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.

Anathema - Serenades

Peaceville, 1993

Darren White - Vocals
Daniel Cavanagh - Guitar
Vincent Cavanagh - Guitar
Duncan Patterson - Bass
John Douglas - Drums
Ruth - Additional vocals


I can hear the laughter already. Early Anathema are a hard band to like in current metal circles. As mentioned in past articles, the 'atmospheric metal' experiment in which English romantic doom/death metal tentatively contributed to, was a way out of the canon for many musicians. It had many ties to punk rock (defocus on technicality, at the same time when the rest of metal music was becoming hyper-technical), dark wave (morose subject matter, fixation on darkness) and indie rock (enduring dissaffection) it's no wonder that after a couple of Heavy Metal records most of the collectives involved moved on to different pastures, and even less wonder that the form doesn't enjoy a positive reputation with metalheads today.

Now, this is a strange situation: when a metal band breaks away from the mothership they usually try to get a different target audience. It's a very risky endeavor and it usually ends in failure, but the few bands that achieve that keep everything but the name, effectively. They change their whole aesthetic to suit the demands of their new followers. 'Atmospheric metal' bands that go off in non-metal territories however are naive in a special way: they keep their surface aesthetic signifiers but they just do away with the heavy guitars and growly vocals. They are trying to become indie, electronic or gothic rock outfits while they're still earnest - though moribund - metalheads at heart. They didn't get the memo you can't play metal without the metal and expect it to still work.

This creates special situations. Most of these bands, Anathema foremost, retained some of their metalhead audience (lost some hardcore doom/death fans, got some mainstream metalheads, perhaps) and gained little to no broader fans to justify their switch of style. The metalheads that retain their interest in them are those that either are a) open-minded to the point where their brains leak out when they tilt their heads or b) feel guilt over being metalheads and try to camouflage the hard liquor with a false front of more palatable tastes. It is oddly fitting, after all, the most self-loathing type of Heavy Metal to have the most self-loathing metalhead fan-base.

It might be difficult to understand in the current climate where metal music's coolness is judged on a crazy 'purity' two-end scale where on the far left is how extreme you can be on your instrument and on the far right is how conservatively you connote your aesthetic concept, but in the early to mid '90s - where this Atmospheric metal business came to a rise and fall - metal music listeners were constantly bombarded with outsider communication on how the music they were raised on - Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Manowar et al. - was now considered dreadfully passé. But they still wanted to listen to metal music and new metal music to boot. The self-loathing of that era was channeled into mainly two psychologically parallel paths: black metal and doom/death (and eventually 'atmospheric metal' as it were). The former cried denial of the modern and a return to the - mostly retroactively invented by teenagers with shallow historic appreciation but sensitive instincts - aesthetic origins of the form. "So what if what we play is passé? It is more than that, it isancient! We haven't died, we never existed" they cried in a shrill womanly voice, blastbeats and tremolo clattering in their mists. The other path was of doom/death where the conceit was subtly different, diversionary. "No no, we are not passe. We are instead, misunderstood" they murmured and moaned. Aren't you misunderstood too? Some tragedy marks your life as well? Join the club. More akin to the gravitas and self-awareness of gothic rock, they said. A type of music that had survived its own brief stint with public awareness and hadn't died away. Would someone accuse Joy Division, theurgically sealed in everlasting public reverence by suffocation, of being passé? I think not.

But the metalhead take on gothic rock was still Heavy Metal music for a simple reason: what draws people to Heavy Metal, then and now and forever, is the promise of beauty, romance, hope and imagination. Gothic rock was - and is, last time I checked - a far more facetious type of music, where irony and double-talk are grimly celebrated as extracts of modernity. "I dare you to be real" wasn't a real dare. Bela Lugosi's an actor that played Dracula, not Dracula himself. Dark wave fundamentally remains post punk in this way. One cannot get too excited about an ironic type of music. The goths, for all their frilly embroidery, are very obvious about their dress-up being an exploration of a character in a play. This self-awareness was lost on the metalheads that turned their metals of doom and death to 'atmospheric metal'. Their romance was earnest to the degree that it was required for their Heavy Metal to strike true.

What is more powerful than death? Is there a truth more real than death? Will anyone survive it and come back to tell us of its falseness? There is no reply to death. Death is forever, he shall never die.

Yet, what is more painless than death? Will anyone suffer it and come back to tell us of its horrid torment? Will any of us truly be there to die? Or will our faculties breathe last a moment before death comes certifiably? Death is unknowable, he will never have a face.

