Our Doom

Problematically, because I read almost no music journalism at all, I frequently have no idea what the music I'm listening to is called. Or rather, I have no idea about the terminology other people commonly use to use to describe the genre-maps of contemporary music. Sometimes I find out belatedly, inadvertently, and it makes the music better (I was glad to find out that the oOoOO stuff I'd been listening to was called 'Witch House': that name suited it). Other times I end up making up my own names and labels that I stick on stuff. I hear genealogies that possibly don't exist, or at least only do in my own ears. A lot of what I've been listening to lately I call 'Doom'; I'm quite sure that's not what it's meant to be called, but there mustn't be a huge degree of consensus anyway because lots of different words seem to crop up on the internets: drone, glitch, industrial, dark-ambient (it's definitely not hauntology: I want to write more about Ghost Box in a later post). Anyway, quite frankly, a lot of it scares the shit out of me and I love it. In retrospect, the gateways into this were probably Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972 album and some Demdike Stare tunes from back in 2009. Recently I've been listening to stuff that's been even more laced with doom and anxiety. The Haxan Cloak's second album Excavation came out in the spring: a less likely time of year to release it I cannot imagine. It featured one of the most memorable cover images I can recall, it opened with the sound of sheer terror, and it went onwards from there to a brutal finale. 

More recently, the brutalism of Vatican Shadow has been entrancing. His famously enigmatic song titles, subtitles culled from the past decade's newspaper articles, capture a sense of mounting dread and discomfort: electronic ghosts of the future dead.

Lastly, I've been exploring some of the output of a "Finnish death dub technician" (hell, if one of the upsides to be being an artist is that you get to write your own job-title, then why not make it sound totally awesome) named Grmmsk. It's plenty startling.
I think there's real fear here, although I'm not certain of what exactly: the ever-present fear of mortality just given a new articulation, or a newer fear of collapse (twelve years since the endless war began, five years since the economy exploded, and only a generation until human society itself melts down across the entire face of the globe). Whatever eschaton is being invoked, this is the sound of that rough beast slouching towards its incarnation.