HOW TO BUILD A WORLD IN 25 SECONDS, HOW TO BUILD A WORLD IN 25 YEARS

HOW TO BUILD A WORLD IN 25 SECONDS,

HOW TO BUILD A WORLD IN 25 YEARS

by CRAIG DATHE

During the last set of the night the stage turned into a tarmac. Throughout the set’s hour-and-a-half long duration dozens and dozens of people, of all shapes and sizes and in all sorts of attire, lifted off from the stage’s edge. They arrived from the back of the crowd on a wave of raised hands, trotted over to another side of the stage, maybe did a little spastic dance along the way, and then threw themselves off into the human mass. The constant flying of bodies didn’t slow for even one moment of the set. The band playing hardly ever had the stage to themselves. But they didn’t look frustrated, nor did they try to ignore their many guests. On the contrary, as they played they watched the crowd and the stage-divers with expressions that communicated an astonished gratitude. They frequently smiled to themselves and to each other, and sometimes gave one of their guests a hand up onto the stage or a healthy push back into the crowd. You see, to this band, the stage-divers weren’t guests at all. The band’s placement onstage and the crowd’s on the floor, as opposed to the other way around, was rather arbitrary to them in many ways. No one owned the stage except the venue. And so the band was delighted to see so many of those in attendance understand that fact, understand it and feel empowered by it to take their rights into their own

hands. The band was already happy for having created a world for themselves with their music; tonight they felt honored to get to watch a few hundred others make that world their own.

A live-music phenomenon like the one described above is rare, but it’s not a complete anomaly. Something similar can be found every week at shows all over the world, especially in the realms of punk and hardcore. Why then is this night’s set so notable? Because the bands who play shows where the bodies fly and all the hierarchies dissolve—punk and hardcore bands mostly, as I’ve said—usually last no more than a few years, if that. Sometimes they get back together for reunions, which are awesome in their own way, but those fresh starts are just that: the band ended and now they are beginning again, or simply memorializing their past. The band described above, the Massachusetts group Converge, has been playing vicious sets on human tarmacs for twenty-two years, and they released their eighth album in October of this year. Over more than two decades they have forged musical landscape after musical landscape on their LPs, brought those LPs to people all over the globe, and in the process have helped others to build their own worlds, worlds that are of the music but beyond it as well.

Converge was not alone in releasing an album this October—in fact, to many a listener’s immense gratitude, three other prime world-builders unveiled new landscapes during that month: Enslaved, Pig Destroyer, and the mighty Neurosis. In these next pages I will consider how each of these four collectives have built their worlds, and perhaps find occasion to muse on how we might apply their methods in our own lives. These four groups tend to play music in the heavier and more aggressive realms of expression, but I’m less interested here in simply rating and reviewing music than in offering a meditation on several methods of experience, methods that I believe will prove beneficial regardless of one’s preference in genre, style, etc.

ENSLAVED HAVE LONG been for me the ultimate astronauts in contemporary rock music. The band has existed since 1991 (as long as I’ve been alive) and has been releasing material from their home-nation of Norway since 1994. Throughout their career the band has always woven certain threads into the fabric of their music—namely a fascination with the folk heritage and landscape of their homeland, a wellspring of inspiration that manifests in the lyrics and the tone of their work— but the band has refused to stand still for even a moment of their twenty-one years. The first half of their oeuvre includes some bona fide gems, including the secondwave black metal masterpiece Frost (1994), but by the beginning of the 21st century Enslaved had become increasingly difficult to classify. They had managed to take the grim, frostbitten black metal that they helped to invent and blend it with progressive rock’s ambition (think Yes, Pink Floyd) and psychedelia’s time-and-space-warping atmospheric powers (Hawkwind, the Zombies). And by 2003, when their album Below the Lights dropped, they had become unfuckwithable.

