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LITURGY is fixing heavy metal, and there's nothing you can do to stop them

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KvP:
Do you think metal is too staid? Too theatrical? Do you feel like you can't take it seriously? Are you waiting for a visionary band to arrive and turn that shit into art?

I have a band for you.

☠☠☠ ✞✞✞ Liturgy ✞✞✞ ☠☠☠



Fuck you, metal bands. Liturgy is playing on a whole different level.


--- Quote ---Brooklyn based Liturgy is Hunter Hunt Hendrix, Greg Fox, Tyler Dusenbury, and Bernard Gann. Aesthethica, their second album and third release, shows the band exploring, in greater depth, themes initially touched on by their critically acclaimed debut album, Renihilation. The band used every instrument, literal or figurative, to produce meaning and intensity, disregarding the genre boundaries of black metal, hardcore and experimental music.
On Renihilation, Liturgy made use of simple song structures, and concentrated on sustaining a blindingly high intensity level from start to finish. Aesthethica, a more controlled and polyvalent effort, finds the band operating at multiple levels and using more varied forms. The music is both elaborately crafted and chaotically performed. Songs often begin in the form of a simple chant or hypnotic abstraction, then evolve into something dense and complex. A constant sensitivity to the states of attention that different musical patterns activate and foster, yields a paradoxical result: the more complex the music, the simpler the message. Cycling through the fundamental modes of being: stasis, chaos, repetition and entelechy, Aesthethica is a metaphorical exercise in affirmation.

The record is a unified whole. A major concern, sonically and lyrically, is the question of what it is to be meaningful, and how intensity relates to emotion or affect. Many of the songs activate and manipulate cliches relating to heroism, tragedy, hope, and so on by connecting black metal techniques to the spirit of film score writing (Vangelis, Badalamenti) and post-Romanticism (Scriabin, Sibelius). "High Gold" presents a vision of apocalypse, "Harmonia" presents a judgment on the meaning of life, and so on. The resulting collection of songs, at once, embodies and transcends these tropes. The music is supersaturated with lofty melodies and lyrics, bursting with frenzied execution, and builds to a boiling point of chaos, distorting all meaning and distilling to reveal the raw core of pure sonic joy. Liturgy surrounds these fractured islands of meaning with a sea of a-signifying ritual repetition and sound (Branca, Sleep, Lightning Bolt). Tear at the seams of the straitjacket of ordinary life, release the energy from the field of potentiality that it binds, enter the realm of the good and the beautiful, so commands Aesthethica.

Highly technical musicianship, poetico-mystical gesturing, and a minimal directness; all singular elements, whose interactions and reactions are contained in and bursting from a black metal framework. Revelatory contrasts presented in an intensely physical performance whose energy is palpable and whose abatement is as illuminating as its arrival.
--- End quote ---

The lead singer is named Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (after his father, Hunter Seeker-Malmsteen) and this dude is obviously the staggering genius that metal needs to become legitimate music.

--- Quote from: P4k interview, 2009 ---Pitchfork: When did you start recording Liturgy material? I heard about it years ago, but only heard more than a MySpace track or two when you contacted me a year or so ago. Did you start it as some kind of harsher outlet outside Birthday Boyz? How did you get into black metal?

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: I began recording black metal in my bedroom as a teenager. The earliest stuff was all on 4-track, very harsh and dark; a lot like Ildjarn. I began calling the project Liturgy in 2004, and I made a cassette called The Paranoiac Miracle. After that was a long gestation period during which I was focusing mainly on other projects, but at some point something clicked and a very specific idea developed about what Liturgy should be. The Immortal Life EP was an initial foray into that.

Pitchfork: Liturgy's visual/graphic aesthetic is interesting to me. Instead of night skies, Immortal Life has a sunny cloudscape. Inquisition take photos in the sunlight, too, but you go further: With both your band name and the aforementioned Immortal Life, you evoke Catholic rites. Can you explain this some?

HHH: The album art is supposed to represent transcendence, which for us means an ecstatic encounter with the present; a violent, apocalyptic, cosmic joy. And a shattering of ego. But then there's also a certain impossibility of that encounter, like a withdrawing horizon.

