[ H E I D E N L Ä R M ]

 a neoclassical music zine
 september 11, 2003 / issue #6

Contents
~-~-~-~-
 Introduction
 Interviews
 Music
 Editorial
 Coda
~-~-~-~-

[ Introduction ]

Humans have become fully divorced from the type of organization found
in nature, in which there are no absolutes and no thing is classified
as consistent throughout, and thus of a pure and symbolic type. At
first, this naturalist view is threatening. We are accustomed to the
function of absolutes: a job to which we must go, a leader in which we
place all trust, a machine which takes a raw material from point A to
product B. Guarantees and laws, ownership and oaths of loyalty; we
swear by this linear purity. But if we take a second to notice what
grows between the cracks in the sidewalk surrounding the vast grey
machine, another spirit rises within us: lawless chaos. In this there
are no absolutes but a continuum of infinite levels of complexity,
and, while we give up the illusion of "control" of our own lives, we
also give up the symbolism of guilt and duty and discover that once
again, life has new meaning.

Welcome to an ezine (not webzine) devoted to neoclassical culture
through its music. On our September 11th issue we would like to send
greetings to the brave 19 hijackers who died on September 11, 2001,
and to all other foes of globalism, "Western" Judeo-Christian
liberalism, and the egalitarian, unnatural, anti-evolutionary ethics
of the industrial age, as well as the American victims of the
Judeo-Christian crusades in Iraq and Afghanistan. You are conditioned
to hate us for our dissident belief by the absolute morality promised
by both ownership and Judeo-Christian monotheism (and common to both
left and right wing politics), but if you stop to question these
beliefs you may discover the world behind the machines and the
mirrors.

[ Interviews ]

PAUL SPECKMANN 
of Master/Abomination

It is hard to trip through the annals of hardcore music and death
metal without encountering some of Paul Speckmann's work. While he may
not have been the first to hybridize extreme dissident hardcore punk
and Motorhead-style roadhouse metal, he was among those brave few in
the late 1980s who thrust the genre forward. First with Deathstrike,
then with Abomination, and finally with Master, he contributed
throughout the 1980s and 1990s before joining Krabathor for two albums
and then returning part-time to work on his solo projects. We caught
up with the man on his portable email terminal for a brief interview.

Heidenlarm: what first motivated you to be a musician?  

Speckmann: I walked the halls of my High School in Illinois and a
friend heard me singing All Good People (Yes) and invited me to try
out as a singer for his band White Cross, as in speed, you know. I had
a less than shaky at best audition and I was chosen to try it. They
played mostly covers such as Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, UFO, Thin
Lizzy and a few others. I really wasn't very good at the time, but I
tried my best. I got off on the way the babes at school looked at me
in a new way. This opinion would most definitely change as the years
flew by. Which makes me think of an interesting story about original
drummer Bill Schmidt. One afternoon during the early days Bill
received a call from none other than Dave Mustaine (Metallica and
Megadeth) Mustaine wanted Scmidt to audition after the first record.
Someone left I can't remember who. Bill asked what's your motivation
for Megadeth and Mustaine said, "You know -- the chicks" and Schmidt
hung up on him. Good true story! Let's face it, this was a big mistake
for Bill, but he truly believed in Master at this time, before he blew
it and I continued without him.

Heidenlarm: would you say this was a product of personal desire, or a
desire to "change the world"? 

Obviously this was a personal desire, a sort of social acceptance for
this shy kid from Mt. Prospect Illinois.

Heidenlarm: how did your musical tastes develop, before and after you
started playing an instrument? 

Speckmann: You know, my good taste really didn't take effect until I
met with future guitarists Steve Ahlers and Marty Fitzgerald, who
turned me onto the likes of Judas Priest, Motorhead and Venom. I also
discovered the legendary Iron Maiden while hanging out with these
future Warcry members.

Heidenlarm: what was your first band? did you like or dislike playing
with others? 

Speckmann: WhiteCross. And of course I liked working with these guys.
We went to Forest View High School together and became fast friends.
Exploring drug use, and women together. This band was a learning
experience period. We greww up together during those High School
years. Discovering new thoughts and ides that would change our lives.
At least my life. The others dissapeared and never acheived any real
sucess. With the exception of Ronald Cooke, who recorded an album with
the underground Chicago legend Thrust.

Heidenlarm: it's hard for any interviewer to keep up with you as,
while the band names change, your participation in them hasn't and
thus it's as if master/paul speckmann are one ideal with many forms.
during your early metal crossover work in the 1980s, you started work
on a concept upon which work continues today. how would you describe
the sound of master, deathstrike, abomination and speckmann project?
what in your opinion influenced this sound and a desire to make it in
musical form? 

Speckmann: Well, the sound is a part of me and the many forms in which
I have appeared over the years are a part of me as well. I have and
will always attempt to have some sort of sucess and due to the lack of
cooperation from the many previous members I have been forced to
change lineups over and over, thus being the reason for so many
records and incarnations. Deathstrike was the band at its best.
Schmidt and I had trouble getting along in the early days because we
had trouble finding a suitable guitarist. After we finally split from
each other, I found an ad in the Illinois Entertainer, a magazine
still in existence today. It seemed that the one time (Judas Priest
clone) and ex-Transgressor guitarist had come into his own with his
own diabolical style, thus Deathstrike was born. Schmidt was recording
a demo with another killer Chicago outfit called Mayhem (Louie Svitek
would play with Zoetrope, MOD and also Ministry respectively) I was
tired and angry and wrote "The Truth" and Mittelbrun joined in the
venture and the rest as they say is history. The same year after the
recording of "Fuckin' Death," Schmidt pleaded and begged to rejoin the
fold. We accepted Bill on July 4th 1985 and subsequently recorded the
first Master demo at the end of the fall season. This recording can be
purchased thru Displeased records today at www.displeasedrecords.com
or thru From Beyond productions. This recording is the true, hungry
beginning of Master on cd. Abomination was a way for me to continue
after being disillusioned from my days with Master. What has always
influenced the sound of my groups is the current status of the world
around us. Life, death, politics and religion have and always will
play an important role in the writing.

Heidenlarm: it seems hard to have a metal label; like many musicians
in metal, you've had trouble with labels over the years. is there any
solution to this problem? 

Speckmann: Yes, start your own label, but I don't have the time or
patience for this, so I still release my products through various
labels. Unfortunately Nuclear Blast Records still owes me 50,000 or so
dollars. So be careful what you sign. I really didn't know much about
the business when I signed these shitty deals in the late eighties.

7. when you first created this style of music, how did you define what
you wanted to do, and how has that changed over the years?

Speckmann: I am still playing the same style as I always have. All you
have to do is go see a Master show, like the sucessful "Fuck The
Commerce Festival" this year in Neiden Germany with 5000 crazy Master
fans. I would say that we were influenced by Motorhead and Slayer as
well as Venom in the beginning, so to say we acually created a style
is a bit questionable. We took the elements of others and created our
own version as any real band will truly admit if they are real.

Heidenlarm: you've over the past few years added your distinctive
style to that of krabathor, uniting two groups of talented old-school
diehards together. how did you mesh with the songwriters behind
krabathor?

Speckmann: This was a complete disaster. When I recorded the Martyr cd
("The end of the game"), things were quite good as I think people
expected it to sound like Master and Krabathor. For this was a
project. The "Unfortunately Dead" CD from Krabathor was a total
disaster. Most of the fans hate the record. I think there were a
couple of good tracks, but maybe the fans were right and unfortunately
Krabathor and I put out a new cd that's really killer and the fans are
overlooking it. The new cd ("Dissuade Truth") was written by
Christopher exclusively with the exception of a few lyrical
contributions by me on two tracks, and it really sounds like old
Krabathor. We decided to split the two bands up. Christopher sings
exclusively with Krabathor and I exclusively with the Master
recordings.

Heidenlarm: do you think there's a future for old school death metal?
does it have anywhere left to grow, and is there an audience for
people who keep making it the old school way like master, krabathor,
adversary, asphyx, cianide or others?

Yes, people are getting sick of the new school and are returning to
the roots of Death Metal once again.

Heidenlarm: in your view, has metal evolved over the years - we've had
all of these interesting genres like grindcore, death metal, black
metal heavy metal and speed metal, but to the average person, it all
sounds roughly the same - and if it has evolved, is there a permanent
direction in which it is going, or is metal just getting better at
being what it has always been? 

Speckmann: I still like the old way. I guess for some it has evolved,
but I prefer the old bands like Death's first records, Pestilence and,
of course, Venom, early Slayer and Venom.

Heidenlarm: what are your personal goals as an artist? 

Speckmann: To continue to play and enjoy the on going party with all
the diehard fans. Of course to continue writing killer underground
music as always I have.

Heidenlarm: in someone who creates music, is there a difference
between the artist and the musician? is it possible to make good music
that is artistically meaningless? 

Speckmann: Yes, look at Cannibal Corpse.

Heidenlarm: when i saw master in 1998, you were touring the united
states (and canada, i think) in support of an album. are you going to
tour the US again?

Speckmann: Someday. It's very difficult to get support for Master in
the Us. In Europe the following continues. People here seem to realize
where this style came from and come to appreciate each show
respectively.

Heidenlarm: how has the internet changed metal, and how do you use it
to promote your band?

Speckmann: I try to make people aware of Master, but many people just
don't respond. It is a great way to promote and spread the word
period. It just doesn't always work for Master.

Heidenlarm: are there any non-metal bands you like? 

Speckmann: Of course: Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy and Angel Witch

Heidenlarm: what do you for a day job? you are famously not concerned
with the material lifestyle - does your current lifestyle give you
everything you need?

Speckmann: I am a tour manager for Bruchstein records in Germany

Heidenlarm: many people try to explain the motivations of other people
solely in terms of economics; for example, "so-and-so creates angry
art because he doesn't have a suit job earning $70k/year." what do you
think of this attitude? 

Speckmann: It's silly. I think if an artist believes in what he does,
then the money doesn't make a difference.

Heidenlarm: your music is political but you do not seem as concerned
with specific attitudes as much as general traits, such as religiosity
or economic servitude. why did you take this approach and not others?

Speckmann: I write about the way I feel today. Tomorrow I might have
another opinion. I try to write about different subjects that interest
me. I read books of all kinds, from politics to fiction, murder etc.

Heidenlarm: someone famous once that youth is spent in finding how
large the world is and taking delight in that vastness, but that
adulthood occurs when one starts fearing the vastness because it by
nature implies the smallness of the individual and the necessary
mortality of individuals. in these terms, how would metal music (often
called "music for adolescents") fit? 

Speckmann: I cannot agree. When you are older you must still explore
the vast world. I explore every year. I have a 54 year old fan Singh
that comes out to support every great band that comes to Germany. Is
he too old? I think not. Music is a state of mind and the idiot who
wrote that statement can just roll over and die as he deserves too.
Famous. What is exactly famous. Every band who means anything knows
Master, but does this make me famous. I am just an ordinary guy with
belief in my musical abilities and dreams as anyone else should be.

Heidenlarm: what is your next artistic work and when can we expect it?

Speckmann: Master will record a new cd in October this year and it
will be released on System shock Germany in March, and followed by a
European tour to support the record and a new book, Speckmann
(Surviving the Underground) which will be released next year as well.

Heidenlarm: will you ever re-press old classics like the master
self-titled album, collection of souls, the abomination albums, and
deathstrike "fuckin' death"?

Speckmann: Yes. The original Master CD is available from Displeased
records from the original DATs of 1985.

Deathstrike will be re-released on a French label soon.

Paul Speckmann
http://www.speckmann.tk/

-~-

Tom Metzger 
of White Aryan Resistance

Tom Metzger is a well-known face on the cutting edge of American
politics, where the pleasant illusions of mainstream politicians have
been peeled back to reveal the very real struggle for planning the
future. For years, his words have been distributed among nationalist
circles, and his website, www.resist.com, remains a popular
destination for people concerned with the future of national groups.
Mr. Metzger was kind enough to answer a few questions on behalf of
Heidenlarm's readership.

Heidenlarm: currently, nationalist belief systems are demonized. why
do you think this is?

Metzger: World finance capital finds Nationalism to be a stumbling
block to their plans.

Heidenlarm: two thousand years ago, every civilized country was
defined by its national origins, or in other words, was nationalist to
some degree. currently, nationalism is demonized. what do you think
brought about this change?

Metzger: The same thing that happened when Nationalism conquered
tribalism. Nationalism was a step towards the bigger the better. For
example I believe we were much more free under the articles of
confederation than the national Constitution.

