As you might have noticed, I took the month of July off from writing an installment of DE. The reason being is that nothing seemed to crawl its way across my desk that I found inspiring enough to write a column about. Now, don’t get me wrong, I work with a ton of great labels that send me killer releases on a regular basis, just take a look at some of the reviews I’ve written lately for proof. But, I had been wanting to take this column back to its roots, which are obviously in black metal, and quite frankly nothing I’d heard recently in the BM department was really getting me excited enough to stoke the fires of a new installment of Dethroned Emperor.
That is, until I received a package from Transcendental Creations containing Migdal Bavel, the latest release from one-man black metal terrorist De Magia Veterum. The album is a sickening swarm of the most unholy blackened noise you’ve ever heard, like listening to Merzbow jam with Ildjarn and Filosofem-era Varg Vikernes while they get fist-f**ked by Lucifer. Everything on Migdal Bavel is buried under a thick black layer of utterly corrosive distortion. The song structures are pure chaos-theory, careening tremolo-picked melodies degenerate into scathing washes of pure white noise. A drum machine pulsates in the background, attempting to keep time but ultimately only adding to the album’s swirling, destructive dementia. The vocals are a disturbing, drainpipe distorto-howl reminiscent of Xasthur’s Malefic but even more inhuman sounding, if such a thing is possible.
What ultimately makes De Magia Veterum so damned compelling is the constant tug-of-war between order and chaos that takes place throughout the Migdal Bavel’s duration. Just when a song starts to become somewhat coherent in structure, it smashes itself into a million jagged, razor-sharp pieces, unleashing shards of sonic battery before taking on yet another new form. Moments of melody are deliberately ripped to shreds, pissed on and set ablaze as destruction and violence take over the proceedings. Yes, Migdal Bavel is a noisy, brutal album that could probably serve as the soundtrack to the inner-workings of a criminally insane mind. But there is a technicality to the guitar-work, buried under megatons of toxic debris as it may be, that bespeaks of a method to the madness.
It is telling that the sole musician responsible for De Magia Veterum is Mories, the man also responsible for the black/ambient/industrial sickness of Gnaw Their Tongues. But whereas GTT is generally more droning and expansive in its approach, De Magia Veterum is far more frantic and feral, with the only respite coming in the form of a couple brief ambient interludes. Ultimately, the record feels like some sort of bizarre abstraction of the now ubiquitous “one-man black metal band” aesthetic, as if Mories is taking that concept and filtering it through the ethos of experimental noise artists, a style who’s frequent “loner” approach (see: Merzbow, Massona, Emil Beaulieu, Prurient, et al) arguably set the stage for the “isolationist” black metal movement.
Like all truly great records, Migdal Bavel got me thinking about the continuum of extreme music as a whole and the finer points of the connection between experimental noise artists and black metal. This idea originally occurred to me when I went to see Prurient and Wolf Eyes play a gig at my college a few years back. For those not familiar, Prurient is Dominick Fernow, a prolific one-man noise machine who also does time in the black metal band Ash Pool. dressed in black and armed with only 2 microphones, a very large amplifier and a box of god-knows-what, Fernow unleashed some of the most ear-bleeding extremity I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing in a live setting. The fact that Fernow was seen wearing a Burzum t-shirt after the gig pretty much says it all.
Of course, the truth is that bands/artists have been experimenting with combining black metal and ambient/noise/experimental music for quite some time now. For proof, look no further than the Swedish duo Abruptum, who started releasing blackened free-form noise epics of sadomasochism back in the mid-to-late 1990s. Then of course, there’s Burzum’s Filosofem, an album that takes black metal’s hypnotic tendencies and grafts them onto a lo-fi, quasi-industrial framework. Indeed, the black metal scene is nowhere near as insular or narrow-minded as some would have you believe, and the roots of the genre’s cross-pollination with more experimental, abstract forms of music reach back over a decade.
While the concept itself might be nothing new, artists such as De Magia Veterum are twisting it into vile new forms in order to push the boundaries of what constitutes black metal. Although the genre might seem static to the outside observer, those willing to dive headfirst into the mire will find a lot of bizarre music to digest, and if the new 1349 album is anything to go by, even the more mainstream strains of black metal are being infected by this plague of new noise.
http://www.myspace.com/demagiaveterum
http://transcendentalcreations.com
If you’re interested in venturing even further into the nexus where black metal and experimental/noise/ambient music collide in addition to Migdal Bavel, try starting with any or all of the following:
Burzum – Filosfem
Abruptum – Vi Sonus Veris Nigrae Malitaes
Prurient – Pleasure Ground
Lotus Circle – Bottomless Vales and Boundless Floods
The Axis of Perdition – Deleted Scenes from the Transition Hospital
Sunn O))) – La Mort Noir dans Esch/Alzette
Wolf Eyes – Burned Mind
WOLD – Screech Owl
Profanatica – Kembatinan Premaster
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