Since then Enslaved have released five albums, and while a couple in the middle of that run (Ruun, Vertebrae) don’t quite come together, the band has never failed to innovate on the advances of their previous endeavor. RIITIIR, which came out on the same day as Converge’s new LP this October, show Enslaved at the very height of their powers: majestic, explosive, meditative and philosophical. Among the most impressive of their achievements on the album is how far they’ve come in developing their poetics of past and future, of astrology and space travel. They’ve succeeded in absorbing the pagan Scandinavian spirituality that they live by and have brought it alive and well into the 21st century. This is no nostalgia trip or antiquary exercise, as most contemporary pagan expression is. This is the record of a vital struggle between celestial powers and modernity, of an epic confrontation between the stars that we orbit and the stars that predict our destiny. No small feat, since those stars are often one and the same. It’s the forces of

nature at war with themselves. And also, it’s the forces of one’s mind at war with themselves. Enslaved’s chronicle takes place as much in the heart as it does in the void. Taken as a whole, the album provides us with a map of how one might shape their mind in order to think and feel freely in a world hostile to one’s worldview, pagan or otherwise. “Sacrificing remnants of the past / Walking all on my own forever ... / ... The illusion no longer needed / It is spoken without words of doubt / Now, we move the stars above, below.” “The grip of anxiety / Shall strangle the brave no more.” It’s a map that many of us can use, and in many different life contexts.

While the methods of thought here show us how to live freely in the 21st century, the music that drives the album throws the listener into the 23rd. It’s an absolutely exhilarating listen. Stunning vistas blow by you in five different dimensions, stopping and starting on a dime, dissolving only to burst out of left field at a gallop. The songs are as meticulously crafted as a symphonic composition, and equally rich in melody. These guys evoke tones and colors with their instruments that I’ve never heard anywhere else, and they do so with only five members, not with an entire orchestra. And keyboardist Herbrand Larsen’s vocals have truly entered a plane all their own. I can’t quite put a finger on how they can be at once so meditative and so catchy. His refrains, and the landscapes that he foregrounds, stick in my mind for days on end after only a single listen.

Enslaved don’t build community like Converge do— the Norwegians are veteran entertainers onstage, playing everything from their newest material to their oldest demos, but few fans wear Enslaved’s name on their sleeves as a motto like those in Converge’s following. I don’t think Enslaved particularly mind, but it’s a shame in a way. They make music just as worthy of living by.

WHILE ENSLAVED ARE a prime example of effective maximalism—there isn’t a single song shorter than five minutes on RIITIIR—Pig Destroyer are about as lean as they come. They’re often associated with the world of grindcore, one of the most vicious strains of music ever invented. The typical grindcore album runs for about 20 minutes, and when it’s over you’ve had the shit completely kicked out of you. It’s an absolutely necessary mode of expression, even if few people ever venture into its sonic realm. Without such master practitioners of vitriol in our midst we would not have access to our full range of anger and outrage, essential emotions to being human, despite what your typical warm-fuzzy kindergarten cop might say. Some of the most powerful protests ever expressed, both social and political, have been on grindcore albums. But in the same way that Enslaved are of black metal but so much more than it and Converge are the sons of hardcore but far more expansive than the word “hardcore” could describe, Pig Destroyer employ the tools of grindcore to write music of astonishing emotional dynamism. Love, power, doubt, contempt, ecstasy, all packed into songs often less than a minute in length, careening like a downed fighter jet right into your skull. You don’t easily forget listening to a Pig Destroyer album.

Once you’re hooked though, as many people have become over the past ten years, you’re often left waiting for years to get your next fix. Enslaved have 12 LPs in their 21-year career, with a handful of shorter releases thrown in for good measure; Converge have eight LPs in 22 years, which seems sparse, but they’ve released a new album every 2-to-3 years since 1994. Pig Destroyer, however, has only released five proper full-lengths since 1997. This October’s album, Book Burner, is the first LP they’ve put out in five years.