What a perfect combination that is then, for reclusive introverts that seek the most powerful symbol with which to adorn their ordinary, middle-class existences, yet do not have it in us to go through the fullest hardship to achieve it. For one to love death they must be alive. Heavy Metal is a music fundamentally based on this attraction to death. No sub-genre captures the drama (and melodrama) of this than doom/death. The most embarrassing type of metal, how I love it. Well, some of it!

Anathema here come late to the doom/death mope party, and they have distilled the lessons of their forerunners to a great degree. They aren't concerned with appearing super-metal, there isn't a slayer riff to be found here. They get their credibility by appearing super-sad instead. It's all slow, all the time. This doesn't mean that 'Serenades' is a focused album, it is in fact, very torn between what it is and what else it briefly entertains being instead. However when it is on, it is beautiful and touching.

'Serenades' is a difficult record to like. The vocals of Darren White are very weak as death metal vocals (from whence they definitely trace their pedigree). Whereas most death metal vocalists of the era endeavored to sound as inhuman - and therefore extra-terrestrially powerful - as possible, he sounds short of breath and winded. Shallow lung moans and whimpers, a human in anguish. Whereas death metal inspires violence, this doom/death vocal style suggests the outcomes of violence. The beauty of this approach is only made apparent to those that spend time with the lyric here. What could possess a human being to voice such language

All tears restrained for years
Their grief is confined
And destroys my mind

An ode to their plight is this dirge

Some yearn for lugubrious silence
Serenity in the image of coffins

Shall life renew these bodies of a truth?
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?
Fill the void veins of life, again with youth
And wash with an immortal water, age

They die

In tones so wretched and foul? In this dynamic is the strength of Heavy Metal. It will take all that society taught us is useless and bad and ugly and with the sharpest edges it will chisel a monument to everlasting beauty. The vocal of Darren White here is sublime, the entity summoned, that 'Anathema', the voice of the disembodied, rotting head. Its mouth aghast and between the stinking humors and bile has grown a flower.

In fields where
Grass grows tall
Golden carpets swell
And whisper
Autumn trees
Will weep

Dawn breaks open
Like a wound that bleeds afresh
In bleak misery
The lifeless lie in squandor

Love has left me
Fled from me
Fragrant lust waits beside
And dies

Like flowers that wilt
Without refreshment
In midday sun I sit
And bide time

Adorning me
A lovelorn rhapsody

The only death left from death metal here is in the pulse and rhythm of the songs. Shambling, see death walking, death alive. Oft stop-starts, while a vocal punctuates, as if the corpse is struggling to do more than two things at once. It's a wretched sight, this slow-motion re-animation and yet, beautiful because reanimation implies sorcery - power, will. Music such as this is misunderstood as a consumer product (like which is undoubtedly reached the listener's possession) because it doesn't seek to entertain in a surface way - in fact those that are entertained by 'depressing music' misunderstand this the most. This is not music to cry over, it is not music that inspires sadness. It is a celebration of magic. Our bodies may die but look what beauty comes from the knowledge of the end. Your sadness is ours, we take it and fashion with it a flag, a tapestry, a cloak, a shield. Very few casual listeners that dabble in with fringe tastes of the metal multiverse get to the core of this.

The beauty of this world is shown in the guitar interplay of the Cavanagh brothers. For all the ridicule that their future career as 'Radiohead for metalheads' has brought them, their debut album finds them in perfect sync with each other. One guitar will start a voice and let it linger mid-way, only for the other channel's guitar to pick it up and give it conclusion and rest. This game between brothers touching and yes, harmonious and joyful. There is no death-lust in the mental image of two brothers playing their instruments together, reaching agreement. I have been enchanted by their conversation on their early material before and long since I could realize similar musicality in my own multi-part composition. Though the brothers here connote this record has come from common grief (a family loss is alluded to directly in the liner notes of the record via a commemoration) I hear in their guitar stereo compositions, joy and lust and desire for something beautiful.

It is in that dynamic that is record can be found to be inconsistent. Though the lyrical material is uniform in its melancholy, the music strays from the mourn path often. For a fundamentally doom metal record, there is much here that puzzles the new listener. One example is the third song, 'J'Ai Fait Une Promesse'. An acoustic and vocal piece of relative simplicity that has a medieval feel to it. The promise being that the woman singing will 'pledge herself unto us' is repeated in French and English. Regardless of the success of the song in melodic or thematic terms, it's easy to get the vibe from the song that this is someone's girlfriend that is being asked to participate in this record they're making. Although this is a metal faux pas if there ever was one (no girlfriends allowed), the end result - curiously due to the still tones of the voice, no vibratto at all - sounds lifeless and distant. More a sculpture of a girl than a girl herself.



