Uzumaki - Gift of Tongues (2013)

 

I believe esoteric music has the ability to spark reflection on deeper truths about the human experience and the world that are inaccessible through conventional musicality. Even in most avant-garde pieces, the sonic expression is bound by expectations and tropes which obstruct the true idea that inspired it. These expectations and tropes create the language of a genre as a way to communicate in the medium of sound, but any language is inherently limited. Some music sheds most layers of expected structure to discover new modes of expression, potentially better representations of their source.

One such project is the one-man band Uzumaki by the prolific Jared Moran, who's also known as Plaguehammer. He plays a form of through-composed dissonant death metal whose rhythmic and tonal forms shift without warning. It's most comparable to Pyrrhon's improvisational jazz take on the genre but much more disorienting. When I listen to "Gift of Tongues", I imagine a dark and cold place where hostile gusts of wind blow past jagged rocks. The guitars constantly counterpoint each other with atonal sweeps and diminished chords dashing past the listener like swarms of unseen, unfathomed creatures. When the music slows down, riffs spiral and slither in uneven rhythms or stomp in a very square pattern before eventually collapsing into feedback - these feedbacking moments of relative calm often precede a new blasting section. In that way there is a songwriting logic to the fluctuation of tempo from lightning-fast to a dirge and back. There are no transitions whatsoever, but these changes aren't jarring in the context of the songs, as there is an omnipresent dissociative feel regardless of speed. The compositions are already loose enough that sudden changes aren't awkward but instead fit naturally. All the aggression channelled during drum-heavy parts is drowned in confusion and comes out more as an animalistic response than purposeful malice. There isn't a meaningful song structure to talk about, but the album's broader songwriting pattern is that of interchangeable chapters (multiple per song) of wild energy that burns down into nothingness. The listening experience of "Gift of Tongues" is being trapped in a cycle through a point of view unable to realize its own existence, acting solely by pure instinct.

It's not as directionless as something like Blut Aus Nord's "MORT". That album was stuck at the same low energy, crawling in lethargic non-patterns, while all instruments on "Gift of Tongues" work together to create a clear rise and fall in the rhythm, which gives meaning to the dissonance. The deliberately obtuse harmonies by themselves only communicate that the soundscape is contorted, but without nuance as to how. Because the notes clash by design, there is a lot of leeway on what exact pitches can be played without changing the nature of the album. A much wider tonality becomes useable when an agreeable melody isn't the goal, though it's easy for that approach to create non-distinct music. However, you can find your way around the album by the movement of notes in time the same way you would navigate a dark place by touch. At high speeds different kinds of blastbeats mirror the riffage, while at medium ones drums push and pull as they alternate between groups of kick hits and individual snare, and vice versa. The echoing vocals also support the fast sections with quick low barks and switch to more prolonged, breathy growls or screeches when slowing down.

There is also an opposition between the guitars and drums. During the slowest parts, when the guitars are relegated to feedback, the drums continue to cut through the noise with off-beat bursts of 3-4 kick or snare hits and more tom fills. I imagine the pitched instruments as higher brain functions, such as perception of the environment and emotional response, and the unpitched ones as primal reflexes - the latter continue to cause involuntary twitches in the body after the former have been completely overwhelmed. The production is claustrophobic with a very dry guitar tone that grinds against the ears, and reverb is focused on percussion and vocals, with the exception of the kick, which is still dry. Every part of the drum kit occupies only a narrow frequency range, so it struggles to assert itself in the dissonance. The metaphorical body movements the drums represent come out as shallow and uncoordinated.

It's interesting that Uzumaki themes all its album titles around language. The band uses death metal's basic vocabulary but doesn't write cohesive songs as we understand them, so even if it "speaks" the same language, the application is very different. Formalizing the expression into a rigid structure distracts from the true source that demanded that expression to exist. With music that wants to express very strong emotions, planning out detailed compositions is antithetical to that goal, so by removing another barrier to the emotional source, improvisation becomes a more "pure" interpretation of it. I must make it clear that I cannot call this deconstruction of death metal experimental, as the conceptual extremes of structure were already reached in the 20th century with ambient and noise (which are two aspects of the same idea) as well as the chance-based approach of indeterminate composition. I cannot be impressed anymore, knowing about these. The common appeal of the vast majority of so-called avant-garde music is misguided - its innovations are trivial in the grand scheme of things, and as such, it should be valued for exploring nuance rather than the illusion of treading new ground.

I don't say this to devalue the project but to show my perspective on how this type of music should be treated. Even if it's initially done for its own sake, experimentation can be dialed back to develop forms of expression better suited to certain ideas and emotions (where older forms didn't hit the mark). Uzumaki stands out in the metal underground with its formless compositions, but more importantly, it repurposes the building blocks of death metal into an unintuitive, yet visceral, exploration of anger and confusion. I've accepted that this type of music will never gain real recognition. The upper bound of what most metalheads can tolerate was established in the 90's with the codification of death and black metal, so any harder listening is doomed to be one of the following: superficially appreciated as a "heavier" version of something else or a fringe curiosity that's quickly forgotten.