and in their seamless incorporation into the broader context of song we are made more aware of the central experience of the whole of the music itself, rather than experiencing it as a series of constituent parts.

For this reason, The Red in the Sky is Ours distinguishes itself not just in the epic breadth of its vision or the diversity and innovative vigor of its technical execution, but in the totalizing holism and lucidity that mark it a master work among master works. The mastery of tactical detail is matched and more than matched by a strategic mastery of metastructure in which each brilliant detail is rendered more vivid and powerful through its placement in the overarching narrative of song. Similarly, each song is enhanced by its placement within the larger context of the album.

Equally impressive is the seeming effortlessness of the whole project. For all the studied precision of its instrumentation, The Red in the Sky is Ours exudes the sort of intuitive genius that can neither be taught nor achieved through rote practice. The Germans call it Fingerspitzengefühl – the ‘finger sense.’ It’s a term that strikes exactly the right chord, evoking both the sheer magic the album conjures, and the deft and nearly undetectable touch of the band’s skillful manipulation of the listener.

Despite the labyrinthine complexity of much of the music, there is very little of the jarring discontinuity the characterized the work of many of band’s contemporaries. Where artists like Deicide and Atheist built tension through abrupt rhythmic dislocation, At the Gates achieves the same goal through subtler manipulations of dynamics, texture, harmonic shading and melodic development. As a result, The Red in the Sky is Ours retains a certain grace and fluidity of movement that aestheticizes the violence, rage and alienation at its core without diminishing or obscuring them.

It was perhaps inevitable that excellence of this magnitude would prove unsustainable, at least in the strike-while-the-iron-is-hot world of modern recording. While At the Gates would go on to release three more albums, none even remotely approached the rapturous levels reached with The Red in the Sky is Ours. However, the greatness of this album is such that even subsequent mediocrity can in no way dim the glory of a band that once stood at the very pinnacle of their artform.

10/10

Fragments and Aphorisms

2007-05-21T22:08:12Z

Dirge before the dawn

Whence the death of music?
Where is the poet’s pen
in a world where golden dreams
still the silver tongues of men?

The beauty and the laughter
Are lost behind the rage
For who can utter soft words
Unto an Iron Age?

Our Fearless Leader

Today a monkey danced across my screen
In the Land of the Retarded, the Average Man is king!

The Mirror Never Lies

I once fancied myself a suffering Poet
Drowning in a Sea of Guilt
But the mirror said:
"You're just a kid, adrift in Sea of Filth"

I once fancied myself a Warrior
In a battle I could never win
But the mirror said:
"Lose some weight, you're not quite in fighting trim!"

I once fancied myself a Leader
Misunderstood by his own
But the mirror said:
"You're a fucking slob, sitting there alone."

I once fancied myself a Destroyer
Hammer in my left hand and a sword clutched in my right
But the mirror said:
"You've got a hammer, today I guess you're right!"

Moral Democracy Fails to Enforce Morality

2007-05-14T22:31:48Z

Olympic Bomber Taunts Victims From Prison

Once again, the internally incongruous nature of democracy deconstructs itself. Democratic government, in upholding a flawed ideal of liberty and justice, cannot enforce meaningful respect for either liberty or justice. How predictable.

In related news:

Quote:

Supermax has a capacity of 490 and holds some of the nation's most infamous inmates, including Unabomber Theodore Kaczyinski and September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

Sounds like the coolest neighborhood in America, to me. I bet you can even get Andy Griffith re-runs there...

The Pattern Repeats

2007-04-18T19:38:11Z

You know, after almost every school massacre, I find myself a couple of days into the coverage realizing that the only sympathetic figure in the whole fucking mess is the shooter. Two days after his Blacksburg rampage, the picture that is emerging of Seung Cho is that of a troubled young man, abandoned by society and abused by his fellows. The picture that emerges of the victims is that of cowards huddling in fear. Not one person in the entire building thought to take advantage of their numbers and rush Cho (a situation that has ended many such events before the death tolls could mount to catastrophic proportions). The 'victims' behaved like craven dogs, and I'm supposed to feel sorry because they were shot down like dogs? I don't think so. If they'd been worthy of life, they'd have at least tried to do something to stop the killer. But they didn't, and they weren't. The contrast between the worthless pansies at VA Tech and, say, the heroes who saved hundreds and possibly thousands of other lives by deliberately sacrificing themselves on United Flight 93 is striking. If the best my generation can do is hide under desks and wait for some skinny Asian kid to methodically execute them, then this nation is doomed. We are a broken race of broken people, and if this is our measure, then I hope the terrorists win, because we simply do not deserve to continue to exist as a people. Let the mantle pass to some other, more worthy people, because we are not fit to bear it.

One thing You've Got to Admire About Gooks...

2007-04-17T18:47:41Z

...when they decide to do something, they sure don't half-ass it. Chain the doors, triple tap every victim. GOD-DAMN!

I just hope the chone didn't listen to any metal.

The Holocaust...Again (read the link before reading my [disjointed] thoughts)

2007-04-03T20:57:45Z

http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/textonlyarchive/96-11-15/3.txt

The taboo issue also looms large. I think any intelligent person should find the evidence for the Holocaust compelling. At the same time, I find it somewhat disturbing that we've reached a point in Western history where agreement with a particular interpretation of a historical event is seen a non-negotiable part of being a morally 'good' person. That this is an absurd way to think ought to be obvious, but it apparently isn't to most people.