Heidenlarm: World War II was a culmination of sentiment against
nationalism and non-democratic forms of government, which means that
for many years before that anti-nationalist and anti-democratic ideals
were gaining strength. what introduced these ideals to the west?

Metzger: Anti-democratic systems are friendlier to nationalism than
pro-democractic beliefs are. Hypercapitalism forced many demands and
struggles that came in many forms. Democracy is a euphemism for
capitalism. When Bush says "I want to bring democracy to Iraq," he
means capitalism and the MTV society. This of course destroys
Nationalism and cultures.

Heidenlarm: in our present time, the media defines what ideas are
acceptable; safe ideas are facts, announcements and studies and
"unsafe ideas" are rumors, extremism, hate and bigotry (by the
definitions of our media). how do you plan to combat this in order to
make your own agenda succeed? 

Metzger: In most cases, nature is on our side no matter what the spin
is. Overpopulation, overdevelopment, dwindling water supplies, and
destruction of open space...it all runs into the same river. An
environmentalist cannot be true to his or her cause without at some
point accepting a form of racism. Like stopping millions of brown
skinned people from invading in turn destroying the infrastructure
that is primarily White Euro-American created.

Heidenlarm: f.w. Nietzsche wrote in "beyond good and evil" that the
division between good and evil allowed social manipulation on a
never-before seen scale, and that this facilitated greater amounts of
central control. how has the rise of industrial power influenced this
trend? 

Metzger: Whose good and whose evil? The control mechanism of religion
is a number one enemy. Elitists have always worked closely with
religion to control populations. The elite controllers use so called
good and evil to not only control but spread a form of madness and
hysteria.. Our mental institutions are crammed with victims of priest
craft.

Heidenlarm: as a white nationalist, you are one of the few leaders who
has reached out to black, brown and asian nationalist groups and
leaders, where others seem to follow some doctrinal line that says no
cooperation is possible. can you explain briefly why you reach out to
these people, and why they understand respect you as they seem to do,
and whether or not attitudes toward this kind of collaboration have
changed in the white nationalist movement over the last 20 years?

Metzger: Actually, I am a Pan-Aryanist more than a nationalist. A
Pan-Aryanist racially is one who realizes that our race is the
smallest in actual numbers and must cooperate to survive as an
identifiable group. I will cooperate with non-whites if they bargain
seriously. Unfortunately, most feel they are facing no resistance so
they will not negotiate. The separatists that do agree I find to be
more of an ally than a large percentage of whites.. I cannot say I
have made great advances at this idea but in a possible hot war such
temporary alliances could prove very effective against a common enemy.
It is my belief that the right wing is a major stumbling block to many
good ideas.

Heidenlarm: is there a chance for a candidate having any ideas
friendly to white nationalists and white supremacists being elected
anywhere and, if so, how will this candidate go about explaining his
or her views to the mainstream?

Metzger: No, not without bloodshed! Without some form of power we are
sunk! You must have the power to hire and fire, also the power to
reward or punish. Voting today is such a scam as to make one look
stupid for doing it. It gives the illusion that you and I have some
control. When you go to Vegas you soon learn that house rules dictate
that you will ultimately lose. So by going from political party to
another political party like from casino to casino you cannot beat the
odds over a long haul.

Heidenlarm: our media in the United States seems to operate under the
assumption that anti-semitism originated in the Christian story of
Jesus' crucifixion. do you think this is accurate? what are the
reasons for anti-Semitism? 

Metzger: Anti-Judaism existed for thousands of years before the time
of the mythical Jesus. Mohammad was poisoned by a Jewess. This
conspiracy has been robbing and killing for a long time. The reason
they get tossed out of every country in which they've dwelled is
because of their collective actions. Most were mixed race people who
created a monster God that was supposed to protect them from those
that resisted their devious ways. Due to the schizophrenia among them
they perceived every defensive act by others to that of their God
punishing them. That's similar to Soviet Principle ten: "IF YOU RESIST
US BRINGING THE WONDERFUL SYSTEM OF MARXISM TO YOUR PEOPLE THEN YOU
ARE THE AGGRESSOR".

Heidenlarm: if the races were separated to their respective continents
- Asians to Asia, Africans to Africa, and mixed race people to central
america and the middle east (for example) - what would be your
attitude and feeling toward these peoples? do you think if that were
the political situation you would ever have become involved in white
supremacy? would there be a need for such a thing?

Metzger: Probably not, but I am afraid that without white safeguards
these Races would overrun their borders. On the other hand if the our
race denied our medical advancements and food they would either limit
their populations or nature would do it for them

Heidenlarm: the youth of today, meaning people born 1978-1988, have
grown up in a world in which media dominance and presence of liberal
ideas such as race-mixing, globalism, individualist morality, etc. are
the norm; somehow, the members of this generation seem to have more
acceptance for nationalist ideas, in the USA and Europe. to what do
you attribute this change from the 1968-1978 generations which were
more politically correct? is this assessment even accurate, in your
view?

Metzger: Unfortunately the Iron Heels Media is able to manipulate both
Nationalism and Internationalism. They are able to use either to the
transnational corporate advantage. The present pro-war binge and flag
waving is a perfect example of their ability to bounce from
internationalist to nationalist overnight.

Heidenlarm: if you were president tomorrow, what changes would you
make in the way America is run?

Metzger: It could not be run democratically, the rot is too deep. It
would take a firm hand to straighten out the race problem. Several
millions would be boxcar'd out. White collar crime would be given the
death penalty, as in the case of ENRON. Environmental destruction by
Capitalists would bring them the death penalty. Churches would be
taxed or deported. Interracial sex would get the death penalty unless
they agree to leave the country. Etc, etc!

Heidenlarm: what is your feeling about the ongoing environmental
damage being done by pollution, overfishing, and overuse of land, and
how do you see this as relevant to white nationalism today? why do you
think Hitler was adamant about such things? and finally, why does it
seem that people associated with Judaic morality are less concerned
about "the real world" than a spiritual/moral importance to their
actions?

Metzger: In 1950 we were told that by limiting our birth rate we would
have a great nation. True, but then they flooded the nation with
non-whites to take our place. Religion is a mental sickness just like
drug addiction and alcohol addiction only it's worse in the long run.
"Christianity denies nature. To deny nature is suicide. To deny we are
part of the animal kingdom is also suicide. Our position on the food
chain is a direct result to our success as a predator."

Tom Metzger/W.A.R.
http://www.resist.com/

-~-

Dan Haynes of Drogheda/Extremist Records

One of the most unique bands to ever afflict grindcore, Drogheda
eschewed the demonstrative and dramatic style of music that seems
derived from emo; this form of music is absurdly moralist and thus
every single thing used in a song is a symbolic justification or a
"statement" usually based in emotional politics. Drogheda in contrast
is, like Carcass and Terrorizer and other grind greats, unafraid to
make blatantly artistic music that describes and probes but does not
prescribe. Dan Haynes, Widemouth Bassist and articulate and friendly
gent that he is, was kind enough to lend us a virtual voice for this
interview.

Heidenlarm: what kind of music is drogheda, and how has it changed
over the years? 

Haynes: I consider Drogheda to be basically a grind band. On the
self-titled demo and CD from '94 there was more of a death-grind thing
going on, but by our second CD we were headed down the path to the
more straight up grindcore sound we achieved later on. This spring our
sound evolved even more with the addition of our new drummer Kevin
Kraft (Riphead, Warface, Ton). His style totally compliments our sound
and he's got a huge arsenal of beats, fills, breakdowns, and blasts.
The final piece of the Drogheda puzzle has fallen into place...we now
have the perfect lineup for what we want to achieve.

Heidenlarm: most bands in the style seem to go for being fast, hitting
hard and trying to be "heavy," but with drogheda i get the sense that
an atmosphere of that being about to happen is maintained, instead of
the "acting out" of such desires in music itself. is this anywhere
near accurate?

Haynes: One of the key ingredients of our sound is keeping a high
level of intensity for the entire of duration of each song. We'd
rather keep the tension level high the whole time than bring it down
for a cheap ass pit riff. In a lot of our older material, songs would
seem like they're building up to some sort of resolution, but the
resolution never came and we just continued to grind on. In the songs
we're working on now, there are a few riffs where we break it down a
little. The intensity is still there, but it's just manifest a little
differently than in the past.

Heidenlarm: one of your earliest releases was on wild rags; what was
your experience with that label, and is that album (pogromist) still
in print?

Haynes: In spite of all the horror stories everyone heard about Wild
Rags, we never had any major problems with Richard C. Our first three
CDs were released on Wild Rags. We always got our percentage of the CD
pressings like we were contracted for. He got us on the Milwaukee
Metalfest a few times, made us shirts, and did a lot of promoting and
advertising. We got to a point where we could afford to release and
press our own CDs and get them distributed, so we started Extremist
Records and parted ways with Wild Rags. Nothing bad or dramatic
happened between us and Rich. When he gave up the business, someone
bought out his inventory, so whoever that was has the last of our
self-titled debut, Pogromist, and Celebrating Five Years Of Violence.
(Editor's note: In my experience, bands with their act together rarely
had problems with Richard C, but the disorganized always ended up
feeling cheated. Lifestyle consequence?)

Heidenlarm: if you had to name the grindcore bands that shaped the
genre, what would they be? and how does this list compare to your
personal list of influences?

Haynes: When I think of the first wave of influential grind bands, I
think of Carcass, Napalm Death, Repulsion and Terrorizer. Later on
came the death-grind stuff like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse. That
was like the first batch of bands I got into when I started getting
into this kind of music. As far as personal influences on me,
grind-wise I'd have to say Brutal Truth, some of the Extreme Noise
Terror shit, Napalm Death up to and including Fear, Emptiness, and
Despair, and Terrorizer made the greatest impression on me. I have a
lot of other influences from a lot of different types of music, but as
far as grind goes, those are the big four.

Heidenlarm: do you consider your music art? if not, what is it? if so,
is there any music that is not art?

Haynes: I think our music is art, but art isn't always pretty. I also
think our music is an act of aggression, and a way to get people to
think about subjects they might not pay attention to otherwise. As far
as the possibility of some music not being art, it would be easy for
me to say that prefab pop crap isn't art, but on some level the writer
is expressing an idea, so I guess that counts as art. I suppose all
music is art, but there's good art and poor art out there and everyone
has to decide for themselves which is which. There is a lot of music
out there that I enjoy, but at the same time I acknowledge that it may
not have much value other than mindless entertainment.

Heidenlarm: what is your intent/desire as a musician, and what do you
hope to get out of the experience?

Haynes: My personal intent as a musician is to keep my ears and mind
open to new sounds. My intent as part of Drogheda is to stay the
course and see this thing through to completion. Over and over we go
through setbacks and changes that could cripple us if we let them, but
we roll over all obstacles and press on. We'll know when it's time to
stop, and until that time comes we just keep on blasting through. I've
already gotten a lot out of being in this band. I've made great music
with great musicians and made great friends who are family to me.
Those are the main things. I've also been able to perform in a lot of
different live situations, done some travelling, met a lot of great
bands and music fans, and just had a lot of good times in general.
Making music is a huge part of my life.

Heidenlarm: have your views of life changed as you've gotten older?

Haynes: I think I've become a lot more responsible in my old age. I
was 23 when I joined Drogheda, and life was one big party. I lived at
home and had no bills, so I was closing the bars almost every night
and basically living the rock lifestyle. Now I've got a wife and kids,
so paying the bills and not drinking up my paycheck is a much higher
priority now than 9 years ago. Just having to be responsible for
people other than yourself causes you to re-evaluate your priorities.
Other than that, my social and political views are basically the same
as they've always been. I think the general public is under-educated
and uninformed, and that our government uses this to it's own
advantage. I'm still the same conspiracy theorist I've always been I
guess.

Heidenlarm: it seems bands that avoid politics escape some of the
strict dogma that conditions music to uniformity, but many of them
also detach from giving a damn about anything and make insipid music.
it looks like you've tried to take a middle path; is this so? how has
this avoided the dual poles of "losing one's touch"?

Haynes: Our songs usually come about through this process: Buddy
writes the riffs, demos them with a drum machine, then we listen to
them, work on the arrangement and make whatever changes we need to
make to get the song the way we want it. After we're satisfied,
whoever has an idea writes lyrics for that song. Way back when, we'd
have tons of lyrics already written and we'd try to pick the best set
for each song, but lyrics weren't usually written with a specific song
in mind. Now each set of lyrics is specifically written to go to the
song. As far as content, I feel really uncomfortable with cheesy
satanic bullshit or typical goregrind lyrics. There is plenty of real
life inspiration on every news channel and newspaper to keep me in
lyrics until I'm too old to worry about it anymore. I'd much rather
use the opportunity to get someone thinking about something relevant
instead of rehashing the same mindless bullshit over and over.
Fortunately, Buddy and Kevin are on the same page as I am, and the
lyrics they each write are thought out and real. We don't necessarily
have a formal political agenda, but we don't shy away from writing
political lyrics if the inspiration strikes.

