Tag Archives: Music

Music I Love: “Suicidal Emotions”, Abyssic Hate (2001)

Deliberately blurred – the cover is extremely graphic.

Deliberately blurred – the cover is extremely graphic.

Apologies if this is not to everyone’s taste; it pretty much qualifies as extreme black metal. You won’t find it on iTunes, and probably won’t find it on Amazon. It’s utterly bleak, horrifically depressing and extremely explicit metal, and even today it’s not something I can bring myself to listen to very often. However, there was a point in my life when this epitomized everything I was feeling, and allowed me to drown in an empty world of utter loathing and blackness.

Abyssic Hate is (possibly was) a one-man project from Australia, created by someone called Shane Rout. A misanthrope if ever there was one, he once said in interview that he believed “99% of all humans ought to be exterminated”. In the mid ’90s he released a number of demo tapes with such lovely titles as Cleansing of an Ancient Race. Then in 2001 the production values stepped and he released his one and only full-length LP, Suicidal Emotions. There have been no further releases since then, and no further word on Shane or Abyssic Hate since 2005. The website is defunct, and Google searches provide essentially nothing. I suspect it’s very likely that he’s now dead.

The track listing is unsurprisingly disheartening: Depression Part I, Betrayed, Depression Part II, Despondency. Here’s a short excerpt of his lyrics:

I think about life and feel pure hate about being trapped here on this earth

Envying all deceased souls who’ve passed on from this ruined plane

My dormant hours are filled with fear, my waking hours I will not face

All will to live has expired

I just want to f***ing die!

Depression Part II – Abyssic Hate, 2001

The average song length is around 12 minutes, and the music itself is extremely distorted and droning, changing and evolving throughout each song incredibly slowly. The ending track, Despondency, ends with an atmospheric outro, eerie synthesizers and unsettling clinking, as though of someone despairingly hammering at shackles that will never break.

And with all of this, I really feel like I should explain my attraction to this music. I imagine to most people it would be pretty much unlistenable. To me there is a comfort to the constant droning, an escape into mindlessness and a drowning in the comfort of darkness. It returns me to the days of the worst of my depression, and although I would never wish to return there, there is something soothing about those memories. After a while you become accustomed to the distortion, and there are surprisingly beautiful harmonies and melodies underneath it all. The dreadful and terrifying vocals are guttural and screamed, and essentially unintelligible unless you already know what they say.

I absolutely do not recommend you listen to this, or try to track down a copy of the album – this is one to avoid.

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The Devil’s Details: See What?

204eye.3Logarithms abound in nature, and nowhere more so than in the human senses. I was boggled the other day to discover that the human eye has a sensitivity to light of around 1,000,000 : 1. This means that we can see things that are a million times brighter than something else. And it does this instantly and automatically, making it way better than most cameras out there. Never mind that with around 130,000,000 individual sensor cells they beat out my 12MP Nikon by a fair shot.

earIt reminds me of human hearing. You might have heard that humans can hear things from 20Hz to 20KHz, in relation to frequency. What is kind of insane is that a doubling of frequency is about the same as an octave of a keyboard. This means that the human ear can hear a whopping eleven octaves. Sensitivity to loudness is even crazier – a rise of 6dB is equivalent to about a doubling of sound, which means that a doubling from 30dB to 60dB is the difference between a whisper and a conversation, but a doubling from 60dB to 120dB means your ears will start to bleed.

Isn’t the human body awesomely bizarre?

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Opeth in Concert: There Is Nothing Better

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As some of you might know, Opeth are quite possibly my favorite band in the entire world. Their eclectic blend of death metal, acoustic ballads and jazz-styled breaks make them far beyond a death metal band. Their most recent album, Heritage, is effectively an homage to 70’s prog rock, with no death growls at all, and a focus on contrast and musical sensitivity. Their seventh album, Damnation, is entirely soft and jazz-like, without death growls and without distorted guitars.

The point is, they are technically, musically and compositionally one of the most accomplished bands in the world, and their 20-year, 11-album career has given them a musical prowess unmatched by almost any other band. They are one of those bands that are actually better live than they are on record, and the chance to see them live was an opportunity I simply could not pass up.

So I didn’t.

Rock on!

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IMG_0042I was lucky enough to see them in 2003, right after the release of Deliverance, which contains some of the most rhythmically complex music they’ve ever written, and their performance of the title track was astonishing. I heard it again this time, and if anything they were even better.

Their opening band, Katatonia, were musically accomplished and a good compliment for Opeth, but sadly their singer was not on form, and was out of tune far too often (by contrast, Mikael Åklerfeldt was spot on every time, despite being sick and having a sore throat). I’ll skip them therefore, other than to say that they played a number of my favorite songs, including Day And Then The Shade and Deliberation.

Then it was Opeth’s turn. They opened with the first song from the Ghost Reveries album, Ghost Of Perdition, which was simply perfect. This was their first album after the soft Damnation, and it opens with four slow, gloomy, acoustic chords, and the suspense on the first listen is wonderful, because you don’t know what kind of song it’s going to be…until the guitars blast in, and we’re off on a rampant, heavy journey.

The addition of a keyboard player to the live band is now invaluable, since the majority of their newer stuff relies heavily on rock organs, piano and synths. This meant that the outro of Deliverance was simply beautiful, with the dizzying guitar rhythms and the great, faded-in piano chords:

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They ended up cutting the set slightly short because of Åkerfeldt’s illness, which meant they missed out on The Leper Affinity, one of my all-time favorite songs. I suppose I can’t complain, though – I did see them perform it ten years ago, and I have to give immense credit to him; a lot of singers/musicians would call out sick if they came down with a cold; Opeth have the kind of tenacity and determination that means they’re dedicated to their audience, every single time.

Oh, and there was some amusing banter regarding his moustache.

Opeth

 

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