ACHENAR
– All will change
(CD,
Earthen)
When the world is frozen down completely and it is so
cold that every breath hurts, it is easy to imagine the end of the world in
a storm made of ice and hail. And darkness. And bloodshed. Achenar aka
Duncan Hemingway makes a point of enhancing the impression of darkness and
coldness right from the beginning. As if Ulver played a collaboration with
Nosferatu in a Russian enclave somewhere in the back countries under the
consulting of Laibach for arrangements, Harvey Milk for structures and Hasswell for
electronics. Just listen to the devastating “Avalanche of Fire” to get
an impression of the damage that Achenar can do. And it’s all one
person’s mind on top of it.
The slow doom of Achenar is neither heavy nor metal,
yet frighteningly effectful and impressive. It beckons images of black and
white landscapes tormented by evil horsemen and creatures from the
netherworld. Their crazy harsh eruptions of electronic noise on the other
hand are just as frightening, but also aggressive and brutal, which means
that probably Rob Zombie has joined the tag team, bringing along with him Kevin Martin
and the seven deadly horsemen with their grim scythes. Like any good,
apocalyptic warfare, after a short eruption of action there is more stasis
and the vast emptiness of the torn battlefield. You can almost smell the
calm anxiety of battle between attacks, with pictures of dead bodies coming
up and the way human souls are being torn into cold and empathy-less
machines just by looking at these sceneries.
These two souls, the crashing, trashing and erupting
noise maniac and the slowly meandering doom prophets, live side by side in
Achenar, and there is no kind of exorcism able to get rid of either. The wolves
may howl and the moon may shine her bloody light on ghastly scenes of
crumbling noise and fearful soundscapes, the mindset of the listener remains
numb and stricken. High impact, either way, and the orchestral, epic suites
(“Survive Yourself”) may change into crazy dancefloor crushers
(“re-enervate”) but only if both the concert hall and the dancefloor are
somewhere on the outskirts of an evil fantsasy novel. Yes, it is
soundtracky, but only for a zombie movie done by Ingmar Bergmann.
The mixture after all is unique and makes me wonder if
there are a lot of people that like post-modern metal just as much as Techno
Animal and Ryuchi Sakamoto? Usually, this would be the point to add that it
is wondrous how the mixture works – with piano progressions lying over
simple drum machine beats and being exchanged with either long winding doom
keyboards or an eruption of noise break beats in slow motion. Or even just a
low rumbling noise in the distance, like the beginning of “Let us help
you”. The influx of Gregorian chanting is also to be felt (“with
conviction”) as is the purging fire of brute metal and the watchful eyes
of midnight tales and movies.
The themes of Achenar are destruction and death, the
vile stink of humankind and the reasons why it is better for people to
destroy themselves than to wait for their inevitable destruction. Mankind is
doomed, has been from the beginning. Only a storm of fire and ice may
cleanse the world of its human rabies. And so on, you know the kind of
sentiments a lot of brainwashed bloggers like, whose musical socialisation
includes Current 93 along with black metal. I can relate to this, though my
outlook on life is not anywhere as drastically single-minded towards the
apocalypse and eternal snow, but I think that mankind will have the planet
implode on itself by using up all its energy for a gigantic LAN-party of 14
million people joining the same World Of Warcraft session at a single time.
The evil monster created in this session will then burn the world.