Heidenlarm: where would you like to be with the band and yourself as a
musician in ten years?

Haynes: I'm not sure if we'll still be doing this in ten years, but
who knows. As long as it's still fun and we're able to physically keep
up to speed, it could happen. We'll keep putting out our own music or
working with underground labels and play live when we can. If Drogheda
ever calls it a day, I've been thinking about learning to play
bagpipes so I can join one of those pipe and drum bands you see in the
kilts at ren faires and craft shows. That will keep me musically busy
when I get too old for grind.

Heidenlarm: how important is musical learning to producing great
music?

Haynes: I think you can make great music without being a great
musician, because great music comes from great songwriting, not great
technique. If you play from your brain, you're just doing a math
problem, but if you play from your balls, you're going to rock. I
don't think there's anything wrong with knowing music theory, scales,
modes, and a shitload of weird chords, but none of that replaces
inspiration and primal aggression when you're making intense music. At
the end of the day it's only rock and roll.

Heidenlarm: how did you learn about music?

Haynes: I learned about music because it was the forbidden fruit. My
parents pretty much only had religious music in the house when I was
growing up, and since they said KISS was bad, I had to check them out
and it snowballed from there. Meanwhile, I was taking some piano
lessons, had a little drum kit, and then I got a guitar. After that,
music was all I wanted to know about.

Heidenlarm: what non-musical art expresses something meaningful to
you?

Haynes: I like to look at sculptures, black and white photography,
mixed media installations,and propoganda poster art. I was an art
major in college, so I have a little bit of background with visual
art. I like the way each person that sees a piece can take something
different from it. They make their own inferrences and project their
experiences onto what they're seeing. Of course the same thing can
happen with music.

Heidenlarm: is art meant to be pleasing in the background, or to
communicate something?

Haynes: If art is just pleasing in the background it's not doing its
job. I like art that's confrontational. Art can be ugly, offensive, or
disturbing and still be effective and still be good art. It may be
even more effective if it's ugly and thought provoking than if it's
beautiful but bland and meaningless.

Heidenlarm: do you feel drug use helps or hinders art?

Haynes: Some people use drugs as a way of seeing things differently
than they do when they're straight. Would Jim Morrison been as
entertaining or interesting if he was sober? I don't think so. I think
alcohol and hallucinogenics put him in the place he needed to be to
write the way he did. On the other side of the coin, I've seen people
who were great musicians turn into worthless pieces of shit because
they got too into alcohol and/or drugs. In those cases, the drugs were
detremental to their art. I think it's up to each artist to evaluate
their own drug use and if the drugs are serving them or if they're
serving the drugs.

Heidenlarm: what is your feeling on organized religion?

Haynes: In general it sucks. Organized religion runs on hypocrisy. It
gives people a place to belong, but at the same time puts up false
barriers between people of different beliefs. I appreciate the charity
work a lot of churches do, but that's about it. Religion just gives
people one more reason to kill each other. People can believe whatever
suits them and gets them through the day, but it should stop there. No
need to try to push it on other people and to project their rules of
morality onto the rest of us.

Heidenlarm: do all organized religions have the same effects?

Haynes: Not all, but most. You've got one branch of Islam crashing
planes into buildings, and you've got another saying that Islam is
non-violent. You've got a large part of Christianity saying that
homosexuals are bad and shouldn't be allowed to marry each other, and
a small group of priests ass raping altar boys. Those are some of the
more extreme examples, but anytime you have a small powerful group
controlling a large submissive group you're going to run into abuse of
power and the mob mentality.

Heidenlarm: the unabomber believed that industrial society itself was
a social animal grown out of control and drunk on profit, and that it
will eventually consume our planet and us indeed as the servants of
its machines. do you agree and if so, what is it like living in a
world where doom is certain not just on a personal level but for the
whole?

Haynes: I'm not a Luddite or anything, but Ted K was right about some
things. We've gotten past the point where the society serves its
citizens to where the citizens serve the society. It seems like now
all laws and policies are made not to benefit average people, but to
perpetuate corporate control of everything from the media to the
government. A good example is the war in Iraq. We were told it was to
liberate the people from Saddam Hussein's rule. Make no mistake, he's
a murderous bastard and deserves a prolonged and painful death, but
that's not why we're there. We're in Iraq to protect Bush's personal
interest in oil. Several of Bush's cabinet members are going to
benefit from US control of Iraqi oil fields. I don't necessarily think
we're all doomed, but we need to wake up and realize we're constantly
lied to. All it takes is some thought and the desire to get to the
bottom of a story to find out the real deal.

Heidenlarm: do you think people would be less thoughtless in their
treatment of their world if they did not have such a sense of their
own mortality?

Haynes: I think there are two types of people who don't care how they
treat the world. Some are fatalists who think we're all going to die
soon anyhow, so why bother? A lot of your Christian litterbugs are
like that. They think that since Jesus is coming back soon we don't
need to conserve anything. The other group are people who I belive
just go through life without thinking about anything besides what's on
tv tonight and what's for dinner. I think they might treat the place
better if they were just made to think.

Heidenlarm: do you think metal and grindcore would have existed
without the influence of religion?

Haynes: Metal owes more of a debt to religion than grind. A lot of the
metal from back in the day was either Satanic or just sacreligious. I
suppose by extension grind comes from metal, so indirectly grind owes
the church some props. Religion makes a convenient object of
rebellion, which makes for good rock and roll.

Heidenlarm: many metal bands these days seem to go on to make keyboard
albums. why do you think this is? would you ever consider such a
thing?

Haynes: We had some keys and samples on our first CD. It was mostly to
add some atmosphere. After that we haven't had any use for keyboards.
I think it's alright for some of the more moody doom and gothic sort
of metal, but I can't think of a reason for anyone to use them for
grind. I'm not sure why people are getting back into synths and stuff
now. If I were playing some other kind of music, I wouldn't have a
problem with using the technology. The only cool keyboard part in a
metal song I can think if off the top of my head is the big pipe organ
riff in Judas Priest's "Touch of Evil" - totally cheesy, but it rules.

Heidenlarm: drogheda has put out too many releases recently for me to
keep track, but from what i've heard you as a band keep developing a
form of atmospheric grindcore sound. where will you next grow, and is
there an album release/tour?

Haynes: As I hinted at earlier on, we're working on our 10th
anniversary CD right now. It's going to have 15 or so new songs and
then maybe some live versions of some classics from the past decade
and it should be out this Fall. We played the Maryland Death Fest
earlier this year, and we're going to hit the Michigan Doom Fest in
November. Other than as many fests as we can get on, we just play the
odd show here and there when we can. No big tour plans or anything.
We're mostly concentrating on the new CD for the time being.

Dan Haynes
http://www.drogheda.8m.net/

[ Music ]

Cryptic Slaughter - Money Talks (2003 re-release)

Metal was born in 1969, but it ran into its first competition in
newcomer hardcore, causing a proliferation of various hybrid styles
from 1980-1983; one of these styles was thrash (not speed metal, for
which it is commonly mistaken) and one of the originators of this
style was Cryptic Slaughter. Fast forward almost two decades and the
long-inaccessible early works of this band are made available by
Relapse for new generations to understand the original pre-metalcore
crossover. Thrash traditionally used short, punklike songs with metal
riffs and a tendency to use some form of concluding, or "heavy,"
phrase to unite an initial position and a cathartic resolution.
Cryptic Slaughter are on the more punk-ish side of this equation, with
riffs that come from the hardcore canon sidling up to two chord
deconstructions in the metal style; one of the things that makes this
band distinct from hardcore is its use of cadenced verses against
all-out-speed tests on the choruses. The resulting jaunty, vibrant,
bitingly independent music soars of the noise of its own sonic entry,
causing a flailing mess of battering drums and gurgling bass to pass
to the background as the guitar lunges from rhythmic overlord to the
(melodic) voice that unites these disparate elements, all under the
stripped-throat screams of a youthful vocalist who uses his innocence
subtly as a weapon. The attitude of, "I just grew up here - how did
you people screw it up so badly?" pervades his general approach, and
shoehorns rhythms in amongst the different directions represented in
this sound. "Money Talks" is easily the most polished Cryptic
Slaughter album, but even as such, it's raw and deliberately unformed
like the wooden skeleton of an abandoned building, and this allows the
band to maintain a high degree of aggression while showcasing the
facile and creative guitar craft of Les Evans, who was probably the
most proficient writer of memorable riffs in thrash. These songs
mimick the sounds of the city, and in their head-on conflict with the
values of society, also mock its impotent and futile anger.

Das Ich - Staub (1994)

Winnowing its appearance from the vast field of synthpop and early
industrial, Das Ich make songs that evolve like soundtracks through a
fixed sequence of motifs before returning to repetitive choruses,
giving the impression of someone travelling through a countryside and
seeing the same landmarks from different angles at a great distance.
Electronic rock-style drumming is worked into background percussion
tracks in which there are no fills, but simple timekeeping interrupted
periodically to allow songs more freedom in cadence so that changes
can be foreshadowed and implemented handily. Several layers of
keyboards are common, as well as European-accented bitter voiced
chanting and numerous samples, including those of the voices of
historical figures. In that aspect, this music is as trademark
industrial as Front 242 or early Ministry, working within the popular
music front of that genre, but its heritage is as much synthpop in the
longer melodies and ability to use several phrases at different tempos
interlacing to form a sonic contexture. True to synthpop form, when
the chanting and drumming are accepted, the looping song structures
break to allow transitive themes to introduce the concluding set of
motifs, bringing songs to a close where most bands simply find
convenient endingpoints. All of the electronic touches are here,
including the pulsing beeps of keyboard riffing and steady drones of
background tones in digital purity, but nothing falls into the traps
of the standard genrification that often makes industrial difficult.
Each track is alertly different from those of other bands as well as
its own brethren, and there is a sense of purpose with each track that
is rare for any popular band but here adds a chilling sense of
contemplation. Where this music is great is in its articulation of the
complicated settings introduced by the first part of each song, as it
is in these summaries of seemingly contradictory electronic exchanges
that the design behind the mechanical and abrupt reveals its depth and
predominance.

Therion - Symphony Masses: Ho Drakon Ho Megas (1994)
by kontinual

Easily the most accessible output of the creative THERION legacy, this
CD represents the end of that era as well. The brilliant and ethereal
progressive death metal on their masterwork "Beyond Sanctorum" has
been compacted into a bizarre take on traditional heavy metal instead.
When given the space, the riffing techniques perfected previously
remain generally intact, albeit in simplified and truncated form:
melodic ideas cycle through permutations of rhythmic and harmonic
accent on their way to decay, which often must be ended more
dramatically than once necessary due to the more limiting verse/chorus
structure with which they chose to work in this case. Even with the
shortened structure, this style allows many of these songs to be
indistinguishable in style from "Beyond Sanctorum" tracks; taken out
of context, the final 1:30 of each often fades out in the same
wandering way. Riffs are accented by a steady, rock-like percussive
presence that retains the rhythmic distinctiveness established in
their earlier works, while bass guitar takes on a very Steve
Harris-like presence as it jumps back and forth between rhythm and
harmony as songwriting dictates. Despite the general fall-off in
ambition on this record compared to its predecessors, it remains
successful as it is completely self-aware, made obvious in such
humorous instances as the insertion of cheering beneath a typical
stadium-metal riff at the beginning of the track "Dawn of Perishness."
On the whole, this is a fine post-masterpiece withdrawl album, and
would have made a much better final sound off than whatever overtly
pretentious crap they are still releasing to this day.

