Liturgy - Transcendental black metal

One could propose a new meaning for black metal along with a new array of techniques to activate that meaning. The meaning of Transcendental Black Metal is Affirmation, and its new technique is the Burst Beat

(opening of the "Transcendental Black Metal Manifesto")

 

I wanted to make the most important thing possible – to invent a new philosophy that goes with a new music and a new way of making art and living life

(Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix)

Introduction

Once upon a time there was the realm of the Hyperboreans, a people of ice devoted to lunar, atrophic, depraved, infinite and pure practices. Their founding myth was the Death of the Dead, their religion Nihilism, their rite the Blast Beat. Their land lay untilled because the sun never rose nor set, their cult of Transylvanian Rage forced them into contemplation of the Haptic Void atop a mountain, their destiny was to freeze to death.

From the Americas then came the Transcendentals, solar, hypertrophic, courageous, finite and penultimate. Devoted to Sacrifice, they betrayed Nihilism for Affirmation and imposed a new technique, the Burst Beat. Marked by accelerations and ruptures, their days passed without any pretense of getting anywhere. They discovered that the promise of the Haptic Void was a lie, that its absence was its presence, that Re-nihilization would allow them to survive and thrive. On these foundations they built their apocalyptic humanism and called it Aesthetics.

This isn't a Nordic legend, but a contemporary, thoroughly American myth, about "an America that never existed and never will." The one telling it isn't some latter-day epigone of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but a black metal musician – transcendental black metal, to be precise. Far more than a simple musician, in truth: a genuine theorist, who has built around her interpretation of the forbidding subgenre a full-fledged Manifesto, complete with all the trimmings, from which the cryptic images quoted above are drawn. A theorist whose speculation doesn't stop at music, but who has gone on to construct a dense philosophical and theological system: her name is Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, and she is one of the most radical intellectuals in contemporary music. Music that does start from black metal, but which her ambition and talent have ferried onto a shore that still has no name. A Total Music within the horizon of a Total Art, interwoven with her writings, her sculptures and, why not, her YouTube videos, establishing in the process a new frontier of experimentation on her own body and her own identity.

Her artistic story runs parallel to the evolution of black metal as a whole: from a morbid cult for a handful of misanthropes, sealed off from outside contact, to a new extreme esperanto, porous to any contamination. For her part, Hunt-Hendrix has infused it with an omnivorous musical curiosity, the spirituality of a great mystic, and the stage presence of a sacred icon. An itinerarium mentis in Deum that has no equal, and that could bear only one possible name: Liturgy.

Chapter 1: pagan dawn

The biographical starting point reads like a stereotyped postcard of a certain well-off America: a true New Yorker, daughter of the popular writers Helen LaKelly Hunt and Harville Hendrix (former seminarians, authors of best-selling self-help and marriage-counseling books: you couldn't get more American than that...) as well as granddaughter of the notorious oil magnate Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr., she was born into a male body under the name Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. She grew up between New Mexico, New Jersey and Brooklyn, and studied philosophy at Columbia University.

Her first recording experience dates back to 2005 with the Ep The Bro Cycle, credited to the screamo group Birthday Boyz, in which plenty of signs of her future class are already visible: in just over a quarter of an hour, the three untitled tracks outline a personality hungry for complexity, pushing against the genre's boundaries through intricate instrumental weaving.

The Liturgy name was christened with Immortal Life, recorded in 2006 but released only two years later. Following in the footsteps of Big Black and Godflesh, with the isolationist spirit of a college project, the artist does everything herself, relying on the services of a drum machine. Industrial noise dominates, shot through with ecstatic shoegaze-like halos, signaling both a fondness for suffocating atmospheres and a taste for sonic exploration.

Needing to expand her range of action, she recruited Bernard Gunn on guitar, Tyler Dusenbury on bass and the virtuoso Greg Fox on drums, turning Liturgy into a proper band.

Renihilation (released in 2009 on 20 Buck Spin and reissued by Thrill Jockey in 2014), produced by Colin Marston (Behold... The Arctopus, Infidel?/Castro!, Krallice), is the first offspring of the newly formed lineup. With a cover art lifted from Tangerine Dream's "Zeit," amid abrasive tremolo picking and breaks as sharp as nails driven into a cross, the Hunt-Hendrix concept of the "burst beat" begins to take shape: an expansion of the classic blast beat in which tempo speeds up and slows down in an elastic play of contractions and releases, allowing different rhythmic styles to coexist.

