Last year, the intended culmination of The Batlord's Torture Chamber was to have been this artiste, and both he and Frownland gleefully told me they were sitting back awaiting my complete nervous and psychological breakdown, as well as perhaps losing control of my bodily functions. I'll be honest: going into the thing, I was scared. I had prepared myself for the worst, and every moment I flinched in anticipation of ... I don't know ... something ... happening. But it never did. The album finished, I heaved a sigh of relief and asked incredulously, was that it? Was that what I had feared, been threatened with, had nightmares about experiencing? That?
That? That had been a cakewalk!
So amazed were they that Frownland actually (I assume either in jest or just disbelief, and as a way to explain to himself my totally unexpected reaction) accused me of only having pretended to have listened to the album, which is why I now intend to delve further into the music that was supposed to emotionally scar me. In fact, I'm doing a
as I attempt to answer the question that was on many lips last year: did I accidentally listen to the wrong album (no I did not) and was this some kind of twisted fluke that the universe throws up from time to time, where Batty had chosen an album I should have hated, but had inadvertently chosen the wrong one, or at least the one least likely to affect me? Well that is possible, and it's a question I'm now pondering and indeed endeavouring to test as I listen to three completely different albums from the one-man horror show who goes by the stage name of
Interestingly, in preparation for this odyssey into darkness, I've been reading what I can about the man who is to black metal and dark ambient music what Merzbow is to noise rock, but I've foudn it rather difficult to ge ttoo much information on him. I know his name is Maurice deJong, comes from Surinam but is resident in the Netherlands (appropriately enough!) and goes by the single name of Mories. I know he does all this music himself --- composes, writes, produces, plays and sings everything with no input from anyone else --- and that he has occasionally partnered up with other artistes on “split” albums, all of which have given him a catalogue comprising a staggering thirty-four releases (including EPs, some of which are as long as his albums, and splits but not including compilations) over the course of a mere ten years.
With such a wealth of material available it's hard to know what to pick, but I've tried to go for as varied a selection as is possible, given my lack of knowledge about the man and his music. Were I not an Iron Maiden fan, I would have no idea that for instance
Powerslave is a far superior album to
Virtual XI, or that the debut self-titled bears little resemblance to their new release. In the same way, I have very little on which to base my decision, so I've tried not to shy from the longer albums, nor let the titles put me off. I've also noticed that though GTT tends to concentrate on some pretty horrible topics (necrophilia, scatology, bondage etc) the music, at least from my own extremely limited experience, does not seem to mirror that in terms of lyrics, so that for instance you may be about to listen to a song which is titled “Human skin for the messenger's robe” or “Healing open wounds with salt”, but the music does not seem as if it will consist of a man singing about those subjects.
Rather, it seems that Mories is more interested in creating an ambience, a feeling, an overall atmosphere of dread, fear, revulsion and insanity, reflecting what he believes to be the general image of the human condition. As he said in an interview I read, and as I remarked in my piece on Cattle Decapitation in one of my other journals, “I hate humanity and yet I am a human”. Paradox or what? So I think it would appear that in his latter years, Mories has become a little more relaxed, a little less angry and liable to rant at everything and see only the darkness, and perhaps his music will reflect this, as we will see later, when we look into his very latest release, only out this year.
Then again of course, there could be those of you who are very familiar with his music sitting back and laughing to themselves about how I have no idea what I am getting myself into. And you may be right. When I listened to
An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood last year, maybe I was lucky. I had set myself up for it to be so horrible, so unendurable, so soul-destroying, that maybe I oversold it to myself, and as a result the reality was nowhere near as bad as the imagination made me feel it would be. Maybe I heard the easiest of his albums to digest, maybe i twas dumb luck or bad (from their point of view) judgement on the part of Batty and Frown, and maybe I am in fact about to descend into a hell I will regret ever setting foot in. Everything I've read about his albums speaks of the kind of music I hate --- noise, shrieks, black metal, off-tuned instruments, drums out of sequence, movie clips coming and going --- and yet, I remember quite enjoying the album I did hear and being really surprised it wasn't worse. So who knows what I'll find?
Here I go then. Down into the pit I go; will I emerge with my sanity intact? Will I even make it through one album, never mind three? Or will I wish I had never heard of Gnaw Their Tongues, wish I had not been so cocky and overconfident? I guess in a few hours' time I'll know; we all will.