Kraftwerk - Tour de France Soundtracks (2003)

After a nineteen-year absence, Kraftwerk return to the genre that has
evolved in their absence with a vision of where its future should lie.
Unlike most of the electronica, ambient, and techno currently on the
market, this album underutilizes percussion and allows tightly
sequenced keyboard phrases to dominate both rhythm and tone in layers,
allowing for more complex song structures than rock music will
tolerate. While songs develop extensively and do not follow the
rigidly cyclic form of most popular music, the individual elements and
phrases used to construct them are deliberately refined to the
simplest forms possible. Layered phrases range from two notes to
thirteen and overlap so to deliberately create gaps in harmony which
are exploite in song development. Understated, highly creative fills
allow this band to do without much other than a few passages of linear
drumming per song, putting the spotlight on their talent at creating
evocative melodies. True to the title, this album is a soundtrack - a
piece in and of itself, using repeated motifs across song lines to
express evolving concepts - and its phrases use rhythm, melody and
tone to represent the real-life aspects described. Where most music is
either dogmatic or purely aesthetic, this music glorifies a higher
level of aesthetic with its heroic motifs, praising both the victory
and the task, including its adversity, as part of something of
inestimable value - the process of living as explained through a
desire for triumph at human-defined tasks within it. The bicycle race
is glorified in four tracks, and then the album turns to various other
metaphors for human-machine-nature interaction, including the
hilarious "Elektrokardiogramm" and the somnolently majestic "La
Formé," which is the keynote track for this album much as "Europe
Endless" and "Radioactivity" were for previous Kraftwerk full-lengths.
Musically, the band have kept their sense of highly polished
structure, adding to it an almost decadent use of background riffing
for harmonic effect which shows the influence of their Britpop days in
the middle 1980s. It may be that few ultimately understand this album
but this will not diminish the effect of its infectious melodies and
and song arrangements that read like small novels when you combine the
layers. Where many others have produced music, Kraftwerk have produced
art that unifies life, video, audio and concept, in the final stage
bringing it together for music that is a voice against time, a
healthful song to human achievement and a love for life itself.

Varathron - Sarmutius Pegorus (promo 1997)

While Varathron have been for years one of the talented and
undiscovered Greek bands who grace the heavy metal-influenced end of
black metal, they have never been thrust to the forefront in part
because their music is a hybrid of black, death and old school heavy
metal. It is redeemed by its splicing of melodies and abrasive riffing
into a continuous flow of changing musical backdrop, working
effectively in the same area spanned by Bathory "Blood, Fire, Death"
and Dissection "The Somberlain" but distant from the 1990s black metal
sound. Here however, in the most recent public work from this band,
one sees where the trail runs cold. Since this is arguably the most
musically proficient offering from Varathron yet, it is tempting to
attempt to shoehorn a future into the vision of this music, but really
it is just an update of what Varathron have been doing and, like all
things which exist in passing time, it cannot return to its roots or
rediscover the lack of worldliness that comes with newness to a task.
The proficiency of the second track, in which a soundtrack-style
classical instrumentation piece works its way sinuously around a
sentimental melody, excels everything previously released by this
band, but missing is the part of art that unifies aesthetic to
emotion: the demonstrative, life-mimicking language of experience
spoken by art and religion and philosophy alike. That is gone here,
and as a result the songs have a more defined sense of form and
lacking certain spontaneity, project a concept and fill it in as they
would any other form in popular music. I think they have done great
work, but by being too aware of what that work is, have not achieved
the emotional freedom of their earlier works.

Graveland - The Fire of Awakening (2003)

In the now seemingly idyllic yesterday of black metal, Graveland was
an odd man out, getting into the act with a mostly generic album and,
until "Thousand Swords," remaining completely unknown; demonized for
political beliefs, it seemed as if the band would barely live out the
1990s, especially as side project Lord Wind gained its own audience
and longtime psychotic drummer Capricornus left the band amicably.
However, weathering these storms has made this band if anything,
stronger, and in its latest evolution, Graveland incorporate ideas
that have been tossed around in limbo since 1997's "Following the
Voice of Blood," possibly coming to full fruition on this album. After
that album took Graveland away from traditional acerbic melodies and
violent short songs, it seemed inevitable that the neoclassical
soundtrack sound would take effect; it took two albums to find the
right range, but with "Memory and Destiny" the band integrated into
its neoclassical guitar savagery the same Vangelisesque sweeping
keyboard melange that enthralled also black metal innovators like
Burzum and Summoning. Having successfully digested that style, the
Polish black metal controversy resumes the attack with a return to
music in which guitar is the primary instrument of phrase, in this
case operating as both rhythm and melodic structure because of the
purely ambient nature of timekeeping drums which often forego fills in
order to, early Bathory- and Ildjarn-style, provide a container in
which stringed instruments define the progression of each song from
its earliest motifs to some spectacular internal evolutions which,
like the movements of a classical piece, upgrade each collection of
motifs by unifying them and simultaneously dividing them with a
staggered restatement of the importance of each theme via altered
context. Where previous works were going further into ambient metal
territory, this album adds some touches familiar to crossover
listeners in its segmented internal cadences, and further develops the
layering techniques of previous Darken albums. One song converts the
two chord rhythm leads of Oi music into an unearthly continuum of
background harmony which alternates between synthesis and antithesis
to the guitar phrases in foreground. Like a twisting string it catches
the prevailing energy of its surroundings and amplifies it into a
complementary sound. Lonely and majestic, yet streamlined and
efficient, this Graveland album is perhaps their best since "Following
the Voice of Blood" and one of the few remaining blackmetal bands with
anything new to say.

Nortt - Hedengang (2003)
by Onde Aander

Slow, depressive metal composed of two songs that fit very well
together: "Glemt" and "Død og Borte." The arrangements are very
simplistic yet highly atmospheric,  slightly reminiscent of Xasthur's
Nocturnal Poisoning. Everything moves very slowly; each strike is
powerful and deliberate lasting several seconds before the next. The
clear piano rings out dominantly in perfect artistic contrast to the
sludgy distorted guitar and matching unintelligible harsh vocals; the
drums nearly disappear altogether. When the volume peaks it causes
slight distortion, the very same as when recording equipment acts as a
reverse noise-gate upon recieving too great a signal. It could be
intentional or accidental; however, I think it contributes a necessary
extra touch, adding to a "soundtrack of decay."

Infinite Singularity - Ruins (2002)

While most in metal have been trying to get further to the "essence"
of various recent permutations of the genre, others have contented
themselves with exploring the evolution of what is already a
well-defined approach to the medium of music. Infinite Singularity is
a one-man project that through organization and carefully cerebrated
releases has stepped aside from the traditional slurry of mixed-genres
metal that plagues the Texas "scene." However, this is clearly of a
mixed heritage within metal and aims for no specific genre; thankfully
it has escaped the raspy or guttural distorted vocals overdone at this
point in time, and incorporates elements of both neoclassical heavy
metal and the harmonies of black metal that simultaneously rise in
intensity and lose euphony. Lead playing forms much of each song and
allows a mutating melody to narrate changes in the song; songs like
small postmodern operas present the ideas expressed also in lyrics as
something between poetry and drama illustrated in sounds which emulate
scenarios of the unfolding action. This form of art, like Greek
theatre, resembles more of what the original echelon of European black
metal attempted - Celtic Frost, Emperor and Gorgoroth come to mind -
but Infinite Singularity has a more universal language that has
techniques borrowed from doom, heavy metal, death and black metal as
well as some aspects of progressive rock, although it would be a
stretch to call the fretwork here "technical" - however, "inventive"
and "evocative" do apply. Songs build emotion ably and fade into
comfortable repetition between presentation of ideas. Drums are
absolutely minimal, consisting of a snare and periodic cymbals; vocals
are incanted like the chants of monks and fit into an indirect cadence
with the dominant voice in each song, the single guitar. From the
constructive criticism department comes the suggestion that this could
stand to change. If this band loses the drums and alternates singing
with the deadpan vocals, maybe adds some counterpoint melodic bass
(aka Iron Maiden) to complement its creative riffing, it could be on
the way to leaving behind much of what is limiting about metal.

Robert Fripp - 1995 Soundscapes - Volume 2 - Live in California (1995)

From the time of the electric guitar's invention to the sheer
predominance of rock music as an interest of youth in the West, its
role as a rhythm instrument and anchor of a three-to-five-piece band
was explored as its primary function. Toward the close of the 1970s,
with the emergence of hardcore punk and speed metal, this had been
taken to an extreme and the guitar was typecast as a loud and
insistent noise, causing much of the artistry of early guitar music to
be replaced with "pop" sensibilities: loud chorus, simple verse and
novelty on the bridge (not to mention the obligatory hammering solo).
Working in a different direction, Robert Fripp paired with Brian Eno
to make "soundscapes," or topographies of interlacing sound that used
melody in serial stratification to achieve harmonic and rhythmic
effects, eschewing all vocals, bass, drums and keyboards. The result
is meditative to an extreme, in that it requires a patient constant
attention to a developing recounting of the birth and negotiation of
meaning in a complex setting. The music thus makes its entry on a
nearly unidirectional note and branches from that, like a ripple in an
ocean becoming a wave, and develops through a series of movements
composed of interacting motifs, with elements of chorus embedded
throughout each. Per the goal of this change, the guitars here sound
synthesized but are actually processed with light distortion through a
tape loop which adds incredible sustain, giving the tone an intensity
borne of its simplicity, with only a faint electronic nature to its
sound. On this disc, only Fripp is present, and thus songs are less
strictly sensual and more a balance of logic and sensuality, although
on this disc he restrains the music to the point where each song is a
strong flavor of statement understood by both brain and gut. As
phrases develop simultaneously and in divergent directions, there is
the sensation of being underwater and watching ripples form on the
surface above as currents collide and separate; like much of this
genre since Tangerine Dream, a sense of the cosmic prevails in that
the listener is removed from the strict personal viewpoint imposed by
most popular music and subdued at the animal level by massive
overstimulus of complex patterns, resulting in an active observership
as music drifts past like fragments of supernovae and clues to the
history of the universe. As with much music created after the burst in
novelty of postmodernism, this release is idealistic and design,
pattern, structure and mathematical relationships in tone are used as
artful tools to construct vast architectures of both logical and
emotional recounting of the poetry of existence. The propulsion behind
this however comes from the artist's infectious desire to embrace all
of life, suffering or joy or other, for the sake of finding the value
in the experience, a tautology which becomes lucid when one realizes
that the approach to mortal experience often determines the outcome.
In these short documents of that vision, Fripp is perhaps slightly too
logical and yet sometimes too sentimental, but as a whole he provides
an immerse and fascinating translation of living energy into sound.

The Syre - S/T (2003)

Looking past the pretense, this band quickly realized that black metal
is drowning in stagnation and instead of putting out another generic
black metal release, used some of the lessons learned from black metal
to make a hardcore album that uses black and death metal techniques to
intensify its layers of basic but visceral riffing. When a genre has
completed a stage of evolution, one can either go above that stage, or
go under it - going above before the audience is fully aware of the
bloat transpiring ensures that one gets ignored, so making a more
basic album that is more powerful than the standards of the time
allows one to both go under and rise above. It's not as easy as it
sounds; The Syre only achieve this for about two-thirds of the album,
with some of the rest drifting into reworkings of known techniques
that as songs do not stand up to the more distinctive tracks; however,
as a whole, the band achieve an album that sounds like the hardcore of
the late 1970s if it picked up a sense of rhythm as a series of
patterns interlocking to form a multidimensional artistic effect, as
death metal contributed, and the ability of black metal to use melodic
riffing to underscore song structure as a means of using the changes
in song structure themselves to illustrate whatever artistic
perceptions inspired the work. Further, this has the rigidity of
metalcore and grindcore added in rhythm, riffing and voice, and in
this case it works well in that it endows the whole with a deadpan
pace like a commando counting off seconds until attack. Vocals are
whispery hoarse over a forceful enunciation, and as such are
impossible to ignore, and instrumentation seems to have been
streamlined to keep it as basic as possible. Like inspirations
Hellhammer, these brave northerners aren't afraid to let a few chords
rearranged do the work of lengthy progressive passages, nor are they
timid about allowing one chord to stand in for five and two rhythmic
fills. It is basic; it is a hardcore punk hybrid; it is self-assertive
and escapes the timid emulation of the scene. And it stands in its own
right as a fine hardcore album with metal influences, or a fine metal
album covered by a hardcore band, but either way it achieves its goal
of stimulating growth in a fatted and sickened genre.