The frequent untitled interludes, whether vocal or instrumental, reveal a commitment still anchored to the album format, right in the years when music was heading toward an inexorable liquefaction. The coordinates, in any case, still belong to a fairly conventional post-black metal, albeit illuminated by an uncommon spiritual tension (more pagan than Christian, for the time being).

Chapter 2: refounding an aesthetic

Theoretical even before creative, HH makes an even more substantial contribution to the genre's evolution with the impressive "Transcendental Black Metal Manifesto", presented as part of the "Hideous Gnosis Black Metal Symposium" held in Brooklyn in December 2009. The author's thesis, argued in a style somewhere between the visionary and the assertive that is already her trademark, calls for cutting the umbilical cord with the tradition of Scandinavian black metal (renamed "hyperborean" and regarded as the apogee of extreme metal) in order to establish an "authentically American" strand ("the America celebrated by Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring or Ornette Coleman's Skies of America […], a celebration of the hybrid and of creative evolution"): this is the investiture of transcendental black metal. The goal is to overcome deathly Nordic nihilism through the affirmative "re-nihilization" that inspired the title of the album just released: "Our affirmation is a refusal to deny".

The function of the burst beat ("it expands and contracts like the tide, the economy, day and night, inhalation and exhalation, life and death") is precisely to break free from the reckless rush and the yearning for purity of the blast beat, embracing a conscious and positive vitalism, open to perpetual incompleteness: "By mirroring life, the burst beat stimulates and fosters life. By fostering life, Transcendental Black Metal affirms life". To do this, however, it is necessary to recover the true founding gesture of Norwegian black metal: not the murder of Euronymous, but the suicide of Dead, compared to that of Cobain as a Nietzschean overcoming of an obsolete paradigm ("Dead's death secretly inaugurates the birth of black metal and the death of counterculture as such"). The goal of this proposal (steeped in continental philosophy as much as in Christian thought, but also Buddhist) is the refounding of a new aesthetic, "a third modality of art alongside the comic and the tragic […], a resurrection of the aura and an affirmation of the power of meaning to mean". And it is from this solemn point of arrival that the groundwork is laid for the next, gripping chapter of her musical maturation.

Aesthethica (2011), which marks the beginning of the partnership with Thrill Jockey, has more to do with math-rock and minimalism than with black metal, with "High Gold" brushing up against an almost progressive epos. Built on epic, obsessive forward surges, it's a work in which precision of execution matters more than density of atmosphere, which is not dark at all but rather coldly geometric. Its extreme compactness doesn't rule out rock-opera tricks (the minute of silence closing "Sun Of Light", exactly halfway through the record), laconic instrumentals ("Helix Skull", somewhere between a baroque fugue and a Riley-esque recursiveness) and brutal blasts (the crude sludge of "Veins Of God"), while the whiffs of incense sniffed out on Renihilation burn here in a cappella passages of Gregorian austerity ("Glass Earth", the intro to "True Will") as much as in the visceral brushstrokes of the lyrics, indebted to German pietism.

The leap in personality compared to the debut is drastic, and it establishes Liturgy as the undisputed beacon of new extreme music. While the hyperborean establishment turns up its nose and rushes to label them "hipster black metal", the mainstream press takes a liking to them, with the album popping up in various charts well outside the metal continent.

The other members of the band are less thrilled, increasingly marginalized by the overbearing personality of their leader (who in the meantime also indulges in a self-titled split with Oval, released for Record Store Day). In 2012 Dusenbury and Fox (who the year before had made his solo debut with the project Guardian Alien) throw in the towel and, after a few live shows as a duo with a drum machine, the group disbands: it's the first in a series of reshuffles that will keep reshaping Liturgy's lineup. Hunt-Hendrix, however, doesn't sit idle: with Marston and ex-Birthday Boyz members Greg Smith and Jeff Bobula, she creates the math/progressive project Survival, which the following year releases a self-titled album on Thrill Jockey, while she simultaneously prepares the springboard for her main project's next leap into the unknown.

