(As the title of this post signifies, our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri shares some thoughts about new music by kokeshi, Mesarthim, Imperial Triumphant, and Lycopolis, but in this month of beginnings and transitions he also shares a great many other abundantly-linked thoughts before getting there, many of them concerning “theft and intertextuality within music.”)
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” – ultimate guitar user quote… originally by H.P. Lovecraft
It was 210 days left in my 40th year when I started writing this. One of my exes recently said the reason I’ll remain single for life is because I refuse to grow up, probably also why my articles read like they were written by a teenager on crack. 210 is a Harshad number. Harshad originates from the Sanskrit harṣa (joy) + da (give), meaning joy-giver. I for one rejoice in the bliss of discovering new music gushing in from my headphones.
2024 was the year of the dragon, a word which finds its origin in the Greek drakōn or ‘serpent’. 2025 will be the year of the snake, from 蛇 or Shé in traditional Chinese, or Hebi in Japanese Kanji which refers to “the winding thing.” This bodes well for what is to come for the dragon sharing so much of its hoard with us in music. And their etymologies being so linked one could only imagine 2025 to be as prodigious in output.
Image by VH
If you follow the best avant-garde, dissonant, experimental and progressive pages on metastatic media, and value each list according to a racing point system that mixes the World Rally Championship with the International Federation of Motorcycles’ systems, then the releases considered the best of the year of the dragon might not be that surprising after adding up the numbers.
In order to shed light on the ridiculousness of a rating system for something as abstract as art, Ulcerate, Oranssi Pazuzu, Pyrrhon and Blood Incantation took the top four positions in descending order. Feed their first letters into a primitive Latin transcriber for the first word to pop up and you get Uberrime obarmare pabulary baburrus: To feed very abundantly on the barbarian fodder.
You might have read elsewhere that 2025 is a perfect square year. 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣ = 45². It is also represented by the square of the sum of all the digits of the decimal numbering system.
(0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)² = 2025.
It too represents the sum of the cubes of all the digits of the decimal numbering system.
(0³ + 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³) = 2025.
The last “perfect square year” occurred in 1936 and after 2025 it will only recur again in 2116.
If you’re wondering whether I put the rally reference in for nothing, and you like racing, then this new drifting video by RedBull that dropped a few days ago might seem clumsy at first, but the reference hidden in the end is absolute gold; and to bring it back to metal, of course there is a camp and hilarious metal cover of a song from the original OST of Initial D made in 2024 by LittleVMills. And to further caress the millennial gamer’s nostalgia, most people would not have known that a Snoop Dogg and The Doors mashup would have worked, but Need For Speed Underground 2’s OST in 2004 could have been some people’s first interaction with “Riders on the Storm.”
Nothing about the tracks that follow can be deemed to be square in shape, execution, or description. In fact, the whole article is an attempt to be a discussion on theft and intertextuality within music. I go down musical wormholes to appease my self-prescribed apophenic addiction. It can be easy to mistake straight-up homage for something more sinister. But sometimes there are simply allusions. Now that I’ve already surpassed my 16.666% limit on clean music to add to NCS articles, allow me to flagrantly befoul you with more musical references than you’ll need for the rest of this historic month of beginnings and transitions.
They say the less you know the better, but sometimes you just need to let it happen, but the less I let it happen, the better I know, or the time the whole internet claimed they were Ryan Gosling.
There are Mandela effects as I have mentioned elsewhere, and then there’s “Rachel’s song” from the original Blade Runner soundtrack that didn’t actually feature in the film itself. 2024 started for some by going into literal sonic translations of skrying with Mirar rejuvenating the ‘thall’ meme (something I was ignorant of until Islander informed me about it, his article from back in 2011 on the subject is a really fun read) not just in the first week but on the first day of the year. To start off the year by crowning (couronne) it in a meme is quite a statement. As is using cover art by Peter Paul Rubens titled “The Fall of The Damned” from approximately 1620 CE. “Music journalism should contain music goddammit,” so check out the subversively overt megalithic perception-augmenting and convention-shaking industrialized new album by Mirar right here (more words should be spilled about it, but it will have to wait):
There is nothing like memetic overload, so I’m sure many don’t need reminding of the meme of when the original djentlemen in Meshuggah sang about Nothing and everyone and their mom heard Jens Kidman enunciating “I like juice!” instead of “Our light-induced!”