Anathema succeed in their excursion from metal in spite of themselves.

There are more examples to this (besides the obvious up-beat 'Sleepless' that everyone loves to hate). The end track 'Dreaming: The Romance' appears to be the perfect storm of kitsch at first. Pretentious title, obvious overstatement and a 23 minute synth pad ambient track that sounds like an outtake from a Tangerine Dream record. And yet, it works. It works as the bookend to the high drama of the record, it's a gentle wash to a shore outside, shallow consciousness, almost dreaming. Though the heights the record reaches are artificially pushed (as in most metal records - how often does your life make you scream in guttural tones about the death of everything?), the long stretches of melancholy are very human and real - Heavy Metal fantasy peaks and long stretches of gentle melancholy. 'Dreaming: The Romance' serves this notion. Anathema succeed in their ambient excursion in spite of themselves again.

The clearer and most focused Anathema are here is on the fourth track "They Die", a reworking of their own earlier composition. The lyric and music are in perfect synchronization. The brothers complete each other's sentences while Darren White gives his weakest (as in, best) performance to his most beautiful and poignant lyric. Is it a wonder that by the end of its length the doom/death dirge rises to a symphonic, hopeful end?


Anathema would oust Darren White from the fold an (brilliant, yet also uneven) EP later. They would go on to slowly mutate into an alt-rock/mope rock outfit without him. For the fans this would gain them they also suffered nigh-universal derision from other quarters that saw them to be escape artists. It is difficult to like old Anathema and make a case for them as I am here because so much of what they achieved seems to happen almost by mistake, and is foreshadowed by their tendency to wander outside the form. But then again, the form of doom/death (and 'atmospheric metal' as a whole) proved to be a limited one, exsanguinated for all that was potent in a mere five years. So although I do not enjoy later Anathema material, I do not participate in the hate towards them. I take from their long career a full-length and two EPs worth of enduring art. Sadness is marred by hope like a crack on the funeral monument, yet through the crack often senseless, joyful flora grows, the artifact of grief is as beautiful as what it inspires.

Agnes Vein - Of Chaos & Law

Self-released in 2004

Foivos - Drums
Erikos Negros - Bass
Sakis Kioses - Guitar, Vocals


"Elric, sorcerer and swordsman
Slayer of kin
Despoiler of his homeland
white-faced albino

Last of his line"


In the writings of Michael Moorcock there is a foundational notion of eternal strife between the forces of Chaos and those of Law. The former seeking to destabilize the fabric of common reality with their horrid beauty and constant spider motion, the latter standing for stoic staticism, stalwart celibate champions of a world that makes sense, coheres, follows causal premises, is ended. Evolution and entropy, birth and death, the inner and the outer, mirror fragments fall into the mirror pool, how darkly they reflect.


This duality is one that has had more than a surface appeal to the Heavy Metal artists that were inspired by Moorcock and many of his peers. The parallel is simple and so I'll illustrate it as Moorcock did, with his tales of the Melnibonéan prince. His sickly flesh, deficit genes and languid lifestyle in the ancient palaces of his bloodline could not withhold his lust for exploration and adventure. And unlike the barbarian Conan whose journey was an outer one carved on the flesh of many, the depths that Elric of Melniboné plunged were inner: his questioning of the very basis of his existence was the gravitational pull that sent him on wild trajectories throughout the young kingdoms of man and beast.

For the teenager reading fantasy pulp, there were many strong-willed heroes that plundered the earth with great abandon to idolize. And for Conan the conqueror, given as he was to his famous bouts of depression, it was still the rippling tendon and muscle that crushed the world with iron will that characterized him.

Elric instead, of frail flesh and dwindling spirit, seeks refuge in alchemy to not even prosper but merely survive. Concoctions eldritch, potions fashioned to lend a mockery of atavistic vitality. A perversion of the natural ways, where the strong survive by crushing the weak. Elric drew from the countless centuries of tradition of his cruel homeland, his artificial willpower. He was after all borne of high class and had ample opportunity to study sorcery and metaphysics. In the end he meets his counterpart in the black sword, Stormbringer and needs the lesser drugs no more for the infernal black sword swallows the souls of those it slays and lends the wielder their occulted will. It slays the outer and gives birth in the inner. What does it tell us for those that at an early age were ensnared by the tales of its onyx light?


