Interiors

This is my 6-hour lockdown mixtape.

 I started working on it fairly early, in the midst of the whole panicy 'let's culture our way out of this mess!' what a psychic shit storm.

back then, it was just what I was doing in the meantime. but then an odd thing happend.

I had uploaded the first two parts. part two had a song on it by Deathspell Omega, a black metal band I liked. I'd got their new cd, I've been buying physical music less as it means I can afford more of it and I don't think artists really get more if you buy a physical copy. But I wanted their new one on CD so that I could read the lyrics comfortably. DsO classify themselves as 'intellectual black metal' and I came across them when Davide 'ephel duath' Tiso said their album Paracletus was the best black metal album of the last ten years (at the time). So I got it, and found they seemed to be in the middle of a trilogy about Satan, God, and Man... it was good stuff. stuff it's worth having the lyric sheet for. 

But then... I was disturbed at what I read on their new one. the lyrics were very fascistic. as in, completely over the top fascist, to the point of being satirical - written from the point of view of  the rulers and making clear everything they were going to do to you, the listener. 1984 is about fascism, but is not promoting it; but this felt - celebratory?

From tvtropes: 

The unnamed narrator from The Furnaces of Palingenesia leads the totalitarian political faction known as the Order. The Order uses fear and paranoia to force absolute loyalty from all citizens, encouraging citizens to turn in their own loved ones for suspected crimes or even kill each other for perceived disloyalty. As a result, countless innocents are subjected to horrific punishments or murdered. The narrator is proudly aware of the terrors that the Order inflicts upon the world and in fact pushes it forward to the point society completely collapses under his rule.

It made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn't really pinpoint because any thing you pointed to was so absurdly over the top as to obviously be a look at how 'bad' fascisms are. But i still wasn't happy about it; it felt like 'immunity through excess'.

So i googled their name, which i've done on many occasions, but this time 'deathspell omega nazi' came up in the search suggestions. which started to make me think, and i read and searched and had to translate a few webpages, and their singer - if not the band - appears to be 'full on' in the 'national socialist black metal' scene in his other acts. yikes.

So that was that. emotionally and intellectually, that mixtape couldn't stand, nor could I have those records in the house. my phyical copies of their stuff - 4 12 inches and a cd - are in the boot of the car, waiting to be taken to a charity shop whilst I um and ah about the ethics of dumping them onto someone else - if you're the type of person who would willingly pick up nazi black metal, you probably shouldn't be given the opportunity. So I took down part 2 (but not earlier mixtapes that i've played them on, as those are too far gone).

and then, months went by. Bandcamp friday started to be a thing, and I started spending more money on music than I think I ever have done, and at a lower cost, meaning I was downloading an utter deluge every month. I got the whole Broadcast back catalogue from Bleepmart, a massive box of radiophonic workshop cds on record store day, soundtracks of film and tv i've been meaning to get for ages... plus an mp3 player i'd put on random and bookmark any classics i'd forgotton about. 

so my playlists swelled faster than I could mix them down. gradually I sorted the tunes into some vague categories, shuffled things around, balanced each bit to about an hour, and strung them out once a week over a further month. 

the whole think plays very well. it has an odd curve; it starts quite chilled, then has an exciting couple of hours, and then sprawls out into the voidy numbness. anyone who listens to it all in one sitting wins the internet.

cheers.

PS reading more on the band's tvtropes page, the most likely explanation is that the nazi character is someone they 'transgressively work with' who has no input on the material. I quote at length:

The album attracted no small degree of controversy, however, because the band's presumed vocalist, Mikko Aspa, has ties to authoritarian politics. The Needle Drop, for instance, originally gave the album a favourable review, but evidently pulled the video after becoming aware of Aspa's political associations. The band themselves comment on the ideological chasm within the band (and, more implicitly, the controversy surrounding the album) in the Bardo interview, without explicitly referring to any of their members by name:

"A minority of the collective’s contributors – shall we say, parts of the second circle – who’ve been invited to partake because of their incredible talents as musicians are involved with earthly politics, but stand on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum and are therefore irreconcilable political foes. Were it not for dialogue on the grounds of transgressive art, they’d be shooting each other. That tension is what interests us. It’s also an echo of more complex days – times when childhood friends Aragon the communist, Malraux the Gaullist and Drieu La Rochelle the fascist, while never reneging on their respective irreconcilable combats, for years lost neither the ability for sincere and profound dialogue nor their admiration for each other’s unique talents."

The likeliest reading is that Aspa is involved with the band as a session vocalist, and that they strongly oppose each other's political stances but are nonetheless willing to work with one another for the sake of their music. It is also speculated that Aspa may no longer even be the band's only vocalist (if indeed he ever was a member of the band - again, all information on the band membership after 2002 is purely a matter of conjecture, since it has never been confirmed by any official sources); since at least Paracletus, there have been several passages in many of their songs that seemingly contain two vocalists using substantially different styles, and Furnaces being a live release would certainly suggest that there must be at least two vocalists. The most common hypotheses for the second vocalist are Spica of S.V.E.S.T., a band with whom Deathspell has released a split album^note ; and Franck Hueso of Carpenter Brut, a fellow Poitiers musician whom Tobias Forge of Ghost has cited as having produced several of Deathspell's albums.

 

It hasn't helped that they have refused to confirm or deny any particular members, or comment on the controversy directly.