If, like me, you have spent way too much time diverting from a good day by trying to find connections or reasons for false memories like people misremembering the opening chorus/hook line of “Gangster’s Paradise,” then it would be good comic relief to revisit the global treasure that is Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the internet.” Or you could elect to not, and keep going down that scrolling hell until you get to the entire history of the world in under 20 minutes.
If you’d like to opt out of a trip down calque-lane, then you can skip straight to the music, though there’s a lot of music hiding in plain sight in the buildup.
The theme of this article is slapped on so thick you’re probably by now thinking that if there isn’t a good pay-off you’ll email our fearless leader himself and commission the nearest North Korean assassin to just shut me the hell up (I refuse to apologize for abusing this meme). There are ways to divulge others of their sonic possessions, and there are levels of alluding that sometimes transgress the fine line separating theft from quotation. One form that exists is that of parody, and I mean for a band that had almost zero reviews for their Breaking Bad themed project, you have to give it to them for being committed and going full retardataire (latecomer) by doing a parody of the original prankster Weird Al Yankovic’s Gump. Apt for most of the world not currently residing under a rock collectively sighing each time this caricature spews more diabolical inanities with far-reaching collateral and more success than their record of bankruptcy.
The last time you thought you heard about some bitter-sweet symphony lamenting the ills of allusion this is not. Other forms of homage are through translation. Sometimes there are covers hidden in movies of old, that are so true to the original but in a different language, and here is The Cranberries’ “Dreams” by Faye Wong from the Chungking Express OST, a movie she also starred in. When you look hard enough you can find calque’s, other allusions, pastiche, tributes and even intertextuality. There are an infinite number of chord progressions but we still go for the same ones we deem that work, but you don’t have to sift through the most recognizable song from each year in the past century if you’re more inclined to other forms of acknowledgement that come in the shape of throwbacks.
There are sonic ideations in elegant retrogression, then there’s fearless retroaction, the pure unadulterated atavism of VHOL, and then there’s Heilung reconstructing archaeologically defunct languages that Islander wrote about here; and one step further would be experiencing people from cultures altogether removed from the decadent spheres of influence deconstructing Heilung. Further reading on the subject adjacent to cover songs can be found in this mother of all videos, but gearing closer towards where we’re going to end up is the basics of metal from classical.
Plagiarism is the one form of mockery (the root of ‘allude’) that is certainly the one word people are the most wary of swishing around without any proof. Well, songs having the same melody have a long history. Igor Stravinsky infamously thought out loud that Vivaldi’s violin pieces all sounded the same.
In the words of the selfsame and inimitable Igor Stravinsky: “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” He also once said that “Vivaldi did not write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.” I laughed when I read that for the first time because in my mind Vivaldi is still responsible for one of the catchiest riffs ever written this side of THAT fucking “The Czar” riff, the peculiarities and extravagancies of Rebel Wizard (Bob, if somehow you’re actually reading this, we love you and can’t wait for new material.), the sonic meth of the Funeral Candies, and of course Sibelius’ intermezzo to the Karelia suite (elitist classical afficionados would scoff at that just like elitist metal gatekeepers would scoff at numetal, BTBAM’s Colors II or the revelation of Kvelertak, and come to think of it, I didn’t label music back when I was 11 and my brother first introduced me to Ride the Lightning. I had Metallica on one side of a cassette and Bump 2000, an electronic music compilation of the time, on the other. The cd’s I got stuck on in my parents’ collection were mostly Boney M and Dire Straits, as well as one classical compilation that very much informed everything I would listen to later on). I’m supposedly quite the surface dweller when it comes to classical, and so, outside of thinking that Holst is the most referenced composer in metal, protometal, and beyond for their “Mars, The Bringer of War” from The Planets; it’s wishful thinking to muse that Morbus Chron’s opus Sweven opened with a lullaby referencing Stravinsky’s “Berceuse” even if sped up to double time.
“Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.” – Igor Stravinsky
Handel (born Häendel, later assuming the English form) was an interesting cat. His native tongue was German, though he left Germany at the age of 27 and became a naturalized British subject in 1727. His most well-known melody is apparently “Lascia ch’io pianga” from his opera Rinaldo; he somehow contributed the most to Italian opera and English oratoria, and he was potentially killed by the chevalier – read quack/fraud/charlatan – John Taylor, who was (according to this really informative video) “an eye surgeon in the same way that gEoRge saNtOs was a politician” (or Kenneth Evil incarnate Dopeland a healer, for that matter). That medical hack used laxatives and pigeon blood to blind poor Handel, who died a year later. Johann Sebastian Bach who once walked 280 miles just to hear Dieterich Buxtehude play was killed by the same fraud.
In 1722 Handel was accused rather publicly by Johann Mattheson of lifting melodies, and scholars on the topic euphemized this as “heavily borrowing” from numerous sources. Aforementioned contemporary challenged him to an opera-house duel in which the latter was nearly slain, if it wasn’t for the apocryphal detail of his button getting in the way of Mattheson’s rapier. Other instances that were seen as contrary to- and transcending contrafacts merely referencing prior works were those of Mozart whose Symphony No. 37 in G major was lifted nearly wholesale from Haydn’s Symphony No 25 in the same key as well as the same year of 1783.
Fast-forwarding to the 20th century and there’s the blatant theft of a Chuck Berry song by the Beach Boys, then there’s the Taurus of all songs that Spirit eventually took the stairs to, and apparently Cobain felt bad about a song about unmasking oneself that was indistinguishable from a Killing Joke song.
strategically placed meme as pitstop for the ever-gushing logorrhea as reference to the time I trolled my housemates because of rotten and moldy as fuck food left in the kitchen. Took pics, gimped, collaged, printed on canvas and hung in the kitchen.rofl
One of the most repeated melodies known to mankind however is that of “That’s when your heartaches begin” written by Fred Fisher, William Raskin and Billy Hill. It’s gonna start getting weird if it hasn’t been strange already. Fisher was German too, born Albert Breitenbach, a German-American songwriter and Tin Pan Alley music publisher. The Ink Spots recorded it in 1941 and that’s when it first rose to popularity. Written in 1937, missing the absolute square year referenced earlier by one year, that accolade fell to “Your feet’s too big,” another ditty co-written by Fisher. It seems like whatever Fisher was involved in had some Midas qualities, seeing as it was recorded by a lot of people and made it into the sitcom of Harry and the Hendersons’ theme song as well as making a modern appearance by Mos Def for Be Kind Rewind.
Back to the heartaches, and a note on how far-reaching the effect of popular music and the makers thereof can be. In 1953, none other than Elvis Presley recorded “That’s when your heartaches begin” as a B-side, and the most popular band of the 20th century by a lightyear, The Beatles, performed it as early as 1959 in the guise of The Quarrymen. In 1963 Jacky Moulière (a place of mussels by the sea) of France recorded a song named “La Romance” and lost a plagiarism suit against another French singer, Cristophe (nee Bevilacqua, “to drink the water”), for their 1965 song “Aline.”
In 1969 The Beatles were busy recording their final album and two of the tracks were informed by what has come before. Having perhaps more sonic resemblances to the releases closer to them in chronology, one must remember that they did perform the original Fisher tune a decade before. The two tracks in question are “You never give me your money” and “Carry that weight”, of which the latter has been sonically calqued honestly at least once by Cowboy Bebop. If you are ignorant about The Beatles, are impoverished when it comes to good writing content on rock and pop, or just want to experience a musical academic’s take on their work, then musicologist Alan W. Pollack’s “Notes on…” series is a must. This guy broke down a shit-ton, if not all of the Beatles’ tracks, musically. It’s all Lekhitic to me, but it’s pretty darned interesting. Here’s an excerpt of him breaking down “You Never Give Me Your Money”:
“”You Never Give Me Your Money” is a lot of song for the money. There is a large amount of musical material per “square unit” here, and furthermore, it’s formally organized in a way that defies easy analysis, being akin to a medley within a medley.
