Metal Jew

Article on Orphaned Land for The Forward

The new Orphaned Land album is now out. I have an article on the band, featuring an interview with singer Kobi Farhi at The Forward. As I say, the new album's progressive metal stylings are sometimes convoluted, but it's always an exhilirating and passionate journey - and the fusion of middle eastern music and metal is always complusively interesting. The promo photos are something else:

Review of The Spiritual Significance of Music

It's safe to say that The Spiritual Significance of Music is an unusual project. New Zealander Justin St Vincent has taken upon himself to solicit statements and interviews from hundreds of writers, musicians and religious leaders. He asks them all the same question: 'What do you believe is the spiritual significance of music'. The answers have been compiled online in a number of free editions and my own response is here. Now he has compiled a hard copy featuring a selection of the interviews which can be ordered here.

What makes the hard copy interesting is the diversity of the respondents. Many of them are metal musicians, including members of Enslaved, Naplam Death, Dragonforce and others. There are also Christian musicians and preachers, New Age artists and writers. It's a very strange mix but there lies the curiosity of the volume - it's fun to compare how self-proclaimed Satanists, funamentalist Christians and New Age  flakes see the spirituality of music. That's also the main problem with the book: most of those interviewed share a similar lack of imagination and an inability to articulate what they believe. It's quite clear that some of them have never really thought about the question before and have little of note to say. It's safe to say that the thoughts of metal veteran Paul Speckman (of Master) on the subject could have safely remain unrecorded. But even many of those who deal with the spiritual on a daily basis aren't that much better, rarely rising above the conventional hippyish wisdom that music is in some way spiritual. In fact, it's often the hardcore Christians (such as Mortification's Steve Rowe) who are the clearest and least flaky on the subject.

None of this is neccessarily a criticism of the volume though: I see the book as a fascinating case study of the impoverishment of both musical and spiritual vocabulary. Music is hard to deal with, hard to talk about without resorting to cliches. The same is true to spirituality which, when uncoupled from religious practice, tends to be so nebulous as to resists incisive talk. Put music and spirituality together and all too often you have a recipe for verbiage.  You can see the respondents in the volume struggling to find a vocabulary to talk about the ineffable.

So cudos to Justin St Vincent for attempting this project. If the spirtual and the musical are to attract clearer and more penetrating thinking, these inducements to talk are needed. For now though, I'll still be turning to the experts to aid my thinking on music and spirituality: critics, academics and intellectuals are still ahead of the pack...

The Big Shiny Prison by Ryan Bartek - free pdf book

Ryan Bartek forwarded to me a copy of his free pdf download book A Big Shiny Prison. It's well worth a read and cudos to Ryan for being brave enough to go down the free self-publishing route.

Bartek is a seasoned underground journalist and the book details his year long, ultra low budget US road trip, interviewing bands, having strange encounters and musing on America, subcultures and music. It has to be said it's pretty exhausting to read (perhaps more so as I read it on my iPhone screen) and its endless nervous energy can be draining. Still, there are some moments when his observations really hit the bullseye. For instance, towards the start of the book he surveys the various extreme music scenes and this is what he has to say on metalcore/tech metal:

The metalcore and tech crowd come from a bridging of newer styles towards the end of the 90’s. Metalcore is basically hardcore with a diverse spectrum of influences thrown in (thrash, death,and prog). All-out tech metal (or “math metal”) is the sound-freak, we-practice-eight-days-aweek, “so complicated your head explodes” style.

It’s newer, and thus hated by the “you’re a poseur” death, black, and thrash-heads. But
any musician -- be it a blues artist to a symphony conductor – appreciates the jaw-dropping complexity of the often jazz-based fusion rhythms. Tech is the most disciplined metal outside of death, and is truly a 21st, post-modern variation of it. Tech metal is traced back to early Dillinger Escape Plan, with newer bands like Between The Buried And Me & THE END upping it to the next level. The “Repulsion of Tech Metal,” consequently, is a generally unknown Seattle band named SWARMING HORDES who in 1995 released the first album of its proto-genre…

Since metalcore and tech have become mainstream with bands like Unearth, All That
Remains, and Job For A Cowboy, there is a huge influx of hipster metallers that wear tight pants and have girlie emo haircuts, lots of streaks -- this weird offspring of the YouTube generation the old guard don’t really understand but pretend to…

They’ve infiltrated to the point where all the old metalcore bands (all of whom maintained the DIY of punk) are abandoning their old styles. Having a sea of clone bands before them, this vastly confusing apparatus, it changes things…

It’s kind of a mess right now, honestly, and it seems everyone is jumping ship to play
oldschool thrash, doom, or crazed experimental styles. The trend will die, as they always do, and all the underrated, overlooked bands like The Nain Rouge, Psyopus & Signs of Collapse will go down in history, wholly accepted by the “Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame” & pimped through tourist shops alongside Ozzy toothbrushes and Jimi Hendrix coffee mugs…

Good stuff. You can download the book here.