Whether Book Burner stands up to its predecessor Phantom Limb is difficult to say. The latter is easily one of the best heavy-music records produced in the last decade, and the former has found Pig Destroyer with a more

streamlined approach, which many have construed as a step backwards for the group. But I’m not interested here in making hairsplitting comparisons: the fact of the matter is that Pig Destroyer’s seething blasts offer a gripping new way of world-building. Scott Hull and J.R. Hayes are the masterminds here. Hull composes virtually all the music himself and is in a league of his own as a guitarist, his fretwork devising methods of warping space and time in a new way every thirty seconds without ever losing a drop of its savagery. It’s inspiring to hear him work so much variety and innovation into one of the most restrictive musical traditions. At his best he can build a labyrinth out of a 40-second song, rewarding re-listens like the best poetry rewards re-readings. And Hull has the verbal poet to his sonic poet in J.R. Hayes. A recent press release dubs Hayes “the poet laureate of extreme metal,” and for once the advertising copy actually has something meaningful to say. He’s less a lyricist and more a full-time literary artist. The man writes constantly and reads voraciously—the influences of William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Cooper and even Charles Baudelaire are evident in his work—and nothing is off-limits. Songs about serial killers are common in metal, but Hayes’s serial killers are unforgettable, and emotionally complicated. He maps self-loathing with devastating accuracy. And just as Hull has streamlined the music, Hayes has proven that he can strip down even further and still maintain his impact. Take “Totaled”: The bulldozer needs to push something over. If I were a house The state would’ve condemned me. Beware of God.

Forget lyricists—how many writers period can connect the personal with the social and the political as deftly as this, and in only twenty words? Book Burner proves that he can play the long game as well: one version of the album includes a short story he wrote entitled The Atheist, about a biology teacher living in a dystopian theocracy.

So bravery and dynamism under pressure is the name of Pig Destroyer’s game. J.R.’s courage in holding nothing back empowers others to do the same, and thus in a way makes others’s full self-expression possible. And Scott’s dedication to pushing aggressive guitar playing to its outer limits and beyond keeps an entire musical discipline vital, and proves that this instrument so essential to today’s world culture still has untapped possibilities. Those of us who use music to express ourselves, take heart: with discipline, you can find the sounds that you need.

PERHAPS EVEN MORE highly anticipated than Book Burner was an album that dropped at the end of October: Neurosis’s Honor Found In Decay. One could write a book on Neurosis and their influence on music—actually, I’m surprised that no one has—but here’s the short of it. In 1985, four guys founded Neurosis in Oakland, California, looking to play hardcore punk with a crust influence. Over the next five years they borrowed from Amebix, Killing Joke and Swans to innovate a new strain of hardcore, influencing a number of bands themselves

in the process. But from 1992 to the turn of the century something clicked into place for Neurosis. Not even the band knows what it is, and they are highly respectful of that unknowing, refusing to analyze or intellectualize in any way.

What they and we do have, however, are four records from that period—Souls at Zero, Enemy of the Sun, Through Silver in Blood and Times of Grace—which invented a truly visionary mode of musical expression. Brooding, tribal, ritualistic, harrowing, and monumental, the records document both deeply personal turmoil as well as the destruction and creation of gods, landscapes, planets. Times of Grace perfected their inimitable methods of transmission, including a lyrical vernacular all their own, one based in the imagery of soil, smoke, fire and a broken humankind. Their albums since then have explored the depths of that worldview in a number of different directions. And unlike Converge, who abdicate any aspirations to authority in the live setting, Neurosis seek to dominate it visually as well as aurally. Their ranks include a full-time visual artist who creates a cinematic accompaniment for the performance, a live experience specially designed to break you down until you let go of all intellect and receive the music unfiltered. If this sounds somewhat mystical you’re probably right, and Neurosis aren’t ashamed to speak in those terms, if they must speak at all about their work. But after all, like the summary on the back of the book, any words about them are entirely secondary and only useful in helping to convince the wary to lay down their lives for an hour and give a Neurosis LP their undivided attention.