No high-flown aesthetic ruminations this time! Let’s just jump in. The song is built in three different sections which are compatible, but virtually unrelated to each other…The song presents its own alternative notion of repetition in place of a more standard form. Even though none of the sections of this song make a “return” performance once the music has moved on to another section, there are several sections which consist of a short phrase repeated immediately several times. It’s unusual but I believe it works.
Perhaps one can argue that this lack of an internal “reprise” within this song itself is what makes the reprise of section ‘X’ inside of “Carry That Weight” so satsifying (sic).
Sick, add one more and you have a QotSA song, though I doubted Pollack had any more time or words left after spending 12 years on dissecting the bugs’ discography, though he has been working in music commentary and software engineering since.
Enter Albert Hammond with “The air that I breathe” in 1972 and if you know your musical shoplifting then you know where this is going, but if you know me it’s going to get creepily meticulous and wordy. Phil Everly recorded it the next year, but it only got real popular with The Hollies’ version in 1974.
Andy Kaufman kept “That’s when your heartaches begin” alive in 1979 by M.I.B.-bugging the necromanced vocal chords of the king himself into his throat. Wtf, the guy was goood. And the part you knew was coming is none other than Radiohead’s “Creep” from 1992. They got sued. They shared royalties. The Wikipedia article jumps straight to Lana Del Rey’s 2017 single “Get Free,” but there are other … uhm … translations; Маша и Медведи’s “Любочка” from 1998 is definite melodic plagiarism, so is Latin Dreams’ “Vuelve” from 2003 and Los Ronaldos’s 2008 pilfer of “No puedo vivir sin ti” (not to be confused with the actually talented Los Colorados). 7 more years and Mon Lafarte conjured “Tu falta de querer” out of thin air and then in 2016 Teddy Sinclair’s Cruel Youth heisted it masterfully back into the anglosphere with “Mr Watson”. 64 days before baroque alt-pop melan-mour diva Del Rey unshackled the alchemic properties of this virtually auriferous tune, some guy on YouTube dropped the negative harmony track which is infinitely better than a mashup with everyone’s most hated xmas song, yet it’s a great click just for the comments for a concoction that literally caused the pandemic in 2019.
In keeping with neologisms, we were prompted to recall the origins of the jingle as “YNGMYM” was beauti-lariously covered by Tenacious D in 2021. We’re almost there, you’re doing well. 2 September 2024 and a fan-made video of Radiohead’s version of the jig in shoegaze is 9000 views short of 900k sightings of their aesthetically crusty but pleasing tribute, which sparked another fan to make a grotesque splicing of genres merely a day later. At this point the meme has reached levels of absurdity to dull even the most ardent “Creep” glorifier’s spark and yet, the apotheosis of memetic achievement had to be the funny one. It’s all linked motherfucker. Somewhere in the mid-evening hours of Wednesday November 27 2024, Japanese multi-instrumentalist folk artist, Ichiko Aoba, performed this stunning rendition on FLAG RADIO α-STATION FM KYOTO.
Everything is connected, or in the words of Chief Seattle (Sealth): “All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
kokeshi – kurairouka, 20 December 2024 (Japan)
kokeshi is a Japanese horror black-gaze band reminiscent of the nebulous universe of railway sounds interwoven with the ringing of a child playing light percussion on bamboo severed from a place of mountains, and lunging water high up in springs; to power, an object of worship.
kokeshi L-R: Junichi Kanou, Nana Yokota, Adel Hashiura, Kazuma Aoyagi. Image by Mayukh . Banerji
Their name is derived from ‘kokeshi’, which are wooden dolls dating back more than 150 years from the Tohoku region, with 11 main types. The dolls were symbols for bountiful harvests as well as good fortune. In a culture of craftsmanship and appreciation thereof, these dolls were a kind of talisman against the evils of the world, including fire, since a large proportion of the dolls are made from mizuki or water-tree wood and dogwood known for having fire-resistant properties. Though according to the article linked above, kokeshi dolls get cremated at temples in reverence to their spirits for a life in servitude. There are other more sinister and animalistic suggestions for the dolls’ existence, though in this day and age they serve mostly as collector’s items.
