I was re-watching Herzog's Nosferatu (yes, AGAIN) just the other night, and, once again, I was completely bowled over not just by the dismal/beautiful cinematography and natural wonder of the whole goddamn thing, but by the creepy, hypnotic score contributed by everyone's favorite Teutonic prog-jockeys Popol Vuh. As usual, brief ponderance morphed into lingering obsession, and today, I present you with two more droning Vuh/Herzog collabos, namely 1972's Aguirre, The Wrath of God and 1982's Fitzcarraldo. If you are looking to be utterly bummed/mind-blown by either a movie or a movie soundtrack, I can heartily suggest each of these entries--both films are super crushing in a depressive yet visually stunning way, and the swirling Vuh tapestries which accompany them are their perfect audio marriage. Forget what you know about these two flicks. Forget Klaus Kinski completely losing his shit and driving everyone on set nuts with each successive role. Forget Herzog accidentally killing off, like, half of his crew with each movie he made from 1970-1985. Forget the fucking critical acclaim and forget the jungle diseases and forget that episode of Metalocalypse where they go all "Dethcarraldo" on the Amazonian natives. Just soak in the dark, bummer vibes Popol Vuh is laying down for you on this rainy Tuesday afternoon, and thank sweet, sweet Odin that Hollywood still hasn't started on Aguirre 2: Pizarro's Revenge (starring Tom Hanks!) just yet... Nor Fitzcarraldo, Shot In 3D! Some things are still sacred.
As my esteemed colleague, Judge Shredd, mentioned below, We are in the end times. You only have to look at the economic and environmental situations across the globe, the rampant crime and disease rates, mankind has run its course. Mother Nature isn't too happy anymore and Megaupload is gone. We are facing extinction.
During these bleak times you need bleak music to soundtrack those last few heartbeats and breaths escaping you as the world slows down.
No Visible Scars managed to gain my attention with the 1970's/80's Giallo/Exploitation/Porn inspired artwork and imagery, they're love of the timeless C-90 tape, and the fact quite a few of the digital releases are free. Most Illcon followers should be able to relate to one of those. I decided to give a heads up on a few of the releases worth investigating.
Nasty and ragged, thrashy death metal by guys with nasty names such as Plague Bearer and Sadistik Slayer. I guess the term "war metal" suits this best. I can hear elements of Kreator and Sodom in there alongside some Bestial Warlust black noise and a slew of suitably apocalyptic samples. Awesome cover art included.
This is the one I have been digging the most. Comprising the smooth pipes of that dude from Hour Of 13 with some total NWOBHM riffing crossed with proto-Doom jams. THIS SHIT ROCKS. This was a 3-track promo for the EP of the same name. They don't seem to have much else available but they have connections to a whole host of other bands according to Encyclopedia Metallum.
That cover seem pretty attractive doesn't it? Bit more left field this time. Poison Tongue is Giallo/Exploitation inspired noisescapes. Its not full on harsh noise ( though it gets plenty harsh in places) but more ambient and unsettling due to the schizophrenic changes in volume and pacing. Kind of like those quiet bits in between Goblin freak outs crossed with Beherit's noise tendencies.
There you go gang. They have the usual places online here and here. I'm digging this label a lot recently. You should to.
Metal? Really? You mean to tell me you haven't evolved beyond that childish, chest-pounding foolishness yet? There are vaster, brighter horizons to behold, aural transmissions far deeper and more meaningful. Metal is dead, Orff has murdered it.
Bows will chug, gutteral roars will erupt from battle-weary lungs. The clanging of sabre on iron shield, a challenge issued to God Himself. Thunderous screams as hammer strikes string, fists clenching weapons as Death marches forth on a winter tempest.
Metal? Orff scoffs at the idea.
Wikipedia: "In the mid-1920s Orff began to formulate a concept he called "elementare Musik", or elemental music, which was based on the unity of the arts symbolized by the ancient Greek Muses (who gave music its English name) and involved tone, dance, poetry, image, design, and theatrical gesture. Like many other composers of the time he was influenced by the Russian-French émigré Igor Stravinsky. But while others followed the cool, balanced "neoclassic" works of Stravinsky, it was works like the composer's Les noces (The Wedding), a pounding, quasi-folkloric evocation of prehistoric wedding rites, that appealed to Orff. He also began adapting musical works of earlier eras for contemporary theatrical presentation, including Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo (1607). Orff's German version, Orpheus, was staged in 1925 in Mannheim, Germany, under Orff's direction, using some of the instruments that had been used in the original 1607 performance. The passionately declaimed opera of Monteverdi's era was almost unknown in the 1920s, however, and Orff's production met with reactions ranging from incomprehension to ridicule.
