Firstly, it seems like a very silly thing to say. How can a white band be black? how can some white bands be more black than others? Isn't it 'typical guardian nonsense', Beryl? Aren't we massively over-generalising?
Well I keep my eye on the guardian and while I know it wanders into silly territory for some of its comment, by-and-large I appreciate their attempts to broadcast a range of opinions. I assumed that the writer was a white male - like most radiohead fans I know - but turned out to be a 'black girl'. Just that realisation made me think deeper about this.
Are Radiohead a white-white band? Most people's impressions of Radiohead would be... wingey. that's their reputation, from early hits like Creep and Fake Plastic Trees. But their fans, we know that there's more to them than miserable white male winge. Pablo Honey is a pretty white album, right enough; it's all white strummed acoustics and white distortion. The reputation has been hard to shake off, and broadcast-heyday singles from 'street spirit' to 'karma police' have cememented it; radiohead-as-miserable was a universal idea enough to be used as a suicidal punchline in the final episode of Father Ted.
Radiohead's reputation is better applied to bands like Coldplay; they're just about the whitest band I can imagine. Coldplay cash in on their white male priveleg privledge privele privilege hard; utterly unremarkable music with the assumed qualities of born leaders. If you think that's not right, consider their first glastonbury appearance, when their singer told the audience that the group belonged on the big stage. When I saw Ed Sheeran headlining glastonbury on the telly - ahead of such incredibly talented and radical performers like Kate Tempest and Janelle Monáe (and their bands) - I was annoyed from the angle of 'how low the standards are set for male genius compared to female' but of course the same argument can be made about ethnicity.
What I think is really pertinent about the Guardian article is that it defines Radiohead's key character as not a wingey band, but an experimental band - something that's been true since My Iron Lung ep went off in all sorts of directions and has only grown since then - and then reminded us that experimentation and innovation are key characteristics of 'black' music. Radiohead take the template of white rock and incororate jazz and electronics in a way many other bands never bother to.
Even Radiohead's breakthrough song Creep - surely the epitome of winge, the sound of the default male desperately looking for something to be miserable about -
when taken as a tale of imposter syndrome, is an anthem for anyone who's
part of an under-represented or discriminated group.
Queeruption band Houmousexual, in their song 'don't be slack all yr music's black', quote Tom Robinson: "i do apologise to white people, but let's face it, every really important musical innovation in this century has been black' and I think that's what makes this argument work for me. Of course, it would be racist to say 'all innovation is black'. I'm dubious about our ability to generalise at all really here. But ultimately, what is important is not my Default Male take on the article, with all of the self-assumed value of my opinion - it's the fact that the liberation comes from getting a diverse creators behind the scenes. I don't find it silly when a newspaper celebrates the 'blackness' of a white band, when it could be celebrating black musicians directly - if that's what a black columnist wants to write about, I can only celebrate along with them.
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?
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 albumnote ; 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.
I originated the phrase 'burnt ogre' at some point in the last five years, as a simple pun on 'burnt ochre' which is a favourite colour tone of mine; i love all those dark yellows, mustards, siennas. having moved to birmingham, it seem'd a good fit to start a metal band, whose shared their name with the first album, and also the first track on said album, that - crucially - does not contain the name as a lyric. So yes, Everything starts with Black Sabbath.
Before this, I was planning the album 'kno', going as far as mocking up a cover art, and putting it out as a 'grilly' album. However, Kno being a full album of more detail and ambition than anything I had made before, I wanted to try out a vertical slice-style demo, and as I was writing the tune that would become Burnt Ogre, realised it would make sense to fully create that first. After that, I decided to put out an album with Burnt Ogre as the opening track and everything else followed from that.
1. Burnt Ogre
at the start we hear a radiophonic-style backwards delay effect. The idea was to run a note through a high-feedback delay long enough for it to decay entirely into noise, then reverse the recording to make it appear that the signal was emerging from the noise. Despite a couple of takes (both used in stereo) I don't think it was particularly successful. The other intention behind this was to have a distinct sound at the start of the album, as I think it's important to have some sort of unique marker - think of Super Furry Animals' album Radiator, for example. Again, having a sound fade in is not particularly good way of achieving this.
