Tag Archives: Otrebor

Dimmur Paganini

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Metal and classical sound like one another to me. Ok, that’s stretching the truth, but there’s a fundamental something that makes those two seemingly polar genres ring the same to my ear.

Metal’s got highly distorted and compressed music. Classical doesn’t. But for the life of me, I can’t think of a piece of music more metal than Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Throw in Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos,” too. Fast forward to the present and living composers, and it’s no coincidence that the work of Arvo Pärt is a favorite amongst many metal musicians. Likewise, classical’s timeless feel of grandeur gets channeled within me just as strongly with the compositions of In the Woods… or via the ubiquitous black metal minor scale harmony.

You can trace this convergence of the genres back to Yngwie Malmsteen, the famously obnoxious guitarist extraordinaire who partially modeled his egregious personality after that of Niccolo Paganini, the 19th Century Italian violinist whose extreme ability, flamboyance and eccentricities raised him to mythical status. Before Malmsteen’s incorporations of classical scales opened up massive new directions for the genres in the early ‘80s, metal was the doom and gloom pioneered by Black Sabbath, a band whose roots were in blues and who adapted that style into something heavier.

Since then, if you choose your genres right, you can hear the ghosts of Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Albinoni (not always too subtly, either) in many of metal’s subcategories, but you’re most likely to find them in power metal bands, and in black metal bands, too, with names like Emperor, Symphony X, Stratovarius, Angra, and Dimmu Borgir being the most famous.

But this article is about the most underrated bands. Here are two that are criminally underrated and uphold the theme of the interchangeability of metal and classical.

Windham Hell.

Windham Hell is as indispensable a cult pick as it is a nerd’s dream. The band’s sound is something along the lines of if Yngwie Malmsteen recorded black metal albums with limited, semi-improvised means in the bedroom of a log cabin in the same woods where the owls-who-are-not-as-they-seem from “Twin Peaks” flew ominously overhead.

Windham Hell’s compositions often have a stark, menacing tone to them — the sometimes present, incoherent grave-moan vocals, the dissonant application of classical scales underpinned by aggressive, driving metal riffing and beats, and the often off-kilter song structures that brings all these jagged elements together, sometimes into a miasmal hell that would befit a Paganini-inspired legend, and sometimes into a calm, lovely musical respite… but Windham Hell was always something uniquely alien and utterly delightful in its genius — perhaps a genius that was as idiot savant as it was technically gifted — but like a cult show or movie like “Twin Peaks,” the cult appeal is owed as much to all the things that are wrong, goofy, or off-kilter about it as it does what isn’t.
 

 
The band’s ultimate and definitive formation was Leland Windham and Eric Friesen, two guitar genius recluses who lived in Snoqualmie, a rural, forested part of Washington state. Windham was as dedicated to mountain climbing as he was to shredding maniacal classical leads, and the theme of the cold, unforgiving, beautiful granite faces he loved so much were a major theme in his band’s music. The CDs would come with photos of Windham hanging upside down on a horizontally jutting rock face, or photos of mountain goats he would find on his excursions. Friesen was obsessed with playing guitar, and was also an accomplished drummer (while many think the drums on Windham Hell’s albums are a drum machine, they are in fact an e-kit played by Friesen) who released a couple solo albums under the name of Friesen Hell. One of these albums, Friesenburg Concertos, is Friesen’s “hail to the gods” of classical music, in which he plays various classical pieces that he learned entirely by ear, as he did not read music.
 

 
It was possibly Friesen who pushed the “Twin Peaks” worship angle in Windham Hell’s mystique. Whoever it was, the duo had a lot of parallels to play up. Snoqualmie is the real name of the place where the legendary show takes place. The third and final Windham Hell album, “Reflective Depths Imbibe,” was recorded behind Mo’s Motor, which is where Leland and Laura Palmer drive off from in the “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” movie. Leland Windham shares two names with major “Twin Peaks” characters, Leland Palmer and Windom Earle. Indeed, any and all similarities Friesen could find to “Twin Peaks,” he worked, like how the violin in “Alpinia” was played by a Bob (parallel to Killer Bob), and a keyboard bit was courtesy of a Mike (yet another “Twin Peaks” character.)

The “Twin Peaks” worship was so deeply entrenched in Windham Hell’s inspiration (with songs like “Glacier Walk in Me” and “Clear Blue Plastique,” and liberal usage of sound clips from the show amassed in hidden sections at the end of the albums), that Windham Hell’s music has come to be like the alternate soundtrack to the Black Lodge for me: a creepy, gorgeous, passionate body of work that is equally menacing as it is goofy; emotional, beautiful, evocative as it is dissonant; and metal as it is classical.

PS: In case you were wondering, the name Windham Hell is a spoof of the music made under the Windham Hill Records label, who specialized in folk and new age music. The band’s last album was released in 1999, and will likely stand as its last work, as Eric Friesen passed away in 2006.