Chapter 3: enter the fanfares

Having proven the scope of her vision, Hunt-Hendrix takes an Icarian flight with a perversely suicidal move. The Ark Work (2015), with Fox and Dusenbury reinstated in the lineup, is an album so strange it makes you doubt the seriousness of its intentions, starting with the disorienting opener "Fanfare" (an Aaron Copland high on lean). The renunciation of its black matrix is exemplified by the abandonment of screamed vocals, replaced by an apathetic flow borrowed from trap's indolence.

Laid out in a shimmering hi-tech chrome finish, haunted by alien electronics, the menu includes organ solipsisms somewhere between Bach and Berlin-era Bowie ("Haelegen"), harpsichord and bagpipe inserts (the over 11 minutes of "Reign Array") and bass broadsides ("Vitriol"), all under the banner of a capricious, idiosyncratic postmodernism. On "Follow", mademoiselle glitch makes her first appearance, from here on a loyal, deconstructive ally, while the muscles flex just right in the dehydrated doom of "Father Vorizen". The pulsating "Quetzalcoatl", which intertwines rap and metal while negating the energy of both, is the most faithful snapshot of this new direction.

Of Aesthethica's assault on heaven, what remains is a resigned, melancholic, adolescent languor. Allergic to cohesion, more formless than informal, a touch exhausting, conceived more for itself than for its audience, The Ark Work is nonetheless steeped in the fascination of research in progress, and as such deserves respect and consideration – not enough, however, to spare it yet another hailstorm of criticism from metalheads, nor to prevent the quartet's umpteenth breakup.

The antics described above, duly fermented, provide the must for the side project New Introductory Lectures On The System Of Transcendental Qabala, credited to the alias Kel Valhaal. The accompanying press release clarifies its nature as a divertissement, but doesn't hold back from launching into a flight of fancy that says it all: we thus learn that "the aim of the project is to activate transcendental catharsis using the elements of sound design" and that "the project has a horizon that is ethical, political, and eschatological". The music takes shape as a rambling digression through trap, bass and a twisted, viscous electronic sound, one step away from post-club fragmentation. Its amateurish, inscrutable quality sketches an at least partly deliberate caricature, appreciable at best as proof of the author's insatiable curiosity. Let it be noted, in any case, that a 10-minute trap track titled "Ontological Love" had never before appeared in the annals of music.

The increasingly restless Fox, for his part, releases "The Gradual Progression" under his own name and launches the supergroup Ex Eye, together with other celebrated veterans such as Colin Stetson and Shahzad Ismaily.

Chapter 4: the god of love

With Liturgy on hiatus again, our tireless heroine keeps herself busy with the most varied projects: in 2017 she shares credits with M Lamar on the melodramatic Funeral Doom Spiritual, somewhere between operatic pop and industrial. In 2018 she works on the long-coveted rock opera "Origin Of The Alimonies" (which we'll return to later), presented at National Sawdust in New York in a video format scored with a chamber ensemble, and staged again the following year at REDCAT in Los Angeles together with the Sonic Boom Ensemble. In 2019 comes the impromptu moniker Ideal, which with the bizarre single "Seraphim" theorizes a self-proclaimed "trap-djent" fusion (!).

It's Liturgy, however, that she needs in order to give shape to her magnificent obsession. After a live warm-up with Leo Didkovsky and Tia Vincent-Clark replacing Fox and Dusenbury respectively, performing only pre-The Ark Work material, the group's revamped lineup is ready to play its most momentous card.

H.A.Q.Q., surprise-released in November 2019 on YLYLCYN, HH's own personal label, from its very first moments presents itself as a schizoid summa of her omnivorous ingenuity, the culmination of an art-avant-metal now just a step away from classical music, something perhaps only Igorrr (and, more distantly, Tom Gabriel Fischer) has managed to achieve. Following in the footsteps of tormented experimenters like Justin Broadrick or Trent Reznor, our artist no longer intends to hold back from revealing what she calls her own "uniquely marxist and psychoanalytic vision of God", as well as her "struggles around mental health, sexuality, and religion".

