Gnaw Their Tongues – Le Chant De La Mort Triomphante (with bonus awful Dimmu Borgir video!)

I’m busy putting together a Best of 2010 compilation and realizing that a lot of great music will have to be cut if I’m going to keep it all under ninety minutes. Then there’s the question of including something from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy- should my remit be to simply list the best releases of the past 365 days or show that there were amazing things happening in places you wouldn’t expect? Does Girl Talk count? What about covers? Why can’t I just give the 1-9 spots to Agalloch and make everyone else joint 10th?
Gnaw Their Tongues didn’t make the cut, so I’m putting them here. Gnaw’ is Netherlander Maurice de Jong and what sounds like every symphony orchestra in the western world. 2010 has seen more neoclassical elements work their way into black metal than in the past decade. Every corpse-painted misanthrope and his goat is getting a cellist into their parents’ basement to lay down mournful soundscapes. As with any sudden bandwagon jump there is bound to be more music produced simply to be part of a trend rather than in reverence of the artistic impulses that started that trend (I’m looking at you every single bedroom Witch House producer on Soundcloud). GTT has been doing this a lot longer than most and a lot better than almost anybody. Looking at you Dimmu Borgir. Because you are the worst. Evidence below.

According to Wikipedia that wasn’t Robyn doing the female vocals in that video, but you can’t really believe a source that can be edited by just anybody so I’m going to assume that it was. Also, I’d much rather look at grainy static images of an album cover (even that Scorpions album with the naked ten year old) than pretentious Kerrang! TV fodder. On a more positive note, I would be very happy if I got a Squid Crown for Christmas.

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The Terror Fabulous Mixtape #1: Anti Christ Suite

I avoided that whole DJ phase when I was a kid- there’s no branch of Cash Generator out there with the pair of Numark decks and cheap crossfader I sold a year after buying them. Maybe I’m experiencing a late adolescence because I’ve gone and made a DJ mix. It would also explain the pubes.
The Anti Christ Suite is mostly Drag, or Witch House, with a significant contribution from the genres that inspired chillwave’s dark twin, chiefly black metal and new wave. There’s even two cuts from the soundtrack to Inception, which you really ought to have seen by now.
Although I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a ‘concept album’ or claiming any sort of inspiration, it does have a set of samples from Lars Von Trier’s film Anti Christ. When I first saw the film at Norwich’s Cinema City in 2009 there was not only screaming and several walk-outs but a ghost caught on camera.
Click the image above to play or this link to download (134mb).
Full track listing after the jump:
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Because it’s such a lovely day, here’s the soundtrack to every nightmare you’ve ever had: Edgard Varèse’s Arcana. Supposedly, if you play this over Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou they synch up, like Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz or Stockhausen’s Hymnen and Bring It On: In It To Win It.

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Over at Sign & Sight Ueli Bernays has a smart little article on the changing meaning of the Falsetto over time- derided by classical musicians for being ‘false’ and unnatural, and more than anything unmanly, then appropriated by the musical genres that would make lacking traditional masculinity into a virtue: Soul musicians turning sensitivity into a virtue instead of a liability and treating your lady right into the apogee of male sexual achievement; Heavy Metallers who finally got that memo about stereotypical masculinity being, and I quote, ‘gayer than eight guys blowing nine guys’ (G.W.F Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, 1807). Today, Bernays suggests in his last paragraph, auto-tune has made the falsetto false again. Have a read. Continue reading

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