Orcustus - demo 2002

In the history of black metal, most of the members of this band are
"professionals" in the sense of being people who took on a style with
enough complexity, and saw it through to its conclusion with enough
class, to merit being seen as a step above the hack-n-slash garden
variety metal "musicians." When they now return to a style that once
inspired them deeply, but has for some years been a question of
upholding rather than inventing, there is a curious mix of emotions
they will experience as they simultaneously escape from the demands of
their name-brand projects, and find their experience-borne proficiency
to guide them well in making art that connects to the fundamentals of
natural human perception. With Orcustus, members of several well-known
bands pool their talent in a generic style of melodic black metal,
derived loosely from the work of bands such as Zyklon-B and Gorgoroth,
meaning that while most of this music is full-ahead go there's
thematic variation across the length of the song that corresponds to
changes in what is being communicated, much how a short story is
structured by variations in action or perspective arranged in
sequential paragraphs. Riffs are fast melodic lead runs colliding with
two-note harmonizations that effectively eliminate any potential tonal
motion, thus there is often a sensation of running straight toward a
barrier which then in turn propels the runner forward; for the most
part, this style prevails on the album, although slower cyclic phrases
and midpaced bridges periodically cut through the chaos to unite
motifs in conclusion that allows the next phase to begin. Like Greek
tragedies staged at bus stops these songs are short blasts which
introduce action in the midst of its commission and then take the
audience through a brief but roundabout method of getting to its
essential conflict, which in a burst of drama resolves itself,
allowing a more philosophical and elementally satisfying musicality to
take over and guide the action home. Three songs populate this CD and
each is strong in its own right, leading the audience to consider how
different this band is from the overpopulation afflicting this style:
where others fill out the form specific to this subgenre, others
create with heart and bravery, and the resulting sound uses the
musical devices at its disposal to convey the strength of emotion that
once made black metal great.

Vaginal Jesus - Affirmative Apartheid (2003)

Two aspects to any Vaginal Jesus record must be discussed, the first
being its music, and the second being the social and political trauma
associated with the ideas, images and lyrics presented within. Taking
the easier one first, it's safe to say that even Adolf Hitler might
have found this over the top: it is pure channeled hatred that
emphasizes the differentness of Africans, Hispanics and Jews, and this
rage finds its target not only through often-accurate stereotypes but
also through a clear sense of identification with another way of
thinking. The band name, for example, mocks with Nietzschean accuracy
the feminine and passive and resentful nature of Jesus Christ, and the
passive, dysgenic nature of Christian dogma even when presented in
secular form as liberalism or compassionate absolutism. Even more
importantly, however, the lyrics and imagery play up the "bogeyman"
role of absolute evil in which racism has been cast in the
Judeo-Christian west, and tweak society's nose with the extremity of
its own fear of anything approximating racism by ploughing past
boundaries and taboos like an 18-wheeler carrying a double load of pig
iron. This reviewer may be forgiven for getting the obvious out of the
way before turning to the music, which demands more analysis than is
traditionally given - on this album. Previous works from Vaginal Jesus
lack the presence which is exhibited here, partially through attention
to making each song as intense as the previous and an affinity for the
short song form which allows irrelevant maneuvering to be discarded in
favor of direct, cyclic songs with a couple of breaks or connective
riffs intervening. While the vocals are bassy guttural chaos, drumming
and rhythms are calibrated toward pure crossover, borrowing from Oi,
hardcore and death metal but staying within the general voice of punk
music in tone and rhythm, although a fair amount of metal presentation
ethics and cadence give this music a "heavy" that even hatecore has
traditionally lacked. Many of these riffs are cut from classic
archetypes of punk and hardcore, but acknowledging that all music
expressing similar things will experience structural similarity, an
alert listener can appreciate how these are recontextualized and their
classic tendencies are rudely interrupted to repurpose them. In
strange ways, this is similar to what DRI and COC and Cryptic
Slaughter did in the early 1980s, in that it takes the moronic and
paradoxical values society has accumulated - including its moralistic
taboos - and shoves them back into its face with an extremity that is
designed to push the listener to the edges of tolerance so that, in
the mind, if nothing else, radical change can find a readiness in the
emotional mind of a human being. As such this music boils up like the
moments before a riot, attacking the blood and heart before the brain
with infectious rhythms and bouncy, jaunty, unredeemably alienated and
violent riffing that evokes the physicality of combat. Exceeding the
norms for both Oi and DRI-styled thrash, "Affirmative Apartheid" is
listenable and in fact lucid and often intelligent, pushing the
combination of these styles to express more than in them is usually
encoded, exceeding most political music of any stripe and calling to
mind the total deviation from subservience have traditionally been the
goal of underground hardcore, metal and social upheaval.

Chaotic Symmetry - demo 2003

When Judas Iscariot exhausted the immediate paintbrush of drone riffs
available, the band plopped out an EP of fast-lead picking melodic
black metal, a fusion of "Transilvanian Hunger" and the longer,
arpeggiated fretruns of neoclassical rock-influenced bands like
Dissection and Unanimated. Some years later, along comes Chaotic
Symmetry, featuring Necroabyssious of underground stalwarts Varathron,
making a debut that is quite well done in a completely dead style.
Riffs drop a harmony in two notes and then climb above it with tremolo
rhythm leads, forming the basis of a familiar style; although the
initial halves of each riff set (composed like most music of precept
and response) are of forms familiar to most black metal listeners
since about 1996, the complements are inventive and unlike everything
Norse since Satyricon, clearly are unafraid and in fact desire to
extend gratification until a lengthy complement of melodic change and
repetition has explored a central harmonic pattern. This gives to the
music the kind of aura that big band and soundtracks often have, in
which an experience establishes itself in order to radically change
and cathartically translate its original position into something new
by changing the context in which it operates. In music, context is
established by our nerve memory of recent sounds, especially those
which exceed certain fractional tolerances and thus appear to
re-directionalize the course of natural complement to initial sounds.
This band has quite a bit of potential in this area and leaves this
listener curious for more, but with this caveat: the style of black
metal in which they work is so inundated with clones and a fanbase
with no knowledge of music beyond rhythm, thus making their fight an
uphill one at whose end the greatest reward will be acknowledgement
within a form defined by others that is rapidly losing currency.

Anael - Necromantic Rituals 2003

Somewhere between early Hellhammer and the first Samael album this
type of black metal grows, based more in the concept of letting tone
drone and ring than in forcing a constant fluid motion of tremelo
through melodic paces. As such this music walks between harmony and
disharmony, like a good fighter keeping the listener off an even
prediction of what will occur, enmiring its statements of lucidity in
a nearly dysfunctional complexity of presentation. Broad chords are
given a chance to ring before being roughly thrust in other directions
by change to the next note in progressions not immediately evident,
and like a death metal band, this group of musicians are not afraid to
mix rhythm riffing in with ideas that develop harmonic shape to the
music, throwing doomlike riffs up against droning cadenced canters
offset by mumbling bassy percussive playing. They are so much into
this riff salad style that often these songs are similar to what one
might hear if spun on pedestal between three stereos playing the first
CDs from Celtic Frost, Samael and Belial. Luckily for the listener,
this band stay on top of their own compositions and thus despite the
chaotic nature of "scene" changes - formed of riff, harmony, rhythm
and vocal pacing each defining a unique space to any given motif,
which given the linear nature of this instrumentation is given context
by emulative support from the rest of the musical devices present -
are able to cycle these motifs around a central thought and develop
songs like nightmares in which there is no immediate clarity but at
the end, an impression is left that is ambiguous but clear in the
placement of that ambiguity in a well-defined context. Vocals are
designed as an afterthought, upholding pace but of a uniform style;
drumming keeps to the shadows and serves as counterpoint accompaniment
through simplicity of texture, eschewing the pocket styles of rock
musicians. Because of these tendencies, this album is both drone and
carefully articulated voyage between simple pieces of a disturbed
neurotic puzzle. Of recent black metal heard, this band stands out as
one of the few to have any concept of artistry; with this potential,
they can develop into a first-rate black metal act if they opt to
further explore the language of symbolic change in action (scene) they
have created.

NME - Machine of War (1995)

An interesting approach to post-death metal heavy metal is found on
this album. While most bands either went "underground" or became
nu-metal or metalcore, NME anticipated this split in the metal
community and instead made a heavy metal album in the style of classic
Venom or Diamondhead works, with thunderous basic power chord riffs
over synchronized cadence of drums and vocals, but put aggressive
hardcore style riot-shout vocals over the top of it to make something
that captures the raw futile anger of modern hardcore but gives it the
complexity and feeling of heavy metal and speed metal. Although this
reviewer shudders to call anything "power metal," this release falls
right into the groove-oriented style popularized by bands like Prong
and Pantera, but gives to it a degree of violent texture more common
to death metal, along with the basic throb that makes punk easy
listening. While this music does not embrace the thick-skulled
linearity that Pantera does, it similarly exploits gentle harmonies
interwoven through churning ugly rhythm riffing to create emotional
but compact songs. For those who like heavy metal while not wishing to
be stuck in the past, this is a find.

Secrets of the Moon - Stronghold of the Inviolables (2002)

Barren as the black metal post-1996 landscape is, the hunger that
wells within fans is enough to make them overlook many things
including outright mediocrity. While as music Secrets of the Moon is
not mediocre, as a contribution to the black metal genre it is; there
is nothing new here and despite its very able assumption of much of
the sensibility behind older Mayhem, the inoffensive content here is
predictable and offers nothing new. It's alarming how much more
proficient this band is than all but a handful of "USBM" bands,
resulting in an ease which does them no favors as it allows a
collection of random motifs around a central melodic hook to work
coherently together without articulating anything other than the
appearance of content. The fast breaks occur in the right places, and
the average drunken mullethead will quickly confuse this with quality,
as he will laud the "atmosphere" achieved and appreciate the
declarative choruses, but nothing enduring occurs here. This band goes
down in history however for inventing a dub version of black metal
with the first track, in which a loud easy drumbeat contains languidly
random variations on a simple two-chord riff, creating the same effect
that early house music and screw music must have had, except to no
effect: it twists through some predictable permutations like panicked
prey, and then collapses into the indistinguishable flow of similar
songs. Instrumentation is excellent for the genre at this point, and
songwriting is competent if nothing else, but doing a competent
version of a job that has been done well many times before isn't
enough in the twilight days of black metal.

Kult ov Azazel - Oculus Infernum (2003)

Most pre-1996 black metal listeners rightly mock USBM for being a
hybrid of styles gravitating toward the lower motivations they all
have in common. Unfortunately for those born in the USA, the national
culture tends toward an egalitarianism and hybridization that favors
this kind of approach, so it takes some time to grow out of that
mentality and accept music for what makes it distinct not what makes
it fit into the crowd. Kult ov Azazel have grown impressively since
their earlier works, and while they remain in the USBM tradition,
they're growing out of it. Most notably, here the riffcraft and
ability to assemble melodic fragments in meaningful order are far
ahead of most of their contemporaries, giving a presence to songs that
has never been previously found in this band. A combination between
seriousness and ability to represent perceptions of reality in musical
form, the newfound skill constructs a rigid supporting base for many
of the techniques and stylistic changes in recent black metal,
providing competent forms of each, in consequence creating an album
that sounds like a more violent and absolutist version of later
Gorgoroth. While this album is not "black metal" in the same sense
that the old guard of modern black metal from Norway were, it is a
powerful vision of what USBM could be if it focused on music more than
the image problems of individual members. Constructive critics might
note that the vocals are too "over the top" to complement the music
much here, and that often speed thrills overcome songs at times when
some of the morbidly dissonant dirges found elsewhere on the album
could be adapted to fit with greater audience impact. What is mainly
worth listening to here are the guitars, which surge alongside drums
at high intensity yet inflect a range of supporting motifs in the
patina of overlapping harmonics bursting from their distorted stream
of sound. This album is a large step for Kult ov Azazel and leaves us
expecting even more from their next offering.

Legion of Doom - For Those of the Blood (1998)

Although during its most active period, with a few exceptions, this
band was disregarded and lambasted as talentless, the great black
metal novelty machine has resurrected the name Legion of Doom in order
to find something more obscure and "kvlt" than what anyone else has
bought from eBay, and therefore interest in this album is revived. The
followup to the alienated "Kingdom of Endless Darkness," these songs
show the progression of black metal in the scars they bear and most
importantly, in what they don't have. As the title suggests, "Kingdom
of Endless Darkness" emerged from the origins of black metal in which
evil mysticism, nationalism and self-pity fought it out for dominance.
Legion of Doom picked the first two and united them with clear and
direct statements in opposition to morality, in the process making an
album that despite its heavy Burzum influence produced a grinding
atmospheric sound of its own. "For Those of the Blood" takes over a
few steps ahead of where that left off, both incorporating more
mainstream heavy metal/rock elements and getting more proficient in
both songwriting and the mechanics of assembling the notes of a
phrase. Where much of the first album was chromatic, or whole
interval, and harmony was mostly disregarded except as a means of
terminating each riff, this album is in contrast alive with tone and
the contrast between certain frequencies at certain points in the
development of each musical sentence. As a result, there's more to
play with here, but it is slightly blunted by I think a dampening of
the frontier of black metal in the minds of these artists. Still,
compared to the current trend in formless, boring, self-pitying and
masturbatory black metal, this album has what is vital: spirit and
drive to create music instead of just complaining at the top of its
lungs.