Orff's relationship with German fascism and the Nazi Party has been a matter of considerable debate and analysis. His Carmina Burana was hugely popular in Nazi Germany after its premiere in Frankfurt in 1937. Given Orff's previous lack of commercial success, the monetary factor of Carmina Burana's acclaim was significant to him. But the composition, with its unfamiliar rhythms, was also denounced with racist taunts. He was one of the few German composers under the Nazi regime who responded to the official call to write new incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream after the music of Felix Mendelssohn had been banned – others refused to cooperate in this. Defenders of Orff note that he had already composed music for this play as early as 1917 and 1927, long before this was a favour for the Nazi government.
Orff was a friend of Kurt Huber, one of the founders of the resistance movement Die Weiße Rose (the White Rose), who was condemned to death by the Volksgerichtshof and executed by the Nazis in 1943. Orff by happenstance called at Huber's house on the day after his arrest. Huber's distraught wife begged Orff to use his influence to help her husband, but Orff denied her request. If his friendship with Huber came out, he told her, he would be "ruined". Huber's wife never saw Orff again. Wracked by guilt, Orff would later write a letter to his late friend Huber, imploring him for forgiveness."
Carl Orff: Nazi-sympathizing douchebag asshole? Yes. Genius? Yes. More METAL than Cannibal Corpse fistfucking the mesh-shirted corpse of Dave Vincent? You better fucking believe it, Nancy.
O Fortuna, despite its omnipresence in modern society/pop culture, remains one of the most METAL pieces of music to ever exist before the actual existence of "metal" (see Excalibur), and the larger work from which it is taken, Carmina Burana (more info on the original artifact HERE), is a fist-pumping, overtly Satanic ode to all things violent, epic, and brutal.
Metal? I fart in your general direction.
(Then again, if you must bask in that lowly genre, I suggest you go check out ARCHSPIRE.)
"circle pit"
Get Orff's best-known (and most powerful) work, Carmina Burana, here:
Anybody who's been a party to any sort of music writing at all knows that well-worn descriptors like “unique” and “original” are by and large a fucking joke. Ninety-nine percent of everything that's ever had that title slapped upon it fell so short of deserving the honor that terms like that are cheap, tawdry husks of the higher creative impulses they supposedly describe. This isn't to say that unique forms of creative expression are impossible, but they require a retreat into either the feral or the cerebral that most people are unwilling to attempt (though the nagging optimist in me would suggest that anybody is capable, given the proper motivation). The former has birthed well-loved aesthetic concepts as disparate as grindcore or (the lamentably-titled) outsider art, and it often seems that artists who fly by the seat of their pants in the direction opposite that of convention are often afforded more appreciation than those who take a more studious route. And while the more carefree approach might be more immediately gripping and viscerally satisfying, there is something to be said for those whose intellectual pursuits place their creative output in a league beyond anybody else's.
A prime example of this is Harry Partch. Partch studied composition from a very early age, amassing a substantial body of work for an artist as young as he was. He grew impatient with the limitations of the equal-tempered scale, the basis for the vast majority of Western music, and began to look towards microtonality, a process of dividing the octave scale into smaller components – his most famous take on this being the forty three-note scale (the equal-tempered scale is divided into twelve notes), though he employed a substantial number of variations on this. These ideas were all expounded upon in his 1949 book Genesis Of A Music, a product of twenty-six years of writing, that railed against the numbing conventions that centuries of inculcation in the equal-tempered scales had produced, instead favoring the ratio-based tuning scales of Greek philosophers like Pythagoras.
The problem, however, is that the majority of musical instruments from the Western world were designed for the twelve notes of which its music is most commonly comprised. Partch's necessity then spurred his inventiveness and an arsenal of odd instruments was born, pieces with monikers like the Cloud Chamber Bowl, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl that occasionally drew inspiration from violins, pianos, and marimbas, but often bore no resemblance to anything that had come before. He was, as he humbly put it, “a philosophic music man seduced into carpentry,” the builder of strange creations, as much sculpture as functional musical instrument. The music for which these had been produced was equally staggering, both in the breadth of the influences from which it drew and for just the sheer peculiarity.
