jazzorcise me : wearing thin

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but I'm nothing if not....whatever the opposite of prolific is....

Somewhat recently, late spring....
Struggling with some topos theory concepts while simultaneously wondering why jazz/improvisation seems to be the common thread linking most of those I see talking about these concepts, I decide to take an afternoon experimental. At this stage I'm criminally underinformed and uneducated about nearly everything jazz is could be was or will be...a complete novice. After scrambling around youtube listening to scraps and seconds and scrapings from several records by names I knew as an outsider, Coltrane Davis Monk, but an album title caught my eye. I plug in Mingus' appropriately black metal-sounding "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" and plug myself into roughly 200 µg of LSD.

[[the initial wash, the peak, was detailed in the mother/mary bit a few posts back. an ego-dissolution that coincided *perfectly* with a thunderclap and a downpour. when the peak collapsed into the decay stage, i pressed play and lied back down, my problems with this strange musical math in a sober state very much on my mind.]]

Upon the first notes, my arm hair stood on end and I could feel the shape of every instrument individually squirrelling and rumbling around various points of my body. I've felt structure in music, plenty of times, I've even written about drugs and the shape of music, but always in a wondering, speculative fashion. Wondering how much was just in the head, always subjective etc. I've watched music happen visually on many drugs, but this was razor sharp definition compared to large blobs of sound coming out of other bands and musicians. This had definition in a such a way that it was difficult not to think it as a technical upgrade to the technology of music, definition in such a way that I could recognize the math involved, could recognize the accuracy of my perception. It became no struggle at all to understand why it is a challenging genre to try and take hold of out beyond the muzaks and the kenny g's...I could feel the waveform of every musical structure and flow as separate strands and strings and curves, and I could feel the movement between perception and recognition, the gaps as strongly as the sounds. I could see how multiple instruments interlocked and constructed scaffolding for other instruments; how the group swelled and breathed as a unit, a complex system of individual complex systems working toward a unified projection. I felt a hundred spidery fingers, one for every frequency, cascade and crawl around on my cortex. By focusing on a single instrument I could mute the feeling of every other sound, singling out each strand individually from the rest, singling out the pathways that particular strand of energy took through my brain. After playing in this feeling for a little while, I mentally backed off from this awed analysing, relaxed my thinking and simply listened to the morphing musicality as a whole.

I could feel it bending my thoughtwave toward it. The spidery fingers were massaging my mind, attempting to build speed toward nonlinearity, toward a concrescence that crescendos into an awareness that this band is operating seamlessly as a single brain focused on a thing. Or on nothing? That the topology of this album seemed structurally identical to the topology of a single brain pacing around a structure that it is trying to understand. A brain praying to a structure it is trying to understand? A brain preying on a structure it is trying to understand?

I'm hearing myself in this album.
I'm hearing my brain work upon this album.
My perception split perfectly in two.
I have a sort of default, standard hexagonal latticing framework(?) for multi-perception, I've noticed, that occurs when my perception is split into multiples during psych trials and spellcastings, but this was the first time I'd ever witnessed it simply doubling. Perfectly doubling. A single hexagonal cell of unified perception mirrored itself dimensionally, somehow from the inside out, involuting toroidally and I saw myself across the room pacing around the stereo, lost in thought. Pacing around the structure it is trying to understand. I saw myself, and somehow instinctively knew it was a faded copy of myself from slightly earlier in time, and my brain raced past my rational mechanism into the conclusion that I was watching my ghost, and that I had died.

As this emotion overwhelmed rationality with an elegant precision, I started crying. The crying came out like a bolt with a decidedly un-sorrowful feeling, however - the feeling of extraordinary comfort, followed by a surge of flaming bliss. The thought that held my mind in its jaws before had resembled "if only I had myself to talk to, I wouldn't be lonely" was scorched away by the flash and heat of "I ALWAYS have myself to talk to, how could I ever be lonely?" and a warm blanket closed over me as I watched my spectre dance around the room to this beautiful record.

I accepted being dead forever, and suddenly knew the truth, that the structure around which I pray/pace is a mirror image of my own Death.


"A psilocybin mushroom experience in which I had perceived memories laid out before me contained in a seemingly infinite array of mirrors, mirrors that also contained the seeds of future choices, suddenly made sense. A labyrinthine reflexivity, an asynchronous reflection of every possible self. Sitting alone in the middle of the night watching an old man drown in a mirror of his regrets, my vision went geomorphic and I began to weep. Self-reflection was enveloped by void-thoughts and shattered across a broken-mirrored wall. I saw my Death pirouetting in the reflective surface before I reflexively shook my head and snapped out of it in time for the credits to roll."  
Reflections on a Hyperprophet - J. Hypheresis

Because you can't stop me.