Heavy Metal is romantic art, and as such, has in its core a tall order. The quintessential tall order, as it were: live forever, destroy death, purge the world and give birth to it anew. Omniscience and End. Those that are inspired by art that has these ridiculous measuring points often feel tremendous guilt at their own incapacity to materialize in the real world even a semblance of such tenets. There is a certain kind of pain, unlike the common physical one or even the mental anguish of psychological withholding and social deprivation that many dreamers share: the pain of being unable to achieve what dreams inspire. This pain is private. If it can be explained to others it is not easily and not without risk lest one enjoys constant low-brow mockery by self-appointed 'realists'.


It is two-fold our embarrassment that most of us come from a comfortable middle-class background and haven't wanted for anything too terribly in life. Heavy Metal was not borne of this middle-class ennui but it was certainly adopted heavily by its sufferers. Much like Elric, metal fans do not have the willpower that characterizes the savage will to kill to survive. They instead are decrepit and morose, they have everything they need but they're not happy for it. They turn to the fantastic alchemy of the heavy metals for they need a tool of strength to open up their weak hearts.


So then Moorcock, with his tales of Elric and his black drug-sword created a potent alternative to the cruel feedback loop of romanticism, where the Fates look down on the weaklings who like the songs of splendor but can only achieve dour daily nothings in their name. He instead restates the ancient premise that the fantastical hero that survives many perils and prolonged Odysseys is but a vehicle for Fate itself and his own powers are limited, nay, augmented by an Aristotelian Organon: a killing tool that yet gives life. As Elric loathes and loves his black sword, so the listeners of Heavy Metal may through that see the way to accept not just their incandescent love for the high art that inspires them, but also the hidden loathing for own aspirations not achieved.


Heavy Metal is a black sword whose power is only lent and will in the end assist suicide, ablation for what gifts it has bestowed. For the time one has it in their hands, they have to choose to what polarity they will turn its moon-carved blade. Will it be to praise elder god Apollo, bringer of light and cruel law, his white-cast eyes bearing judgment and science on all earthly things, or will it be to glorify mega Dionysus, cradled in grapeseed and maniacal with frenzied laughter? Either season though it appears never-ending, does gradually, with the passing of the storms and cold sleep, give way to the other.


A human life seems to me to be an unlimited thing, experientially. I will not know death because when they say I have died, I will not be there to live death. Therefore, although evidence of death is plentiful around me, it is with a certain arrogance that I secretly believe I will never have to leave here. 'Here' will leave with me, instead. Isn't that a comforting thought?


Death is then, for society to function, substituted with something that I, as all, have experienced: suffering and loss. Others plead you not to give them death with this explanation of external loss and pain. It is the constant fear of suffering and loss that humans have christened death in its wake. Death is useless.

But suffering and loss is an internalization of an outer experience, it is something the outside inflicts on the individual, it does not equip them in the least for any ingressive quest. It could be said instead that the constant pain that the outer world inflicts on the individual retards their potential for the self-discovery of what death could mean, inside, what it could be to not exist, to never have existed.


What is chaos, then but the end that came before the beginning. It means that what 'they' say exists, doesn't. It never did. Chaos is motion, eternal motion, undefinable and unlawful in the purest sense. Law, in ancient Greek, also described the etymology of physics, the description of causal relationships. When everything is in ever-constant mutation and motion, such relationships are impossible to define. Then and only then, when the pain of a static world inflicted on what is fundamentally a jubilant reason-less inner existence has been halted, can the lone traveler ponder what it could mean to exist, and what it could mean not to.


Agnes Vein are a Greek band that plays epic doom metal. Their demo "Of Chaos & Law" is very evocative of the qualities of Moorcock's work (though not his style of writing). They employ a pulse that flows from the ponderous and glacial to a frenzied and war-like gallop. There is a lot of antithesis in their songs, yet the compositions, though simple, are elegant and cohesive.

The aspects of the whole here are very foundational: the most advanced technique on display is seen on the '90s metal informed drums. This means they're quite busy and heavy on the double-bass, with the rolls following the cadences of the riffs. This is an artifice devised by thrash metal bands and since then employed generally on the whole field of extreme music. Agnes Vein are dated to 2004 purely on this level. The songs on display otherwise could have belonged to many great Heavy Metal records from 1986 and onwards.