Partch pulled from a variety of sources over the course of a life filled with extremes. His lifelong engagement with Pythagorean tuning was possibly the most readily apparent of his sources, but the hobo graffiti that he witnessed riding the rails during the Depression held as much sway over his later work. Prior to his destitution he had consulted with William Butler Yeats regarding an experimental opera treatment of Yeats' translation of Sophocles. His homosexuality, in an era in which it was largely considered aberrant (at best), was occasionally touched upon. The influence of music from Polynesia, India, and Africa occurred decades before the West began to look seriously towards those cultures' music.
What he did with those influences is the notable part, because few are easy to spot. Partch had his precedents, but his take on those elements had no direct predecessor. It's an eerie, sensual music, one that reaches across large swaths of the temporal and the geographical, plucking disparate strains of the arcane and blending them into a seamless whole, a junkyard opera on the edge of perception, a subversion of rarely-considered social fundamentals, a leap forward into a distant past. Disorienting and disarming, it is among the only bodies of work that deserves the tag “unique.”
Nearly two and a half years ago, our old pal Aesop described Dark Quarterer's first album as such: "Really only Italians could pull off something as bizarre and grandiose as the proggy cult doom of Dark Quarterer. The band was formed way back in 1974 by eccentric bassist/vocalist Gianni Nepi, but didn't release their amazing self titled debut album until 1987. And while I wonder what these guys must've sounded like in '74, this album shows them sort of treading the same path of backward-thinking eccentricity as Cirith Ungol and Slough Feg... Truly epic cult metal filtered through the Italian psyche with all the melodrama and pageantry that we've come to expect from the country's metal bands."
Epic indeed, but the hazy ESL present on Dark Quarterer's very own Last.FM page ups the ante even further: "The original group was formed in 1974 in Piombino and was called “Omega erre”. Eight years of playing cover followed with no concerts or performances, but a continuous effort to capture the sounds and colours of the hard and progressive rock of those years...
It was an absolute imperative for the band to reproduce the songs faithfully - they played dozens of covers of Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden, Krokus, Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Gentle Giant, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Van Der Graaf Generator, Deep Purple, Ten Years After, Cream, Manowar, Michael Shenker, Colosseum... Their first composition was too light-weight harmonically and too commercial, boring even on first hearing. Fulberto Serena experimented with classical sonorities (Bach), arpeggios that were also veritable riffs, almost exclusively in the minor aiming to achieve the darkest colour possible...
So it took a lot of instinct but also many corrections and radical changes in order to achieve a final result that could not be improved upon. Only when everyone firmly believed in it was the result considered definitive. The introverted and moody personality of Fulberto contributed to disturbing pieces like the self-titled Dark Quarterer, The Entity, Gates of Hell, in which the protagonist actually wanted to live and die in the name of evil to dethrone Lucifer in the underworld!"
Are we clear on all that? Good. Here's their second album.
This nearly-impossible-to-find score from the nearly-impossible-to-find film comes courtesy of IllCon Alumnus The Thing That Should Not Be, who submitted it in response to my pathetic pleas following our last foray into Tomita Territory. Having now heard this buried gem, I am utterly charmed by Mr. Tomita's seamless blend of sleazy wah-wah, Vegas horns, and nasty 70's funk, blended as it is with his omnipresent, reverbed-out synth--sort of like an absurd mix of Deep Throat, Tron, and Dead-On-A-Toilet Elvis. Fucking sweet.
But here's the rub. Now that I've heard the tunes, I REALLY need to see the movie (pulled from the shelves in 1980), which limited research has found described as such: "The film centers around the family of a scientist, Dr. Nishiyama (Tetsuro Tamba)... concentrating on hallucinogenic international imagery in a manner looking forward to such films as Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka. In the film, scientific advances cause an outbreak of giant slugs, oversized bats, children with genetic mutations enhancing their physical or mental abilities, and bizarre changes in weather, such as snow falling on the pyramids. The film gets bleaker and bleaker, until Dr. Nishiyama hypothesizes a scenario that re-edits the climactic war footage from The Last War, augmenting them with a scene of the surviving humans, looking like sufferers of neurofibromatosis, fighting over who gets to eat a snake." Whoa.
Another outstanding outing from an old-school IC favorite. FUCKING. TOMITA. RULING. SO. HARD. Thanks, Thing.