It bursts onto the scene swinging, with a title that's an acronym for "Haelegen Above Quality And Quantity" (but also plays on the Arabic term "Haqq", one of the ninety-nine names of Allah, translatable as "Truth") and a cover summarizing the key points of her inscrutable weltanschauung, clustered into the macro-blocks "Axiology" – "Metaphysics" – "Cosmogony" – "Eschatology": only Sun Ra had managed to elaborate a belief system just as dense. And if all this should leave you disoriented, just wait until you press play…

A speedcore storm drags us into "HAJJ", an accelerated version of "Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh" in which inhuman screams drown in a torrential flood that also sweeps away piano, ryteki, hichiriki and esoteric chants, shifting mood with cyclothymic volatility: this is the prog of the future, more akin to a psychiatric ward than a pastel fairy tale. A cynical electronic manipulation also hijacks the interlocutory sketch of "EXACO I", two and a half minutes of pianistic hammering, almost like a Wim Mertens steeped in digital hardcore.

If nothing survives the deflowering in "VERGINITY" (certainly not that harp bled dry by a supersonic guitar), "PASAQALIA" reaches heights of classical-sounding majesty in its asceticism of strings, vibraphone and glockenspiel, while the slippery chiming of "EXACO II" even indulges in name-dropping Ligeti (who, in this case, sounds anything but "mournful, rigid and ceremonial").

But it's with "GOD OF LOVE" that Hendrix-thought can unfold in all its aberrant magnificence: a cinematic orchestral intro, an burst beat worthy of a horde of ogres, algebraic math-rock counterpoint, blackgaze sighs à la Alcest, in a melancholic crescendo of tearful stalactites. Faced with tracks like this, invoking the category of disbelief doesn't feel out of place.

"EXACO III" goes back to pouncing on Ligeti (but also on Chopin), while the title track uproots a toy organ with a savage, napalm-like shockwave, lit up by a coda for piano and bells that fades into four dots of suspension, the only comment a survivor of a massacre can offer, and the only semiotic trace that lingers in our electroconvulsed mind, dying out in an enveloping guitar tumor.

A riot of internal rhymes in perpetual cognitive dissonance, H.A.Q.Q. is the irregular consecration of the greatest living metal outsider, a manifesto of visionary genius and one of the records of the year.

The ideas hinted at become part of a full-fledged philosophical system, the "System Of Transcendental Qabala", laid out through a bewildering series of YouTube videos that reveal a voracious devotion to new media. The Hendrix-ian motto might sound like a "mystics of the world, unite", though devoid of esoteric connotations, perhaps more akin to a new new-age sect, albeit one taken tremendously seriously: "I've been developing a mythology which derives from psychoanalysis, Christian mysticism and things like Kabbalah", she'll declare without false modesty in an interview.

Intermezzo

"I am a woman. I've always been one. The love I have to give is a woman's love, if only because it is mine". The pen is the same one that sketched the dark lyrics of Liturgy and the even more layered theo-philosophical appendices, but which, when needed, can wield a sincerity so disarming it melts the heart. The message is entrusted to a dense Instagram post, on May 12, 2020: with a naivety and a tenderness that are more unique than rare, Hunt-Hendrix recalls the difficulties of discovering and accepting her own gender identity, outlines a poignant conception of femininity ("the feminine imbues everything I am"), and shouts out the visceral nature of the feelings she experiences. The solemnity with which she enunciates her words echoes that of her music, and faced with a statement like "I have no choice, there is no way for me to stop it from coming out, I am simply surrendering to it", it's hard to keep dry eyes.

The news bounces around like a pinball in burst beat: if metal coming-outs have always been scarce (except for the sensational but isolated one of Rob Halford), a revelation this delicate and complex has no known precedent. What's striking is the profound distance from any pre-existing communicative stereotype: far from the defiance of the gender warrior, Hunt-Hendrix coins a deeply personal trans-theology, proudly claiming the consistency of her choice with her intricate intellectual and religious path. A consistency that, after all, is hard not to notice: an artist congenitally transgender in her linguistic ease, she turns her own personality and body into an unprecedented field of experimentation, yet another extension of an incessant gesamtkunstwerk/merzbau and an incarnation of the divine being invoked with such fervor. Only Genesis P-Orridge had gone as far in blurring the line between life and work.

