The first black metal album is considered to be Bathory’s ‘Under the Sign of the Black Mark’. Here, we see the emblems that come to be staples of the genre, thrashing guitars that underpin spiritual dissolution, Goya-style rams and pentagrams that dot the sonic landscape, archimedean shapes that pervert Elijah’s religious vision. Isn’t it funny that even the angels came to be made of wheels? No? Anyways, Four years later, in 1990, Bathory followed up with Hammerheart. Here, at the climax of the album, the high point both sonically and lyrically, the genre culminates with ‘One Rode to ASA bay’. The song is concerned with the native Scandinavians who, at the point of Catholic swords and fire, are forced to build a church. The same trees that were once sacred to the ancestors are uprooted and stripped of their divine qualities, colonised, repurposed, and fashioned into a new architecture of divinity; that of the church. The sky is boxed off to be called holy only when it shines through tinted windows. Hands are bound, enchained and covered in callouses as they pray at a new shrine.
At a 2002 Reading festival, the ‘Dillinger Escape Plan’ performed their set of tracks, frenetic, spiralling guitars that combined discordant time signatures with images of sanitariums, carnivals, baths, and holes of the body that burst into vomit. The lyrics here are disorientating, deliriant screams that fail to hold together a coherent image like that of the fiery church. Instead, the locus of the tracks are in the body, messy and bursting things, unresolved, only externalised with this: It was at the festival that the frontman, Greg Pucatio, defecated at the front of the stage and threw it onto the crowd. His waste, lyrically, bodily, lands amongst the pit.
There is a movement that exists between these two performances, the forceful imposition of a sacred exterior (the church), that is then internalised, believed and seen as natural, bodily, and only ruptured with the expulsion of excess waste. This movement from exterior architecture to interior boundaries, from the penetralia of the cathedral to the dissolution of the sick body, recalls Foucualt’s definition of transgression as a “profanation without object”, that is, a movement towards the limit of one’s own subjectivity, mediated through a collapse of these internalised beliefs. The binary between sacred and profane collapses when viewed to exist first as outside the body, by being externalised as waste and then reincorporated as music. The cosmic gives way to the gastrointestinal. The church, once a visible symbol of divine authority, collapses into the lining of the gut. Its liturgy is replaced with screams. It’s stained glass with bile. And the spiritual sickness that follows can only ever be perceived as something that comes from the outside and follows you, follows me, down dark alleyways with a lollipop in its hand. It tells me to love it when the sweets go down my mouth, but I can’t when there’s it’s just sleaze inside of you, sleaze inside of me.
And I let it in.
Occasionally, I start to seize in my bed at the body horror that exists just beyond my door. I can hear it gag and mourn and cough and moan. I can hear it repurpose its own organs into symbolic titles I am supposed to give it, provided I open my door and watch it watching me. Provided it tells me what goes on inside my own body, swimming about my torso. Presumably, it has x-ray vision.
I have not bathed in ten days now. My door leads to a hallway, which leads to that room it stays in, which I must cross if I try to get to the bathroom. I’ve made some kind of bet where I trade away that last ritual of personal hygiene just for some safety to not have to see it or think about it in anything but abstract, musical terms. The seizure is not worth the hassle. And so I refuse the outside liturgy of personal cleanliness, of purification and the colonialism of the sanitary. Besides, I can’t stand to look at it. When I was younger, it tried to put me in the hospital. I was too small to escape, its limbs wrapped like clingfilm around me, and the sheen of it all made me swim in my own filth; I found it a shame that the whole world might be more on its side. It called the process love. Anyways, it was a septic tank then, and wanted my body to be the shape of a church. It stripped me down until it was correct, whittled my bones into pews, my fingernails into stained glass. The process was more humiliating than it was painful, maybe, maybe not, but I had noticed that certain organs within me seemed to have no pain receptors. They just blushed as they were disembowelled. And I just blushed when I was embalmed. My waste was smeared across the walls of that little white cube.
Did I love it?