Recently I guest-posted on a Canadian metal blog with the intent of doing something slightly regular, a here-and-there-ish 'when something my style pops up for review' level contributor. One post and it became pretty clear they weren't really interested in my style, but just in filling space. I am posting this here because their editor eviscerated it in the name of style-guides and I like it better the other way. Fucker.




Rings of Saturn
Lugal Ki En
(Google it. Lazy bastard.)

[Full disclosure time: I don't like much death metal, and I like even less 'core. In fact, this album /on its surface/ is nearly the diametric opposite of my own personal tastes - which lean significantly toward the atmospheric, the bleak, the noisy, the raw, the droning. This opposition is precisely why I accepted this particular reviewing gig. Call it a means to escape my shell /a review for people that would never give this a chance on its own.

Because it is fucking GOOD.
Incredible even.

Death metal space-fury gone virally berserk. Be warned: the following has a lot of hyphens and copious use of words like fractal and spiraling. New concepts had to be invented, existing words had to be chopped up and blended to describe parts of this everything-but-chaotic album. I literally gave up on the thesaurus.com entry for "precise" and made something up at one point.]

digitalis in extremis

Rings of Saturn are inhuman post-digital precision, slick and clean even amidst the depths this style is clearly capable of plumbing. Self-described "aliencore" and absolutely drilling in its pointedness, this album is spectacularly tight and technical even when losing its mind entirely in the grind and the guttural. Right off the mark full destruction reigns, the opening track Senseless Massacre living up to its name and pulverizing from the first second before a beautiful melody flows seamlessly into the closest thing this song has to a hook. While this explosive leadoff symbolizes the blend of mercurial hyper-melody and impossibly massive sledgehammer rhythm to be found in abundance on the record, the second tune, Desolate Paradise ratchets up the intensity of both. Sparked by a spiraling lead break and elevated by perfect use of mood-bending near-ambience, demands of the listener to "wake from slumber" precede its going wildly off on a treble-happy shred excursion that drops into a breakdown that would leave the proudest hardcore kid in fear for his life.

Track 3, Lalassu Xul is an altogether different beast from the groove-laden doom I'm so used to. Bungle-esque carnivale-bounce frames the mechanistic and repetitive drillpress xeno-grind in an off kilter its-happy-music-if-you're-a-robotic-serial-killer kind of way. Following up that is Infused, one of the more humanoid bytes from this disc. A standout track, the cyborg blending of wicked thrashed out human guitarplay and galactic deathcrush virulence is top notch, near painful in its attempt to drive -through- the star rather than go around. After the short and appropriately-named interlude Fractal Intake, the midway point that is Natural Selection restarts the malevolence in a cauldron of pistoning meticulousness. Spiteful electronic spikes of twisting melody slicing through the jackhammer trigger-warning drums before Beckon calls the terraforming ships in to calculate and articulate how your planet will be destroyed, ending in a wonderfully lucid echo-driven final drive toward peace before Godless Times schizoanalytically (go look it up, I'll wait.) progresses from shrieking lockstep to doomed-to-drift breakdown to tech-splatter and beyond. An industrialized /solar/ intensification of death, grind, and deathcore tropes into a vicious exclamation of hybridization.

Unsympathetic Intellect is a peak moment, the first few seconds vividly portraying the wonderment that could come from the Eye or access point of a vast intelligence turning its gaze upon you before it begins to communicate /before it reminds you just how alien it can be/ before it ups the grind in unsettling/hectic/body hammer measure. Not to be outdone, Eviscerate flashes without segue between several modes of RoS' extraterrestrial stylistic choice, rapid-fire alterations and complications of their sound continue unabated as the instrumental The Heavens have Fallen shows a lush, almost comforting form. Maybe a reminder of technology's inherent promise hidden in ultimate wasteful destruction/a breath of resistance before the ferocious 12th and final track No Pity for a Coward (a Suicide Silence cover) brings ending in a violent, direct assault of laser-guided planet-glassing before our new overlords descend to greet us in star-wrecked climax.


The Alex Grey meets Voltron artwork sums up the tone of this release tremendously. There is no hope. The visitors do not come in peace. Surrender or face imminent annihilation.


(insert a video here!)

(I think the only thing that could ruin this album is finding out the sample at the end was used un-ironically.)

veneration of violation

(from an "audition review" for a doom/sludge blog.)