But remember this: if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Spit At Me and Wreak Havoc On My Flesh --- Gnaw Their Tongues --- 2006 (Independent)
I suppose if we're going to take a trip through Hell, we had better buy our ticket at the ticket booth, in other words, start at the beginning. This was the first offering from GTT and it certainly has an abrasive and disturbing title, but what is the actual music like? As this is this first effort, and by his own admission, he was really angry and desolate at the start, I'm expecting this to be pretty black, dissonant, off-putting.
Hmm. Well, neither of my two streaming services have it (though they have others by him) so that's a little disquieting. Was it considered too graphic, too abrasive, too dark for them to carry? I guess it's off to YouTube then. Ah, they never let me down. But will I be praising or cursing them some fifty minutes from now, I wonder? We open on the sound of dripping water, presumably in a dungeon or cellar somewhere, then dark organ cuts in, sort of off-key and a voice says something but I don't know what. This then is the start of “A burned offering”, and it runs for just over eight minutes. Now chaotic percussion crashes in with what sounds like orchestral keys, the sounds of a woman crying and somewhere in there an audio clip from some movie I presume. It's certainly upped the intensity now as guitar drives the tune, although just as I say that it slows right down on kind of nails-on-blackboard guitar and then exploding screamed vocals. Kind of a doom metal thing happening now, grindy and black and very slow, while at the same time other elements are racing along. We're three minutes in.
Everything fades away now and we can hear the water dripping again with just a single guitar strumming, then a spoken vocal --- sounds like he's describing a black mass maybe --- I've looked for the lyrics to this album but probably unsurprisingly there are none available, so unless I can really make something out I can't comment on the lyrics themselves. The music, meanwhile, has now taken up a sort of dramatic, powerful orchestral punch which is pretty sweet, with some effects and sounds going on too, and we're now almost at the end, seven minutes in. Big ambient kind of echoey sound like walking backwards out of a cathedral as the sound of the mass recedes behind you, and then into the title track. A heavy feedback guitar merges with crashing drums to almost create the sound of breaking glass, and I guess that's a screeched vocal going on; that gets deeper and darker in a few seconds, and it's a big roar like a wounded beast or a soul cast into the Pit for all eternity.
Now there's ambient synth that brings in a sort of choral vocal before the guitar smashes back in with a really powerful, even catchy riff before it fades out and almost cushioned drums take over, with dark ambient chanting and wind sounds, the drumbeat hitting about once every twenty seconds or so, very slow and precise, like a metronome or a clock measuring out the minutes. Looks like it will continue in this mode up to the end, as there's only about a minute to go. Oh, the drums stopped completely and we're left with the dark chanting. Next up is “Stabmovement and skinning essay”, another feedback guitar with an audio clip playing over it, something from the Bible maybe, hard to say. Harder guitar now in a doom metal vein, very slow and crushing, joined by drumming and now someone is speaking again, but I have no idea what he's saying. Something about surgical procedure. I guess given the title we're talking scientifically about skinning a body. Nice.
This is pretty cool. There's just the hard, smashing guitar and some percussion while the narrator goes on with his lecture. Sounds like violins now, very frenetic and urgent, very classical, an organ (hah!) in there too I believe, maybe. Hard to be sure, as there seems to be a lot going on. Some of this could also be sampled music I guess. The lecture (essay?) has now stopped, and we have dark, hollow sounds and now a quote from the Bible, think it's about The Great Flood. More violins, which is funny as he's now saying “The Earth is filled with violence” but he could be saying “violins”! Sounds like the theme from some old Hollywood movie now, then sort of native drums, played very fast, a dark breathing voice as we head towards the end of the piece (Earth's last breath?) and into “... Gnaw their tongues in pain”, a Biblical quote and I guess where Mories got his inspiration for the name for his project.
A massive drumroll opens this with what sounds like --- I don't know --- lasers firing? Probably some guitar effect, who knows, but it certainly gives the impression of an apocalyptic end approaching. More speech; whether it's Mories or taped audio I don't know. Big roaring scream (which I assume is Mories) and a great guitar riff playing now. Sounds like quotes from Revelations now against a hammering sound and echoey drums, finishes on a choral vocal and slower, but still echoed drums and the title repeated to end. “Healing open wounds with salt” is probably the most straightforward brutal track I've heard on this album yet. It just explodes across the speakers with a raw, visceral, almost (well, completely) unintelligible snarled vocal and guitars that just break your neck and then come back to check and make sure you're dead, stomping on your face and then dropping their trousers to dump on you for good measure. If there's a track I don't like on this album then this is it. Just don't see anything in it. Energetic, yes, brutal certainly, aggressive without a doubt, but no real structure that I can see, unlike the rest of his material.