My friend stands outside of my door and asks me to open up, to count the holes in my body and forget each fibre that twitches in my neck. First off, let me say I’m fine, really, I’m fine, I’m just like this; it’s who I am really. And not worth thinking about any more than that. Sometimes people are born to be thrown away, a divine comedy, a little Gehenna that spins with the paint on the ceiling. Boo hoo. And I can’t stand to say this all to you behind a door but I won’t open it. Truthfully, I think that you might just be another grafted voice that the septic tank uses to lure me outside. Oh well. Sorry.
My friend asks me to take a bath. I picture a repugnant architecture of white cubes, down, and I imagine a porcelain basin. Again, did I love it?
At night, the sun stops dripping hot wax through my window. The small gap of freedom is interrupted with a smoke that follows me from the draught of my door, wisps of drunken grey will turn the ceiling black, looping like rings of cassette tape. After this, a small cleft of flesh will try to ooze through the bottom of my door, the wood will bulge and wane, and my seizing will grow worse. I will try to hold myself together. And with the last vestiges of strength I will throw a towel underneath the empty space between my door and that thing that circles me just outside. The tank will ooze it’s good news, the humming and huhing as it leaks into the towel. I will try to put on headphones but my pews will groan at the movement.
The possibility of an escape plan seems like a distant dream. I toss over and towards my laptop, where a faceless email asks me if the review is ready yet.
Here is my review:
Admiral Angry. Buster. Written sometime when the leads throat was filling up with fluid, Buster replicates the drowning sensation of cystic fibrosis; the landscape bubbles up with tar and explosive epithets, filth dominates the images of each track. Disgust is the primary emotion, disgust towards each person, towards the body, towards life itself. The album cover, a pallid green whorl, replicates those sterile mandalas that people look into for revelation, but look closer at the album and see only the black silhouette of a rabbit. Look for revelation and find only the stench of animals born to breed; look closely at anything and the vortex starts to consume you, genitals will spin around one another with tawdry, edging conversation, never getting to their point, never climaxing, accents will shift like tectonic plates orbiting around some bottomless pit. Towards you. I hope you’ll find it repulsive. We become content with the colonialism of etching our failings into that reproduced waste of ours: our kids, our victims, I mean. All the same. And it all reminds me of those old church fathers, celibate men like Saint Augustine who said ‘Inter faeces et urinam nascimur’. Translated from Latin, he said that man is born between urine and faeces. A life lived is revolting, in all ways, a revolution between the pharyngeal and fricative. Anything to avoid that natural interstice between the two sounds, it comes from outside in, creeping at first, then cascading as it follows you and I. Nothing stops this urge to heave. No seizing will hold it back. The fluid will fill our lungs each time.
I look at the email in the little text box. I think of sending it but what if it doesn’t make sense anymore, what if the reviews won’t be enough to escape, what if I am stuck with the septic tank forever? I should just give the album some boring score out of ten. I toss over and my pew fingers cross. The towel undulates slightly as it senses my movement. Ten. Nine. Eight.
I think of how much the words at the other end of the email might pay me if it even went through, the low level fame and how much closer I’d be to escaping. I try to divide the pay into fractions, then times it by how much I’d need to find another place to stay; I think of rent prices and housing bubbles and my dreams settle on a roommate. They start off human. They start off with a body. It expands outwards and around me, the plastic sheen of their limbs turning to machinery as they grow, a factory of distorted crossbeams, flying buttresses for elbows and pulsing vats for veins. They become a septic tank as they wrap me up. There is no escape. Not by doing the same thing again. I start to shake. Thought: disgust is boundary work.
Through the window, I can spot a manhole cover shake slightly. A thought comes to me, as if transmitted from the pig iron, a thought so perverse that I know it’ll work, a thought so clear that I know it’ll free me. How did I not see it before? My church-body shakes and I spend the night concluding with myself, drawing up plans and bidding goodbye to my worldly possessions. All I need are headphones to drown out the world, my laptop, and some safe replication of a bath. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.
At the last second, a church-body seizes at the thought of climbing through the window, rebellion against my decision to escape with its own actions. I feel the nerves short-circuit within the body, pulsing sparks of either ‘yes I should go’ or ‘no, stay’. Those latter sparks, the urge to stay, come to the body as music, an electric tremolo that hums in the rhythm of its trembling. I try to listen and I can hear it, the voice of the septic tank coming from somewhere inside of the body. I feel parts splitting apart, wires that start to coil and fray as they separate. I see the body stare back at me from the top of the window as I start to fall, down, down into the world and the manhole cover and the sewer beneath, seperated, divorced from the wan flesh.
