Pirates of the Underground

 In the long and ill-considered term where old internet got subsumed into the grotesque corporatist conglomeration of 'web 2.0' services and when all the little useless homes of personal chronicle like this blog felt truly outmoded, people of our subculture struggled to recreate and retain their spaces with variable degrees of success on the new attention economy platforms.

One such small community is 'Midnight Lighting Steel.', a facebook group of 100-150-odd people, lovers of old metal, weird metal and unique metal all the same that I was part of founding. 

In this space over the last few years many topics were brought on for discussion and many an obscure metal gem was dusted off for re-appreciation. Interesting thoughts came out of seeing disparate individuals appreciate forms of metal and particular cuts that I thought were truly passé for the constitution of the modern heavy metal listener, but that's a story for another time. Suffice to say that even in this crippled state the promise of internet connectivity still inspired something new for me and others.

Web 2.0 being the cretinous machine that it is, however, it soon became apparent that even the groups internal oral history was getting lost in the obscurity of the near yesterday, as the search functions and, generally, the archival functions of the platform are pointedly inoperable, discouraging any sort of conglomeration of fact in lieu of an endless re-discussion. That's attention economy, isn't it? 

My mind rebels to that idea, especially when it comes to matters of passion and fetish; Surely we have talked about Secrecy before, right? Surely we have all listened to Last Crack by now, no? We can build upon an edifice, but how? How do we know what is worth bringing up and what's been enshrined in the certitude of fact?

The idea that new members come and go and old members forget and we can't simply fish out our own discussion out of a deaf-dumb archive set me to ponder on the kinds of ways we propagated metal wisdom in the older world, the nascently connected but not yet overconnected world. What is an attractive package, even for a very small audience, even better, exactly for a very small audience to remember and remind itself of its oral history? 

In the world of tomorrow no-one should seek to talk to the many, the many are deaf to the world of tomorrow. One should seek to talk to the few because the few can become a community that imagines freely what will come to pass.

In this sense, for Midnight Lighting Steel I sought to do a little bit of a pirate radio show. I do not want to be a 'content creator' for youtube, I don't especially want to have my face or voice on the internet at all to be honest, but I thought it a decent challenge to contain my generally extremely verbose brain on all things metal down to the radio show format, and to hearken back to a different standard of how we package and convey information on this style of art to each other all the same.

Furthermore I sought to be a living example of how 'we listen to music', in ways that to people of similar background and idiom to my own will seem obvious but to a generation of listeners fed by spotify and listening to music on a phone that mutes their song with a ding about a video ad will be a challenge. Offline hard drive of meticulous collection, record cover and lyric, year and country, genre and ambition, the lives of little humans given with such passion and steel dedication to a purely useless thing. The inspiration is to never forget them, so we as well may never be forgotten. To listen to music with love and to comment with wit, it is a simple thing to the loving and curious but fewer and fewer of us remain...

Ultimately, and this is no shame it is in fact the biggest ambition of them all, these are meant to be videos you put in the background that deal with something you dearly love with passion and mature understanding, to keep you company and give you a feeling of comradery while you have to work a stupid fucking dayjob or take a long car ride or just assuage the loneliness of a long night, here and there. Steel has always been there for us and I am paying it forward.

The videos were unlisted, they were meant to be seen by 10, 15 people tops. They were meant to incite small discussions and more than anything they were meant to do that one magic thing where when, say, Secrecy would come to mind for one of the viewers/listeners, the memory would also conjure up a comment, a bit of wisdom, something mentioned or something sparked in relation. A metal brother has already given years of life to thinκ of this, we learn from each other.

To assuage this catalogue fixation, the rateyourmusic wound of endless scroll and no papyrus of what the metal chronicle has become we need to get a little post-apocalyptic. A small human's story, an interesting anecdote and not too much more, an overarching theme and concept to this subcultural endeavor of metal, all of it dancing madly on a stolen radio-wave, hijacking a service meant for gross self-exploitation -- pirates of the underground, lightning, the speed of sound we will prevail


I did a few of these inward-looking radio shows for the group and then I thought since they're unlisted and they still fall in a hole of facebook groups backlog not easily fished out, I might as well give them a final resting place here, where all my other thoughts are, where my heart always rests, in the ethereal tomb of Poetry of Subculture: my most useless and in some ways my most cherished creation - and trust me, I've indulged in so much uselessness over the decades - satisfying the double credo of maximum effort and for no apparent credit. Levitating between the anonymity of the unlisted internet of yore and the data aggregative totality of the future, we soar the liquid seas of imagination.