Virgin Black.

On the other end of the spectrum from Windham Hell’s cult bedroom insanity is the music of the Australian entity Virgin Black, whose career pinnacle came in 2007 with the release of the 2nd part of the band’s “Requiem” trilogy, “Requiem Mezzo Forte,” and the subsequent release of the 3rd part, “Requiem Fortissimo,” in 2008. (The first part of the trilogy, purportedly recorded with the rest of the albums, has yet to be released. The trilogy is meant to be listened to in succession, with melodic themes that run through the albums.)

Virgin Black’s sound is like Gothic doom-influenced classical music. The classical aspect here is largely tied in to singer Rowan London’s operatic singing style, and how all their records have featured classical elements, like cello and piano, given a heavy treatment, but it wasn’t until that landmark 2007 album that Virgin Black’s sound moved out of the backroom studio and the digital box, and into recording an entire record with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, making a full record that didn’t just have orchestral segues, but was mostly orchestral, punctuated by passages of heavy guitar and bass and tastefully simple, pounding drums and martial snare rolls.
 

However, some of what or what is not going on in Virgin Black’s records is a bit of a mystery, and what I think is the truth is so awesome it gives me minor chills. I know what I witnessed. I saw Virgin Black on tour at Slim’s in San Francisco in 2008. I saw a small, muscular man in a see-through black mesh shirt take the stage as Virgin Black’s frontman and keyboardist. He seemed to be wearing mascara, and he had an odd, out of place, kind of alien demeanor about him, like he was physically there but his spirit was in different places at once. I saw this man deliver the male operatic vocals from the records, and then, I saw him deliver the female operatic vocals as well. He would seamlessly switch back and forth between the two, as well as the deathgrowl parts from the material of “Requiem Fortissimo,” and the realization that when I was blown away at the sweeping, crushing beauty of the compositions and vocals of “Requiem Mezzo Forte” and its seeming choir of singers, it seemed I had in fact been hearing the work of a man who was somehow a soprano and a tenor. Like a castrato who was allowed through puberty but never lost his choir boy voice. Maybe there’s some kind of pitch shifter voice box that allows one to do something like that. Whatever it was, I was blown away.

Subsequently, I swear I’ve looked up Virgin Black on line and found a wikipedia page in which Rowan London was dubbed something not terribly flattering like “androgena.” I swear I saw this page, and I remember it having information that supported my perception that indeed, Rowan London was *every* voice on the Virgin Black records. This elevated already superb albums into the godlike in my view: that someone could possibly have that much musical ability to physically pull something like that off, and do it in the context of such beautiful music. However, any trace of those words are no longer there. Maybe they were changed. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing. I probably did, as the soprano voice on “Requiem Mezzo Forte” is credited to Susan Johnson, but my appreciation of this band’s work was forever raised even farther when I saw them that day in San Francisco.

There’s not much information or interviews with Virgin Black out there, and the band has been on a long hiatus. Even if the final, purportedly completely choral and orchestral work is never released, “Requiem Mezzo Forte” stands as perhaps the finest example of the seamless marriage of classical and metal, featuring massive, timeless melodic themes as tremendous as the performances… whoever those performances were done by.

Losing One’s Way in NeverNeverLand

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There’s a major comic market in France. Since I don’t know the numbers, I hesitate to claim it’s a bigger industry than the US’, though I’d like to imagine so. My argument: like manga in Japan, comics in France are seen as targeted to a wider audience, and not just to what is perceived as an audience of kids. It’s not quite to the extent of Japan’s market, where there are comics for as many social demographics that exist, but in France, some kid’s grandparents are as likely to read and enjoy the same comic book as their 15-year old grandchild.

I had a period where I was wholly engrossed by US comics, around the age of 12-15, but I had been indoctrinated into comics years before (by Astérix and Tintin and before that, Topolino, the Italian-language Mickey Mouse comics, which is another story of comics transcending the target audience perceived in the USA), and although my romance with superheroes ended in my early teens, my love for the French comic industry in general continues far into my adulthood.

The attitude of French comic lovers from France — where there is a substantial market for manga and US comics, known there as “comics” (to differentiate how the French call their comics “bandes déssinées” or “BDs”) – is that their native-language comics require an immense amount of work and planning to put out… perhaps in unspoken contrast to their perception of how much less work manga or “comics” require to complete, or perhaps not. Sure, it’s part snobbery, part elitism, but take a look at any French comic book and you can tell that at least there’s a more important investment financially in being a fan: Every single BD is hardcover, from the original Lucky Luke‘s to the final volume of De cape et de crocs, and as such cost around 13-15 euros a piece. There are never any ads in any French BD, and there’s a sense that the population in general sees the medium in a more artistic light than how Americans view the comic industry – take a look at most reviews of French BDs on amazon.fr and you’ll get far more florid, well-spoken, nigh-erudite examinations of the artistic merit of the art style, the story pacing, and the cultural significance of a comic series (take Aldebaran as a good example), as opposed to the kind of reviews you’re likely to read on English-language Amazon where people can’t get things like “their” vs. “they’re” straight.