I'm not exactly sure why today's post reminded me of Brother Seanford's words during Guilty Pleasures Week, but it did, and in case you don't already have those words memorized (you really should), they were posted HERE and went something like this:
"...sometimes we as bloggers are compelled to post things based on a criteria that uses something other than quality as a measuring stick, a criteria which uses rarity and trueness to determine whether or not something is postable. Now im not accusing any particular blogger of posting records they’re not crazy about, I’m simply acknowledging an impulse which I believe exists amongst bloggers, perpetuated by a need for social dominance. Is it possible that posting obscure records has become too competitive? Is it possible that even the true catch themselves posing?"
Excellent observations on the part of our beloved second-in-command indeed, observations that do in fact make me question the motives of most music bloggers, observations that make me myself look inward at my own reasoning and internal impetus. Why do I do what I do? Am I looking for some sort of "social acceptance" by posting "obscure" music that may or may not be deemed "good" by my peers via the internet? Are my reasons for spending time almost every day sharing music with the public at large entirely altruistic, or are my attempts at connecting with people via shared opinions about music some sort of psychological compensation for other inadequacies? I think the answers to these questions boil down to one common denominator, hinted at by Seanford in his earlier quote. The denominator is this: Do I (and other music bloggers) post stuff because it is GOOD or because it is COOL? Let's take a closer look...
- GOOD MUSIC: I guess saying that one posts only "good" music would imply that motivation for sharing comes from some sort of internal barometer of quality, that the blogger in question writes, listens, and works solely out of love for the art form, not from any sort of desire for acceptance or need to be considered "cool" or "fashionable". Sounds which are pleasing to the ear, no matter who makes them or how they are delivered, will be propagated and shared, not through any prism of social judgment or peer approval, but through a sense of benevolence and, to drop an old phrase, sincere BRONESS.
- COOL MUSIC: The idea of posting about "cool" music would seem to indicate that the blogger in question is writing and uploading more out of a sense of inner emptiness and desire for heightened social standing than any real need to share good art. The hipster plague is no stranger to this concept, and while I try not to throw too many stones here in my glass pyramid, I think that many online publications (Pitchfork or Vice perhaps, maybe even certain sites closer to home) tend to hype COOL music rather than GOOD. But I digress.
I think my point is already pretty clear. We here at IllCon love GOOD music, and to prove it, I'm going to post four albums today that absolutely nobody else will like. These are tunes that are indeed close to my heart, that I believe with every fiber of my being resound with talent, integrity, heart, and intelligence. But they are also tunes that will earn myself and Illogical Contraption ZERO fuckin' "cool points" with the In Crowd. YOU won't like this music either, but you know what? I don't care. To me, these four releases are the summation of GOOD MUSIC. That's right: SHELBY COBRAS IS THE ONLY PURE MAN IN THE INDUSTRY.
If you're looking for quality jams, you need look no further than the collected works of Japanese synthesizer maestro Isao Tomita. Sure, I've posted about him in the past (three times, actually), but I've been on a major Tomita bender in the last couple weeks, and felt that it was time to purge a large section of my library. Some people might write Tomita off as some sort of second-tier Japanese Wendy/Walter Carlos clone, but in all honesty, I find Tomita's compositions to be far more creative and listenable than Carlos' (and I do consider myself a big Carlos fan). Dude shreds balls, and the intergalactic/transdimensional/alien aesthetic of his work vibrates in tune with my own inner Icke. He rules.
Anyway, this intro is way too long already. We've still got four albums to get through. Let's do this.
ELECTRIC SAMURAI - SWITCHED-ON ROCK (1972)
Tomita released this collection of tripped-out pop music standards under the moniker "Electric Samurai" way back in '72, between his early years composing themes for film and television and his mid-seventies forays into Moog-ified classical music. The track list here is pretty cheezy (4 Beatles songs, "Jailhouse Rock", and a couple Simon & Garfunkel jams can all be found herein), but Tomita's psychedelic interpretations breathe spastic new life into these tired numbers, and although the album takes a song or two to really get moving, it's fucking unstoppable once it hits stride. The fact that Switched-On Rock appeared a full four years after Walter Carlos' Switched-on Bach does little to further Tomita's case for artistic independence, but this album is nonetheless an excellent cocktail-party soundtrack and/or late-night hash-smoking companion, depending on your intoxicant of choice. Super mellow but pretty freaky too.