There are rhythm guitars that play the structures of the songs in power chords. Saturated middles put meat on the bones and there is no excess fat, no technical flourish and needless belaboring the point. The riffs here are specific and refreshed sparingly. The mode is muscular and therefore masculine, direction is conveyed by repetition and simple ABCABC structures. The songs go in very specific places though what is to be found there is left to the imagination.

The bass guitar is uncharacteristically prominent for modern metal perhaps, but this is more common on the doom metal sub-genres where 'heaviness' is often equated literally with the low frequency stack. They play fluid lines that often counterpoint with the more choppy rhythm guitars. The classicist beauty of this record is found in this interplay and I would hesitate to call it ample. There is however something very enticing about a band that plays on very primordial themes yet sparingly embellishes on them with gentle elaboration between no more than two or three voices. I think that a lot of metal music and its widespread appeal can be summed in this effect: something simple and direct, yet with a layer of subtle grace.

On top of the mix lie watery guitar leads, drenched in curious reverb and distance, along with the vocals. There is a certain suspicion that Agnes Vein felt their singer ill-equipped to stand front and center in the mix so they instead buried him in echo chambers and thought nobody would notice his faults. This - perhaps - unfounded assumption arrives to a winning idiosyncratic sound. The singer is adequately tuneful and his vocal lines are splendid, his Greek accent is very clear. The reverb downplays the importance of the individual lyric (scarce lines may be caught but no more than that). For those familiar with the works of Michael Moorcock, every signifier offered here is strong with his archetypes.

There have been other great Heavy Metal bands inspired by the tales of Elric (Cirith Ungol first and foremost) but what attracts me to this take by Agnes Vein the most is that it is not a literary approximation of the source material, it is an aural one. I read the Elric stories many years before I ever knew of the Greek band, but when I finally did listen to them, their aesthetic simply clicked with the weight of many invented memories of a fantastic place. I cannot imagine one without the other now, and it is very significant when such a thing happens to art that is separated not only by disparate mediums but also decades of social change. The individuals in Agnes Vein did not live through the sixties nor were they British neither, I would expect, have they taken copious amounts of psychoactive substances, all of which contributed very directly and clearly to the work of the fantasy author. Yet somehow, from London to Thessaloniki and from hippie communes to conservative middle-class ennui, a silver string connects. The lumbering crack of shifting earth and storm, defiance to the outer Law and glorification of the inner chaos.


What is there to take from this approach, considering that one is gathering lessons to apply to their own Heavy Metal, is that it is perhaps a balsam to the wound of romance to acknowledge Fate as a contributing force, and not just will and absence of. And that even if one's footing is found - after the veil of decades of passing seasons has been lifted - to amount to no clear stride in any direction, this is no failure. It is however, drama, motion and force and perhaps it is that, that the Heavy Metal musician should focus to express. Not just the Gods of Law & Chaos with their frowning, grinning faces, but also the man, the plaything of fate whom so often fails them and disappoints and then eventually realizes what it means to not exist, to never have existed. Perhaps there is a song for him as well to sing. A song of hope as well as laughter in the face of unsurmountable desire.

The 3rd and the Mortal - Painting on Glass

Released in 1996 by Voices of Wonder


Ann-Mari Edvardsen - Vocals, Keyboards
Finn-Olav Holthe - Guitar, Keyboards
Trond Engum - Guitar
Geir Nilsen - Guitar, Keyboards
Bernt Rundberget - Bass
Rune Hoemsnes - Drums


Many additional musicians helped in this recording.


The 3rd and the Mortal were a Norwegian group. Their origins were in the 'doom/death' metal genre and from there they moved towards an amalgamation of such with ambient and electronic music. Their shift from here to there is documented in their four full-length albums and two EPs between 1992 and 2002. "Painting on Glass" is their second album, released in 1996, which straddles the apex of that evolutionary curve.


Doom metal is simultaneously the oldest kind of metal, as its characteristics (ponderous pace, extended song lengths, rhythmic austerity (no 'groove') and relentlessly dark lyrical and aesthetic subject matter, often concerned with personal anguish and existential futility) were those defining the first metal band, Black Sabbath, and one of the youngest as it has been formalized as a genre and cloned extensively only by the late '80s. Black Sabbath's early '70s material was not considered doom metal when it was first released as the term did not yet exist. In fact at the time, there were no metal sub-genres. 'Heavy metal' was a term coined to describe vaguely clumsy and loud rock and roll acts and it was an initially pejorative term at that. The co-opting of it and the further specialization in smaller sub-strands was the result of its rising popularity during the market heyday of metal, in the late '80s. In any case, any and all doom metal bands since adopt some their characteristics from Black Sabbath's palette. Other aspects of Black Sabbath -as interpreted often through Judas Priest or Iron Maiden - were extrapolated upon to give rise to almost all the other sub-genres of metal.