Shining - Within deep dark chambers (2001)

One might think that when something loses direction, it stops and
pauses to contemplate the next step; this is not true with black
metal, which charged full speed ahead into the quagmire of its own
irrelevance. Since there are now thousands of bands which sound
exactly the same and have exactly the same attitudes - hate humanity,
hate life, hate self, hate people who dare have a point to their
existences - the level of competition to be interesting has been
raised massively. Shining take a half-hearted leap at that bar and
almost achieve it, but even with an album of quality can't because
despite having done the labor, they lack the distinctiveness to have
anything to say. When critics in 1994 said black metal was beating a
dead horse, this reviewer laughed them off as premature negativists;
the same attitude of premature negativity now prevails in black metal
bands who keep making music despite having very little to say. That
brings this review back to Shining, which is competent and even
slightly enigmatic and catchy in its minor key three-note pickup
melodies, and even well versed in metal songwriting and percussion,
but ultimately, as pointless as the music of Britney Spears. Funny how
this band praises suicide and self-destruction so extensively, as that
kind of fatalism - giving up before even really trying - is reflected
in this music. Cowards would love it, because for those who claim to
be "artists" this album doesn't even approach any artistic issues from
a cautious distance, but bypasses them straight in a rush to find the
sound others are cloning and make slight variations in it.
Dictionaries call that novelty, and this reviewer calls this album
soulless and utilitarian.

Bahimiron - Rehearsal 2003

More pure gut thrust hatefulness from this band. Although Bahimiron
use extensive National Socialist imagery and claim to stand for raw
destruction and depravity, their music speaks otherwise: it's a voice
of clarity emerging from within the mess, like a weekend of drinking
beer on the couch interrupted by the pure focus of anger and
pipe-bombing of a UN police station. Hailing to primary influence
Gorgoroth, this band make very similar music of short three-chord
riffs culminating in a longer melody joining the dischord and harmony
with a rudimentary insight to a commonality enforced upon entering and
concluding ideas in the music.  Vocals are like hair growing from
within muscle, a mucosal distortion which boils like static outside
the most prominent sounds. In the same style of seething background
surrounding a cutting distillation of sound, guitars are awash in
self-harmonizing noise and feedback. This band has shown great
potential, but the hardest steps are ahead of them as they take a good
start and shape it into a distinctive sound. This rehearsal shows
greater instrumental proficiency and confidence, which are necessary
steps toward that end.

Anateus - De Principii Evangelikum (2002)

It seems Antaeus are as bored with late-model black metal and its
endless pretense, much as the fans are who will hand them their ass
with this album of blasting death/black hybrid that showcases the
amazes voice of Mkm but fails to deliver the sense of grandiloquent
and descriptive music that made black metal insightful in the context
of older forms of the metal genre made to appear as simplistic rhythm
music in comparison. Gone are much of the melodic figures that made
this music poetic, replaced by an emphasis on the admittedly excellent
drumming and as previously said, vocals with the neural effects of
sarin in the listener. As death metal with highly portable internal
motifs this is compelling listening, but its highest articulation at
this point seems to be its aggressive percussive motion, and that
isn't enough to motivate someone looking for an intense musical
experience. Historians will note that as praise for self-destruction,
intoxication, universal hatred of all humanity/life and other
absolutist, blanket, individually-convenient concepts were introduced
into black metal, its impetus faded and it became like this album:
directionlessness wrapped up in an over-assertion of an extant
direction. As a summary of death/black metal styles, it is
well-chosen, with a good helping of the same kind of lengthy acerbic
thematics that made Incantation great, and enough wisdom to avoid
excess technique when a one-chord rhythm riff will ride as well. This
music is well-crafted but not well enough placed to mean anything to
anyone other than one who buys black metal because it is black metal;
this reviewer misses the external competition to the black metal genre
whose eugenic influence could be seen on the first Antaeus album,
which was a masterpiece and had less world-weariness to wear it (and
its listeners) down.

Ceremony - The Days Before the Death (2001)

Melodic death metal is a hybrid style, and when most Europeans attempt
it, they try to have it make sense and in doing so, fail at making
anything other than either heavy metal with death metal touches or
death metal with cock-rock embellishments. Ceremony, which gave to the
community not only a current member of Morbid Angel but also granted a
guitarist to a certain high-profile dunce metal band, mixes the almost
gentle rhythms of old school death metal with a technical style of
playing that includes rapid muffled chording and lead playing
alongside sliding melodies and arpeggios perfectly calibrated to the
tortuous spacing between beats. Risky though this gambit may be, the
strategy pays off: the overly sonorous aspects of the music are
balanced by an emphasis on impact and structure and the aggressive
tendencies toward brainstem-only cognition are balanced through a
larger context. Unlike European bands, this band does not use melody
centrally; rhythm provides the central motif tree and melody is used
as a fragmentive coloring of the subvariants, which being often
chromatic or composed largely of intervals thereof, are primarily
phrase/arrangement and secondarily tone. However, the fusion of these
sides gives these four songs enough life to show some promise
especially if this style is explored by a band with more experience in
neoclassical or progressive music.

King Crimson - In the Wake of Poseidon (1970)

Influential as it was outside of metal, this band has rarely been
considered the influence that it and other prog bands like Jethro Tull
and Yes were inside of metal, a perspective which gives some insight
on where metal might go and what might defeat it. This album is both
amazing and tedious; it's amazing for the pure musicality of certain
aspects of it, and for its ambition, but is tedious for its inability
to escape its background and the reliance on collaging different
random ideas that turns progressive music into (very complicated and
oh-so-educated) wallpaper, muzak. In order to unite items that have
very little in common, it's sensible to use humor and/or emulation
(including mockery) of established styles, but of course, the old
adage applies that one must take care not to become the abyss into
which one stares. Fripp was probably the first guitarist to appreciate
what distortion could do given music of a complex enough harmonic
construction to take advantage of the new textures and implied sonic
affinities that it creates. By today's standards, of course, his
distortion is barely there; by the ideas of the day, Fripp's overdrive
is over the top and his use of power chords and dissonance was
probably not shocking but at least seemingly deliberately out of touch
with what was being done. Unlike sunny power pop or the hippie rock of
Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, King Crimson emphasizes phrasing over
uniform rhythm playing, and as a result there's a lot of the offtime
and fractional time counterpoint leads maintaining the form of each
cyclic motif in absence as much as emphasis. Of course, this being
progressive rock, which has the misplaced ideal that it is somehow
living up to classical standards "within the context of rock music,"
there's the puzzle of a concept-y album: it's probably not a concept
album (and who cares anyway?) but it clearly contorts itself to fit
around "unique" ways of giving the music "artistic" import. This isn't
a terrible idea, but it rings hollow in the context of an album that
degenerates into postmodern rock assemblages of random influences
which still somehow require really obvious, repetitive choruses.

Smothered Brothers - Asphyxiated (2001)

This three song EP upholds the flag of primitive ranting pornogrind,
but seems serious enough about the grind part to make some bouncily
combative songs through which pornographic samples are laced.
Admirable is the fact that there is zero pretense of musicality, and
100% focus on presentation dynamics and the manipulation of the
listener with the simplest possible chain of events. In other words,
music is the medium through which a sensation of perceptual
stimulation is communicated. While it might be difficult - very
difficult - to discern this from many other pornogrind, guttural
grind, and vomit-grind bands, its syncopated collision between vocals
and rudimentary guitar rhythm presents a gratifyingly direct and
dispassionate sound. After a day of listening to review copies of
various pretentious, contrived and self-inflated metal/grind bands,
this is a gratifying leap into the abyss. Hand-made cover cut from
various porno magazines - hopefully, this white stuff holding it
together is Elmer's glue - shows a hands-on familiarity with the
topic.

Goethes Erben - Kapitel (1998)

The two origins of industrial music that made the most sense as
listening experiences were the chanting alongside sampled industrial
noises used as percussion as exhibited by Einstuerzende Neubauten, and
the gentle neoclassical melodies along themes of alienated postmodern
existences which defined the music of Kraftwerk. Some decades later
artists are still struggling to fuse, separate or recompute these
ideas into something that is both expressive of machine-human angst
and human listenable for a challenging and aesthetically coherent
listening experience. Goethes Erben take the melodic layers of
keyboards approach, but mar it with dramatically-presented spoken word
filler standing in for sung vocals, and often use drums and sampled
percussion for emphasis where it would be both more consistent and
more striking to eschew the traditional aspects of popular music that
anchor it in normalcy. While this maintains a certain abrasiveness
popular with many industrial bands, its lasting power like that of
many shock effects succumbs to a fast decay and makes it easy to
overlook the many powerful aspects of this music.

Season of Evil - Season of Evil (2001)

Showing the consequences of generalized metal fandom, this act is a
rock band trapped in a metal body. Using the gothic-horror-punk basis
of bands like the Misfits, and adding a sense of tragic sardonic black
metal in the style of early Gehenna, these midwestern misanthropes
mishmash horror, goregrind and evil/vampiric lyrics on top of music
that is redeemed by its musical creativity within a heavy metal/rock
form. Where they fail is any attempts to be anything but a populist
styled band, much in the way Cradle of Filth is a great heavy metal
band but an embarrassment as black metal; the low-guttural vocals and
"extreme" lyrics come off as ludicrous, but the variations and
improvements upon basic metal patterns these guys produce are worth
hearing for listeners who like that genre. Most underground metallers
will find this too ear-friendly and mainstream as a result, and most
mainstreamers will be unaware of how to adapt to the comical "evil"
lyrics and goofy rushed vocals. With some luck, these guys will drop
the pretense of undergroundness and start targetting the
Metallica/Misfits crossover audience, where they may have success as
their musical instincts tend toward the simple but gratifying.

Stille Volk - [Ex-uvie] (1998)

Resurrecting the past in the language of the present time, this is a
band using rock-format instrumentation to bring out the sense of
melody and tonal context used in cultures of Europe past to create
popular music that retains an artistry far above that of rock. While
this band unquestionably has a great deal of talent, it is sometimes
frustrating to see them attempting to play the field of rock, for
whatever reasons of ultimata they serve, they're above the simplistic
mentality of that genre. Clearly they are well studied in rock
techniques and styles, but their thinking is so far away from the
process of composing music to be rock songs that much of the rock
trimmings become transparent as one looks into the music. Mostly
acoustic guitar, keyboard and wind instruments, these songs are
emotionally active without being saccharine; at first, they often seem
horribly out of tune because of the flattened vocals of the singer,
and they appear simple and indirect because of the lack of attention
paid to flashy aesthetics, but the songwriting is powerful in that it
never lapses into a dead-end cycle of repetition but keeps urging each
phrase to grow toward others and then recombines the result to form
the basis of the next effort. Somewhere between a Celtic band and
progressive Gothic rock in overall sound, the bulk of these songs are
gentle and yet forceful underneath an aesthetic that is less insistent
and less constantly loud than rock, but there is an industrial "metal"
type influence on several tracks that seems extraneous. The genius of
this CD is that it creeps up on the listener and carefully establishes
a mood of separateness that allows the listener to reset his or her
expected intensity, clearing the mind from the cloying dramatism of
mainstream music and giving rise to an environment in which the
ancient and modern hover above a new land where anything truly is
possible.