Tomita's electronic interpretation of Claude Debussy's Children's Corner "tone paintings" earned him three Grammy nominations (including one for Best Classical Album) in 1975, and, if that weren't enough already, also contained the theme for the PBS series Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer ("Arabesque No. 1").
From Wikipedia: "The use of the term tone paintings here describes the nature of a large portion of Debussy's work, which was concerned with mood and colour, eschewing traditional tonality in favour of constructions such as the full-tonal scale, parallel chords, bitonality, and to a certain extent atonality, in order to achieve a greater degree of musical expression not allowed by strict adherence to a single key. Thus, the term tone painting is quite appropriate, in that Debussy's compositions often experimented with a much broader palette of tones, allowing each to behave similar to a colour within an illustration."
Also endearing to me is Tomita's penchant for listing every single piece of equipment he used during recording in the liner notes of each album, a list that, for Snowflakes, read as such:
- Moog synthesizer
One 914 extended range fixed filter bank Two 904-A voltage-controlled low-pass filters One 904-B voltage-controlled high-pass filter One 904-C filter coupler One 901 Voltage-controlled oscillator Three 901-A oscillator controllers Nine 901-B oscillators Four 911 envelope generators One 911-A dual-trigger delay Five 902 voltage-controlled amplifiers One 912 envelope follower One 984 four-channel mixer One 960 sequential controller Two 961 interfaces One 962 sequential switch Two 950 keyboard controllers One 6401 Bode ring modulator
- Tape recorders
One Ampex MM-1100 16-track One Ampex AG-440 4-track One Sony TC-9040 4-track One Teac A-3340S 4-track One Teac 7030GSL 2-track
- Mixers
Two Sony MX-16 8-channel mixers Two Sony MX-12 6-channel mixers
- Accessories
One AKG BX20E Echo unit One Eventide Clockworks "Instant Phaser" Two Binson Echorec "2" units One Fender "Dimension IV" One Mellotron
This is a relatively short list, compared to his later releases.
Another standout in a seemingly endless stream of classical-via-Moog releases in the mid-70's, Tomita's reworking of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition (released the same year as his excellent Firebird Suite) finds him at the top of his game creatively, melting faces not only with his nimble fingers but also with a constant barrage of special effects, delay, oscillation, and all manner of other assorted electronic tomfoolery. The original Pictures, written in 1874, was a tribute by Mussorgsky to his recently-deceased friend, painter Viktor Hartmann, and is meant as an aural analog to attenting one of Hartmann's art shows. It is by far Mussorgsky's best-known work, being interpreted by many a conductor over the years--none of whom could match Tomita's Technicolor treatment, of course.
Wiki again: "Mussorgsky links the suite's movements in a way that depicts the viewer's own progress through the exhibition. Two "Promenade" movements stand as portals to the suite's main sections. Their regular pace and irregular meter depicts the act of walking. Three untitled interludes present shorter statements of this theme, varying the mood, colour and key in each to suggest reflection on a work just seen or anticipation of a new work glimpsed. Mussorgsky, not generally known for cutting a svelte figure, wrote to Stasov: "My physiognomy can be seen in the interludes." A turn is taken in the work at the "Catacombae" when the "Promenade" theme stops functioning as merely a linking device and becomes, in "Cum mortuis", an integral element of the movement itself. The theme reaches its apotheosis in the suite's finale, The Bogatyr Gates."
Our final Tomita effort today is The Bermuda Triangle, which, unlike the other albums posted here, contains quite a bit of Tomita's own composition. Other sections by Prokofiev and John Williams (you'll know it when you hear it) round this one out, with the whole package being a diverse and wholly sci-fi excursion into creepy, spacey realms of pure fantasy and high weirdness. Bermuda is probably my favorite of the four records presented in this post, not only for the completely top-notch music, but for the track listing as well. Check it out:
1. The Round Space Ship Landing on the Earth While Emitting Silvery Lights (The Arrival of UFO and the Mysterious Electric Waves) 2. Look Out the Bermuda Triangle, Look Out the Bermuda Triangle, Look Out 3. Strong Electromagnetic Waves 4. The World of the Different Dimensions 5. The Giant Pyramid Sitting at the Bottom of the Sea of Bermuda and the Ancient People 6. The Venus Wearing the Space Uniform Shining in Florescent Light Color (The Return of UFO) 7. The Children Playing in Agharta, the Deep Underground Kingdom 8. The Hollow Vessel Called the Earth 9. The Song of Venus 10. The Dawn at Bermuda 11. The Mysterious Electric Waves (Computer Data Signals) 12. The Dazzling Bright Cylindrical Object Which Had Crashed Into Tunguska, Siberia 13. The Harp Being Played by the Ancient People and the Venus and Her Space Children Singing the Song of the Future 14. The Visionary Flight to the 1448 Nebular Group of the Bootes (The Departure of UFO) 15. Now, You Have Been Carried Away from the Earth
That's right, my friends: Hollow Earth Theory, UFO's, the Bermuda Triangle, and an insurmountable wall of swirling Moogs all in one place. Please try to contain your excitement.