Pitchfork: Like other NYC black metal bands (Malkuth, Krallice), you guys don't don the corpse paint. If you did, what would Liturgy-style corpse paint look like? All white?

HHH: Heh, it's hard to say.

Pitchfork: What exactly is "Pure Transcendental Black Metal"?

HHH: That name isn't meant to specifically designate anything, but I hope that among other things it carries the connotation of something between a Romantic experience of the Sublime and the ecstatic experience of Oneness.

Pitchfork: Renihilation opens with a kind of chanted/droned beginning. You have these series of tracks simply titled "-". What's their place in the collection? Why didn't you opt to call them "Untitled" or something? It's somehow visually striking. Sonically, they're like weird prayers or exercises or something.

HHH: "Untitled" could have worked; I just thought the dashes looked pretty good. Basically, before the full band was formed I used to perform solo using voice, guitar, and loop pedals-- totally different from the solo recorded material. Once we pulled the band together I still wanted to make use of the live solo stuff somehow, and some of the pieces ended up fitting on the record perfectly, in a truncated form, as interludes.

Pitchfork: When we were talking about the Mirror Me exhibition you showed me your "Prophetic Vision style poem." I read it. It's fascinating stuff. Can you explain how it relates to the music? I think of Current 93 or Seldon Hunt's texts for Sunn O))) in some sense.

HHH: The poem isn't so different from the lyrics, just longer and more unified. I usually write lyrics after the music is all written and arranged, but this one just sort of stands on its own. The style is influenced by Nietzsche, William Blake's prophecies, and some of Aleister Crowley's writings. I think the comparison to Current 93 is pretty on point; David Tibet rules.

Pitchfork: On Renihilation it's hard for me to pin down what particular songs are about: "Arctica", "Beyond the Magic Forest", "Behind the Void". Is there a red thread through it all? Can you explain the lyrics some? I remember you saying they were different from what shows up in the poem.

HHH: They're all about different things, but a red thread might be the theme of tension between hope and critique, or between apocalypse and apostasy. I think something like this is at the heart of all black metal, which participates in nostalgia and nihilism simultaneously in an unresolved way. Or at least that's always been an attraction for me. I think in our day and age we are starved for meaning and also hostile towards meaning, and this interests me.

Pitchfork: What does Renihilation, the word and concept, mean to you?

HHH: I like the idea of a second nihilism or a double nihilism, a sort of annihilation of an annihiliation amounting to something altogether different from a return to what was originally destroyed. That's what renihiliation is.

Pitchfork: You went from a one-man bedroom project to a four-piece band who can play live, etc. How did that change the feel or dynamic of the band? For certain one-man black metal bands, a sort of solitary "loneliness" seems essential. For instance, I can't imagine Leviathan fronting a group. But you clearly incorporated it all on Renihilation. Can you discuss how you formed the full band and where you recorded, etc.? How was this different from past recordings?

HHH: Liturgy originally had a lot to do with loneliness and alienation, but once it started being about cosmic unity, it just naturally turned into a group project. I made a demo of Renihilation on my own, and knew I wanted to pull together a band at least for live performances. Tyler, Greg, and Bernard used to play in a few different bands together, and I've known Greg for a long time. It all fell into place easily. The live sound and the group dynamic really exceeded my expectations, and it was obvious soon that we should record as a group, too. (At this point I'd even say the live show is the "real thing"; there's an energy to it that can't be captured on a record.) Everything before Renihilation I recorded myself using either a 4-track or an MBox, but I knew it wouldn't do us justice to record the full band that way. We made Renihilation at the Thousand Caves of Menegroth with Colin Marston, who has recorded a lot of our friends' bands, and who is in a bunch of awesome bands himself. He did an amazing job, I think.

Pitchfork: What's with the White Metal tag?

HHH: I don't know where the "white metal" tag came from, but I hope it doesn't stick. To me it connotes either NSBM or something like "grey metal". Not really going for either of those things.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: The Village Voice ---What is "Generation" about?
 - "Generation" is an adoration of the most primordial operations: concatenation, permutation, interpolation. ... The idea was to create a cross between Rhys Chatham and Meshuggah. Or a Meshuggah song with one note instead of two notes.

What does this song's sense of triumph and ecstasy represent for you? How do you feel when you play it?
 - This is my favorite song to play live because it has the most groove. Performing it presents the satisfaction of locking into a breakdown and the satisfaction of a gradual buildup, both at the same time.

You guys still have a focus on hypnosis and repetition, but it's increasingly more of a math-rock/Stravinsky vein. What records inspired this particular shift in sound?
 - I've always wanted to make a sort of black metal that has lots of explosions and jolts in it. On Renihilation we had the explosions, but they were more inexact and freewheeling, more part of the performance. For the new record the idea was to create the same effect but have it be composed out a little more carefully. The influences aren't really new. In fact it's mostly music that I no longer listen to much but loved really intensely at a time and am finally finding a way to digest and incorporate into our output. Meshuggah is an example. I like that you mention Stravinsky, actually. The kind of eddies of jolted repetition in Petrushka, The Rite [of Spring], Les Noces... those pieces really shaped the way I feel music, what I want and expect from it. He creates these moments of ecstatic frenzy that are strangely glitchy, these wild stabs, but composed out very carefully. Dionysiac experience created using Apollonian technique. Though my Stravinsky phase was years ago. Converge's Jane Doe is a similar influence. Anyway I don't think of it as a change in direction at all, just a development from embryo to fetus.

Now that you're dealing with more odd time-signatures, is there more anxiety that the song might fall apart?
No.

There was a little bit of hubbub about you guys being a metal band on Thrill Jockey. What's the most ridiculous reaction you've had to that move?
 - Man, there are people that despise our band. Within the black metal scene there have been plenty of seriously rabid haters from the start, people offended by the fact that we're situating black metal in a wider musical context. Or something. We've already heard it all before. I think those people really don't grasp how little their criticism means to us. I always expected it and I even kind of enjoy seeing it. But as for the label, I think if anything our joining up with Thrill Jockey has been a sigh of relief on all sides, because our musical project really makes more sense shoulder to shoulder with acts like Nobukazu Takemura, Dan Higgs, Boredoms, Lichens. And people who identify more broadly with experimental music tend to get what we're doing right away. I mean, it is really important to me that our music is black metal, but more and more I feel alienated by the bigotry that is a part of that scene. It's not really a community we ultimately want to have anything to do with, insofar as it really is a forum for reactionary politics and so on. The most interesting and ridiculous reaction from a hater that comes to mind is an unofficial music video to our new song that someone put up. Basically it's just scenes of men kissing, synced up to our song. Honestly I almost died laughing when I saw it, but it's also like, "Really?"

What's your favorite place to eat in Brooklyn?
 - I get the Hanna Jang sandwich from the Hanna Deli on Union and Metropolitan as often as I can.
--- End quote ---

Download their new song, and cry as you realize all of the so-called "metal" you listened to before today has been but the sound of toddlers banging on pots and pans and intermittently soiling themselves. Their second album is coming out on Thrill Jockey, which is super deeply meaningful because Thrill Jockey don't fuck with mere "metal". Can Liturgy finally bring beauty and discipline to this ugly excuse for music? Will metal fans finally be able to air their enthusiasm in public without shame and derision? Thrill Jockey is betting so! God bless you, Thrill Jockey. And God bless you, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix!


<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

What is your favorite thing about Liturgy and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix? Haters stay out 8-) 8-) :police: 8-) 8-)

Watch the band in action!

David_Dovey:
No my main problem with metal is that there weren't enough manifestoes up in

SWOON! at My Gravitas:
siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

I heard their new album last night coincidentally, they play with a remarkable amount of energy and their drummer is pretty great but Jesus ass-Christ I don't know if I've heard black metal that's any more pointlessly meandering in my life

David_Dovey:
Also bro applause for using yr 6666th post for this

Johnny C:
is there a unicode inverted cross

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