Zaō (dentō/traditional) shingata-kokeshi (modern), Tōgatta (dentō)
Sculpted in 2017 by guitarist Adel Hashiura and drummer Kazumo Aoyagi, acquainted since their teenage years through music. According to their bio, the two founders made noise together in the Japanese underground for years before starting kokeshi, and fast-forwarding to 2019 the band was completed by the bass of Junichi Kanou and lyricist/vocalist Nana Yokota. With their ability to craft horror film soundscapes, blackened post-hardcore distortions paired with the enraptured dance between fevered neurotic overdrive and soothing emotive lulls of their frontwoman, their debut was quickly acknowledged in the Japanese underground.
I saw them live late last year at Hanoi’s Blvck Festival and it was an enrapturing experience. Missing most of the bands and barely catching the very crust of Dødssanger’s over-produced new direction of crowd rousing anti-raw black metal (best produced black metal sound I’ve heard in Tonkin to date), I didn’t feel it was right to do a show review. Luckily, these Japanese troubadours just released a new single.
“kurairouka” opens with a voiceover laced in static making way for inevitable pensive tones interplayed with a horror-attuned zither as the tape catches on fire with concrete dust waves booming in the far distance. The single proper opens with imposingly loud doom inflections and choral Ghost in the Shell background choral vox. A confused android in its last gasp attempts to intone before Nana mantically chants a lead into a bloodcurdling scream shorn of all inhibitions, and then a deeper beastly growl with the guitars giving a hypnotic dirge-like feel. A funeral march ensues mixed with something like a lullaby before the song comes to full conflagration into the intensity kokeshi are known for fucking assassinating predeterminations in their live shows.
Image by Mayukh . Banerji
Somebody labeled them as a screamo band and that’s like calling a Mastodon a Rock Hyrax. They’re related but at an imperceptibly mammoth scale. Goddamn this new song hits hooks and pincers aplenty the further you get into it, like a casually prejudiced finger trap gripping tighter the longer you try to rip your headphones off. Layered tastily with effects complementing the rhythms set out to obliterate your preconceptions. The sonic form of strobes in a fairly extended feedback jilt does jolt for a short while before the lullaby is entered again and a cinematic edge is found, with the track shifting once again, this time with cleans, as if there are not one or two, but three or four different vocalists fronting this dynamic-as-fuck band.
If this is anything to go by and serves as the first single off of their new album, then it will be one to look out for. And if you find yourself anywhere near the land of the rising sun, look out for their live gigs, kokeshi steals every fucking show they play. Hanoi was lucky enough to experience them live and it’s the kind of performance that creates a cult of personality. Sending the crowd into a takobozu frenzied stupor for being scalped by the precise angular slicing from these emotionally southern samurai daemons.
Image by Mayukh . Banerji
Ethereal, doll-like, alien, animistic and primal; taking all the frustrations and trauma of human existence and channeling it through raw emotion into their instruments. Take the energy, stagecraft, entrancing aura and presence of the best front-humans and musicians you know and you get kokeshi. Every aspect and every breath Nana and crew gasp is a coup de maître.
Here is a video that captured them live, and you should watch til the end unless you think someone can sing from a ‘Sadako Yamamura’ -catatonic position:
From the land of the rising sun, they are believers in the magic of words for conjuring into creation a future where their sun shines on all, (みんなのこけし, minna no kokeshi- or ‘everybody’s kokeshi’). In a world sans the apocalyptic shadows of lesser judgement, where art is still expressed not in mere superficiality for content, but from the very marrow of the fire against- and awareness of senescence, with grace and atonement to the admitted flaws of a bruised truth in human existence.
“Kurairouka”:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=T7iJNgvFuII&list=OLAK5uy_kJgcBmbzVjVZ9cqCnk2CtEa1xYu79kTRM
kokeshi – 胎海 Official music video from 2023:
I jumped the gun a bit in my penultimate article from last year when I gave a spoiler to the next installment of this essay. There’s good reason to believe that The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land album is heavily based on Hardfloor’s TB Resuscitation (released 4 years earlier). Smack me and call me a female puppy, but you can have a look for yourself right here:
I found the Hardfloor album through this video by another bilingual German detailing some of the fascinating history of the Roland 303 synthesizer. If it is just the one song, it was their biggest hit by a long shot one of their biggest hits, and it’s as hypocritical as the British museum for suing people that stole from their loot to say that it ain’t been lifted.