PS: If anyone has a link for Tomita's soundtrack to Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradomus, please send it my way. I have, as of yet, been unable to locate it through conventional means....
I asked of our readership just yesterday, in regards to the elusive L'Anticristo soundtrack, product of the brilliant minds of spaghetti Gods Bruno Nicolai (right) and Ennio Morricone (below). BAM! Within an hour, our very own Brother Cory stepped up with a bootleg version from his very own private collection, a rare and creepy masterpiece which I now intend on sharing with all of you lucky fuckers. Cory, you rule. Good lookin' out.
I can't say enough good shit about this soundtrack, but rather than talk your ear off about all the mind-bending minutiae herein, I will highlight just a few details and leave it up to you to fill in the blanks. - This is a definite "bootleg" version, and contains all the pros and cons as such. There's a little bit of hiss and a weirdly scrambled track ("Ippolita's Past Revealed"), but there's also a shitload of Satanic dialogue and ambient noise, which, for me at least, is a major bonus. - HOLY SHIT this fucking thing is an atonal cacophony of caterwauling violins and haunting organ, THIS is what a horror soundtrack should be, FUCK this rules HARD. Morricone should go "Satanic" more often. - Morricone & Nicolai's L'Anticristo puts all those Written In Blood compilations that Seanford has been posting to SHAME (JK Bro, post the last 2 please). - If this soundtrack doesn't give your brain a boner then your brain is mostly likely malfunctioning and you should apply to have it replaced immediately.
I should mention that our female-fronted Manowar cover band (said female being Illogical She-Bro Manslaughter) is playing at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland this Saturday. IC Drumbro Mike J will be sitting in on the skins for this set, so be prepared for complete double-bass annihilation, blastbeats during the chorus of "Carry On", and the stunning spectacle of Cory DiMaio's hulking physique (right). His body is indeed a wonderland.
Few black metal bands are as divisive as Tokyo's native weirdos SIGH. Sure, they're off-kilter as fuck and their albums are mixed all wrong and they're oddly commercial in an unpleasant, Cradle of Filth-y kind of way and they play saxophones and shit, but hey, this is a band that I'm 100% in favor of, always have been and (probably) always will be. I thought 2010's Scenes From Hell was fucking great (strange production be damned), and I can listen to--and enjoy--just about any release from the duration of their 20-year career (besides those Venom covers). Fucking sue me. But I think that when people are busy arguing about whether or not Sigh has "sold out" or the merits of a chick in angel wings prancing around onstage during their performances or whatever, one cold, hard fact often gets glazed over: back in the day, Sigh was comprised of three denim-and-leather clad Bros, who, way way way before any sort of fame or recognition, were still composing some really disturbing and angular music, every bit as fucked up and compelling as their newer stuff, without any sort of interest from their immediate "scene" or "social circle".
Scorn Defeat, despite its many WTF? moments (see the horrendous guitar solo in the middle of "A Victory of Dakini" and/or the six-minute ambient/organ/piano opus "Gundali"), is Sigh's first "real" mission statement, and is a full-length debut album so full of vision, ambition, and weirdness that it's no surprise Euronymous snatched them up and signed them to Deathlike Silence so quickly. I don't know if it's a "corny" move to post Sigh's first record, but I felt compelled to either way. This shit rules, and I still listen to it on the regular. I just wish I could have been running around in the back yard with these dudes back in 1990, fighting with medieval weapons made out of cardboard and duct tape, getting baked on whatever the Japanese version of Mexican brickweed is--just to get that glimpse into their brains, to see what sort of twisted minds it took to create something this strange (and this GOOD) in such isolation and amongst such societal constraint.
