Breathing Isn't The Right Word

"Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one's fellow man, or merely say evil of one's neighbor while knitting.  But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman."
                                                                                    The Fall, Albert Camus.

A few small comforts in a hollow world;

The Rebel.

Explication of The Enemies.

Redemption. 

Continuing.....

Escape Velocity

Behind this crowd, however, hides the one true patron.  If you have patience enough to search, maybe you'll catch a glimpse of what you're looking for.  And when you find it, you'll probably be disappointed.  It isn't the devil.  It isn't the State.  It isn't a magical child.  It's the void.
                    - Roberto Bolaño, "An Attempt at an Exhaustive Catalog of Patrons" Between Parentheses.



"UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4."
                     - Transmission from Russian shortwave radio station UBV-76, 23 August 2008 at 13:35UTC

  UVB-76 Aug.23.2010 9.32amPST by djoutcold 

In all am I scattered

I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic man, and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself.

—From the Gospel of Eve, quoted by Epiphanius, Hæres., xxvi. 3

On Terror In Music

One often hears films or novels referred to as "terrifying."  The word is more rarely used in reference to music, and it is even rarer still to find musical artists that utilize terror in the fabric of their work.  I don't mean the terror that attacks a middle-aged suburban housewife if by some strange chance she happens upon a Tyler, The Creator track.  And I don't mean the limpid, stylized fear-mongering so prevalent in certain goth and industrial scenes.  What I mean, frankly, is Icelandic sound sculpturist Ben Frost.

There are a number of ways to come across terror in recorded music, from a listener's perspective.  There is the experience of being confronted with something so far outside your comfort zones - be they for lyrical decency, tolerance for noise and volume, or taste for speed and aggression - that it is shocking.  That would be the housewife's reaction to violent hip-hop.  There is also the experience of having one's expectations confounded, of realizing that something which you thought you had all sussed out can also come at you from a whole different angle.  I vividly recall the first time I heard The Beatles' "Helter Skelter," on headphones, with high volume, in the middle of some strange 1970s compilation cassette with a haphazard and bizarre tracklisting.  My image of the Beatles - a particular image drawn mostly from their sheer cultural prevalence and a teenager's attitude which derided the group as "parents music," - was shattered by the emergence, seemingly our of the ether, of such a damaged, deranged - possibly evil - song.  It was frightening.

But when it comes down to it, the only really unnerving part of "Helter Skelter" is the coda, which fades out in the traditional manner, only to fade back in malevolently.  Its a simple but effective warping of listener expectations, as the brief respite only seems to heighten the madness of the song's jammed-out ending, which pushes insistently forward, which feels very much as if its coming at you, before it disintegrates completely and the stereo pans and fades follow suit, sounds and instruments dropping in and out and around the mix, until finally Ringo Starr, sounding absolutely unhinged, lets out the scream about blisters on his fingers and it abruptly fades out again with one last bit of guitar abuse.  It has never surprised me that Charles Manson chose this song as the soundtrack for his own personal apocalypse.

Ben Frost's album By The Throat takes the ambience of the "Helter Skelter" coda and stretches it for 45 minutes.  This is music designed specifically to unnerve, to frighten, to provoke anxiety.  And here is the key difference, alluded to earlier, between various aspects of terror in music.  This is not the anxiety provoked by the unknown or unfamiliar, or by a sudden curveball thrown at you from previously safe and reliable sources.  Those reactions hinge mostly on listener expectations.  This is music that makes terror its very sonic template and emotional palette, music that sets out to make panic aural.  The album, taken as a whole, establishes a mood of tension which is never resolved.  The tension, in fact, seems to cycle back on itself, amplify itself in a mobius strip of anxiety, as the album ends with the same hovering cloud of atonal violins first heard in track number one.  Clinically, anxiety is both cyclical and self-amplifying, and I have never come across a better sonic representation than Ben Frost's achievement here.  The appropriate parallel is the "Grief" section of Lars Von Trier's masterful Antichrist. 

Not, then, music for a sunny day.  But not all music is about reassurance and comfort, and very little music goes to these places and burrows into them as deeply as By The Throat.

ADDENDUM

 The four specific instances I can recall being frightened by a piece of (pop) music:

1.  The Beatles, "Helter Skelter."  Already covered that.

2.  Sonic Youth w/ Lydia Lunch, "Death Valley '69."  Lunch's untethered expression of carnality and incipient violence was scary (and arousing) for a teenage boy.

3.  Joy Division, "Decades."  The last song on Closer.  Something in the sound of that rattling percussion - like wasps swarming at a funeral - is deeply unsettling.

4.  Ben Frost, "Killshot."  The first song on By The Throat begins on familiar enough ambient electronic ground... and then the massive bass pad drops in, the sonic realization of spine shivers, and you start looking over your shoulder for the person that is out to get you.

An Excerpt

From the novel A Pornographic History of the United States:

The Loneliest Places in the World

You wake as if from a dream, but it isn’t a dream.  You are walking a long street in a city you don’t recognize.   A man walks by you, bumps into you, shoulder to shoulder.  You stop and turn to look at his face, but he has no face.  He hands you a piece of paper.  It is a map.  It depicts no territory with which you are familiar and it is written in a language you don’t understand.  It isn’t recognizable as any language at all.

                      The man points across the street and walks on.  A woman is walking on the other side of the street, walking away from you.  She is naked.  There is the sound of rushing, blaring city traffic, but the street is empty.  You run across and follow the woman.  She walks swiftly but unhurriedly.  She turns left at the next corner, where the exposed lattice-work of an under-construction sky scraper looms like titanic skeletal remains.  A few more yards down this street there is a door painted white.  The woman opens it and descends a staircase into darkness, leaving the door open behind her.  You follow.