There have been quite a few videos circulating on the making of certain songs by The Prodigy, and none of them mention Hardfloor as a reference for being sampled the living fuck out of to create some of the more memorable remixes whose title did not age that well.
Advance a quarter century and we get an Australian atmospheric black metal act that has traversed through the darkest hallways (kurairouka) into the cosmos and whose 2022 single didn’t get a lot of press. It got re-released by Avantgarde Music paired with a new single, so I spilled some words on how this prodigious psychopomp wears the inlet to their ethereal fluid on the armholes of their tunic.
Mesarthim – Anthropic bias/Departure, 13 December 2024 (Australia)
The little quirks, skeet-boop-beedled-brrps and soft xylophone of the opening epicness of the atmospherics with a bass line to turn into stardust for is majesty attained. Mesarthim isn’t here to fuck around and takes it beyond just being cosmic black metal or even metal. Even if you knew what this enigma is up to, “Anthropic Bias” could have stopped at the 3- or 4-minute marks and it still would have been one of the best cosmic black metal songs that year. Add in the signature void-hanging vitriol of dimension-flensing fucking oomph and it morphs into the upper echelon of what’s ever been done.
Layers just keep getting added or enhanced as the electronics keeping time and dancing with the percussion of the drums escalates the song towards a climactic confluence akin to a kilanova. Not a fake build, this gem is of valium-requiring atrophic flare, as you don’t want them ventral walls to tear.
At around the 6-minute mark Mesarthim has certainly alchemized new elements out of the aether through sheer force of repetitive excellence. I could have listened to the first half of “Anthropic Bias” for an hour.
The meditative plane of eventually finding the delectable soloing of an anti-rainbow is gorgeously shattered in a resplendently appalling way with a doubling down of techno. Aggression and fury steps it into epic territory again and it is seamless as fuck as only one person with a fuckton of attention to detail and a massive love for music as encompassing as Itkovian’s embrace (more spoilers). And everyone’s favorite delimiter (.), or Gamma Arietis, gives back not just in homage, but in memetic hilarity because I nearly tore my vocal chords scream-laughing when it hit the 11:31 mark.
Another SPOILER ALERT.
Apparently, I never really listened to much Duran Duran, because other people picked up on a distorted sample in there somewhere. This was my response to the announcement of the compilation: “Prodigious release. Haven’t been this excited since The Density Parameter. Cosmic vodũ.” I’m sure 11:31 will give you a fat smile too. Going full voodoo, just for that shortest of instances before scything in again with the swing of abyssal indifference.
“Anthropic Bias”: where the tunes come from, where the homage is paid towards, linked to the cover art too showing what seems like a planet, gashed in black diagonally by space’s immensity with the pastel aurora of a departure into super-astral planes piercing the veil of night.
People like to add in filler atmosphere, ambience, fatty synths, but you can smell the oil a mile away. A good chef keeps their kitchen clean and knows that if they just served a masochistically devilish mix of appetite-destroying ferocity, their audience, their clientele hopefully, would need that palette cleanser afterwards. And it is wondrous.
@cosmicvoidfestival September 2024 Image by: @runkz
“Departure” is the new one. But man, it is just super unfair to have to follow a Chris Cornell at the karaoke bar. How do you top that? Well, you don’t unless you’re into necromancy …fuck that’s a bad joke.
“Departure” is more… spacey, opening with muffled voice-overs of lost cosmonauts that segue us into launch phase.
The sucking sound of rapid and violent absence greets a semi-faux drop and here Mesarthim dial up the in-density, you read that right. I’m still emotionally attached to The Density Parameter for the time that it dropped in my life. I knew about Mesarthim before, but one night a good friend gave me a hit or two of some oregano at a time that I was, to be honest, apathetic to the point of just numbness. Went to bed, opened Bandcamp: saw new Mesarthim, hit play. And motherfucker, when them electronics hit. The biggest smile just hit my face.
That was love. Creation is the truest of love.
