Gnaw Their Tongues - Reeking, Pained and Shuddering

 

Artist:         Gnaw Their Tongues

Album:       Reeking, Pained and Shuddering
Year:          2007

Line-up:     Mories – All instruments

Label:        Paradigms Recordings

”It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

- Krishnamurti

When we dwell upon the nature of art, we easily think of something of extraordinary beauty and something close to perfection. However on the present day there are a few individuals who find aesthetic pleasure from things which are not considered beautiful and harmonious by the traditional conventions. In the late 19^th century the Western classical music was facing what now call ”a crisis of tonality”, meaning that composers thought that they had more or less exhausted the possibilities of the system of traditional tonal hierarchies. This resulted in atonality which in short means that music lacks a tonal center, the key. Therefore the music does not sound ”happy” or ”sad” to the average listener but rather harsh and jarring – discordant. In the early twentieth-century Europe also lay the cultural origins of the broad genre which we call noise music. The only distinguishing genre feature is that the music employs noise (an unpleasant or disturbing sound) as a principal musical resource.

One day as I was exploring the website of the English record label Paradigms Recordings, I happened to stumble upon an album that had such an intriguing description that as a little musical pervert I had no choice but to venture forth in to the sick, disturbing and frightful but yet the so fascinating world of the Dutch one-man project known as the Gnaw Their Tongues. The website says that the music is ”harrowing, apocalyptic bestial ritual music from the deepest, darkest cellars of the Netherlands. Avant black metal, agonising funeral doom and blackened experimental drone noise stab forth again and again until all the blood is split and total carnage is all that remains. Pure dread put to music”. That really sums up the record perfectly. Reeking, Pained and Shuddering is a truly unique mixture of noise, black metal, black and dark ambient, martial industrial, spoken word sequences and drone, if you care about genre tags.

The music consists of horrendous, distorted cacophonies which are accompanied by drums, strings and painful screams. Occasionally, the overbearing barriers of noise and blasting black metal mayhems dissolve into more dark ambient soundscapes and almost gentle string passages almost resembling a piece of chamber music only to explode to screeching screams of demons. One piece opens up even by a female opera singer creating an interesting contrast to the menacing humming background sound until a brutal blast beat appears out of nowhere. The general sound world is cold, harsh and uninviting. The songs are narrated with spoken word performances which reflect the twisted and sick aspects of the modern day society. Fanatic preachers painting pictures of a christian hell, sinister voices reciting biblical quotations and eyewitnesses recounting the search of Ed Gein's house.

The music is truly frightening. It takes you on a cinematic horror movie-like trip to the darkest corners of the human psyche. However, it is a journey of a most fascinating nature similar to that of Dante's descent to hell. Proceed with caution:

Utter Fulity of Creation

Written by: Παναγιωτης