Then we come to the main riff (-11.44). This is based around three notes - an inverted major triad of D, playing F#, D, A. This comes from a very comfortable fretting when it dropped tuning (C in the case of the recording):
C-9-----
G-7-----
C-6-----
The whole first meloding idea is just an unfolding of this arpeggio. it feels unsettled and like it has direction, the heavy inversion preventing it from sounding resolved. We move through D maj/F#, then to Gminor, then down again to F#minor - a chord where only one note is only one semitone different to the opening chord. then we quickly move through Cminor and Ebmajor. all that sequence just felt like a very natural progression from that opening triad.
We play this on two guitars - one classical, the other clean electric. no guitars that made the final cut were intended to permanent; they were just decent-enough takes that I got used to.
at this point, an electric rhthym starts - initially just on off beats, but then coming in as a beating/marching rhythm at -11.21. This was generated through my Littlebits synth kit; noise source triggered from PC MIDI, which I'm effecting with filter, envelope, and delay. there are two takes - the fast rhythm and the slow rhythm are independent, so that I could have a long release on the 'snare' sound and a short release on the 'hat' sound. The rhythm is a musical nod towards Holst's Mars, which I hear Black Sabbath were trying to rip off when they came up with the riff for Black Sabbath. Mars is in 5/4 though, and the first parts of this tune are all in straight 4/4 time, so I had to mangle it a bit but that's where it came from.
Also the Doepfer Dark Energy synthesiser comes in at this time. Like the In Case Of Emergence album, the notes for this are entirely programmed, while filtering and affecting were done live when recording it.
at -11.59 one of the guitars drops down an octave. More synths - a melodic one and chords (the Waldorf Rocket, I think) - and cellos start to come in.
Melodic idea B kicks in at -10:17; a 6-chord sequence that again felt like a completely natural progression from melodic idea A, possibly being written in the same day. The melody to this part came after, written so that this part wasn't 'just chords'. The chords are: Bminor, Ebmajor, Gminor; Dmajor, Fmajor, Aminor. Each chord is related to the last and the sequence still resolves to the Dmajor in the middle. Generally, each chord drops one or two notes down a little to form the next chord, except the last to the first, where it all raises two notes.
We return to A at -9.33 with a synth drum beat starting too. there is more arpeggiation in the guitars now, and the 'snare' sound is firing on a more frequent off beat.
At -8:48 we come to melodic idea C: Dmajor, Gminor, Eb-5, F#diminished. as it progresses and speeds up, it takes on the rhythm of Smells Like Teen Spirit, another musical reference. The pace accelerates so as to naturally bridge to the higher BPM grind section. a breakbeat - Realized's The Human Mosquet, sampled from the Japanese Assault sampler on Relapse records - tells us it's time for the first heavy bit.
Melodic ideas D (-8:07) and E were both written at school during an ofsted inspection. I found it tricky to transpose them into keys that worked well together, ultimately they both resolve to C although they are in slightly different diminshed modes.. Here we find kick and snare drums sampled from Living With Disfigurement's track Better Living Through Surgery, which helpfully starts with a simple 'kick snare' intro. I didn't sample any closed hi hats in this track.
Completing a 'technical exercise' cover of The Berzerker's track Reality some years before, in preparation for this song, helped me with the programming of the drums. All snares are off beats in this section, which is tricky to tell when they're this fast, but I think it sounds better than on-the-beat blast-beats. All programmed, naturally.
at -7.32, we hit a bit of an clubby break (melodic idea F), with chords similar to melodic idea A (but more diminished); we play it light then heavy. This section (particularly around -7:05) is as close as the track gets to a guitar solo; I had planned to some bring in some hot brass to squeal over the track, particularly over D, E, and F, but the pandemic ruled that out.
I think the return to melodic idea D at -7.03 sounds better than when it first arrived. This is partly due to the guitarmonies between the two takes of distorted guitar. As said, these were not meant to be final takes, so rather than re-record the harmonising guitar, i just pitch-shifted it up three semi-tones; an advantage to playing in a diminshed scale is that it allows for this self-similarity.
At -6.44, the last two diminished power chords - an audio reference to the Dillinger Escape Plan's track 'The Running Board' - reach up to a final high, but instead of the C diminshed that would be expected, we hit the notes E and C - an ambiguous inversion of Cmajor, also a transposition of the chord that openend the song.
However, at -6.40, we resolve the ambiguity by introducing the bass note A, defining the two notes as part of an Aminor chord. Also at this point, we leave 4/4 for a folky post-math riff in 5/4 (melodic idea G).
