Oakhelm

Once upon (twice actually) a time I lived in the Bay Area. A veritable mecca of punk, metal, music, activism, queer culture, and spiritual growth.

I hated it.  I couldn't get it together.  I couldn't find a job, make friends, find anywhere that felt like home.  On many days, I could barely muster the energy to leave the house.  Something about the sprawling, grey, crowded East Bay was so alienating and soul destroying for me.  I still think back on it occasionally as one of the most painful periods of my entire life. 

 I guess with every dark night comes a dawn, and with the dim light of hindsight I can kind of see what it was all for now.  Sometimes you have to walk through miles and miles of poisoned landscape, frozen water, and desolation to find out what nourishes the light of your soul. 

Somewhere in those years spent in ruins, I discovered the music of Oakhelm.  Some members' former projects Fall Of The Bastards, and Assuck had been old favorites of mine, so it seemed a logical step to see what they were up to now.

Goddamn, was I in for a treat.  The opening track begins with ghostly howling, and then goes straight into the song proper.  The music that unfolded in my ears was unrelenting, epic, masterful, inspiring.  It is broken up by two, quieter interludes.  I don't really know how to describe the music here.  Epic blackened death metal?  Sure.  It's not all that dissimilar from Fall Of The Bastards, just some more melody, and a little less misanthropy, and more spirituality.  The lyrics are heavily influenced by the Celtic Book Of The Dead, and speak on journeys of the soul to cleanse inner turmoil, which is just I needed at the time.  This record helped me view the place in my life as part of a journey, and not the end, not somewhere I had to be stuck forever, and for that I will always be grateful. 

2011 brought the release of Oakhelm's second full length:  Echtra.  I'm only on my second listen of this record, so I can't speak super clearly about it,   I will say this:  Even on the first track of this record, it's power is undeniable.  There are a whole slew of guest vocalists, and guest musicians who lend even more epic depths to this record.  Again, the title and lyrical content invoke the imagery of epic spiritual journeys through the otherworld.  I haven't gotten the chance to pore over them yet, but I have a feeling this record will be on heavy rotation come winter, and will further aid me in the life long process of healing. 

Thanks y'all. 

Both of these records are available on vinyl.  Go buy the shit out of them. 

Here and Here.

Isis - Panopticon

I read a blog recently describing this band's latter material as girlfriend metal.  Let's go ahead and just disregard that entirely shall we?  I'd rather not spend time giving the neanderthal douchebags of the world voice.  They speak too loudly as it is.

This is the record that turned me on to Isis.  I heard a copy of The Red Sea when I was 18, and didn't enjoy it much.  Five years later, I heard Panopticon, and was blown away. While band members insisted in interviews this not a political record, the liner notes and lyrics bring up some political themes, that astute listeners would not miss.

Central to the theme of the record, is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. 

The atmosphere of dread and paranoia, of a technological culture gone awry run thickly throughout this record.  You can feel it in resonate through your bones in the slow build up of track 3, In Fiction, it's as if the band captured the feeling of walking down a dark city street, seemingly alone, yet knowing somewhere a surveillance camera may or may not be zooming in on you perfectly.  Power is thus maintained by being everywhere, and nowhere at the same time. 

A dead 18th century British Philosopher's idea, for constructing prisons, in an effort to maintain the illusion of constant surveillance, and thus fear, and order, has disseminated through the rest of our culture, ensuring a certain amount of social control.  Let's think about that for a second:  we allowed our culture to be shaped to resemble someone's bad idea for prison construction.  Surveillance, and control may not be total, but we are led to believe they are. 

"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen."
- Michel Foucault quoted in the the liner notes


"Magistrates dream of plague
Tongues loll in anticipation
You are awake in their darker visions
Drool slips from grinning mouths

The plague is forced on us all
Is it there? Are they there?
Shouts of fact abound
But whispers of truth burn through

Is it there? Are they there" 
Track 7 - Grinning Mouths

  

Cameras as common as streetlights

Asunder - A Clarion Call

Take one part Thergothon, one part awe at the enormity and immensity of the cosmos, and you have this little gem here.  The music is unrelentingly crushing, while being etheric enough to conjure the visions of soaring through darkness of the cosmos, cold, beautiful, and undying; stars burning on, out, and pulsating in the darkness.   In some ways, this band never really go their due, so lest we forget them. 

Here

Old Journal Entry

One time in 2007, two friends died in one month, and I wrote this for them.  Cheesey?  Yes.  Embarrassing?  A little.  Sincere?  Yes. 







"I miss you"
spraypainted across trains stopped in the night
and the other night you stopped forever
And if I had the belief, or the strength I'd say a prayer that this train rolls past someone
who loved you on a night like this one.
cold and just a little bit emptier because you left us
I'm not mad at you
I never got to tell you how many nights I've stood at the edge of that abyss
with the blackness pulling at me, and daring me to fall
I could never explain what's given me the strength to carry on
but I wish more than anything I could have lent you some of it.
Just enough to get you through the night.
Maybe you would have felt better in the morning.
Or just felt it less.
Maybe the sunrise would have given you strength
Or it could have just been another day.
where the morning rays of the sun feel like a whip
and each breath draws like black eyes and slit wrists
with the weight of this culture bearing down like a fist
But maybe, just maybe you would have found strength to go on.
"I miss you"
Written across the train, as it rolls into the night
may you ride forever.
and death bring you the peace you could never find in life.
I'll never not miss you
If I could just write it bright and beautiful enough
beautiful enough that the words would reach you in
your place beyond the sun
I miss you.
I'll never not miss you.