Rows of Endless Waves I: Corrupted Ambience
Considering the cosmic, organic sorrow of funeral doom as durational mindfulness practice
If you’d like to skip the commentary and get straight to the Inter-Dimensional Music, keep scrolling
As regular readers of the Void Contemplation Tactics newsletter know by now, this publication is an inversion of our weekly Inter-Dimensional Music FM radio broadcast. Where the show is 90% music and 10% dharma, the newsletter is mostly my slop-style dharma talking with a few links to dharma rocking. I worked professionally as an editor, critic, and journalist for a decade starting in the late ‘90s, and got pretty burned out on writing about music before switching to a more wide-ranging style of creative nonfiction. For the last few years I’ve mostly been interested in finding ways to talk about mindfulness practice through the lens of my personal experience as a medic, Zen center resident, and artist.
Funeral doom – an extremely slow, often very pretty, and ... funereal ... variety of metal that's a little closer to the dejected prog of Pink Floyd than the wasted hippie blooze of Black Sabbath – is one place where all of these concepts overlap. The heavy music that makes it onto the ID Music airwaves is a sincere part of the overall “mindfulness”-driven creative endeavor, but funeral doom is an ideal demonstration of the kind of metal that gels with my Zen practice: music about the suffering that connects us, rather than the cruelty that perpetuates more suffering. As Kim Kelly put it writing about the funeral doom band Lycus: "The quartet refrain from histrionic, death-worshipping self-hatred and instead embrace a more cosmic, organic take on sorrow."
These slow, long, quiet, and then loud songs also offer the opportunity to practice "equanimity in armagideon" not unlike sitting meditation or slow yoga. And so for this series we’re returning to one of Lama Rod Owens' dharma talks about sitting with "dark, difficult emotions" for extended periods of time, and learning compassion from despair.
This series is hardly a comprehensive introduction to funeral doom. One of the luxuries of producing an understandably unpopular difficult obscure FM radio art project is that I can focus expressly on the things that I enjoy, and have no responsibility to offer a broad perspective on music, Zen, entheogenic experimentation, or what I’ve lately been calling “spiritual anarchism.” A clique of Scandinavian and English bands is often credited with birthing this understandably unpopular difficult obscure genre of long-form clinical depression soundtracks, but I’m choosing to focus on the loose creative lineage of the Seattle-based band Bell Witch, whose new album Future’s Shadow Part I: The Clandestine Gate emerged in late April. The first single is the only song: An 83-minute long dirge of gothic shoegaze in amber: Long streaks of slowed and throwed bass guitar interrupted by methodical rhythms keeping geologic time.
These lineages are easily traced through Encyclopedia Metallum, a massive, meticulously organized archive presented to the world in a comforting and efficient Web1 interface. The thread that we’ll follow over the next few programs mostly avoids the stately grandeur1 of bands like Skepticism and Esoteric, and focuses on more recent funeral doom artists whose work is – paradoxically – influenced by the sloppy crunch and swinging low-end of crust punk. These are the bands that bring something organic to the widescreen cosmic sorrow that funeral doom is known for.
We start with a focus on Corrupted, a band that will be well familiar to regular listeners of our airwaves, and to participants of my occasional Basking in Gravity mindfulness installations. Corrupted is like a dark yin counterbalance to Boredoms’ blitz of ecstatic yang frequencies, a comparison that has little to do with their shared country of origin, beyond a few overlapping contributors such as Rie Lambdoll, as seen on the mic in the above video. Both bands have a devoted following despite being deliberately obscure and releasing an incredibly confusing and diverse discography of hard-to-find music.
As anyone who’s tried to learn more about Corrupted has discovered, this shifting collective doesn't do interviews, or photo shoots. Their lyrics are often in Spanish, but also German, English, and Japanese. Their discography ranges from harsh noise 7-inches and ambient piano compositions to four-minute bursts of sludgy metallic punk. They’re revered for their crusty take on funeral doom: 2005's El Mundo Frio is their Vision Creation Newsun. It’s one 72-minute song that drifts through a haze of acoustic guitars, ASMR whisper-vocals, and harp, only to be twice interrupted by radiant sheets of droning, maximum volume post-metal.