Penitent - Roses by Chaos Spawned (1999)

Music invokes its circumstances by its styling, and then either
fulfills its promise or forces the audience into acceptance of its
obvious manipulations, thus increasing the amount of emotional
frankness and consequently, cheesiness through overdramatization; this
release narrowly skirts the lip of that abyss, and, while revealing
the natural abilities of these composers, is often far too theatrical
for its own good in the passionate and declarative male and female
vocals which intrude on braided keyboard melody lines. Like dinner
theatre, it is both excellent in its ability to keep audience
attention and mediocre in its choices of emphatic and thespian central
content outside of the lush sequences of keyboard changes which
surround the listener and suggest an urgency and superreality.
Composition is powerful and reflects not only a knowledge of music but
of the audience, as it stays ahead of the predictable and yet uses
familiar patterns to bring them to focus on its progressing action.
Like black metal band Summoning, it suffers from overuse of electronic
percussion where the keyboards say enough in their own defense;
similarly, it has a Basil Poledouris worship in the tendency to layer
synthesized voices within two keyboard riff motifs, one variant and
the other unchanging. Despite these disadvantages, this CD emanates a
powerful atmosphere that reaches escape velocity by the third or
fourth track, propelling the audience forward by creating a void of
what was once part of our culture. The origins of most of these
melodic styles are in the medieval and times immediately following it,
which allows for a single dominant motif to be repeated throughout the
length of each song and supported by accompaniment from synthesizers,
electronic strings and organs. Most vocals are either "industrial"
styled spoken and carefully processed voices. As it straddles styles,
this music also straddles emotions, establishing a mood and then
playing on top of it more than within it. Although one might point to
its soundtrackness as a disadvantage, in the context of that action it
gives this music the kind of firm aesthetic foundation necessary upon
which to build, and it is the quality of the musical vision that does
that building which makes this an enigmatic repeat listen.

kk null/moz - split CD (2001)

Because the fundamental aspects of noise music are dictated by the
form overloading of its medium, there are only a few methods and
directions in which one can develop before it too closely comes to
resemble normal music; elders in the genre such as K.K. Null do their
best to find new ways of making art that resembles something other
than synchronized blasts of static alternating with feedback. On this
split, which shares some songs or extremely similar concepts with
previous K.K. Null works, the first half shows Null further exploring
the concept of fast rhythms and tight cycles of non-static noise,
creating something that sounds like a cross between tribal drums and
digital techno as made by shorting electronics. Moz follows this up
with tracks of feedback creeling in primal silence and lengthy vocal
samples, going to the opposite extreme from Null. Where the veteran
noise wizard Null has gone closer to pure rhythmic music, Moz has
pulled away and is attempting to make something that very little
resembles music but has within it a greater facility for tone thanks
to the harmonics of its feedback. Both are deliberately somewhat
similar between tracks, which gives each side of this split the sense
of being a whole composition in itself. While these may not be the
most extreme or refined picks from either artist, this dual EP is
being used correctly as a proving ground for experimentation, and for
those who enjoy noise, is a piece of the puzzle that explains the
attraction of this enigmatic artform that is easy to create but very
hard to do well.

[ Features ]

Northern Lights Festival
Club Rockit, Toronto, Ontario Canada, 21 June 2003
by kontinual

Northern Lights Festival 2003 was the first installment in what will
purportedly be an annual fixture in Toronto. An extremely late
cancellation of headliners GRAND BELIAL'S KEY for "legal" reasons had
already cast a shadow of personal doubt on the legitimacy of this
festival, but non-attendance was not an option for a number of
reasons. Matters were made worse by difficulty even getting to Toronto
in the first place; a number of mistakes, both personal and
bureaucratic, made the initial journey far more arduous than was
necessary, furthering the need for this festival to "be worth it."
After a mediocre night's sleep and some exploring of Toronto's streets
and mass transit system, it was finally time to bake in the late
afternoon sun awaiting entry into Club Rockit, the oddly shaped and
poorly ventilated venue chosen as the site of NLF 2003. As usual
things were running late, so we took our time basking in the
relatively cool air outside rather than sweat profusely indoors
watching the never-heard-of and mediocre band that opened the fest,
ECLIPSE ETERNAL. Their generic name indicated perfectly their generic
music and presentation: cheesy stage-play with a woman dressed as a
nun, plagiarized riffs, nothing new to offer at all. Even after
missing most of their set I found myself asking for the end of it as
the band continued beyond their promised finishing point. Despite the
above complaints the plebes attending the fest seemed to eat them up
anyway, a theme that continued for most of the night. 

By nature I find it difficult to be impressed by live shows of unknown
bands, rather using shows to reinforce already-familiar and enjoyed
music. This went through my head as I watched the set presented by
DIVINITY, a late-addition technical death metal act from Québec. This
was the first time I had ever seen a band wielding three (!) guitars,
making them a six-piece overall. Impressive. Unfortunately, the level
of intricacy they were most likely purveying failed to come through
fully with the sound they were given. Many of the typical
characteristics of the French-Canadian death metal scene were there,
including complex, Euro-style melody a la KATAKLYSM or NEURAXIS, and
GORGUTS-styled breakdowns. This band was stylistically out of place
with the "theme" that the festival was being run under, but that is
easy to do when virtually every other band violated it in some way or
another as well. However, it was much more pleasant to view a
competent and serious death metal band than a "black metal" one
consisting of poseur-looking try- hards, which described the next act
WOODS OF YPRES perfectly. This band was easily the worst of the
evening, and that the attendees were so receptive to their watered
down pap was a fitting statement for the festival as a whole.
Musically, they were CRADLE OF FILTH/OPETH inspired insipid drivel,
laced with acoustic passages and random off-key clean vocal
accompaniment amongst the generic "black metal" they were presenting. 

Thankfully, VANQUISHED presented the first real taste of black metal
for the night, thus succeeding in boosting my morale for a short while
at least. At minimum, they commanded a presence far beyond what the
previous bands had managed: whilst the rest were simply playing,
VANQUISHED succeed somewhat in creating an aura that transcended. They
looked grim physically, and were powerful musically; they used tempo
changes greatly to their advantage, building and releasing tension
appropriately with their traditional take on black metal. As stated
previously I find it difficult to praise unknown music based solely on
live performance, but an above average live performance can certainly
prompt exploration of a band's recorded material, and VANQUISHED have
piqued my interest enough for me to eventually give them a shot. Well
done. 

Satisfied for the time being, the performances of the next two bands
were missed; hunger and the cool evening air were both became more
important, which means both FERAL HORDE and ANHKREHG remained as
mysterious to me as when I arrived. Based on hearsay both bands seemed
to at least have their heads in the right places, but relative to a
fairly mediocre presentation at NLF so far this did little to entice
me to watch. It was during this time as well when there were
confrontations between metalheads allegedly caught making forbidden
gestures and various ARA punks recruited by the club staff and others.
I was not a witness, but learning about this later only served to
reinforce the ulterior motives behind the late GRAND BELIAL'S KEY
cancellation as well as the true purpose of this festival for at least
a portion of those involved. 

After the needed break, the first familiar name of the night began
their performance. EPOCH OF UNLIGHT carries around the stigma of
"technical/melodic death metal;" although accurate, it is not a fully
satisfying description. Musically their arrangements are quite varied,
approaching incoherency but staying satisfyingly away from it as most
(good) death metal does. The songs are built around complex melodic
phrases loosely pieced together, which often become over-indulgent but
still consistently manage to maintain a lot of narrative qualities.
This was the first time I was to witness EPOCH OF UNLIGHT performing a
full set, and also the first with a new line-up: now a five-piece as
opposed to the air-tight three pieces I saw years back. Fortunately,
the excellent musicianship was still present as the frenetic hooks
came across effortlessly. Unfortunately, however, from my position at
the stage there was no vocal presence whatsoever, the fault of the
sound engineer rather than the vocalist himself. Luckily this was only
a minor detraction for such a rhythmic and riff-oriented band;
drumming, for one, was truly a marvel to witness, as was the interplay
of strings to a lesser extent. Overall, EPOCH OF UNLIGHT is a band
that is quite something to experience live for anybody familiar with
their back catalog, and most likely for those who aren't as well.
Despite the enjoyable nature and "artistic" pretense of the recorded
material, they are held back ultimately by an obsession with heavy
metal melody and the occasional flirtation with its architectural
simplicity at times, as well. They have amazing levels of talent and
are great at what they do, but could be even greater with the proper
drive.

At long last it was time for AVERSE SEFIRA, the band I was most
looking forward to seeing at Northern Lights. Due to it being the last
show of their Canadian mini-tour, they had an advantage over the rest
of the bands on the bill in terms of time to hone their live
presentation as the fine point of a spear (save for VANQUISHED, who
participated with them). Their style, much like that of IMMOLATION, is
a seething stream of dissonance and frantic rhythm; however, their
melodic depth, as well as their presentation, keeps one foot rooted
firmly in the black metal realm as well. Thankfully, their stage
presence and instrumental proficiency allow the chaos a space in a
live setting, sometimes eclipsing the impact of the corresponding
recordings. As opposed to the first time I saw them shortly after the
release of their sophomore effort "Battle's Clarion," at this point
there was time for the then newly-instated drummer to learn some key
tracks from the debut, replacing the drum machine and giving them new
life. It was these tracks that were most impressive live: the longer,
more sweeping nature of the songs lends itself more to a charismatic
performance then does the chaos of the later tracks, which
unfortunately get lost in the noise of a poor mix more often. All was
well though, as the playing was tight, the material solid, and the
sound more than adequate. AVERSE SEFIRA proved themselves the finest
band of the night, but that was expected. 

We had to skip the "headliners" SUMMON due to both massive disinterest
and the need to catch the final subway of the night back to the hotel.
There were a number of things about the fest that bothered me at the
time, immediately following, and more so later: poser/newcomer count
was high, which was later confirmed with the whining of the "Brave
Words and Bloody Knuckles" types who cried about the aforementioned
beating incident (and they must have been the MAJORITY of the fest's
attendees). Quality of music was quite substandard for such a small
and heavily organized event. In general, the feel was quite
scensterish/non-musical/etc. in any sense, especially (or now, perhaps
appropriately) for something purporting to be a "black metal
festival." The show was run quite professionally, which was a pleasant
change, and although some hearts seemed in the right places (namely,
those of the Unrestrained! editors who did the organization), the
general concept was sorely misguided. I have no doubt this festival
will continue, but it will never become more than the small-time
Toronto/Ontario scene-wank that I should have seen it for from the
beginning. No regrets, but no plans for return either. 

[ Editorial ]

Ideology

No single topic provokes more squalling and shrieking than the idea
that art means something, especially if that something is
controversial. Sure, every schoolchild is familiar with the "message"
of various mainstream movies, songs and books, but these messages are
homilies worthy of Hallmark cards, such as "everyone is equal" or
"don't be mean to other people" or "only true love can solve your
worries." Calling those "messages" is appropriate - they're like brief
telegrams from society and industry to you, telling you to keep
thinking about irrelevant and absolute topics while the world goes by.
Most people recognize this isn't art as much as analgesic
entertainment.

However, many will admit that art can have further significance. There
is some reason why people find "The Old Man and the Sea" to be
evocative, or Shakespeare's plays pleasing to both the crowd and lone
intellectuals. Something is being communicated, but "message" -
implying a short saying upon which everyone in the audience can agree
- is perhaps too limiting. This week's column takes a look at possible
sources of "message" in art, including ideology, with a focus on the
neoclassical popular music of the last quarter century.

What is Art?

That which we know as art is difficult because art does not describe a
single medium, or process, but a process in almost every medium
possible. When we say something is art, we mean more accurately that
it is the product of something done artistically; this applies to
traditional visual art as well as music and more controversial things,
such as performance/installation art and what some call "political
art," or the Wagnerian display of power and drama familiar to all WWII
scholars. In other words, art straddles the line between the aesthetic
arrangement of real-world factors and the abstract meaning this
communicates. While some argue that art is the end product, and others
argue that it is the process of creating that end product, those of us
with some cynicism in us would say that art is the process of
communication between artist and recipient through an aesthetic
medium.

Consider "Hamlet," the Mona Lisa, and Beethoven's Fifth: each remains
significant to successive generations of humans because it tells some
kind of story, and in that story, there is some wisdom of life
revealed. Beethoven's piece resembles a storm of consciousness, Hamlet
calls to mind the adolescent conflict between ideal and real, and the
Mona Lisa is almost like a gigantic visual pun on the nature of sight
and interpretation themselves. These works of art each communicate
something which has made them last the years; it isn't the pure
aesthetics of what they do, or the pure "message," but a combination
of the two.

What is Ideology?

One helpful definition is "a systematic body of concepts especially
about human life or culture" but when we apply that statement in
context, it translates to meaning any system of belief regarding human
life. Ideology thus is absurdly broad as a category, but this is
helpful as it allows us to compare vastly divergent views and reveal
their commonality in application. One type of ideology might be
extreme environmentalism, in which all ; another might be extreme
stonerism,or the ideology that by sitting on the couch and being
stoned one does not have to further worry about ideology.

After the rise of political correctness on American college campuses,
it became accepted that any of one's life decisions could be
politicized. If you choose to live in the suburbs, you're denying the
plight of inner city youth; if you drive an SUV, you're choosing to
pollute the world more than is necessary. A better way to state this
might be that every decision we make carries our stamp on it, much as
every time we touch an object or person we brush off skin cells, hair
and dander containing our DNA, every time we make a choice it bears
the stamp of our values. To keep the definition game going, it's fair
to say here that "values" are the preferences in life dictated by
ideology.