Death metal is a late development, occurring in tandem with the resurgence of doom metal in the late '80s. It is instead fast and visceral, it takes its morphology from thrash metal and hardcore punk and pushes the mix to a chaotic extreme. The most defining characteristics of death metal are the growled, inhuman vocals and its morbid fascination with depictions of death, disease and decay.


Doom/death is a British invention, typified by the band Paradise Lost and furthered by many in the early '90s. It takes from doom metal the sound design and dark lyrical matter and marries it to death metal's vocal extremity and bipolar tendency towards extreme speed. Their anemic progeny is dressed in frilly garments romantic and wept for extensively. Doom/death is really more than the sum of its parts, though it's unfortunate it never got a better moniker than the exact sum of them. It is unlike death metal in that it is entirely humorless. Death metal, concerned as it was with the nonsensical and random risk of mortality, carries a 'horror show' aspect, as if there's nothing to do when you see a horrible car crash but laugh. Consider also how some watch splatter films in a jovial manner - these are the people that at the time started death metal bands. Doom/death however services its morbid existential concerns with a framework that closely mirrors Romanticist notions and ontology. The car crash is not just the result of life's design, but a monument to its deepest principles, it is as beautiful as it is horrific. The implication is - as in 'The Birth of Tragedy' - that the purpose of drama is the affirmation of life, the re-appreciation of the here and now. It is often said that those that speak often about death and their desire of it are the ones that are safest from actually committing suicide - it's those that silently ponder death that reach for it. Likewise doom/death's morbid fascination seems to dispel the magnetic pull towards death, it instead incorporates it into life and so makes weakness into strength.


The 3rd and the Mortal did not employ any growled vocals in their records, nor are there any excursions into choppy thrash-inspired supersonics. However they were obviously influenced by the those romantic metal foundations laid by aforementioned British bands. They instead employed female operatic vocals and varied extra-instrumentation to broaden their palette. They were accompanied in this evolution by a great number of other graduates of doom/death in many countries around the world in the early '90s. This sub-strand of a sub-strand was later defined by some predominantly European journalists as 'atmospheric metal' and would become much more popular for a time than the genres it spawned from, before collapsing in and on itself. An unfortunate term, for what sort of useful music lacks an atmosphere? Nonetheless, one that clearly describes the direction metal music was taking in the early to mid '90s.


"Painting on Glass" sounds very much like ambient music, also. It it mostly gentle in textures and rhythmics and welcomes the listener in its introspective space. It could be used as background music, like ambient music is intended for and yet it takes a wholly different shape when listened to with undivided attention. Each piece is built upon few riffs yet has a progression to it and more importantly the succession of the pieces conveys a storytelling arc that could be lost on the inattentive listener. The material alternates between a mid-tempo pulse that seems largely the same for all the pieces that have it and weightless floating for the intermediate instrumentals that surround. There are only a few pieces that have distorted guitar chords as their backbone - an otherwise definitive aspect of metal music. More showcase delicate acoustic arpeggios along with extended & sustained guitar lead work on top. For long-time listeners of metal music, it must have been baffling at the time, to hear so many trappings of metal music (riffs, robust percussion, shimmering lead guitar) divorced from their common surface qualities (distortion, dry mix). This tendency was thoroughly explored in that decade of metal to the point where the definition of metal itself in the minds of many, drifted to include any rock-based music that is vaguely loud and imposing. It is something modern appreciators of metal music generally do not know: their tastes that now cradle anything from industrialized dance music to sloppy stoner rock to shapeless drone ambient to lowbrow hardcore punk as being metal, are the result of uncoordinated and unintentional efforts of now forgotten 'atmospheric metal' bands in the '90s.


The sound design of the album is remarkable. For most metal bands the performance captured in the studio is the absolute guide to the sound design. That is to say, an engineer is employed to augment and stylize the physical quality of the playing captured. The staccato bursts of activity, the sharpness of the stops and the pummeling drive of the rhythms. Here The 3rd and the Mortal take a very different approach. The mix is very even, every layer can be heard and no voice floats many decibels above the foundation. Dynamics are conveyed not by fluctuation in volume of individual parts, but by introducing or removing voices from the whole, almost like a baroque approach to mixing. Guitar leads hit accents as soft as the acoustic instruments that riff the context, the bass drums do not cut through as they usually do on metal records. Everything is washed in delay and reverb like on gothic rock album, perhaps. There is little treble to the whole, middle frequencies dominate and sand off the edges of the stone.


It is in this sound design then that The 3rd and the Mortal approach the idea of 'ambient metal' most of all. Their gentleness is of a wave, the continued flow and ebb and implied pulse is what characterizes this album. Even the silence between (or sometimes inside) songs seems to bid farewell to past and introduce future riffs seamlessly. That said, there are builds that lead to violent crescendos, but the peaks also slope back into the great plateaus that characterize the majority of the album's length. The vocals are layered and wet with reverb as well, giving them a spectral quality. There is no exerted passion to them, they carry sombre melodies like suspended lights flickering in the mist. And what do they sing about?


I am bound to past
And stagnant presence
Sallow faces, seducers
Seize my threads of mind

To suscipe pre animabus illis
Quarum hodie memoriam facimus


Common experiences for human beings are few. Hope and hopelessness, a sense of unreality, the passing of time. The rest which we pretend to be public domain is not. Each of us feels complex emotions differently and our language is only a tool for facilitating the friction between our subjective lives. Language, when employed to describe how we are alike in any other way than the fundamental, is a weapon meant to convince others of their sameness.


People make small-talk of the weather, isn't it funny? Seasons are primary and universal. Cold, warm, blooming, humid. "Painting on Glass" is an autumnal record. Not because I listen to it more at that time of the year but because whenever I listen to it, it conjures the feelings of Autumn in itself. That is generally, the power of great art, not to augment the daily lives of those that peruse it, but to manifest with force its own rule and dare the recipient to engage it. To survive it. "Painting on Glass" wages war with gentility, but a war it is, still. Who survives a war unscathed? Art that leaves one unscarred is only a plaything.


Autumn is often defined by memories of overcast skies, falling leaves and of rain. But a defining autumnal experience is also that of the new day after the rain, the smell of the earth opening up and the vibrant, almost unreal clarity of the atmosphere. In emotional parallel, "Painting on Glass" travels from a sense of sorrow, loss and resigned torment, to that of a solace, quiet and respite. The pendulum levitates weightlessly at the extremes but quickly returns to the long travel in the middle. This is also how The 3rd and the Mortal sounds, persistent and fleeting, never touching on extremes for more than a short moment. It is a circle that inspires both ugliness and beauty, mixed and varied in value but conserved in its palette.


I gave you my word
And the shafts of light
Opened the sky

But as your shadow rise
Passing colours in your mind
I bow down silently

I gave you my love
As the rusting trees
Sprinkled blades on the ground

And as your shadow rise
Passing colours in your mind
I bow down silently
Creeping frost pits my skin
Crystal orchids blooming


It often feels as if this music wants there to be no end to this back and forth. The romantic impulse is essentially narcissistic: I suffer therefore I am. I can tell of beauty because of pain. Those that do not suffer cannot appreciate true beauty. This is the terror of the pendulum motion, the endless sway that marries extremes to each other. But as the pendulum eventually comes to a rest without external force to fuel it, so here we do not truly run in a circle, but up a spiral fueled by human hope. Painting on Glass obfuscates its hope with the many beautiful flowers of hopelessness. behind its trajectory a guiding hope of teliosis. Not to say that this is a fantastic vacation in a horror sideshow meant to titillate and educate and once one leaves and returns to their normal life they can gloat over their brief stint with depression. Hope is hidden deep, here. Exit from the seeming circle of "Painting on Glass" is difficult, the record is long and not many will be attentive when it delivers.


The pulsation of my blood
The pressure splits my skin
Magma floats
Burns feeble flesh into ashes
Sulphurous screams in my head
In a petrified soul


Romantic music is inspired by terror but arrives to hope. There is awe in terror, there is awe in internalizing violence but violence is ends to different means: desire. This is why Romantic art will never be outmoded. As long as humans live, they will desire. And the desire of something greater, of something purer and clearer, is hope. We are trained in docility, but hope still burns hidden, shameful, inside us. Ultimately the desire is of theosis. Of immortality and absolute control of the inner and the outer. In Greek, the word for perfect is 'telios', whose root is 'telos', the final end. This is how hope feeds back into terror. To be perfect, you must not be. To live forever, you must die. To understand Heavy Metal, think of how these concepts resonate not in you the adult with your embroidered dress of common sense, but instead on you the shy, introverted teenager, feeling like an alien being inside your own skin, misunderstood and directionless, waiting for life to arrive. Is it a wonder that the premise of absolute control achieved only through self-flagellation and misery is attractive to the teenage psyche?