This episode is a project I’ve been wanting to take on for as long as I’ve been listening to Corrupted. It’s an hour-long live mix of the ephemeral drones and delicate acoustic passages that provide such an effective contrast to the dense walls of downtuned guitars and screeching noise that are essential for the complete Corrupted experience. This is sacrilege, but no more apostatical than suggesting that it might work as a soundtrack to zazen or yoga.
Unsurprisingly for a band that renounces any publicity beyond word-of-mouth transmission, their online profile is low. Their music can be hard to find outside of Youtube rips and live recordings. Few things dispel the myth of a reclusive underground band than “check out our Spotify page.” In keeping with their commitment, their Spotify page consists of only three songs. Two of which are extremely obviously not the same Corrupted, unless the group has been producing progressive house on the low.
For the next few shows we’ll wander dejectedly around the gloomy habitat occupied by Corrupted and their comrades, such as Asunder, Mournful Congregation, Aldebaran, Samothrace, Hellish Form, Un, Celetstiial, and Fórn. If all goes according to plan we’ll end up with a similar ambient-forward mix of Bell Witch edits.
One of the other paradoxes of funeral doom is that despite its foreboding tone and intimidating duration, it’s some of the most accessible and straightforwardly beautiful music filed under metal. A lot of this work could pass as down-tuned Pink Floyd, black-pilled Allman Brothers, or the Ungrateful Dead. At least until the death metal growls start to rise through the perpetual gloaming.
I hope you enjoy this point of entry, or perhaps take it as an opportunity to put Lama Rod’s theory into practice, to sit with dark, difficult emotions and see what they have to teach us. “In hopelessness, in despair, I think they're teaching us how to live with much more openheartedness,” he says in the episode of the Action for Happiness podcast sampled on today’s show. “They're teaching us to understand that we're not the only ones in the world who are experiencing really difficult emotions. And that opens the door to compassion.”
As always, gratitude to friends of the show with significantly higher profiles who graciously endorse our work, people who follow us here after casting social media aside, those who share this newsletter with fellow travelers, downgrade their subs to free because times are rough, upgrade their subs to paid because they’re feeling flush, and peace and blessings to the wise individuals who unsubscribe because this is not the newsletter they were expecting based on the meditation workshop at the yoga studio. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to know you’re out there.
blessing up and blessing down,
Daniel
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Inter-Dimensional Music 20230428
Rows of Endless Waves I: Corrupted Ambience
For this week's practice, it's the first installment of ROWS OF ENDLESS WAVES, a series of broadcasts exploring the cosmic, organic sorrow of funeral doom in the context of durational mindfulness practices.
We begin with a continuous live mix of ambient selections – and one brief passage of shimmering post-metal – cut and pasted from across the discography of heavy mellow polymaths Corrupted. Language throughout the hour from Lama Rod Owens, in conversation with the Action for Happiness podcast:
"But in hopelessness, in despair, I think they're teaching us how to live with much more openheartedness. They're teaching us to understand that we're not the only ones in the world who are experiencing really difficult emotions. And that opens the door to compassion."
artist – work
Corrupted - VIII - El Mundo
Corrupted/Asunder - Live at KFJC
Corrupted - Garten
Corrupted - Against The Darkest Days
Corrupted - An Island Insane, Part 2
Corrupted - Paso Inferior
Corrupted - 月光の大地
Corrupted - El Mundo Frio
☸️ Lama Rod Owens
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These bands are fine as far as I can tell, and are widely beloved. The very petty reluctance I have about digging into their back catalogues is extremely superficial but …
… too many of them look and sound like the sort of evangelical atheists who would name their band Skepticism, perform in an artfully undone topcoat and tails, and then try to change the topic to Richard Dawkins when you're done talking about depressing metal. They’re probably actually very nice? I’m probably being a jerk. Decide for yourself: