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The Protagonist :: Interim EP (Cold Meat Industry, CD)
Once an old school industrialist like most of the early roster of
Sweden’s Cold Meat Industry, Magnus Sundström elevated himself to
neo-classical martial music with the release of his first recording as
The Protagonist (A Rebours back in 1998). While Sundström
took some time to start his own label (Fin De Siècle Media — a
name very much in keeping with his style of music), he eventually came
back to The Protagonist and released Interim, a four-track EP
that is a bombastic premonition of the High Romantic orchestration of
Songs of Experience (released shortly after Interim).
Filled with martial percussion, ominous strings, the marshalling of
brassy armies and the lamentous groans of ghostly choirs,
Interim sets the stage for a bleak and harrowing armageddon.
“Strife” is a rolling thunder of drums and a Wagnerian string section
that approaches like an infinitely vast infantry, endless ranks of
armoured warriors cresting a battle-blasted hill. “Sacrifice,” filled
with the funereal sweep of weeping strings, groans and swells with the
promise of conflict and an apprehensive hint of violence lurks in the
bleating calls of the distant brass. The tension tightens in “Der
Wahnsinn” as the strings and horns begin to face off, calling and
singing to one another across a field of slow percussion; and,
finally, “La Fin De La Journée (Stripped)” is the sound of a
dry wind drifting a cracked, post-conflict wasteland. The dolorous
breeze carries with it the voice of Marjorie Stievenart (who recites
part of Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs Du Mal”). The cataclysm has
come and gone; the only life left is the subtle creep of nature come
to bury the dead.
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The Protagonist :: Songs of Experience (Cold Meat Industry, CD)
The stage set by Interim, Songs of Experience catapults
us into nightmarish martial landscape. Based upon a series of poems
by William Blake, the English poet, Sundström’s epic cycle is
filled with orchestral hallucinations, percussive martial holocausts,
angelic choirs whose voices are tempestuous harbingers of destruction
and the sepulchral intonation of Romantic poetry. This is music for
orchestra, voice and military percussion ensemble as scored by Wagner,
interpreted by Laibach and realized by the Royal Dramatic Theater of
Sweden.
A flute tries to offer a pastoral melody in “The Hunt,” but it is
drowned out by the stiff drumming and the emphatic bleats of the horn
section. The strings attempt to play with the woodwind instrument,
shivering notes offered as sanctuary, but the flute is no match for
the aggressive brass and it fades into the background. The strings
fill the void and their crisis with the brass — while similar to
“Sacrifice” — becomes a crescendoing battle. “Spirits of the Dead”
opens with a brass adagio like the slow rhythm of oars in the thick
water of the Styx. A requiem for the passage across the river in
Charon’s ferryboat. “Down There” swirls with ghostly voices and
quivering strings while a distant drum tolls like a giant’s heartbeat.
The army that disembarks on the far shore of Styx shuffles slowly
through the open gates of the Underworld, each step taking them
further and further from life and light.
Blake’s Songs of Experience were the bleaker collection of
poems, the cycle of stories that revealed to us the futility of life
when it becomes crushed by experience. We leave innocence behind as
we grow into the world. We are wracked with pain and despair; we are
mauled by heartache, our love is devoured by disease; we fall into
darkness. Sundström’s cycle is wrought with the consumptive
passion of the High Romantics.
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Des Esseintes :: Mondo Macabro (Fin De Siécle Media, CD)
If Interim and Songs of Experience are the conflict and
descent into Hell, then Mondo Macabro is the arrival — the
screaming, shrieking, pleading denial of an eternity of being boiled,
fried, melted and scorched upon a sea of fire. Collecting various
vinyl releases (mostly from Sundström’s own Fin De Siècle
Media), Mondo Macabro encapsulates Sundström’s furious
noise anarchist persona, Des Esseintes. Somewhere between Tarmvred
and Merzbow, Stone Glass Steel and Darin Verhagen’s noise-classical
collisions, is the space where Des Esseintes flays the chamber
orchestra.
A string quartet plays in the background of “Muse,” as if the elevator
which has brought us to Hell is still open and the canned musak is
drifting out. Not that you can really enjoy the wandering andante as
Sundström layers stacks of noise and static and punishing
machinery on top of you, burying the listener in a maelstrom of
scalding noise and electrified rhythm. “Succubus” has all the
subtlety of a tsunami wave — a roaring, crashing storm of noise that
both buries and bruises the listener. “King of the Jungle” is a
safari nightmare, a terror-filled flight through dark jungle. Drums
rattle in the distance, natives thrashing through the underbrush
behind you, and close at hand, jaguars or men who have become jaguars
scream in the thick foliage. Their voices are augmented, made into
howls filled with shrieking bird song as if they have just swallowed
tropical birds whole before coming after you and the birds are still
screaming in their bellies.
Some of the tracks like “Fragments,” “Aftermath” and “Like Myself” are
darkly ambient, claustrophobic soundtracks to heart-wrecking
nightmares. The radio signal drone of “Tension” reminds me of
Muslimgauze’s Gun Aramaic period, though the martial thunder,
tropospheric wail of radio signal and anxiety-ridden whisper of
strings makes the track much more reminiscent of cold European horror
stories than hot Middle Eastern political landmines.
The haunted sanitarium coupling of “On” and “Off” (released as a 7″ on
Fin De Siècle Media) sucks the listener into a spectral
landscape of crackling noise, distant rumbles of thunder, phantasmal
whispers of dead spirits and spooky drones. Martial drums
(Protagonist style, as if the only other inhabitant of this asylum is
Sundström himself) beat through the industrial haze, building
towards a climax that doesn’t resolve anything as much as simply
releases all the tension built over the last four minutes. The voices
in “Off” are more distinct, though clarity does little to assuage the
horror of the sonic situation. The drum explosion of “Off” is a
rhythmic noise eruption — a swirling and churning mass of thunder and
metal that morphs into a furious sparking of white noise and terrified
screaming. “Turn it off!” the scientist screams. “Turn it off!” The
monster has been unleashed and there is no stopping its rampage.
The industrial landscape has certainly changed since Sundström’s
first release as The Protagonist. While some artists went deeper into
mechanized noise, others wandered into the woods to explore the darker
side of Romantic naturalism. Sundström has a foot in either camp
— building dark symphonies with martial overtones and Romantic
grandeur with The Protagonist, and breaking down the world with the
aural mayhem of Des Esseintes’ noise. In keeping with William Blake’s
belief in the paired cyle of “The Songs of Innocence” and “The Songs
of Experience,” one must leave the delicate realm of the pure, fall
deep into the sooty blackness of life, before you can raise yourself
to the light again. Sundström will take you all the way down
and, when you’re at the bottom of the hole, he’ll bury you further.
His music makes us stronger. If we survive.
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Interim and Songs of Experience are out now on Cold Meat
Industry. Mondo Macabro is out now on Malignant Records.
