More Noise Please

At War With Genre Respectability/ She Called Herself Tania

Lack of posts

A fun spell in hospital put me behind schedule by at least two months on everything I’m working on. This also meant I didn’t do my post on crime rap, noir fiction, and true crime books that was tied into the release of the second Luke Sick & Wolfagram album and some songs I produced for Falcon Outlaw (Ghetto Youth’s Rise from The Tzu Keepers album and the single Shooters).

I have the notes, but it’s unlikely I’ll revisit them.

Garshas.

Yegg War (first album from 2020)

Tik Tok killed the Instagram killed the YouTube killed the video killed the radio star

Super Jen (human name Jennifer Creagh) asked me months ago to record a guest spot for her radio show More Noise Please and I finally did it (sorry Jen).

You can find it archived here (Wednesday January 17th 2024 episode) and here

Things you will hear:

• My favourite two songs of 2023 (billy woods & Kenny Segal featuring Danny Brown - Year Zero, and Blockhead featuring Quelle Chris - The Cella Dwellas Knew)

• My two favourite current local bands (Coprolith and Slash Need¹)

• Two unreleased songs by me (one featuring New Villain and Crownovhornz from an upcoming release on Iron Lung, the other from a release on Avalanche Recordings)

• Me talking about rediscovering a long lost collaboration and saying it’ll be released (it won’t be, sorry, vocals aren’t mixed properly, master session long lost)

Things you will not hear:

• What my walk on music would be if I was a professional wrestler (Morbid Angel - Invocation of the Continual One)

• Th’ Faith Healers - Delores (way too long, i played Pop Song instead)²

• Any actual mixing

• Genre consistency

Genre

I was talking to a friend recently and she mentioned that she feels trapped in genres and it’s only when she leaves those genres to do other music that she feels unrestrained and free. She plays a lot of music - from noise related, to composing operas, to bestial death metal - so i asked how she reconciles this feeling given that some of her most visible work is very embedded within genre metal. The answer was one I can understand respect; that it’s fine being in a collective/ band that operates strictly within genre lines, but with solo and composing work it’s an issue.

My own feelings are fairly noncommittal; I think genre is helpful as a set of guiding principles when you’re creating, but as a consumer genre is largely useless other than organizing drinking arrangements & ad hoc social gatherings.

At its worst genre is a cheat code that can establish the mediocre somewhat quickly - though with limited reach - at it’s best genre is a series of signposts that show what the limits are and how far from the centre you can get before your sound becomes something else entirely³ .More on genre as an anchor further on.

Fuck genre respectability

I check out immediately when people attempt to bestow an intellectual respectability on something that doesn’t require legitimizing on any terms other than its own existence.

On youtube there is a cycle that comes and goes every few years where people play death and black metal on piano and the comments sections are full of people saying things like:

Sometimes the richness of melody hidden within certain types of music need this sort of treatment to be truly appreciated

And:

The 2:39 bridge sounds like it could've been written by Rachmaninov haha

And none of this is necessary, metal does not need to be culturally legitimized to be valid. Let’s face it, metal on piano sounds like a cross between a Harold Lloyd chase scene, Tom and Jerry getting up to some violent tomfoolery, and a cut scene in FFVII that’s 15 minutes too long.⁴

I don’t want to spend too much time staring into this particular abyss, but see any fawning “thinking mans metal” article by the respectable press. This generally translates as: cultural product removed from its milieu because the writer doesn’t understand the milieu enough to participate and realizes that they’ve found something in the genre they actually do like. Horror films suffer this indignity more than heavy metal does. See anything described as elevated horror. I like a lot of these films and some of the music being heralded, just not the people doing mental gymnastics trying to justify why it’s ok that they like some things and not others from the same cultural sectors.

Brutal Death Metal will either save us or kill us (likely both)

Mack from God is War was schooling me on Brutal Death Metal recently, this started because we were both ecstatic that Brodequin has new material forthcoming. I think I remarked that I wanted to bench press a horse whilst listening to the new song on repeat.

For Mack the appeal of Brutal Death Metal is in the skill level required to even enter the fray, for me part of the appeal is less the skill level and more the focusing of that performance towards a virtuosic aural violence. Paroxysm Unit might as well be The Cherry Point run through a pitch quantizer (for clarity this is not a dismissive remark).

Brutal Death Metal is the inverse of cosmic horror - oh poor baby mercifully can’t comprehend the contents of the universe? Well guess what, you’re a fragile bag of meat with a very thin, easily pierced layer of skin separating organs from air. Also microorganisms are constantly trying to kill you in horrible ways.

This fragility of life and physical form becomes not just theory but also practice.⁵

• Focal dystonia, lateral epicondylitis, and tenodinopathy for guitarists.

• Bursitis, median nerve compression, and a variety of musculoskeletal disorders for drummers.

• Nodules, cysts, and polyps for singers.

• Tinnitus, hyperacusis, and general acoustic trauma for all (both listener and performer).

With the constant push towards extremes of performance these are the body horrors being summoned into existence.

Acute Exposure to Undetermined Acetylcholinesterase Inhibitors

Repeat the word sugar 100 times and it loses meaning and form. The syllables blur together

Am i really saying Shh? How long does that sound last? How hard is that G supposed to land? Am I dropping the R consistently? Which syllable does the emphasis even go on in this word? I can vary how I deliver each syllable, but if all three are off is it still recognizable as the word sugar? How off is too off for this word to still be heard by the listener?

Basically, why do we even have words man?

Trichomoniasis - Makeshift Crematoria

Back to my point above about genre as sign posting the boundaries and anchoring an approach.

This album does the standard things you’d expect from a Brutal Death Metal album; pitch shifted gurgling vocals, obnoxious pinging snare, medical research paper song titles, gravity blasts.⁶ You know what you’re in for.

But it seems to become intentionally more abstract as it progresses; the awareness of where the genre limits are allows it to become something else; a shifting swell of sound divorced from the human.

By the time we get to Predacious Stylet the guitars have largely disappeared, replaced by swelling drones, and clangs with some woozy clean guitar bends fading in and out. The vocals are reduced to being a straight drone, the constantly blasting drums become literal patterns, the spaces between individual drums move the more you hear them, and the shifting velocity and the resonance of that snare sound creates new things that you notice, you lose track of the accents and where the driving part of the song even is anymore.

The drums are saying sugar 100 times in a row.

But this switch only works because of the twelve songs that precede and the six songs that follow. And you don’t even notice that you’ve arrived here.

Ultimately it feels like the forces that propel free jazz and HNW have been accidentally (?) applied to metal, it feels like Makeshift Crematoria is not solely predicated on disgust and brutality, but uses them as a guide. I also kinda hope that Trichomoniasis are cough syrup drinking, PCP smoking degenerates and that I’m projecting all of this on to them. I romanticize that Trichomoniasis are the kind of youth that will rob me outside a 7/11 somewhere.

Nithing do a related thing on their/ his 2023 album Agonal Hymns, we have the recognizable sign posts that tell us this is brutal death metal, but with unusual sounds and elements pushing through, offering new approaches.

Recently read:

Silver Nitrate - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A recording engineer and a fading actor come across a lost cult film that a Nazi occultist embedded ritual magic into. The Nazi occultist in question seems to be equal parts Indiana Jones villain, Otto Rahn, and Hans Heinz Ewers.

Of course I’m going to read this book, great fun, and manages to say something meaningful about people and interpersonal politics and still maintain a coherent horror story that isn’t there solely as a vehicle for commentary.

Recently listened to:

I mean, mostly Nithing and Trichomoniasis when I haven’t been listening to final mixes and masters for some soon to be released material.

But also the first release of 2024 that I’m on just came out digitally (physical is in preorder), Stalingrad - She Called Herself Tania, and given that i only heard the entire album a couple of days ago (I’m only on one track) I think it’s ok to mention it.

I’ve written about Stalingrad before so if you want the historical context go here. This is already likely to be one of my favourites of the year, it flows perfectly and it clearly had a lot of significant thought and effort put into it. It’s a weird one, enjoy the journey. My own contribution is in the song Rise of the Consultants (last song on side A), Richard sent me a rhythm track and I did a dub version of it.

1. You should visit the Slash Need link

2. The video to Pop Song is the most 1991 thing you’ll ever see. Th’ Faith Healers were an early 90s UK band. The weekly music press of the time loved making up genres, the one that became a real one was Shoegaze, the one Th’ Faith Healers were lumped in, Camden Lurch, obviously didn’t. Early on they were very much of the UK variant on noise rock of the time, just significantly less dour about it. Though the rough edges were gradually sanded down over time, initially they sounded like Can living in a London squat drinking white cider all day. Their three best songs are Pop Song, Delores, and Reptile Smile.

3. I die a little inside when I’m at a show and the Gen Z’s on stage suddenly start playing Vocal Test/ other old music. I enjoyed watching the reactions to Cel Genesis when Intensive Care played with them recently; young people to the front, grey hairs and sensible shoes to the back. Please alienate the older people in the room, I want to see what you’re doing on your own terms, especially if it’s incomprehensible to me. Anyway, Cel Genesis, great live, music that could not be made by someone over the age of 21.

4. I listened to a lot of youtube piano covers for this paragraph, I heard some of my favourite songs butchered (at birth), I heard some of my least favourite songs made even worse. I did not hear one song that benefitted from a piano cover. The Synthwave cover of Abscission was the only novelty I didn’t immediately hate.

5. Is the world ready for Cathar Brutal Death Metal? Someone has to take gnosticism away from black metal…

6. I don’t care if these things make it Gore Slam, or Retro Barf Grind or fucking whatever nerd shit someone’s going to try and pull, so save your “actually it’s not Brutal Death Metal…” for someone that wants to engage.