The 2nd half enters into that format that you have to realize Mesarthim is not just constructing songs here, he is making full-blown compositions of classical scale and is forced to cut them off at some point and stick a label on them. “Departure” could have been three movements with as many names, even 4. But it is pretty distinctly divided in two. Depart. And Ure. ‘Ure’ means hours in Afrikaans, my once home language. I haven’t had a home since I moved out of my stepdad’s house when I was 18. Mesarthim, cosmic black metal, music: that’s a home. My friends are my home, music is one of them. Hours, because in referencing time just like in “Anthropic Bias” of harkening back, it’s a reminder that our finity, this short little burst of agony, pleasure, strife, wonder, stress and then nothing: we have all the time we need, we have to but notice it.
I mentioned too in the Bedsore review that an observer can change that which is observed by the mere act of observing. Time here observes us, and in elegiac harmonic redress and ‘impress’, and demurred murmurations of contemplation shows us that we could but step outside of this messy, stinky, all-consuming little bubble of ours and touch the stars that are so infinitely far yet right at our grasp.
Another band that released some fabulous singles in the year of the dragon was Imperial Triumphant; the first single – “Eye of Mars” – was covered here by Islander, who called it “a head-spinning sonic cataclysm, though of course with some eccentric accents and hallucinatory diversions along the way toward total ruin.” They released one more a bit later through Century Media Records titled “Hotel Sphinx”. And in keeping with a theme of paying homage to what has come before, Imperial Triumphant harkened even further back.
Imperial Triumphant – Hotel Sphinx, 13 November 2024 (NY, NY, USA)
image by Alex Krauss
Lots of people like to throw out the ‘jazz’- or ‘avant-garde (siiick album) labels to things that are barely experimental. Then there’s bands who could care less about the little boxes you’re trying to fit them into. Then there’s bands with a true jazz spirit. You read about two songs playing at the same time in the Bedsore review; Imperial Triumphant didn’t just play 2 songs at the same time, each member played a different song and then somehow melded them together to fit ever so funny-bone-shatteringly offbeat, so off in such a good fucking way.
And if playing 4 different tracks (they only have 3 members listed now [Zachary Ezrin, Steve Blanco, and Kenny Grohowski], so perhaps Kenny G made a comeback) and taking an album’s worth of the scurf of a peyote-psyched crack of the dreams of a head trauma nightmare in sonic form wasn’t enough, splatter in the mix of the samples that I didn’t even hear on the first play-through; and then have their kids join in in a lullaby over Handel’s “Sarabande”… motherfucker. “Sarabande” was written for the saraband dance in triple meter. If the opening movement didn’t already prick up your ears, then the synth/stylophone pay-off motif will definitely do the job.
The video made by Louis F. Cuffari, Steve Blanco, Neska Beverly and Mabel Lau is more than gratifying on levels of visual and thematic gratification, as well as reserving some tongue-in-cheek humor.
The layers in this peculiar yet provocative pastiche would be like going into the crab nebula as Yog-Sothoth and trying to 3d-map it. If I could read music or play it, then I would probably be astounded as to what the notes are on this. This song alone as a musical- and visual referential meme of the highest order should be studied in universities and deserves an upending Alan W. Pollack-level review. Both songs, and indeed a third even more recent one, are from a new Imperial Triumphant album named Goldstar, headed for release on March 21st.
Not always the best at connecting the dots, this time round I found it apt to link things together at least arbitrarily, and so, this next single is by the mysterious Lycopolis, from the land of the sphinx… duh:
LYCOPOLIS – The Sedgeland, Thinite Confederacy, EPs, 30 August and 6 Dec 2024 (Egypt)
Lycopolis is the eponym of the ancient مدينة ‘madina’ that their native city أسيوط Asyūṭ is located near and is appellative to being the city of wolves. This is fitting for the two most prominent deities exacting tenancy there both being canine in guise, Anubis and Wepwawet (aka Ophois, Apuat).
‘Wepwawet’ Image by Ahmed Sameh (gimped slightly by VH)
It’s good to know what was presaged in ages gone by. ‘Sedgeland’ possibly refers to Sedgebardia papyrus or Cyperus papyrus, an edible and buoyant plant which also served as “the source of papyrus paper, one of the first types of paper ever made.” ‘Papyrus’ is the precursor or etymon for ‘paper’ and the same plant was also called βύβλος (Byblos) or βίβλος (biblos), which English appropriated into words like ‘bibliography’ and ‘bible’; denoting the inner bark or phloem of the papyrus plant.