Heavy Metal is informed of this path, of birth, life and death. It is heavy exactly because of the weight of this realization. It is metal because it revolts to the path, it wildly gesticulates alternatives in full knowledge of their futility. It is intensely tragic, hope. This is a life in itself, that state of mind where beauty is eternally married to horror. The grace of such art is not easy to quantify but it is easy to feel. Romantic art does not inspire romantic act; We shall never conquer life through death, never destroy the old world to give birth to the new. Romantic art, taken literally and especially when looked upon with the eyes trained in modernity, is ridiculous. But what else is ridiculous is any true desire one feels in their heart and this is why we do not show each other our hearts easily. We are trained to scoff at romance in favor of some cynical, intellectually and emotionally bankrupt sense of 'realism' to which I am certain no human being alive truly adheres to. There is no real, but there are advantages to claiming otherwise.


Heavy Metal inspires one to abandon some of these advantages of participating in the play. Like a peculiar form of self-inflicted social autism, it asks naively, "Why be ashamed, what's there to lose but everything?". It pleads to unravel the romance in our hearts. Heavy Metal is an embarrassing thing and it's no wonder that, for those whose dalliance with it was limited, a need to put distance between themselves and that period, is a priority. As if to atone for their brief amour with romance itself. "I was momentarily deluded in my youth to think my youth would last forever, but I am older now and hear your voice clearly, outside."


The 3rd and the Mortal are very heavy here, but they are not crushing. Oftentimes, metal music is concerned with conveying weight and pressure with every element of its sound. Extreme shifts from fast to slow, lurching and uncoordinated to a machine-like unison crush, extremely loud to louder, all the while overflowing with minute surface information. The 3rd and the Mortal here are instead like anti-gravity. Airy and open to the point where one feels themselves suspend upwards, through the atmosphere and towards the greater darkness. It is there where nothing's left, where the boundaries between an external and internal journey are blurred. Like a sensory deprivation tank, the endless distance leaves only the inside for examination. "Painting on Glass" is a monument to the self-discovery that occurs in vacuum.


I want to inhale you like fresh air
But slowly you spin a cocoon and disappear
Let me open your seals and enter your garden
Let me seek to find your well
Then I'll sit down by the source
And wait for the deep secrets to reveal

I change with you
I extricate some threads
And make a place for you
Then I become you
And you become me


A useful lesson here for those that seek to make their own romantic art, especially Heavy Metal, is that the form is not as important as it might seem. What is important is the content and the intention it serves. It is too often that metal purists, disgusted as they exclaim to be with the state of modern metal, will revert their own stylistic efforts to some approximation of the genre tropes circa 1980. That music often succeeds or fails as Heavy Metal, but not because of its retro-conservative form but on whether it really has intentionally crafted aesthetic, philosophical and emotional impact as romantic art. Some people can only feel comfortable to explore romance when they're clad in denim and leather and spikes. Others - like The 3rd and the Mortal - do away with that dress code. At the time of their release, albums such as these were tagged as being 'avant garde' because they didn't fit in the existing metal canon. With the benefit of hindsight however, it is easy to trace a direct lineage from the aesthetics and concerns of Black Sabbath to them. There is nothing really 'avant garde' in the content of this album and it only serves to confuse the meaning of Heavy Metal itself to call anything that doesn't ape only its surface characteristics, something else.


That said, it is worthwhile to consider how The 3rd and the Mortal's trajectory through the arts did take them far away from metal in the end. In their next two albums (and in further offerings by resultant project 'The Soundbyte') the sonics slowly abandoned the riff as the morphological foundation and the lyrics became concerned increasingly with modern sociality and inevitably, reflections of life through the broken shards of post-modernity. There is a lot of merit in those recordings, but it goes to show that indeed it takes very little for something to become, or leave behind, metal. Romance and riffs, distortion and arrogance. The horror of loneliness and the salvation in individuality, the vilification of lust and the glorification of desire, order to chaos and order through chaos. Damnation and his beautiful sister. these are the ways to tell what Heavy Metal is. Once one knows what it inspires, they know what they desire.


Behind your door
Landscapes
Your name carved into a stone
Rivers
Water in your hands
Salvation