This part was tricky to mix, and i began to pare back the mix by dropping layers in and out. at times the guitars are emphasised, at times the cellos, at times the synths. We've had some fairly maximal music, and at this point it the tune I was craving simplicity.
Melodic idea G does not repeat or make a call back in the tune. This idea of a melodic detour is fairly predictable, but I think Comus did it to another level two songs on their 'First Utterance' album, where an entirely different tune seems to fade into the middle of a song, then fade out again, like an interval or interlude. I see G like that; I needed a complete break from the themes of the song, different key, and different time sig, and this riff was waiting to be used.
Then at -5:26, something changes; we return to melodic idea A, but keep the 5/4 time sig established in G. the tune then proceeds to work through melodic ideas A and B but in 5/4, then fading out into a drum break, before returning to C in 7/8 at -3.22.
from -5:04, the guitars stop, leaving just cello, bass, and drums. I found this space really important; you've heard so much that plenty is going on in your brain at this point and inferences are being made that mean I didn't have to put as much up explicitly.
at -4:27 a filtered and distorted sample of the drum break from Botch's 'Transitions from Persona to Object' comes in. more programmed drums come in and a bit more prominace is given to the rocket synth chords. as the music fades out, extended takes from the intro fade in and further drum tracks kick in, until it's largely noise.
late in the day, i decided to add a cutup of the amen break, as i'd finally figured out how to multi-track the sampler in reaper and was able to build a kit out of cropped samples from the same wave file. this doubles the synth drums from -3.14. we stick to 7/8 as we enter a break-heavy version of melodic idea E; it's missing guitars because I could not play it at that speed in that time, which makes it even sweeter when they come back in the in the 7/8 reprise of melodic idea D. also late on, I kept the amen break going through this section, making the drums less monotonous (at the risk of sounding like a self-rip-off of Klein Bottle Fish Tank).
I remember practising guitar a lot in the summer leading up to recording, for the first time sitting down with a metronome and steadily improving the speed I could play these riffs at; the -3.00 minute version of D is something I'm especially proud I managed to achieve, probably the hardest thing I've ever written for myself to play. This section actually works out as 30/8, as it's three bars of 7 then one bar of 9, or two bars of 7 and two bars of 8. again, we use the pitch shift trick rather than actually playing three semi-tones up; at the same time, i bring the ride cymbal back in which just elevates the mix further.
then the guitars repeat their trick from the end of melodic idea F, but this time land on the Cdiminished chord that was promised. this rings out and knobs are tweaked, and then at -2.20, we enter a slower, heavy reprise of B in 4/4. paring this back to start off with to guitars and cellos, then 2 drum samples I could not better enter; pig destroyer's Junkyard God and Giant Squid's Panthalessa. A new guitar melody has started; one thing that loving Mansun's album Six left me with was the notion of having more than one melody going on at once.
The rocket goes into arpeggio mode, and the original melody enters on synth and cello, eventually the lead guitar joins in with it too.
at -0.21, we get a guitar lick that bridges to the outro; it's on a completely separate channel, with a mild distortion and echo, which sets it apart from anything else in the mix. I've a 'personal best' number of tracks running in this mix - 51 - which I think I've handled, despite being an uncompressed mix. I want to fit in with Earache's 'High Dynamic Range' style of old-school mixes but really it comes from incompetence...
Sort of. I didn't *want* a compressed mix. I wanted something spacious and swirly. something that doesn't cow to modern ideas of listening to music on laptop speakers and tiny white headphones.
now at -0.16, was where the tune used to end. but then I saw a video about the Thue-morse sequence by Matt Parker, and experimented with the chaotic rhythm it produces.
the rule is: A and B take turns at taking turns. so you start with AB, then you invert the current sequence and add it. so AB -> ABBA - > ABBABAAB - > ABBABAABBAABABBA, which is where I left it; I carried out a longer version of it here:
taking kick and bass note as B, and diminished power chord and snare as A. Oh! and then i messed about with breaks over the top and realised that a The Locust drum break sounded great over the top, as it put some some toms in - I can't remember the name, but it's off track 15 plague soundscapes.
I wasn't sure to let the chords ring out or just end it very quickly - letting ring won out this time. I also pasted the very first arpeggio over the ending too.
