Of blood and memory

Launched in 2016 in Seattle by singer and multi-instrumentalist Joy Von Spain and sound artist Masaaki Masao, both already members of Eye of Nix - a project that has released three albums straddling atmospheric black, doom and sludge-metal - To End It All (a name borrowed from a line in Billie Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday": Billie Holiday: “My heart and I have decided to end it all”) moves between dark-ambient, death-industrial and neoclassical darkwave. “Our goal, at the start, was to create a big sound with a small setup - shorter musical pieces based on a single idea per song.” Among their stated influences, Von Spain lists, besides a sextet made up of “pain, anxiety, beauty, renunciation, resilience and oblivion”, also synth-pop and the music of American composer Donald Erb (1927-2008), famous above all for his works for large orchestras.

To End It All first released two EPs (a self-titled one and Lure, both in 2017), followed a year later by their full-length debut, tellingly titled Scourge Of Woman (8 tracks; 34:55), which was already enough to put them on the radar of listeners keen to dig through the American underground. Influenced as much by first-wave industrial as by its death-industrial offshoot, and clearly shaped by forays into black-noise and ultra-doom territory, the music of To End It All - whose name, in case it wasn't clear, refers to the act of “ending it all”, i.e. suicide - is a terrifying portrait of human pain and suffering, especially that of women.

“At a certain point in history, a false doctrine of male supremacy spread across nearly the whole world,” says Von Spain. “It's a disease born of the greed for power, and its most fervent proponents have imposed on humanity a way of life that is literally killing everything. These men of power have always imposed the language of cruelty as the species' fundamental language, and people of all genders have ended up using it, either out of fear, or because they too are driven by the lust for power.”

Opening with Von Spain's spoken-word delivery, which runs through actions such as “to inflame, to conflagrate, to cauterize, to erode, to desire” and so on, “Lure” pits dark rumblings against a sense of looming threat, as the voice plants its bloodied flag in a borderland between Diamanda Galás and Lingua Ignota. The black mass of “No Hero's Death”, with its industrial-noise counter-melody, is dedicated to those who believe there's something heroic in death. What it actually depicts, instead, is a slow, devastating decay: “Nessuna morte da eroe/ Il fetore del vomito di bile/ O putride viscere sciolte/ Sul letto umido e puzzolente/ Una malattia grigia macchiata di sudore/ Che si contorce nel suo disordine”.

To End It All rival, in terms of disturbing imagery, all those bands usually lumped together under the goregrind umbrella. If in the apocalypse of "Beast Filth" the witch Von Spain falls ever more prey to demonic forces, in "Mouths Searching For The Breast" the singer takes center stage with a performance tinged with faintly operatic overtones, while Masaaki underpins it all with a mix of hovering drones and metallic crashes. Lyrically, the world continues to be depicted as a horrible place, where compassion is a luxury no one can afford, while man wastes away like a blind "scar" in his suffering.

Involuntary power, demanding competition

So dire, encompassing all

Erasing compassion

Grappling, claws extended

Smile bared, she slices

Instill fear, nudity of hatred

Mouths searching for the breast

Hungry, futility steeped in anger

She sliced me

A scar now festers

Blind in suffering,

This mewling maw still clings, still searches

Teeth digging, she slices

Speaking about "Mouths Searching For The Breast", Von Spain, usually reluctant to discuss the meaning of her lyrics, told us that in this track she tried to highlight "a correlation between the behavior of animals, which inhabit the natural world, and the emotional dynamics between individuals", because "instinct and need are always present".

For its part, "Instinctual Force" is a sort of treatise on the psychology of noise, whereas in "Future Aborted" the voice rings out didactic and echo-laden, evoking one of the most terrible afflictions of our time, that "viral infection of self-satisfaction and hatred" that spreads like wildfire. Against a backdrop that is, as ever, extremely bleak, carved out of noise and samples, the future seems horribly distant, indeed entirely "aborted".

A pale menacing burst of aggression is rapidly approaching the surface.

This spill of awful force first burst forth from a fissure long ready to crack open as the beak of foul ego

tapped and tapped and tapped its own white shell. Viral infection of self-aggrandizement and hatred

spreading.

Curtains, walls, lies and iron bars climbing up and slamming down.

Handcuffs, razor wire, barbs and wiretaps encircling bodies and blood-fueled reality.

Cranes of progress ever toppled by shovel after shovel after shovel of fearful blind belief, disturbing

the ground on which future relies. Future aborted.

"In Cases Of Rape And Incest" reminds us, instead, that "there are some sins from which one cannot be cleansed", such as "having violated a mother", "a sister", a mother and her child". Unspeakable sins. And so, the harsh-noise furnace of "Burning Rapists" suggests just what fate rapists deserve.

The LP version of the album includes the bonus track "Cages Bleed Shiver And Shake", even more demonic in its refusal to spare anyone.

In 2022, To End It All released Live At Teatro De La Psychomachia/ Strength Is Nothing – A Partial Soundtrack For Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker", split into two twenty-five-minute tracks: the first made up of some of their earliest studio rehearsals; the second a live version of their partial score written to soundtrack the masterpiece by the great Russian filmmaker, suspended between neoclassical, drone music, gusts of noise and an ever-grim atmosphere. That score, written together with New Yorker Zvi (real name Ron Varod), was meant for the never-released compilation "Death As A Reflection", put out by Black Horizons.