Meanwhile, a few images start to surface, first alone, then on stage: wrapped in floral dresses, long hair in the wind and the SG slung over her shoulder, this screaming madonna imposes a new aesthetic paradigm, pulling off the improbable feat of updating rock iconography. With that mix of discretion and resolve that is her trademark, she gladly documents her adventurous transition, harnessing her well-established social-media firepower to tie it to an ever more mammoth discourse on the Whole. In the comments flooding her channels echoes the ecstasy of those rushing to answer a prophetic call: a countless number of people fall under the spell of this ineffable creature who alternates selfies with biblical discourses, messiah of a new advent already capable of reaping select converts. A quiet revolution has begun.

In this as in other areas, the sense is that the innovations introduced by this extraordinary figure will take years to be fully absorbed. While waiting for that to happen, what's stirred is the kind of wonder sparked by paintings that break free of their frame.

Chapter 5: the appearance of the eternal church

Given the intensity with which it manifested and the media coverage it received, from now on it will be impossible to separate Liturgy's music from the leader's moving coming out. The first record to emerge from this new chapter does nothing to disprove that assumption, starting with an artwork that does not go unnoticed.

Richly heralded, Origin Of The Alimonies (2020) is the rock opera HH has dreamed of for a lifetime, following through on her never-hidden ambitions as a classical composer and an increasingly Wagnerian calling. The concept isn't limited to philosophical speculation but develops a genuine narrative fabric, further shaping that self-contained saga which is by now the Hendrix-ian cosmogony. As for the plot, from the booklet we glean that "the opera tells the story of a cosmogonical traumatic explosion between OIOION and SIHEYMN, a pair of divine beings whose thwarted love tears a wound from which civilization is generated, producing the Four Alimonies of the intelligible universe and the task of collective emancipation": all clear, right?

Not content with that, the author layers onto the music a mini-film which she directs, writes, edits and is the sole performer of, from which she also extracts the eloquent cover art, the first in her career on which she puts her own face and body. It is precisely the shifting nature of her transitioning physicality that becomes a mirror of the lyrical-musical narrative, in an extreme act of courage that seals the definitive assertion of her new gender identity. The effect, to put it mildly, does not leave one indifferent.

The quartet is accompanied by an eight-piece ensemble that, alongside the film projection, will also follow the band on the promotional tour, testifying to the importance placed on the organic unity of the project.

The symphonism of the previous album is reined in, veering instead toward a moody theatricality redolent of Russian ballet, with Stravinsky and Prokofiev looming large among the references. An Eastern European air also runs through the impetuous orchestral surges, indebted to Mussorgsky's romanticism (as well as a certain Mahlerian grandeur), but Hunt-Hendrix doesn't shy away from engaging with the saboteurs of tonality either (Scelsi, Boulez and Messiaen, the latter explicitly cited on "Apparition Of The Eternal Church", alongside the beloved Skryabin). The opera format (overture plus three acts) is this time the starting point rather than the destination, with the metal component scaled back to moments of attacking play. Nor does the album forgo artificial electronic interference, once again resorting to destabilizing bursts of glitch, albeit deployed more sparingly.

In its own way, it's a post-human update of the bombastic rock-with-orchestra albums that were all the rage in the Seventies. It's inferior to H.A.Q.Q. because it doubles down on its recklessness, but once again you're left stunned in the face of the protagonist's dizzying artistic gamble, a living work of art that keeps wringing out unsettling admiration.

Released the same day is the single "Antigone", a curious collaboration with the harp-violin duo LEYA.

Chapter 6: before learning the truth

After months of intense live activity, 2022 proves to be a harbinger of further developments: first of all, Hunt-Hendrix sets aside her given name once and for all, transforming into Ravenna (Haela Ravenna from 2023 onward), thus stabilizing her hard-won identity. Meanwhile, following in the footsteps of Perry Farrell, she reinvents herself as a sculptor, colliding industrial materials with Christian iconography within the horizon of a futuristic sacred art. One of these works ends up on the cover of As The Blood Of God Bursts The Veins Of Time (a title drawn from a line in "Glory Bronze", the eighth track on Aesthethica), an Ep serving as the appetizer to the most gargantuan indigestion yet inflicted on us.

