Inter-Dimensional Music 20211008
North America's Gnarliest Mix of types of chanting that don't matter
Inter-Dimensional Music is heard weekly on the airwaves of Marfa Public Radio, LOOKOUT FM Los Angeles, and WQRT Indianapolis. Find broadcast times below.
ID Music returns to the airwaves with a fresh installment in our “Rituales de lo Habitual” series looking at traditional and non-traditional forms of devotional audio and psychedelic ritual sounds. Visit our expanding archive for the 20210917 and 20210924 installments, and find the Aquarium Drunkard essay that inspired the series here:
For this third chapter in the series we turn to "ritualistic death metal." As regular listeners to our airwaves will surely know, our appreciation of this music can be understood as a kind of inverted blasphemy, an appropriation of such morbid, grotesque aesthetics as a crepuscular yin to ambient music's radiant yang. If meditation is "seeking equanimity in discomfort" then perhaps such caustic vibes have a place alongside more intuitive ambient and New Age soundtracks to mindfulness practice.
In exploring these ideas two concepts have arisen: The first is an understanding of the difference between work that praises cruelty, and that which acknowledges suffering. This isn't necessarily a judgement, but on a gut level music celebrating serial killers, torture, and other malicious acts has never been of much interest to me, nor do I find it useful for the counterintuitive ends of my projects combining heavy music visual art, Zen, and yoga.
Music that celebrates the physical realities of our bodies, or dwells on the suffering experienced by creatures currently passing through impermanent realms, is both interesting and useful, offering opportunities for catharsis and acceptance. As the Zen teacher Lewis Richmond writes, "the fact that we all suffer means that you are not alone."
This approach to such morbid and often gruesome subject matter also benefits from the idea we've been talking about throughout this ritual music series: Do the words actually matter? Or is it possible to appreciate Incantation's "Christening the Afterbirth" as something other than a song about baptizing placentas?
This is especially relevant to metal discourse, where the concept of "separating the art from the artist" is particularly fraught, given the depressing proliferation of white supremacists, transphobes, misogynists, and other shades of fascist within the culture. There is much to be said on this, but for the purposes of today's session I make the case that it's important to hold artists accountable for their work and their actions. But those works don't belong to their authors, and there is power in appropriation for compassionate ends.
And so it is with a spirit of lovingkindness that I welcome you to this hour of heavy death affirmations ranging from canonical monographs to radical contemporary treatises on impermanence. Listen for Mortiferum, Ripped to Shreds, Altarage, Incantation, Ominous Circle, Tzompantli, Cavurn, Immolation, Void Rot, and Vastum. Our practice begins and ends with Chi Factory, ambient music to complement such cavernous vibrations as conceived by two dudes living in a cave on the island of Patmos.
Language throughout the broadcast from Zen Master Seung Sahn.
ID Music 20211008
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setlist
artist - work
Chi Factory - Bamboo Recordings Part One (excerpt)
Mortiferum - Grave Invocation
Ripped to Shreds - (Sacrificial Fire)
Altarage - Sighting
Incantation - Christening The Afterbirth
The Ominous Circle - As The Worm Descends
Tzompantli - Ohtlatoc Copa Ilcahualuztli
Cavurn - II
Immolation - Those Left Behind
Void Rot - Descending Pillars
Vastum - Orificial Purge
Chi Factory - Bamboo Recordings Part Two (excerpt)
☸️ Zen Master Seung Sahn - Wanting Enlightenment is a Big Mistake
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