So why write about Neurosis at all? Because they offer us another method of building worlds, and a very important one at that. Enslaved teach us how to build landscapes as stages for our inner conflicts and to embrace the complexities that result; Pig Destroyer teach us to be brave and uncensored in our expression, and that even rage contains a thousand different shades— all we need to do is examine ourselves carefully, and meticulously craft our expressions of what we discover. That goes for all meaningful expression, not just “artistic” ones. Neurosis adds to this masterclass by teaching us to shut the fuck up. Don’t rationalize, don’t even think at all. Instead simply listen. Listen very, very closely. The most elemental aspects of ourselves won’t shout over all the noise to get our attention. Neurosis knows this, and it’s evident in their music that their methods are borne of silence. They demonstrate that when we make the effort to listen, to confront ourselves at square one, the rewards we reap can be earth-shattering. Every one of their albums is an experiment in naked, fundamental experience. Truth be told, I haven’t found Honor Found In Decay to be quite as affecting as some of their previous efforts. But it came out only a few weeks ago as of this writing, and a Neurosis album takes time to settle in. And besides, with 10 albums in 27 years, and most of them all but perfect, they’ve already done their part.

I WOULD LIKE to return to Converge here as I conclude. So much can be said of them—their perseverance, their discipline, their craftsmanship. How three years after Axe to Fall, their best album since the soul-flooring Jane Doe, they produced the perfect next musical step for their career in All We Love We Leave Behind, an effort that homes their focus in on the art of the song instead of the album and produces one of their most gripping and complex observations yet. How despite all of those complexities these four guys can get onstage and play every song perfectly amidst a sky full of flying punks. Like Neurosis, whole volumes could and probably should be written on Converge. But what can these Massachusetts luminaries contribute to our October masterclass in world-building?

Their most significant lessons: compassion and dedication. Most of us probably knew a straight edge kid or two in high school, but how many of them stayed dedicated to their principles into their mid-thirties? Three of the four Converge members have been straight edge since childhood. The particular strictures of straight edge aren’t important here: what’s important is the lifelong dedication to a strict code, a code that most corners of American society seeks to corrupt, a code that forces you to make choices about how you think and act every day. The choosing is what’s essential: to choose one must be aware, and for Converge an aware life is the only life worth living. And the compassion and gratitude Converge express in their shows translates into the rest of their musical lives. Every member is an active participant in the community they’ve helped to build, a community composed of listeners as well as creators. Singer Jacob Bannon helps run Deathwish Records, the hardcore label par excellence, and designs some of the best artwork in aggressive music, and guitarist Kurt Ballou runs GodCity studio, an institution whose recording history speaks for itself: Cave In’s Until Your Heart Stops; Blacklisted’s Heavier Than Heaven, Lonelier Than God; almost everything by Trap Them. Nate Newton and Ben Koller play in other projects and contribute to their friends’s recordings. And the albums the four of them have forged together document their awareness and compassion well. Take Jacob Bannon’s lyrics from “Sadness Comes Home” on All We Love:

There’s no such thing as good enough For arctic eyes and hard earned rust I’ve grown tired of counting odds To somehow make things even

It’s not always easy. And so Converge have no sympathy for those who give in, and no remorse for those who stand in their way. See “Coral Blue”:

Swam out to sea To try and be me To drown those that Thought they could never sink When in the deep Weakness is easy to read... ...Swam out to see What karma would bring Its jaws crashed down On drowning bodies around me When in the deep Weakness is easy to read

Real compassion doesn’t waste its time. And real compassion will keep you on top of your game twentytwo years later, upright and eyes wide open, still learning and still fighting. Enslaved, Pig Destroyer, and Neurosis’s new albums this fall each offer us some essential methods for life, but above all, if you follow Converge’s model, you’ll not only be able to build worlds your way: you’ll also be in the best of company.<

Craig Dathe finds bodies of water and then throws rocks very, very high into the air above them.

CRAIG DATHE