"I never believe the lore": let's start from this blunt statement in an attempt to frame 93696 (2023), an hour and twenty minutes of music spread across a gold double vinyl. We already knew the artist has little patience for tradition: the "Transcendental Black Metal Manifesto" was, after all, her own personal challenge to metal dogmatism. And what to make of her increasingly brazen theological heterodoxy, pursued through social media posts in which she drives the merchants from the temple one by one? Yet such positions risk structuring a malign auto-tradition of their own, barricading themselves within a formalism that merely varies its own clichés, however original they may be.

Continuing through the lyrics, as usual not exactly transparent, we come across this further confession: "I could never endure a seance that didn't observe my faith". There follows the claiming of a victory ("We turned a terrible poem into a pre-critical tome") and the admission of a defeat ("I'm sorry I could never fully generate heaven"). Let me try to interpret: faithful only to her own titanism, this Doktor Faust in a skirt has indeed transformed black metal into something else, which however may not match the vision that struck her on the road to Damascus. Could holding the line, perhaps by polishing the cannons and loading sharper shells, be the only move available at this stage of reprogramming?

And yet there are plenty of deviations from the course within 93696: starting with the extra-large format (dispensed across the four acts "Emancipation"/"Individuation"/"Sovereignty"/"Hierarchy") and the title itself, which unlocks glossolalic aphasia by drawing on binary code. There's also a less self-sufficient streak at play, with a return to Thrill Jockey after two self-released albums and the enlistment behind the console of none other than Steve Albini, a figure seemingly far removed from the Hendrixian palette – though only seemingly: witness the deranged a cappella reinterpretation of "Prayer To God" served up in 2012 for The A.V. Club's "Undercover" series.

Let's talk about the music. Here too, there's no shortage of novelty: a recurring theme pursued with more insistence than usual, a greater concession to post-metal force, a particularly intense reliance on piano (both acoustic and electric), a firmer embrace of Glenn Branca's maximalism as well as microtonal experimentation. And then there's the Skinny Puppy-like bridge of "Djennaration", the boy-choir voices of "Angel Of Sovereignty" (which, set against the feral ohm that opened Renihilation, seem to seal a fully accomplished Dantean ascent), the Cave-esque accents of "Haelegen II", the almost-grunge of "Ananon", the almost-shoegaze of "Antigone II", and the twelve-string madrigal of "Haelegen II (Reprise)".

Finally, one shouldn't overlook the Albini effect, curiously more noticeable in certain rhythmic-harmonic choices than in the production itself (the second segment of the mammoth title track could pass for an outtake from "At Action Park", albeit set within a scenography somewhere between "Suspiria" and an old peplum film).

So what's the point, then? It's a shame to have to resort to such a silly argument for such an intelligent artist, but there it is: had this been the first (or even the second, third or fourth) Liturgy album, we would unhesitatingly have hailed it as a masterpiece. The issue lies precisely in what happened in between, in how far the band pushed the boundaries of an entire genre (if not of contemporary music as a whole), and the resulting difficulty of shaking off a distinctiveness that has by now hardened into a reassuring mannerism. Insisting on stamping the same signature by rehashing overused codes (especially in the glitch barrages, which by now generate more irritation than surprise) only ends up confirming this thesis, as does the already-familiar use of extra-rock instruments (from the marxophone of "Angel Of Individuation" to the ever-present strings and flutes) or stylistic mash-ups (the beloved trap infections).

Should we then take 93696 as a summary and/or deepening of previous chapters (the hypnotic plots of Aesthethica, the polluted aquifers of The Ark Work, the imposing gestures of H.A.Q.Q., the programmatic development of Origin Of The Alimonies), scattering out-of-place knick-knacks in a self-referential treasure hunt for fans? But what emerges instead is an even more paradoxical outcome: amid a scream more scathing than ever and a flood of archaic words in lyrics resembling magic spells or ancient legends, brimming with a violence that is at times almost childish, this might be the most genuinely metal record the Brooklyn quartet has ever cut. Music history textbooks teach us that the Romantics were followed by the Neoclassicists, but in the case of Liturgy this seems more like a side effect than a conscious choice.

Autistic and divisive as double albums tend to be, 93696 is a colossal binge that, if nothing else, offers newcomers enough cardinal points to decide whether or not to plunge into that magmatic creative well called Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix.

Thanks for everything

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