As these videos are not meant for general use keep in mind they need not be circulated, nothing has to be made out of them, and I don't particularly want to think of them as media to account for in any other way than a measured discussion in this old world comment space. If you've found yourself here there is surely a reason and they're meant for you, instead. You understand this distinction and you know what to do with such information.

As always I remain your faithful correspondent, beyond time and space, amidst world-ending chaos and uncertainty. We met a long, long time ago and before this is all over we may truly never die.

The experience of listening to music consists of two seemingly incompatible challenges. If you watch a film without trying to retain the image of the past, that is to say, what happened so far in the plot all the while focusing on taking in what's happening right now in some sort of dreamlike stupor, it could be argued you're missing out, you're being lazy, you are in one way or another engaging with this artform wrong. Let us not dwell on the exceptions to this logic and observe the general rule, for now.

Similarly with reading a book. How often have your eyes glazed over as you read a sentence and you've realized you have lost focus and you have to go back and re-read the whole page to pick up the track. So to say, there is some sort of track, you are on the scent towards some ultimate revelation, such is the power of prose. Even a poem can bewilder the mind in such ways that it sends one back, back, back again, start from the beginning, hold in your heart this immensity.


Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress

The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.


Music is the one art form (aside from perhaps more abstract types of video art, which also usually most often employ the guiles of music) that welcomes your letting go of the past, asks you to forget everything about just a moment ago and carry on with the ever-unfolding present. I suggest that it also goes further than that: by form and function (the richness of this ongoing ever-present moment) it actually resists your nostalgia for the past. There is simply no time for it, and if a record makes you yearn for the song before as the current song sucks then it cannot be said to be a complete offering, can it? The most beautiful music wants to enthrall you with such an impossible promise: oh, you liked that? Well get ready for this. And soon after, all this will be developed further into that. Truly in music does the soul feel drunk with the whole of possibility. The drunk mind often returns in circles, in little spirals, projecting a weightless vector filled with sanguine humour, a morning of regret and then...

The dialectic completes itself in time. If a song, or album, or movement is truly beautiful we do not listen to it only once. The experience on the whole delivers us in a state beyond nostalgia, it makes one feel the deepest sense of melancholia instead. Oh, how I long to listen to this song again and again not because this gave way into that but because the experience on the whole was blissful. It lifted up the chains of time from my soul, the excitement was so complete, it was as if nothing bad had ever happened for a short spell.

When we listen to a song - or an album, or a symphony - again and again no matter how much the jubilance of the ever-present moment resists our plotting, we do chart, if not a course, a place. A geography. We create a map. In our 'anticipation of perception' we are longing and looking forward to beautiful musical events experienced before, and in our retraced present we are connecting our herewithin with what will come again. Music makes us long for a future on repeat. Music has very little to do with the past. Dionysus, drunk with wine and ready to fuck, as he has done a thousand nights before is longing for this experience that will inexorably lead to that one, he's not thinking of the experience of yesterday. What is the broader story that coheres as we levitate upwards from this orgy of lust in particular to hold in our eye this entire city?

No other artform is so 'repeatable' as an experience. Not prose, not poetry, not even painting (its closest relative in the realm of longing). Only music is engaging our ever-present now with a future we anticipate in full knowledge of its goodness and of its potential for perpetual revelation. Our past is just the totality of life spent seeking.

A deep love of music, not just of listening to songs but somehow charting their potential spaces through a deeper connection, through a ritual of repetition, through this annihilation of the past is a high sign of innocence, that something in the heart is intact no matter how they cut at you. The monad is love.

Finding oneself listening less and less attentively, not for signs of the past but for how this moment connects to future moments, moments well forecasted but never fully and completely described (as the potential of the future is limitless) is a sign that cynicism now rests at the throne of want. A heart made of clay, hollow to the touch, reverberation empty.

Take out an album, do nothing, truly do nothing but listen to it, read the lyrics, memorize the moments that are to come, touch the future potential. No spotify, no cat videos, no other distraction to your excitement for this present moment reaching to the beauty of the next. Well forecasted, you know the movement of the seasons in this realm, even though you can never predict what new will be stirred in the subconscious by the inchoate and dreamlike motions of the clouds.