SWANS - COP (1984)

a ritual of humiliation.
an endurance test.
a glorification of submission, even as it is repeatedly proven horrific, unsafe, and weak.
an ugly tombstone over buried happiness.
the opening riff of Half Life never ends, grinding you down as effectively as it grinds the laborer of the lyrics, passive and crushed by an obscene but far from otherworldy tyrant. in fact, the real-ness of their pessimism, unburdened (on this album, at least) by concerns for the metaphysical, adds an urgency to lyrics such as
"ambition is senseless
don't make a wrong move work with a purpose"
...sounding for all the world like a fellow prisoner of the Machine whispering the "rules" to a newcomer, an outsider, in an effort to help him understand his place and the hopelessness of any attempt to deviate from the Work. the constant downward trajectory of the main phrase drags you ever deeper into this machinery, into the hole. a pervasive atmosphere of meaningless toil and futility numbs you into accepting it.

the lurching stutter of Job (track 2) splits this inelegant droning with a confused "waking up" that slowly solidifies into a grooving chant, an effort to regain some feeling of the natural, of something organic. from there it begins slipping into and out of rhythm while equally wavering between the elemental and the structural, between tearing apart and desperately gripping. the song culminates with an exhausted wearing down, carrying the burden of heartache as a mantra until collapse.

the third track Why Hide opens on firmer ground, insistent bass and solid, compact drumming providing an ominous foreground for the exorcising of an overwhelming lyrical nihilism. bathing in a crushing lockstep, m gira shouts why hide the lie?? over and over as if THIS was the moment he was waiting for to ask the question of his abuser. as if his oppressor was looking through him, dead-eyed, as he recorded the vocals.

barely a pause for breath between tracks, but those silences are a welcome glimpse outside the isolation this album evokes. these are not dance songs. you are fitted for the collar from the first seconds and it never relents in its exertion of power and domination. the listener is never in a position of control, is never allowed to relate to the dominant perspective even when (especially when) those perspectives are shown. there are only brief moments where the pain and discipline let up to take a deep breath before intensifying. Clay Man wastes little time establishing a musical corollary to the dissonant drive into sexual submission. the ghoulish lines "get into this car bow your head down" over painfully grinding mechanical drones twist the Work alluded to in previous tracks into an obedient acceptance. unexpected chokes and lunges in the noise feel like the moment a bone breaks or a dentist wrenches a tooth free, the onset of a panic attack, an unwilling orgasm. the last minute brings with it an undeniable pulsing heaviness that, almost ironically, forces you to bob your head in time as it sucks the air from your lungs. maximum volume, indeed.

Your Property disguises itself well as a rebellious shout at Control, until you realise it as the desperate howls of someone learning it was their own weakness that led to control in the first place. Authority is corrupt and corrupts, Authority is worshipped nonetheless. to be trapped in this is perceived as an ultimate weakness and the vocals grow harsher, the music more nakedly aggressive as it briefly loses a pretense of subtlety. inward contempt is far more malign than any exterior assault.

track six. Cop. this is where it gets dark.
it slithers in sinister, sleazy, initially maintaining a calm demeanor. proclaiming "the punishment fits the crime" and judging the guilty in a combination holding cell/execution chamber over an unhealthy melody that, despite being nearly atonal, subtly reinforces the infectious reptilian menace of this song's mood. as the beating continues, the music keeps steady as a metronome, placidly describing atrocity with an almost-accessible laid back throbbing. through the primary section the perspective never fully sets on victim or bystander until finally collapsing into a hypnotic, martial agony that (in a ferocious dichotomy) gradually but spectacularly crumbles and bursts until nothing is left.

after all the buildup of intensity, all the intentional and directed increase in depth and hostility, Butcher is all hanging tension. a pause in a relentless attack on the Self juuuusst long enough to see outside and warn someone. "don't be a whore you could be screwing yourself", advice given from a position of intimate knowledge of a great darkness. the music never seems to resolve, solidifying the uncomfortable and unsettling feelings elicited by words like "you're in the wrong skin i don't recognise your smell" and "you're too close".

halting, cacophonous bursts of feedback scream above a strangled, sluggish drone that sets the stage for the final catharsis of degradation. Thug is confrontational and provocative in a sneering passive aggression. "obedience pays if you use it right", but "the only real thing's misery"…..words finally breaking down into paroxysm and even a seven second fade out feels suffocating and endless. Having this album on repeat for a few hours in order to write about it pulled me through a significantly more visceral and challenging experience than i expected, even having heard the record quite a few times before. it forces one to inhabit all of the negative spaces it describes in ways most art (and even a great deal of the hostile stimuli referred to in the lyrics) can't come close to replicating, and it left me shaken, stretched thin, and feeling sickly afterward in such a way that almost overwhelms any possible cathartic value.