"We weren't very familiar with Tarkovsky's work (perhaps due to limited exposure to Soviet art, having grown up in the 1980s), but it was a real pleasure to be able to watch his films, which are truly hypnotic. After seeing his movies, we focused on what's said in 'Stalker', namely that 'strength is nothing'. That can really be illuminating for our times. I wish all young people would take it to heart and not harden themselves against others and the world around them. There's so much to explore in Tarkovsky's films. At the end of the score, I wanted to add a vocal part that came out in the studio just like that, by chance, and I probably couldn't sing it that way again."

In April of this year, 2024, the duo returned to the scene with Of Blood And Memory (8 tracks; 45:13), an LP in which the music keeps inflicting wounds on the soul.

We started writing the songs for this album mainly between 2019 and 2020, caught in a whirlwind of several losses that hit us closely, but also in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, an unbalanced political climate, news of police violence and, as if that weren't enough, fires and tear gas that reached right up to our rehearsal space. So it felt like we needed more expressive means to fully lay bare the heart of these songs. But also more instruments, more time in the studio, more exposure. Melodic/harmonic writing is my forte, and it took center stage more often on this album. By contrast, 'Scourge Of Woman' was more rooted in Masaaki's brutal environments.

Backed by singer/guitarist A.K. O'Neill and cellist Lori Goldston (who has already worked with Earth and who in 1993 had the honor and good fortune to play on some tracks of "Mtv Unplugged in New York" by Nirvana), Masaaki and Von Spain carve out songs that resemble, in their own words, "temples of mourning, of fire, of blood, of memories", injecting every crevice with dark, visceral emotion.

Welcoming us (so to speak!) is the negative liturgy of "Introduction", followed by the industrial-noise ritual of the title track, continually lashed by rough guitar figures that drift like banks of putrid fog and enveloped by swarms of synths foreshadowing the Last Judgment. Closer to the atmospheres of Scourge Of Woman, with its urge to walk a tightrope stretched over the chasm that separates - if only in theory - the ultra-doom torment of Khanate from the death-industrial/black-noise nightmares of Pharmakon, "Hunt (Root Out The Source)", which pushes past the nine-minute mark, is haunted by droning premonitions of catastrophes yet to come: Von Spain's voice is a fierce rasp, a torrent of poison, destruction and implosion, all in order to "root out the source of all this misery". The coda is an electroacoustic abyss: black, dissonant, endless. Like hell beneath the skin.

Hunt, hunt, hunt

With poisons, swords, and guns

Hunt, hunt, hunt

Implode, explode, destroy

Hunt, hunt, hunt

Root out the source of all this misery

Hunt, hunt, hunt

With poisons, swords, and guns…

In the opening seconds of "Foreign Tissue", Lori Goldston's cello appears, despite its melancholy timbre, like a ray of sunlight - though it's impossible to savor its warmth for long, because Von Spain's voice quickly echoes back up from the deepest abysses, moving through a vast territory that stretches from the usual Nico all the way to the Fursaxa of "Kobold Moon", a voice that is an open vista onto "vague and undefined" dimensions, and which asks pain to wrap itself around her, so she can be guided toward understanding it. Understanding that is comfort. Understanding that is patience enough to drown in the depths of one's own self, there where perhaps lies the "only place nothing gets in", as Von Spain slowly and obsessively repeats in the spectral ceremony of "The Drink Of Silence".

In the far more impetuous "A Year Of Lapidation", a track that Black Tape For A Blue Girl would surely have appreciated, the singer instead questions the possible futility of love ("Useless love/ Is it all for nothing?").

The piano-and-strings sonata of "Oyasumi" is "a Japanese lullaby, sung by the oldest to the youngest". At the end of life, their ages reverse: the elder becomes dependent, so, with tears and tenderness, the young one sings it back to them to keep them away from anguish. When keys and strings shed their guise, a whirlwind of harsh noise invades the stage. "It's a requiem for a dear family member taken far, far too soon from life. We offer it to everyone who holds the hand of the dying and kisses their forehead."

The operatic gothic passage of "Elegy" is the final act of this tight reckoning with death. The synths swell, and with them the voice, intent on chasing "the traces of youth", which slowly dissolve, to turn "into a small coin" scattered "among the slums of the mind".

On this, my final day

Traces of youth ease away

Slowly turning on a dime

In the shallows of the mind

I fall, I fall, I fall

And when I call

I hear, I hear, I hear

Nothing at all, at all

On this, your final day

Traces of youth ease away

Slowly turning on a dime

On the gallows of the mind

You fall, you fall, you fall

And if you call, you call

You hear, you hear, you hear

No voice at all, at all

A “remixed” edition of Of Blood And Memory has also been released, featuring an acoustic version of “Oyasumi” and contributions from, among others, Xiphoid Dementia, Test Frenzym, irr.app.(ext.) and The Unbodied Air.

Meanwhile, for the winter of 2024, the duo has already scheduled the mixing of the new album. “It will be a sort of return to the brutality hinted at on our first LP,” Von Spain tells us. “This time, together with our collaborators, we've created a beast that we hope will devour the world and put an end to humanity's misery.”

In short, all that's left to do is wait.

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