Wild flowers of Palestine. Papyrus at Lake Merom. (1900) Wikipedia Commons
“The Sedgeland” ensues with distorted alarm-reminiscent ringing tonalities entering a fray that divulges into flesh-flaying fierceness settling into a mid-paced groove with a verse recurrence incrementally exacerbating in magnitude. Lycopolis then ferry in a combo of a one-two haymaking jawbreaker before subjecting your ears to spiritual scaphism (I’ve used that word a lot before but this is the first time it’s actually geographically apt). You might see it coming but it doesn’t prepare you any more for the defenseless apoplectic paroxysm it will subjugate you to beyond question.
“Hor-Aha” bursts forth with a severity in union with its antecedent and apropos to its namesake, one who many consider as the first pharaoh of the black land, Kemet ( ). Uncoiling black waves of bellicose grooves coincide with blazing leads that ascend into sky-tearing calescence and a percussive assault that transcribes the fury of mid-battle slaughter. Nile has given us a lot of Egyptological sonic refrains over the years. Not taking anything away from those titans in the metal-sphere while in the same breath Lycopolis are demonstrating here what we’ve all sometimes scrutinized as a thought; what the dish tastes like in its country of origin? I for one am in equal parts unsurprised yet astonished at the vitality such a ‘reserved’ rendition of a recipe with minimalist ingredients is able to pack so much punch with to relish.
The Sedgeland is a ‘greatest hits’ of Egyptian origins with “Umm El Qa’ab” traversing back even further to the sacred place of broken pots. The vehemence has very little letup. Mixed and mastered to have a lo-fi raw quality across the board, yet here an appeal towards degradation not in overall sound quality but aesthetic appeal to the very grains of sand and dust that culture burgeoned out from. As if the instruments and amps had to travel back in time to project forth what was re-amped from pre-dynastic Egypt more than 6 millennia ago. Nice enough to give musical plebeians an easy backbeat to thump stompers to, it is the most repetitive and superficially least dynamic track on offer, though there are bursts of freneticism and frantic exaltations leading back into blast-beaten superfluity with the searing bark and Apep-ian howls of the vocals nigh inaudible but for one blackboard-scything shriek telekinetically administering a hoarfrosting of the spine. One might not have had to have lived by Ma’at (Truth, Justice, Harmony, Balance, Order, Propriety, and Justice) to enjoy this condensed offering awash in history, but the spirit – however the listener interprets its manifestation – would surely attain some meditative calm on reaching its terminus.
Lycopolis released another EP in August of last year. It’s just as worthy of your time, groove-laden to the point where “Dynasty 00” is the nonpareil in eastern melody you’ve never heard. The first track is infectious enough to make the new outbreak of pneumonia in East Asia pale into pre-critical extinction. Matched and possibly surpassed by “Dynasty 0.” I only started listening to Thinite Confederacy after I already wrote about The Sedgeland. Propitious because you should listen to them in the same order.
I’ve been hiding in Hang Sơn Đoòng (Son Doong Cave) for too long. African metal is more than okay; its vitality is positively pullulating. “Naqada III – (demo)” has acoustic similitude with The Sedgeland and together the two releases would have made a formidable LP if the rehearsal tracks on Thinite Confederacy are taken into account. These two EPs should have been in way more end of year lists. The second “Dynasty” themed track dooms-up the dynamism factor with a “hold my fucking Shedeh, serf, the trve Sedge and Bee is back in ‘dmi’ (بلدة /balda/town).”
Special thanks go to the tremendous work that HEAVY HOPS online radio has been doing for quite some time now in promoting African metal. I wouldn’t have known about this band if it weren’t for them, and that’s just from following them on the aetherwebs.
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Voy en un viaje de tres horas en tren y leer un artículo como éste, plagado de referencias, es un verdadero placer, aún sin ser fan de ninguna de las bandas.
Gran escritura, enhorabuena y gracias por compartir con nosotros