                     It is completely dark.  You keep your balance by reaching out for the walls, which feel cold, metallic and slightly damp.  You can hear her footsteps below and you follow the sound.  At the last step you trip and land face-down, but the blow is soft, the surface feels like fine sand.  Suddenly there is light.  A room is illuminated.  The walls are white and tiled.  The floor is indeed sand, with a strange burgundy color.

                     The woman stands at the far wall, her back to you.  She places her palms on the wall and extends both arms, angling her back so that her body forms a triangle with the plane of the wall.

                     There are no words spoken, but you move towards her, removing your clothes.

                     She spreads her legs and arches her back.  For a few moments you are achingly enclosed in her and pulsing, everything pulsing, the lights flickering on and off until finally you empty completely, gasping.  Then comes the sinking feeling, the deflation.  The vertigo of someone perched at an event horizon, feeling themselves drawn inexorably towards a black hole and knowing that they are about to disappear forever.   

                      You grip tightly to her waist, clasp her stomach, and feel yourself slipping from her, shutting your eyes tight, anticipating total dissolution.

                       She is gone.  You stand alone in the white tiled room, your cock limpid and slowly dripping semen onto the burgundy sand.  You get dressed and head back to the staircase but you have forgotten something.  You have lost the map.

                 The stairs are lit now with a violet haze.  You exit at the top into a blinding white light and find yourself in a subway car.  You take a seat as the train rattles through some dark tunnel and gaze at the assortment of people arranged around you; normal, everyday people, non-descript people.  A man in a business suit.  A woman in glasses and a long dress.  A heavy-set man with a thick beard wearing khaki shorts.  Your eyes settle on one man in particular.  He is seated at the opposite end of the train.  He is the most non-descript of the non-descript people.  He wears a tan windbreaker and rumpled olive green slacks.  His hair is brown and receding, and styled conservatively, but with care. 

                      You watch him and he doesn’t so much as glance in your direction.  He doesn’t look your way as he stands up and walks slowly and steadily to the other end of the subway car, where the man in the business suit sits.  He doesn’t look at you or anyone else when he reaches into his tan windbreaker, pulls out a long knife, and plunges it deep into the business man’s chest.  The man in the tan windbreaker doesn’t even seem to be really looking at the man in the business suit as he falls forward in a hunched position and blood rushes forth, soaking the right sleeve of the tan windbreaker.  The man in the windbreaker kneels beside the fallen business man and stabs him again and again in the torso with swift, methodical motions.

A few passengers rush towards the assailant.   He stands up, looks at them but mostly straight through them, and swings the knife in a wide, almost lazy arc.  They retreat.   The tan windbreaker man is grossly outnumbered, but he is also the one with the weapon, and the one who has proven his actions know no restraint.  Bravery, even with numbers, is a trait hard to come by.  Kneeling again beside his victim, the man in the windbreaker begins sawing at the throat. 

You watch.  You have been rooted to your seat the whole time.  You watch as the man in the tan windbreaker saws and saws away until the business man’s head is severed completely.  The man in the windbreaker stands, turns, and looks directly at you, at only you, and the slightest smile crosses his lips as he presents his trophy. 

The train is screeching to a halt at its next appointed station, the brakes grinding, its heavy metal frame heaving, but these sounds reach you as if you are submerged in water.  Passengers are fleeing and screaming, but their cries are even more muffled, as if you have sunk even deeper.  The man in the tan windbreaker keeps his eyes on you.  He kneels down again, as in a Yajrasana meditative pose, left hand on left thigh clasping the knife, right hand on right thigh clasping the business man’s head, and lowers his own head, eyes closed, as he recedes further and further away from you, as you are drawn backwards into the water.

You float.  New York City is submerged in water.  The world is submerged in water.  You are drifting. 

On an abandoned basketball court on 103^rd Street a homeless man’s windpipe is crushed by another vagrant’s boot heel.  On the Staten Island ferry a fistfight erupts between drunken firefighters.  In a summer bungalow on the North Fork of Long Island a man slaps his wife across the face.  In the Paris metro a seventeen-year-old girl is raped by two boys from her school that she’d met at a party.  In a forest in Central Africa two twelve-year-old boys hack the arms off another young boy whom they believe to be an informant.  In a town square in Saudi Arabia a widow is stoned to death for practicing mysticism.  In a bazaar in Basra a man with explosives strapped to his chest approaches an American soldier, detonating just as the soldier meets his eyes.  Outside a temple on a Tibetan mountainside a Buddhist monk douses himself in kerosene and lights himself ablaze as a group of fellow monks look on and chant prayers.  In a Bangkok hotel room an actor from Los Angeles enters respiratory arrest as the teenage boy he’d hired tightens the belt around his neck.  At a karaoke bar in Quezon a brawl breaks out and a man is stabbed in the throat after singing a poor version of “My Way.”  Islamic militants storm a Club Med nightclub in Jakarta and execute anyone with British or American passports.  On the Indian Ocean a skiff of Somali pirates hijacks a French shipping vessel.   40,000 feet above the Mediterranean a Norwegian passenger on an Alitalia flight to Greece, intoxicated with sleeping pills and alcohol, assaults a flight attendant, biting her neck.                                                                                                                                                                  

In the Mexican desert, in the scalded landscape between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, a tall man, seen from behind, a man with no face, dumps the fractured body of a 15-year-old female maquiladora worker in a sulphurous river bed.  There is the sound of a car engine – or is it water rushing – or is it people screaming.  But the noise is loud, it grows louder, becomes deafening, and then is sucked away, and everything is silent.  The atmosphere is empty.  There is no ocean and no desert.  They have become one.  They have become nothing.

streets keep quiet

if you hear this, it's not all right / the streets keep quiet / the shades get drawn
all good folks keep their eyes shut / and your tired lungs scream to no one.