5 Songs for When..... Part 1, by Adam Lehrer
5 Songs for When the future looks unclear but bleak all the same...
1. Plecid “Sssexy”
Disturbing industrial mechanical rumblings and distortions bleed into desperate synth squalls that place the listener inside the mind of a late stage incel. “Sssexy?” Maybe, I suppose, if the desperation of a libido so bottled up it's bubbling to the surface as an unstoppable primal violence gets your juices flowing. Plecid is David Woodward, perhaps, and others, likely. This track appears on a compilation published by the Freedom in a Vacuum in 1993. Nothing else on the album sounds like violent masturbation to quite this extent.
He once said in an interview published by Descent with Tyler Davis, proprietor of the rather important dark and occult-leaning Anja Offensive label, that his aesthetic goals leaned fascistic. And yet, he understands well enough that the fascists would see him annihilated for his pandering to degeneracy. But this isn’t degeneracy nourished and allowed to flourish. This is degeneracy denied. This is the sound of sexual longing asphyxiating the spirit and blackening the heart. There’s nowhere to go. No one to fuck. What comes next?
2. Olho Seca “Vencer/Regras”
Vencer/Regras. Win/Rules. The winner makes the rules. You’re the loser. Forever. Always. You lose. The Brazilian hardcore band Olho Seca, formed in 1980, fulfills punk rock’s implicit promise as fight music for undisciplined, chaotic, and anarchic violence. Winner makes the rules? Why not put this on and just kill the winner? See how his rules are doing after suffering blunt force trauma to the chrome dome. And again. And again…
3. Heroin Makes Happy “Mind Desolation Cause H”
Heroin Makes Happy? Not really. At best, heroin makes you feel dead when you no longer have the will to live but don’t have the courage to just fire up an overdose of Fentanyl into your central nervous system and slowly let it all melt away. Heroin Makes Happy is an experimental synth project by Andreas Bettinger, a German satanic drug addict freak best known for his evocatively incompetent black metal project Grasaumkeit. Heroin Makes Happy is an indulgent project. This track sounds like someone drifting into an opiated dream inspired by GTA: Vice City. ‘80s cop synths are diluted by hiss, dank distortion, and Bettinger’s own deluded vocal musings. Have you given up and totally retreated inward into a subjective world of perverse fascinations and egoic death drives? OK then…
4. Legless “Butcher of Baltimore”
The butcher of Baltimore was Joe Metheny. An alcoholic, junk and crack addicted, fat, homeless bastard, he “confessed” to murdering and raping 13 prostitutes. Weirdly, the police were only able to connect him to two crimes, for which he was sentenced to life. In 2017, he was shanked in his cell. When asked why he killed the women, his only response was that he enjoyed it. The Butcher of Baltimore was a braggart, above all else. Somehow he’s made all the more despicable for the fact that he was so lazy and useless that he couldn’t even carry out all the crimes he wanted to commit. In any case, Dan Propert, also known as Legless, makes music that bums me out more than this pathetic true crime story.
5. Hellvetron “Abbadon - Wings of Permission”
Does the future look too bleak to handle? Perhaps it’s time to usher in the end and call forth Abaddon, archangel of the abyss? He can vanquish it all in one fell swoop, rushing in the inevitable apocalyptic march to extinction. Does this sound like a gloriously fitting end to your life in wreckage? This oppressively slow and dank blackened death doom track by Hellvetron, which shares members with American black metal terror squad Nyogthaeblisz, might give you some great (re: dark) ideas. Don’t tell anyone you got them from me.
Schopenhauer said that the effect of music is more powerful and penetrating than the other arts: “For these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.” So, for this column, “5 Songs for When…”, Adam will be compiling short playlists to emphasize specific but universally understood philosophical ideas.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. a tape by Plecid
2. excerpt from Plecid interview in Descent no. 4
3. Olho Seca
4. Andreas Bettinger
5. A Legless album cover
6. Hellvetron