Maurice de Jong‘s latest project MASSA/GRAF has me thinking about Lon Chaney, “The Man of a Thousand Faces”. Widely regarded as one of American cinema’s most versatile and powerful actors, Chaney was (as portrayed here) “renowned for his characterizations of tortured, often grotesque and afflicted, characters and for his groundbreaking artistry with makeup”.
De Jong doesn’t have Chaney‘s fame, but he has been a person of prolific musical guises, more than 40 of them according to Metal-Archives, perhaps best known for Gnaw Their Tongues and Cloak of Altering. And many of those guises, like Chaney‘s most famous ones in London After Midnight, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, have been dark, disturbing, even horrifying.
The article linked above includes something the great Ray Bradbury wrote about Chaney:
“He was someone who acted out our psyches. He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them on-screen. The history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that’s grotesque, that the world will turn away from.”
That too resonates when listening to some of De Jong‘s musical manifestations. (Put aside the fact that all but one of Chaney‘s films were silent movies and that De Jong is a sonic artist.)
What guise has De Jong assumed in MASSA/GRAF and the project’s debut album The/Deholyfied?
Some initial clues can be found in the project’s name and the album’s inspiration. MASSA/GRAF is Dutch for “mass grave”, and the music “delves into the atrocities of war and a longing for the end of mankind”. To achieve those ambitions, MASSA/GRAF draws from poisoned wellsprings of industrial black metal, creating the kind of sounds likely to appeal to fans of Mysticum, Thorns, late-’90s Dødheimsgard, and early-2000s Aborym.
More tangible clues are provided in the song from The/Deholyfied that we’re presenting today. Its name is “Global/Genocide“, though at times you might think, given the music’s apocalyptic intensity, that “Galactic/Genocide” would have been a more fitting title.
In its own various guises industrial music is known for its throbbing beats, and this new song has those, a mix of high-speed hammering and more methodical pounding, interspersed with bursts of percussive automatic weaponry firing with precision fury.
But what goes on around the beats is an experience in violent insanity, a frenzied and freakish blur of sizzling and swarming riffage that rises and falls like boiling tides of radiation, decimating at their crests and dismal in their troughs, pierced by De Jong‘s maniacal screeches and screams.
Searing ethereal synths also slowly cascade across the top of the song’s upper reaches, wailing in agony and despair, as if aghast at the convulsions of nuclear destruction devouring the landscapes below. At the end, scratchy electronic pulsations occur, like some kind of device is still making transmissions though no one is left to hear them.
And so, the song proves to be horrific and haunting, primitive and pernicious, but also twisted in its experimentalism and thus even more viscerally unsettling. To the question, Is anything worth saving?, it seems to answer NO.
We’ll also include a stream of another previously released song from the album, this one named “Sarin/Dreams“. This one is driven by more rocking grooves but is armored in a carapace of dread. Here, the rising and falling sonic waves are a channel of degradation and pain.
When the rampant hammering begins in earnest, the music soars in greater agony and begins to writhe as if the fencing of sanity has broken apart. De Jong also fires up the industrial jackhammers and blends them with a kind of horrid growling chant, breaking up those sky-high waves of pain, and he again brings in stratospheric synths — screaming in hopelessness.
If anything, this song is even more apocalyptic than the one we’ve just premiered.
The/Deholyfied will be released by Chaos Records on November 6th (if the world survives that long) in a jewel-case CD edition with a 4-panel insert, limited to 300 copies worldwide. It will also be released as a digital download. Pre-orders are available now.
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.chaos-records.com/product/massa-graf-the-deholyfied-cd/
https://chaos-records.bandcamp.com/album/the-deholyfied
DE JONG WORKS:
https://www.facebook.com/GnawTheirTonguesOfficial/