Metal as religion

Apparently, Saxon vocalist Biff and Metal Hammer are starting a campaign for people to list 'heavy metal' as their religion in the next census. This should be the sort of pank that appeals to me but I have to admit that it leaves me cold. The reason is probably that it is a bit too close to Manowar-style ultra-serious metal-as-sacrament bollocks for my liking. I'd be  happy if everyone put metal down on the census as a prank but I fear that some would do so at least semi-seriously. Why shouldn't metal be a serious religion? Well, the concept of religion makes me squirm - as a Jew I resist the concept as a Christian invention that articifically corralls a whole breadth of activities into a God-shaped box. I love Judaism but I hate the religion term. I love metal and I don't like it being seen as religious, even if not entirely seriously...

Jack Zaientz on the silver age of Jewish music

Jack Zaientz of the excellent Teruah Jewish Music blog did an interesting Ignite talk on what he calls the current 'silver age of Jewish music', which you can view here:

The sound of ice

I love these recordings of the Dispersion of Sound Waves in Ice Sheets

Stupid metal gags what I dun myself

What is a supporter of an Islamic caliphate's favourite black metal band?

Dhimmi Borgir

What was Renaissance Italy's favourite black metal band?

Dimmu Borgia

What is a tree surgeon's favourite death metal band?

Cannibal Copse

Stupid metal gags what I dun myself

What is a supporter of an Islamic caliphate's favourite black metal band?

Dhimmi Borgir

What was Renaissance Italy's favourite black metal band?

Dimmu Borgia

What is a tree surgeon's favourite death metal band?

Cannibal Copse

Thoughts on Hungarian

I was priveliged to have an article of mine translated for a Hungarian journal called Replika in a themed issue called‘Extreme Scenes.’ Music, Genres and Online Communities'.  The title of my article 'Unspectacular Subculture?: Transgression and Mundanity in the Global Extreme Metal Scene' (which first appeared in a collection I co-edited called 'After Subculture')  was translated as: 'Nem látványos szubkultúra? Határátlépés és hétköznapiság a globális extrém metal színtéren'. Here's the first paragraph:

A szubkultúrakutatás CCCS-féle modellje1 szerint a szubkultúrát „látványossága” defi niálja, ugyanakkor éppen e tulajdonsága okozza a kényszerű vesztét is, hiszen ezáltal folyamatosan ki van téve a médiaipar és az állam kitüntetett fi gyelmének. A CCCS kortárs kritikusai helyesen értelmezték újra a „normális”, „nem látványos” ifj úsági kultúra értékeit, és azt is kimutatták, hogy még maguk a látványos stílus termelői is híján lehetnek a látványos szubkultúra iránti egyértelmű elköteleződésnek. A látványos szubkultúra azonban továbbra is legalább annyira érdekli a kutatókat, mint a médiát és az államot. Bármennyire nem szeretnénk használni a „szubkultúra” szót olyan terek leírására, amelyekben látványos gyakorlatok jönnek létre, és bármennyit is változtak ezek a terek az 1970-es évek óta, a CCCS egy olyan kutatási témát határolt be, amely továbbra is nagy érdeklődést vált ki. Mindezen túl, az elhatárolás ezen gyakorlata azt jelenti, hogy a szubkultúra „kísértete” még akkor is ott marad a látványos ifj úsági kulturális termelésről szóló kutatásokban, ha azok más elemzési keretet és kifejezéseket használnak e terek leírására.

Now I'm fully aware of the dangers of exoticism, but even so isn't there something fabulously evil-looking about this paragraph? I love languages where the rules of pronounciation are so foreign to me that even written in roman letters they appear utterly alien (Gaelic is another example). I have no idea at all how to pronounce these words and it's only my knowing what the article is about that gives me a clue as to the meaning of some of them ('szubkultúrakutatás' is presumably 'subcultural'). There's a real frisson to being distanced from ones own words in this way and I feel priveliged to have been chosen for translation. 

I have always had a soft spot for Hungarian. The sound of the language and the way it reads feel totally unique and it has nothing in common with its neighbours. It has a very distant relationship to Finnish and various Siberian languages but it is effectively a language apart. Hungarian's mystery, is redolent of a Magyar heritage of horsemen and nobility that cannot help but evoke powerful (if cliched) images. It's all terribly metal and this was brought home again when I witnessed the thrilling performance of Attilla Csihar at the recent Sunn0))) gig in London. His impossibly deep voice, used as a source of sub-bass drones that compete with the guitars of O'Malley and Anderson; his use of strange costumes; his esoteric English and Hungarian lyrics - all these endow him and his music with a wieghty, almost scary charisma. How can a track entitled 'Big Church [Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért]'  (off 'Monoliths and Dimensions') fail to thrill?

If I have any Hungarian readers they may feel patronised by this post. In my defence though, I'd point out how incredibly bland it can be speaking English. It's a language I love but it's also the world's Esperanto and it has no sense of esoteric power. I do speak Hebrew though and it's letters and sounds do seem to have an aura that I find in Hungarian and other languages. Sometimes though, it is thrilling to gaze at the words of an unfamiliar foreign language.