Film has become something I'm less and less interested in lately. I've enjoyed going to the theater on a fairly regular basis and taking in the sights and sounds of the summer blockbuster season, but I doubt I'll be thinking much about Thor or X-Men First Class once the leaves start falling. I find it harder and harder to sit still for my fallback films as time goes on and after selling off half of my once cherished collection, I can definitively state that the days of Shloggs the compulsive collector have come to a close. It's time to come clean about the obsession currently consuming this erstwhile cinephile. Bodybuilding. Yes, you read that right. I grew up in the 80's, worshipping Arnold and Sly and reading Muscle and Fitness magazine, dreaming of one day sporting the lats of Lee Haney, the traps of Rich Gaspari and the bicep peaks of Albert Beckles. I'm certain no one is interested in my encyclopedic knowledge of mid 70's to late 80's body builders, but the point is, after moving into a complex with a well stocked workout room, my love affair with resistance training has been rekindled with a passion.
The endlessly inspirational documentary Pumping Iron makes a clear cut case for body building as an art form. The pursuit of attaining symmetry, strength and size with your own body as the canvas using hard work, discipline and scientific understanding of muscle groups and diet as the instrument. I have found an outlet for my creativity outside the navel gazing of sedentary consumption or self loathing misanthropy and it feels fantastic. Finally, here is something in life that I have complete control over. The results are dependent entirely upon the effort, both physical and mental, I put into it and nothing else. It's liberating to be involved in something which preconceived opinion and differing taste has no bearing. I've always been a big dude and dabbled haphazardly in it, but dedicating myself wholly to the discipline with purpose and clarity has been rewarding and life affirming in a manner bordering on spiritual.
Point being, this endeavor has occasioned me to re-familiarize myself with music as it is my sole companion and trusted motivator while engaged in my morning sessions. Music was my second love after film and I (mis)spent most of my teens and early 20's playing in bands. Heavy metal most appealed to me with its darkness and aggression. I discovered Slayer, Metallica and Megadeth first, but just as my tastes in film clamored for the ever more extreme, I found myself searching out underground publications (in the glorious pre-Internet world where you had to put effort into finding that which spoke to you personally) to help me locate the cutting edge. I moved onto Carcass, Godflesh, Entombed, Prong and a bevy of similarly transgressive acts. Standard music with 4/4 time signatures and intelligible lyrics concerning the pedestrian notions of life and love became unlistenable tedium. I would come across albums that spoke deeply to me and study them for months. I mean literally listening to the one album for MONTHS and nothing else. Albums like Godflesh's Songs of Love and Hate, Carcass' Necrotism: Descanting the Insalubrious, Sepultura's Roots and Dimmu Borgir's Death Cult Armageddon.
I need my music to be like my films. It has to be confrontational and complex to the point that it can't possibly be understood on first listen. I need to put serious effort into comprehending it for it to be worth my while. I want to discover something new during each subsequent listen. To me, bands like AC/DC and The Ramones are the musical equivalent of Paul Blart Mall Cop and Rush Hour 2. Purely predictable pap, formulaic and easily digestible. I've been spinning a lot of jagged vitriol spewed by inhuman musicians while shredding muscle fiber such as The Red Chord, Whitechapel, Converge and Daath, but a certain album has come along and completely blindsided me. That album is the recently released masterpiece from Hate Eternal entitled Phoenix Amongst the Ashes.
Hate Eternal is the brainchild of death metal guitarist and producer extraordinaire Erik Rutan. To the uninitiated, it will at first listen seem a maelstrom of indecipherable nonsense. A blistering cacophony of merciless eardrum punishment conceived by steroidal demons in the bowels of hell with the sole purpose of driving mere mortals to irretrievable madness. There are no choruses here, no reference points, no calm amidst the storm, just pure insanity for 45 straight minutes. If this album were a film it would make the likes of Tetsuo, Irreversible and Cannibal Holocaust cower in fear. This shit makes avant garde Jazz and noise rock sound like the fucking Goo Goo Dolls. But, if you possess the intestinal fortitude to brave its monolithic onslaught more than once, the intricate brilliance of its otherworldly composition will slowly reveal itself. There are a million melodies contained within a single riff, a thousand ideas at play behind every blast beat. This album is artistic creativity moving at a million miles a second.
There is no commercial viability to this piece of art. The motives for its production are without compromise or concession. It is a vision as singular as anything from Kubrick, Fincher, Tsukamoto or Cronenberg. Rutan is the sole composer, the primary musician, hell, he's even the man behind microphone placement and performance selection. Through sheer force of will he has constructed this entire accomplishment, devoid of outside influence or marketplace dictation. This will only appeal to or even be understood by a select few who can tolerate its nearly unbearable intensity. To paraphrase Sherriff Wydell from Devil's Rejects, Rutan is playing on a level that few will ever see and to me, that is a feat as breathtaking as it is beautiful.
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