At least it's only three minutes long, the shortest track on the album, and leads into the penultimate, “Seven heads and ten horns”, which quite in contrast to the previous track starts .... exactly like it. Crazy, frenzied drumming and shuddering guitar, but this time there's another audio track going (is that Mories talking, just reading the stuff out? I don't know, but I get the feeling it's samples) with some keyboard thrown into the mix. This one is longer, a full eight minutes and change, and certainly amps up the energy on the album. There's a strangely hypnotic, almost reassuring quality though about this track that the other one did not possess.I can't explain it; I'm sure it's meant to horrify, disturb, scare, but it does none of these things for me. Now we have what sounds like slow, dull explosions going off one by one and a dying echo. More Biblical quotation as the echoes continue; this time the audio sample (if such it is) is double-tracked so that it sounds like two people speaking, one a half second behind the other.
Now we have that fast, native-style drumming, like bongos or congas or some goddamn thing anyway, and a chant which sounds like it's mostly female voices, a spitting guitar and now faster, harder percussion as the tempo from the beginning of the song returns in the last few minutes. Really builds up to, again, a totally hypnotic rhythmic crescendo and then just fades away, ushering in the final, and longest track, “Death, suffering and death”. Low, muted, echoing sounds with what appears to be slow breathing, a few ringing guitar notes and then another audio sample, a woman's voice, who talks about drugs, alcohol and becoming a hooker, before a snarling guitar kicks her out of the way and the Biblical quotes come back in. Tiny taps on the drums and a few louder kicks of the bass drum, then a big snarl which elongates like a dark snake out over the music and the continuing speech. Then the speech falls away and in a very interesting piece of juxtapositioning, a sort of male choral vocal backs the screeching roar as the guitar pounds away slowly. Oh, there's the Biblical stuff again, but it's very hard to hear over the loud music, which is now fading back and the voice is getting louder until there is only the speech, with bells pealing slowly behind him. Now a woman's voice is giving out about some people who “deny God”, though she doesn't say who “they” are: unmarried mothers and gays, probably.
The bells counterpoint everything she speaks about, and there's a deep, rolling kind of feedback or effect going on too. Now someone is whispering, a male voice, as she still goes on, and now a guitar is taking charge as both sets of voices fall away and we move into the final two or three minutes. Oh, she's still rambling on: just we can't really make her out over the guitar. Just as well, say I. Finally she shuts up and we're left with the guitar kind of groaning out feedback to the end.
TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS
1. A burned offering
2. Spit at me and wreak havoc on my flesh
3. Stabmovement and skinning essay
4 ... Gnaw their tongues in pain
5. Healing open wounds with salt
6. Three heads and ten horns
7. Death, suffering and death
In much the same way as I was nonplussed by
An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood (the thing that most affected me was the title) I find this debut album by GTT to be interesting but not anything I would shrink from listening to. I of course don't know what future releases from him are like, and truth be told, this could be the “easy” album, if such a thing exists. But considering that he says himself that he is mellowing in his older age, I would think the music would reflect that, be less angry, less cacophonic, less chaotic, so that as each album is released you should find a slightly gentler, more acceptable and accessible tone to them. Could be totally wrong and the next album could wreck my head of course, but so far so good.
I'd also like to take a moment to talk about the album cover. Given how lurid and visceral, even downright disgusting, some of the later ones are, this one is oddly sterile. Showing as it does what I thought at first to be an ambulance but can now see to be a morgue freezer, it fails to inspire the kind of horror and revulsion that, say,
Eschatological scatology (where we're headed next) does. Maybe he engaged another artist down the line, or just realised the cover wasn't controversial enough, or maybe conversely he thought it was
too controversial, rooted as it is in what we would see to be an everyday object, and not a vision of Hell. Or at least, Amsterdam. Whatever, I just think the cover is nowhere near as scary or shudder-inducing as other, later albums are, so maybe I have it all wrong. If the progression of his album covers mirrors that of his music, then I could be in big trouble!
But so far, my sanity remains intact and I haven't yet had to change my underwear. Whether that will remain the case after the next album, we'll know soon enough. One down, two to go and I'm still kicking. For now.