The three-song EP that immediately preceded Scorn Defeat. Two of these jams were re-recorded for the full-length in slightly lengthier forms, while the third, "Desolation of My Mind", is an ugly, doomy ode to the screaming anguish of early Abruptum. Bad production and an overall atmosphere of murk and filth. Highly recommended!
Sure have been a lot of posts about "old school death metal" around here in the last week or so, haven't there? And don't you find it kind of weird that music written 20ish years ago can even be considered "old school"? After all, this blog has featured its share of music from the late 60's (thanks Sean) and early 70's (thanks Manslaughter), as well as a healthy portion of classical music (thanks Peter), lots of it dating back a century or so. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, the OLDEST "old school" jams ever featured on IC were part of Peter's post about composer/murderer Carlo Gesualdo back in October. Gesualdo wrote his life's work around the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, just over 400 years back. Epic indeed, but I'm taking it waaayyyy back today. WAYYYYYY BACK.
Allow me to introduce you to Hildegard of Bingen, and also allow me to thank Camellia sinensis for introducing me to Hildegard lo these many years past. To keep things as bland and factual as possible, I will allow Wikipedia to have first say on Hildegard's life:
"Blessed Hildegard of Bingen (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis) (1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Saint Hildegard or Sibyl of the Rhine, was a writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, German Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama. She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and the first surviving morality play, while supervising brilliant miniature Illuminations."
That's right, fuckers. Today I'm taking it back to the TWELFTH CENTURY. ALMOST 850 YEARS AGO. "OLD SCHOOL".
Hildegard tripping balls
From a young age, Hildegard experienced a multitude of "visions", which she came to interpret as communications from the Christian God. Her parents gave her up as a tithe to the local church, and before she was a teenager Hildegard was holed up with an old nun named Jutta. There are no written records of the next two and a half decades of her life. When she came out of her seclusion with Jutta, Hildegard began transcribing her hallucinatory God visions, and became renowned quite quickly for her leadership and talent as a writer and songstress. Although often ill and quarrelling with (mostly male) heads of the church, Hildegard was unanimously elected the magistra of her local Sisterhood, and proceeded to create a vast and inspired body of work in music, literature, and illustration before her death in 1179.
Wikipedia again: "Attention in recent decades to women of the medieval Church has led to a great deal of popular interest in Hildegard, particularly her music. Between 70 and 80 compositions have survived, which is one of the largest repertoires among medieval composers. Hildegard left behind over 100 letters, 72 songs, seventy poems, and 9 books. One of her better known works, Ordo Virtutum ("Play of the Virtues"), is a morality play. It is unsure when some of Hildegard’s compositions were composed, though the Ordo Virtutum is thought to have been composed as early as 1151. The morality play consists of monophonic melodies for the Anima (human soul) and 16 Virtues. There is also one speaking part for the Devil. Scholars assert that the role of the Devil would have been played by Volmar (Hildegard's confessor and scribe), while Hildegard's nuns would have played the parts of Anima and the Virtues."
Check out this 1998 recording of Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum, as interpreted by medieval revivalists SEQUENTIA. This is some haunting, ethereal shit, mostly monophonic but multi-dimensional in its moods and theme. Ordo was the first of Hildegard's two greatest musical works, the second being her Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum (also worth seeking out). If you're into creepy shit like chanting priests and lonely voices ringing out in abandoned cathedrals, this epic album might be just your cup of tea. Weird, ambient jams, great stuff to fall asleep to (and I mean that as a definite compliment) and a creepy backstory to boot!
LOL @ this picture
I was re-watching Herzog's Nosferatu (yes, AGAIN) just the other night, and, once again, I was completely bowled over not just by the dismal/beautiful cinematography and natural wonder of the whole goddamn thing, but by the creepy, hypnotic score contributed by everyone's favorite Teutonic prog-jockeys Popol Vuh. As usual, brief ponderance morphed into lingering obsession, and today, I present you with two more droning Vuh/Herzog collabos, namely 1972's Aguirre, The Wrath of God and 1982's Fitzcarraldo. If you are looking to be utterly bummed/mind-blown by either a movie or a movie soundtrack, I can heartily suggest each of these entries--both films are super crushing in a depressive yet visually stunning way, and the swirling Vuh tapestries which accompany them are their perfect audio marriage.
Download HERE
Download HERE
Also, LOL @ guy playing one ride cymbal
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