Without my body, I swim my red innards down the industrial plug hole, seep like a sleazy ocean down and into the sewer. The thick, viscous fluid that is my being cascades through the narrow hole, I clench and narrow myself through grid iron bars. I pass k-holes and keyholes, ears and mouths and subterranean skeletons thick with rust. I think of my body still caught up in that room and feel a slight exhilaration. As if I escaped the church and the septic tank. Then a pang of shame: I could only escape by abandoning my body, only through sleaze and trailing down the sewer.
I comfort myself by telling the ooze that I had to do it, had no choice, if I had bathed then it would’ve gotten to me…
Through the goop of my tarry being, I feel the circuits of the laptop fizz, the half-digested wires connecting to my amoeba frame. I’ve got an email back. One that rejects my review, saying that songs I’ve commented on are not metal, not real metal, not pure metal. I ooze along, even the purity of metal rejecting me. The sewers hum like another septic tank. My headphones play ‘Unretrofied’. Dillinger. The sleaze that is my being shakes to the rhythm of wails and tom fills. It’s another seizure.
I am a word not confined to the waves of oil that make up my being, ineffable, I’m almost impossible to translate. I don’t want to be. All I need is the mouth, before the point where it learns language, before it boxes itself into the order of sentences. I am what sticks to fingers after the Eucharist rots, what sinks into the carpet and the banal plumbing of the skin, between the organs and right at the tip of the tongue; the kind of thing all hierarchy spits out to keep itself safe. I speak in curdled mucous and distortion pedals, sleaze par excellence; I need to cling to a set of sharp, white teeth. I am the plaque inside of everyone.
I try to review anything and it becomes my own oily being, an ethnography of sleaze. Let me try regardless. ‘Women are gaping holes’, Sartre wrote for a Nobel prize. His reading of Freud was all about holes, depth, the plumbing hands of children who only grow by exploring absences and filling them with their presence. Holes. He might’ve gone on stage and just repeated that nearly-Christian word time and time again, holes, wholes, holes; he might’ve stood up and wait for that moment for the pharyngeal to loosen to the fricative, try and find that space in between the two sounds. That’s why people repeat themselves ad nausuem, which, even the phrase ad nausuem is one of those pretty Latin things. It means “to the point of vomit”. Why repeat yourself? Only to wait for the moment that the boring symbols of language break down and whatever point you’re trying to prove is finally shown with the retching chunks of truth that spew from your throat. Open up, say the little dictators of the world, the mothers and Gods, open up and pretend that it is something more than sleaze and plaque inside of you.
I look down at my sleaze-body. It is a map of the grates that I have passed through. Despite everything, I do not feel grateful to keep going. In time, maybe you will stop hearing riffs and start hearing the organs processing trauma.
Another attempt. One of the albums from Dillinger, ‘Miss Machine’ kills fascists by gurgling their riffs mixed with curdled milk, clenches fists between Tom of Finland and those ‘genuine’ Hugo Boss uniforms, flirts with that colonial order of bodies by sucking it in and spitting it out. All men are leatherboys. The word itself, man, is the same organised militarism as a gimp suit; get rid of it, break it down until it loosens into chunks of dejected waste. Kill the order of holes and seepage, the hierarchy of clenched upright uniforms and performative identities. The album cover is a cut-up set of images: the body of a woman cut into part-objects, air conditioners and ventilators and CCTV cameras interspersed with the broken body. It all means nothing to ask me to open up, to call me holes, you colonist, you penetrating machine. It all means nothing to ask me to subject myself to the order of baths and cleansing rituals, the structural purity of every uptight oppression. The escape plan is this: to become waste, to flow, to ooze through the structures designed to keep me contained, to pass through the manhole.
Cited
[Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell University Press, 1977.]
[Augustine. (2006). Confessions (R. S. Pine-Coffin, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 397–400).]
[Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Washington Square Press, 1992.]