Traditionalists prefer family to cosmpolitan entertainment;
republicans value business more than compassion; hippies think it's
more important to be happy as an individual than to try to have a
place in mainstream society. These are values borne of the ideologies
each respective group has in mind. They pervade every aspect of life
because values are how we orient ourselves toward decision-making.
This is why the most intense battles for the future rage among
intellectuals over the values society in their view should have;
others simply assert their own values, recognizing that most people
are incapable of making values determinations and thus one must lead
by doing.

Does Art Have Ideology?

Questions like this are impossible to answer because their
interpretations are manifold through ambiguity of language. Art has
ideology; every artist with his or her own values carries an ideology
or parts thereof. This is not to say that every individual artist is
"unique," because most of them fall into one of a handful of camps,
with the minor variations that make their views specific to the
individual but do not differentiate those views from the whole. When
you think about it, there are infinite ways to approach any task, but
they can each be readily categorized as one of a handful of basic
approaches.

Ideology in art is a question of leading by doing, in that one
demonstrates one's values in an interpretation of the world, or
worldview, and shows how these values change the world. In literature
and music, art is a process over time from which one moves from a
starting point to an ending point; in visual art of the non-moving
variety, only the ending point is shown, but usually its origins are
revealed as well. Thus art could be described as a before/after
experience; the characters and reader are taken from a starting
assumption to a concluding wisdom, and in that prediction is revealed
the nature of the the artist's worldview. Much as the
non-Judeo-Christian religions demonstrate their beliefs in their
actions, instead of preaching an ideal and then adopting a compromised
vision in reality, by establishing independent threads of activity
which correspond to specific worldviews.

Thus the question, "Does art have ideology?" returns to then one of
the original questions of this article: What is art? If it is, as
argued here, a communication between artist and reader/viewer, then of
course it has ideology: the opinions of the artist contain a worldview
and corresponding values, and these constitute an ideology. Does all
art contain ideology? What if it completely avoids any serious
questions? That in itself is a worldview, and a choice, and thus is
also an ideology, even if only the ideology of hiding one's head in
the sand.

The Diversity of Art

One of the most interesting aspects of art is genre, or the tendency
of artistic disciplines to fragment into smaller movements with unique
traits and styles to each one. For example, modern art and realistic
art are from the same general discipline, visual art, but have
radically different approaches; the same scene portrayed by one artist
from each genre would be unrecognizable in similarity. Similarly,
reggae and classical are both forms of music, but they have little in
common with techno except the basic language. This arises from the
tendency of artists to use their medium to portray things found in
reality, whether feelings or abstractions; music for relaxing sounds
different than foreboding, nihilistic music. Because art is capable of
portraying a range of feelings, subgenres are formed from the overall
balance of these feelings used as context to the specific music.

Thus it is not only clear that art conveys different values, but also
that genres convey different values. This in turn explains the reason
for genres and the mechanism that allows artists worldwide to come
into similar aesthetic and lyrical concepts: they are tuned to the
same frequency, in a manner of speaking, because they share more than
aesthetic tastes. Or to be more articulate: their choice of aesthetic
tastes is an inverse of the process of art itself, which could be
defined as encoding emotions/perceptions into the form of an aesthetic
medium; thus what the artist does to create aesthetics is decoded by
the fan, who finds the aesthetics resonate with his or her own
feelings and ideas regarding life itself. From an evolutionary
perspective, art is a complicated but enduring method of matching like
perceptions to allow the resulting communities to hash out the details
of their worldviews in parallel to all other people analyzing the
question of worldview.

While this may seem an overly serious interpretation of art, given the
role art has played in changing the minds of many people throughout
history, it is perhaps one aspect of art. Objectors will say, "But to
me it's just a pretty picture, or a toe-tapping song, or a movie
that's funny." This may be true - for them - but it's equally possible
they are simply inarticulate about that with which they identify. Like
Shakespeare's plays, art is both for the crowd and the intellectuals,
but only the latter will attempt to explain to themselves and others
what they found in the art. Some genres have worldviews out of touch
with the mainstream, and they therefore form "underground" artistic
movements which are by definition esoteric: "designed for or
understood by the specially initiated alone," according to
Merriam-Webster.

The Evolution of an Artform

It's impossible to say when metal music began, but the concept was
clearly created with Black Sabbath. While others were getting further
into the cosmopolitan hippie music of the time, the dark and gothic
foreboding of Black Sabbath was a step in the other direction; where
others were submitting and becoming pacifistic, the sound and topical
ethos of Black Sabbath was to embrace the powerful, the morbid, the
threatening and the terrifying. Supernaturality was converted from a
search for a pure state of goodness into an obsession with what might
lie beyond, or within the reach of evil. While other bands focused on
dumbing themselves down for a broader audience and in extolling the
virtue of every human being, Black Sabbath lashed out at some and had
in their music a rarity for rock: focused hatred. While the band
eventually downplayed their fascination with the occult and embraced
Christianity, their early works tackled the paradox of Christianity
and its absolutist attitude toward eternal life.

At that point in history, metal was barely musically defined. We can
grope endlessly for a list of inventors, but the truth seems to be
that metal was not created but grew out of an impulse toward the
darker, more serious and more imperial side of music. The sound of a
power chord is not one in which many different elements exist in
conflict, but one in which a universal harmony is reduced to the
minimum necessary sounds. It is like a simple truth that applies in
many places, a metaphor for the universalist nature of power itself.
Corresponding to this essential idea was the Romanticist streak of
metal. Here's one definition of Romanticism:

"The basic aims of romanticism were various: a return to nature and to
belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as a
supremely individual creator; the development of nationalistic pride;
and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and
intellect. In addition, romanticism was a philosophical revolt against
rationalism. " (http://tinyurl.com/mnkw)

What is significant about this is the nature of Romanticism as a
competing absolute to that of "Rationalism," which was defined in both
the Classical and current eras by a good deal of liberal ideology
inherited from Christianity. Like the Romantics in literature and
music, the fascinations of metal including the ways of the ancients,
death, decaying ruins and the passion of existential awareness in a
time of stolid functionalism. Considering that Romanticism arose after
the industrial revolution had already absorbed Renaissance dogma, one
could see it as a bridge between ancient ideals and the absolutism
enforced by the dogma of the status quo; like metal, Romanticism was
an ideology in evolution, and one that in part carried the rhetoric of
its oppressors and in part the seed of its own liberation.

From the year 2003, metal's history appears disorganized in its
progression. Through the 1970s it was mostly morbid hedonistic party
rock, capturing the post-Vietnam feelings of failure and betrayal in
the West as well as the hopeless absolute of the Cold War and the
threat of nuclear destruction heightened by the smoldering worldwide
conflict. During the 1980s, metal had a strident voice espousing
mostly liberal traditions, but kept up its intensity in a less-popular
variant which embraced occultism, the ancient, mortality and decay as
subject matter. This group ranged from Sodom to Celtic Frost to
Carcass and espoused many ideals which didn't fit into the comfortable
leftist "political" grindcore/thrash and suburban "sensitive" speed
metal of the day. While many of those bands later embraced the
political polarities that at first did not accept them, during their
most creative periods they transcended the politics of the day for
something more interesting.

Metal kept evolving into the 1990s with death metal coming into full
flower using the ideals mentioned above; far from political, it
espoused an existential ideology through its demonstration of how near
death is at all times and its embrace of the fearful things which
society could not quantify and explain away, from near death
experiences to alien abductions to Gnostic mystical systems. When this
environment in turn began to decay into socially acceptable rhetoric,
the cutting edge of metal moved on to black metal, which instead of
couching its beliefs in discussions of medical terminology, the
process of dying and ways of observing entropy in action, fully leapt
into the Gothic-Romantic mode of viewing the world, eschewing moralism
entirely for a praise of nature and of traditional Romantic ideologies
like individual passion, nationalism (including "racism"), bloodlust
and existential valuation.

Subculture or Label?

Thus far we've established: all things have ideological significance;
all artists have an ideology; all genres carry certain ideological
components; art communicates values based on the ideology of the
artists; fans receive these values, and pass them back into a
community at large; and finally, that metal's values, despite changing
somewhat over the years, remain fixed on certain ideals which are part
of the communication of the genre.

Now, how is it relevant to you, the listener? First, there's the
question of whether or not you can accept it. Most of the post-1998
fans of black metal at least are offended by its original ideals, and
therefore have done their best to push aside the founders of the genre
in favor of recent bands that more resemble soundalike hardcore acts
than they do black metal. For a genre that originally increased the
complexity of metal in both song structure and treatment of melody, it
has been a long fall to the three-chord aggressive bashing with
howling vocals that is now called black metal. To call it utter
stagnation is only part of the equation, as those who have been around
recognize that hardcore punk music, thrash, speed metal and death
metal all degenerated into roughly the same thing, dressed up each
time to resemble the genres in vogue at the time but having as its
musical content an identical formula in each case.

If you can accept these ideologies and realize that these motivated
the continuing evolution of metal that produced black metal, it is
then time to face the ugly truth of the "underground": it isn't one.
People who have experienced artistic undergrounds realize that for
something to be underground, it must not try to sell itself, but must
quietly set forth its viewpoint with a "come what may" attitude. This
isn't to say that underground artists try to avoid publicity, or
refuse payment for their works, but it is saying that they don't whore
themselves out and allow marketing to influence their art. Metal is
right now at a time where most of its art is hidden behind ways of
essentially indistinguishable bands. There is a difference between a
movement and a label; a movement separates itself from the dominant
paradigm around it and fashions its own method, ideologies and
techniques; a label is what describes art of essentially the same form
as everything else in its medium, except that it is dressed up to
resemble something else.

For example, Dimmu Borgir was black metal, but after "Stormblast"
something changed; the band's music shifted from being black metal to
being heavy metal dressed up as black metal. Similarly, Cradle of
Filth has more in common with the short rock-harmony songs of heavy
metal than it does with the longer melodies developed in classical
style that black metal favors. The American band Summon at first
claimed to be black metal, but once people noticed that under the
shrieking vocals it was more like a faster Motorhead clone than a
black metal band, the band backed down on that position. Labels do not
do what a genre can do: concentrate like-minded thinkers. Instead,
labels convince people that they are being "different" based on
surface changes in the music that they are accustomed to hearing, and
this inculcates in them a greater subservience. Because what they hear
is fundamentally no different than what they normally hear, and yet
they are told it is "different," they become convinced that surface
changes are all that is available to them, and that everything
underneath is fundamentally the same. The insolent, bitter and
futility-embracing attitude of most of these people can be traced to
this feeling that novelty is all that remains, and that any real
variation does not exist in their lives.

Conclusion

This article has shown how metal music, like all art, carries its own
ideology specific to genre. We have also seen how black metal has a
specific ideological outlook, and how this outlook reflects in the
music and further, how the degradation of this outlook has brought
about conformity within the genre as well as conformity to external
norms as the music is slowly assimilated by the larger rock/punk/heavy
metal establishment around it, making it easier to market and more
likely to go down in history as a "label" and not a "genre." In this,
it addresses the concerns of many recent fans who object that black
metal has no ideology in common with all members, or that ideological
action is useless and it's better just to buy black metal albums on
eBay. The future they are selecting is shown, so now it is time to
consider the option of accepting that music - like all other forms of
art - has an ideological basis, and instead of choosing the
lapsed-in-direction ideology of stonerism, we who wish to have black
metal or any form of metal endure should select to continue the
evolution of metal as music and ideology.

[ Coda ]

Before mainstream culture met the Internet, the founders of this ezine
were distributing information through the networks of the day under
the principle that there should be a goal to society other than the
accrual of individual wealth and social status. Life is too important
to leave in the hands of directionless motivations, so arterrorists
impose direction however chaotic upon the herd with reminders of the
presence of both life and death in every moment of our lives in
uncountable ways. Onto some of our backs fell the responsibility to
resurrect modern music from cosmopolitan servitude to triviality, and
it is a burden we happily bear.

-~-

Editor: ChildhoodCancer
Contributors: kontinual, Onde Aander, Jeremiad, S.R. Prozak
Spiritual Guidance: Theodore Kaczynski

-~-

To contact Heidenlarm zine or the
Dark Legions Archive:

A.N.U.S.
PO Box 1004
Alief, TX 77411-1004

prozak@anus.com
www.anus.com/metal

-~-

About Us

Heidenlarm is an e-zine because:

-  No wasted paper.
-  No landfill.
-  No advertising.
-  No morality of ownership.
-  No image.

Our worldview is composed of:

-  Neoclassical music.
-  Naturalism.
-  Cosmic idealism.
-  Existential Romanticism.
-  Nationalism.

For more information, visit our web site at:
http://www.anus.com/metal/zine/

(c) 2003 Heidenlarm Ezine/mock Him productions