BURNING AMBULANCE #5 OUT NOW!

The latest issue of Burning Ambulance is out. It features a cover story on New York improvising funk/rock/jazz/hip-hop/other music ensemble Burnt Sugar; interviews with saxophonist Marcus Strickland, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, and Swans founder Michael Gira; a profile of improvising guitarist/composer and former Burnt Sugar member Morgan Craft; a black metal roundtable featuring members of Averse Sefira, Infernal Stronghold, Krallice, Krieg, Lightning Swords of Death, Panopticon, Xibalba, and Yaotl Mictlan; an essay on Cecil Taylor; an essay on the nature of time in music; and a look back at Monte Hellman's movie Two-Lane Blacktop, 40 years later.

As always, the print edition is $10 for a handsome perfect-bound paperback; the ebook version (compatible with Nook and just about every other e-reader on the market) is $5; and the Kindle version is a mere $3.

Why not pick one up today?

LITURGY

I've got a longish feature on the Brooklyn-based black metal-ish band Liturgy in the Summer 2011 issue of Signal to Noise. I'm not gonna put the whole thing here; you should buy the magazine. But here are a few paragraphs, to give you some idea of its tone:

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's core idea, that black metal is fundamentally European in outlook and thus requires philosophical reshuffling in order to be relevant to American life and culture, is certainly defensible. This has been true of other musical movements in the past; contrast, say, the Sex Pistols' declaration of "No Future" with Black Flag's determination to "Rise Above." Compare the fatalistic doom of Black Sabbath when they were 100% English to the heroic mythmaking of their second lineup, with Italian-Americans Ronnie James Dio and Vinny Appice on vocals and drums, respectively. The wintry nihilism of black metal as performed by its Scandinavian creators—Mayhem, Enslaved et al.—is only minimally applicable to American sensibilities. Consequently, US black metal acts like Nachtmystium and Black Anvil add elements of punk, industrial and Goth in order to give the music a rock-star edge it would otherwise lack.

Hunt-Hendrix's use of the word "transcendental" is misleading, though. He seems to be primarily talking about transcending the limitations of black metal as a musical genre and set of philosophical concepts—actual links to Transcendentalism are minimal. The closest thing modern America has to the 19th Century Transcendentalists are the Amish, or maybe some super-committed hippies, militant environmentalists, et cetera. There are black metal musicians who have taken the genre's embrace of paganism and primeval nature in that direction, most notably the Pacific Northwest-based group Wolves in the Throne Room, whose members live on a collective farm in the woods. But Hunt-Hendrix is a city kid, and he wants no part of this kind of rejectionism. "I'm not interested in pre-industrial ideals," he says. "The more technology and science the better."

...

Of course, it's possible to argue that black metal itself is essentially anti-metal, that the qualities it emphasizes—obscurantism, lack of catharsis (blast beats aside, the guitar riffs seem to hover in place rather than galloping forward), crude sound quality—are precisely the opposite of metal as it's been known since the late 1970s, when bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were first forging a unique sound out of the ashes of the heavy blues-rock scene. Black metal rejects the strutting godhood of arena-sized metal, and the use of makeup puts them into a weirdly androgynous performative space occupied mostly by, yes, Kiss and the other glam-rockers of the 1970s (from stars like David Bowie and Alice Cooper to also-rans like T.Rex and Jobriath). Is black metal itself androgynous, and is Hunt-Hendrix, with his shrieks that are sometimes more like the yelps of a startled Girl Scout, playing into that?

POSTED WITHOUT COMMENT

(Title of image file: Satanic_Illumination02.jpg. No, really.)

Direct quote from a press release I got today:

"The forthcoming SARGEIST album took us more than five years to make. After two albums, the standard we had raised was needed to be met with a liturgy surpassing the previous works, and for that reason alone, it took such a long time to complete the new work. Finally, when everything started to fall in place, it didn't take long. Lyrically, Let the Devil In is a continuation of the heinous path we had chosen - that of black magic, necromancy, and worship of Satan. The result is definitely the strongest of SARGEIST yet, taking all the assets of our past with a new Satanic illumination."