Dr. Novick touched briefly on another issue that doesn't receive nearly as much attention as it ought to, namely the way the Holocaust narrative is used on contemporary discourse. For Jews, it has become a discourse of exoneration, a get out of jail free card that has allowed, for instance, the Israeli government to act with near impunity against its neighbors (and against Arabs living within Israeli occupied territory). For others, it is a discourse of guilt, a silly 'never again' rhetoric that drives policy decisions that are objectively against the interests of the nations that pursue them (see Iraqi Freedom, Operation). And still for others (present enemies of Israel, primarily), it is a narrative of cynically manipulated fear (see Iran). None of these narratives are productive or helpful, and their continued use to bludgeon the political opponents of the unfettered domination of Israel over its neighbors in fact is a major driving force behind revisionism and Holocaust denial.

I think there's a degree to which the way the Holocaust is decontextualized in Western (and especially American) education that also breeds resentment. Because the Holocaust is taught as a seperate event, its connections to the wider historical context of its time is lost. The Holocaust is unthinkable without the military conditions that prevailed in the early 1940s, yet it is rarely taught in the context of the war. Worse, it is taught as a specially heinous crime targeting a special people, which not surprisingly, breeds resentment (the more so given that essentially half of Hitler's victims weren't Jews at all, and despite occasional genuflections in the direction of Gypsies and homosexuals, the Holocaust is still taught almost exclusively in the context of Jewish suffering).

This tendency to teach the Holocaust as a special event with no historical parallels obscures the fact that it was one of many genocides in an age of genocides. The Holocaust wasn't a unique event that could only have happened in Germany to Jews, and only at the direction of Adolf Hitler. Rather, it was an archetypal example of an evil built into the fabric of the modern nation-state: systemized, centralized and industrialized violence as a political tool. It's a pattern that began with the Conquistadors and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, was instutionalized by the Terror, intensified and industrialized during the 19th century colonial expansion, made the chief instrument of state policy by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao and made endemic to much of the world through the post-colonial adoption of Western organizational models. The Holocaust is just one of many such events, but that gets lost in the sociopolitical shuffle.

Metal as neo-Medieval Art

2007-03-26T02:22:28Z

For the last couple of months, I've been sending music (mostly metal) to a friend and former adviser of mine from my undergrad days (in exchange, she scans all the journals she has access to that I would like to read in the comfort of my own home, but don't have the hundreds of dollars required to subscribe to them). Yesterday, she sent me an interesting comment (apparently percolating for a while, though immediately precipitated by listening to Vikinligr Veldi):

"You know, a lot of the metal you've sent me sounds like medieval music if you pay attention just to the melody lines."

I found it pretty interesting, because it paralleled some of my own recent thoughts. Metal is often treated as a neo-Romantic artform. This view has been, of course, popularized within the metal community by Spinoza Ray Prozak and ANUS.com, but outside observers (notably sociologist Deena Weinstein) have also commented on the convergence of metal and Romantic art. The equation of metal and Romanticism is, I think, fundamentally sound. However, there's a strong case to be made that metal goes beyond the Romantic fascination with the medieval past to actually embracing ideals that are consonant with the beliefs that permeated the medieval world.

The Dance of Death (1493)

Decidedly medieval themes were central to the genre from its earliest days. Black Sabbath's classic albums were littered with songs that read more like 14th century sermons adapted to a world of atomic arms and injection drugs than 20th century rock songs. Songs like "Black Sabbath," "War Pigs," "Electric Funeral," "Hand of Doom," and "Children of the Grave" display a sense, not only of the inevitability of death, but also of its looming imminence. Like the itinerate preachers of the plague years, metal is keen to remind us that death will come for us all, and it could come at any moment through songs like Hellhammer's "Triumph of Death" and Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

Illustration from Betwyx the Body and Wormes (15th Century)

Metal's treatment of death in general is strongly medieval in its tone. Where 'death' often appears in Romantic art as a metaphor for social ills or the sublimation of the personal will in Modern life, metal has largely adopted the medieval iconography of death. Metal is not concerned with death as symbol or allegory, but with the fundamental realness of death. Like the transi tombs and litanies of the tortures of the damned common in the late middle ages, depictions of death in metal are often focused on the practical mechanics of dismemberment, disease and decay, and shy away from the comfortable euphamisms of a culture in denial of death.

Satan's Tortures (12th Century)

More medieval parallels can be seen in metal's fascination with the occult. The occult was, of course, also a common theme in Romantic art, but occultism in metal draws on typically medieval archetypes - Satanism and Germanic paganism - rather than the Masonic ritualism and Hellenistic hermeticism more typical of the Romantics (though it should be noted that the arch-Romantic Wagner also made great use of medieval occult imagery). Despite the occasional penetration of LaVeyan Satanism, for the most part, metal's 'Satan' is the Satan of the medieval popular imagination: a horned entity of enormous power locked in struggle with the deity for domination of the universe, not the urbane gentleman of Romantics or the Rolling Stones.

Detail from the Bayeux Tapestry (late 11th century)

Metal's iconography and ideals are rooted almost entirely in the cultures of the European middle ages. Metal - like the chivalric codes of the high middle ages and pagan epics of the early medieval period - celebrates the cult of the warrior. Its virtues are the virtues of a warrior: honor, fearlessness in the face of death, and the heroic will to live out one's purpose in a violent world. Its vices are the vices of those without the courage to live as warriors: weakness, misplaced mercy, falsity and dissimulation. Its master icons are war, death and the sword. Its goal to build temples to transcendent belief from raw materials of the crudest sort.

Interior view, Chartres Cathedral (12th-13th centuries)

People Over Thirty Pretty Much Need to Die

2007-02-14T08:12:59Z

"He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap..."

Terminate all Yupsters!

And why does every article like this have to have a bar mitzvah joke?

A Puzzler

2007-02-05T06:04:58Z

If Jews really want us to like them, why do they spend so much time telling us how much we hate them?

Just wondering...