But all this “high” art, with all of its veritable or romanticized artistic merits, does come at a price beyond the financial one: The next issue of a BD series in which you were left with a cliffhanger revelation on the last page of the previous book might not come out for years. In France, it’s viewed as nothing short of a well-oiled machine in the extreme when a BD series puts out a new book every year. In fact, it’s borderline suspicious. Take Christophe Arleston, one of the biggest names in BD from the past 15 years. He’s got his scenario-writing fingers in no fewer than five pies at once, with some of those pies baking a new slice every year, much to the criticism of the French public, who generally believe his work has become about cranking out quantity over quality, and has become rehashed, shallow, recycled. formulaic pulp as a result. In contrast, the superb, highly celebrated series La quête de l’oiseau du temps‘s first book was released in 1983, and 2010 saw the release of only the seventh book, including an 11-year gap between books 4 and 5, and a nine-year gap between books 5 and 6. Compared to that, the release schedule of the next book of a series like “Harry Potter” would seem like the next issue of “Vogue.”

I’ve always wondered how an industry could sustain itself with such a business model; how people wouldn’t get so aggravated or simply just lose interest during the years of wait between books 2 and 3. French comic shop owners point out that there generally aren’t any deadlines on BD creators, and that the industry isn’t quite so successful to allow the creation of BDs as a livelihood to more than a few artists.

There’s even a bigger drag to having to wait, though. Sometimes where a series ends is far different than where it began. The series that will live in the most personal infamy is Régis Loisel’s re-interpretation of the origins of Peter Pan (BD) It took some convincing to read this series, but that it was a darker, more adult-oriented re-imagination of the famous tale, and that it was made entirely by part of the creative genius team responsible for the essential “La quête de l’oiseau du temps” made me take the plunge.

In Loisel’s version, Peter is the bastard son of an abusive, alcoholic whore in 19th Century London. After meeting a fairy in the slum where he lives, Peter manages to escape to Never Neverland, where he ingratiates himself with the fairies and satyrs there. They elect him their leader after he helps fight off the pirate who later loses his hand and becomes Hook. Hook is hanging about in part to find treasure purportedly hidden in Never Neverland. There’s also something to do with Hook having had an manipulative affair with one of the islands fatter mermaids, who’s still in love with him.

Loisel’s first “aha!” creative spin on the tale comes from the origins of Peter Pan’s name. In the story, it is derived from Peter’s own, Christian name, and the name of his short-lived best friend and leader of Never Neverland, Pan (yes, just like the mythical satyr), who is killed during the struggle with Hook. Pan’s death leads to Peter becoming the island’s leader, and he takes on his friend’s name as an homage.

Loisel’s “Peter Pan” first four volumes were released between 1990 and 1996, a relatively brisk pace for the French market. As such, the story is interesting, creative, and most importantly, gives a sense of a well-progressing narrative.

By the time volume 5 was published, five years had gone by since volume 4, and things were starting to take an odd turn. There was a lot more focus on a side story involving Jack the Ripper back in London, and an arc portraying Tinkerbell as a manipulative, selfish, careless creature responsible for the deaths of Never Neverland residents who got a little too much in her way. The story still floated, but the feel that books 1-4 were one entity, and that book 5 was another was strong.

2004 saw the release of the sixth and final volume of the series, which cemented the sense of bewilderment. Now, the Jack the Ripper side story became central, and it was revealed that Tinkerbell had been repeatedly rubbing out her rivals. She never suffered for her actions, though, in part because it turned out that Never Neverland had the effect of wiping clean any inhabitant’s mid- to long-term memory. This meant that no one could remember where anyone came from, why they were there, or how their situation came to be… and that included Peter’s tale and Peter’s own personal recollections. It turned out that the tale of Never Neverland had been on constant repeat since time literally immemorial, and that all of its inhabitants were caught in its temporal memory-loss loop.

It’s not even how the series ends with Jack the Ripper stalking and killing another victim (I seem to remember it being Peter’s mother), or that the entire series took a major emotional turn from a boy’s tale of triumph over adversity and his rise to power. It’s that the story changed tone and content to such a degree that it not only felt like two separate stories, it felt like the author had taken too long to complete his vision, had grown weary of the work he had made in the ’90s, and wrapped it up with some out-of-left-field randomness that felt convoluted, obscure, half-baked and rushed. Essentially, whatever had been built during the successful first 4 volumes had been utterly crapped on in the final 2. The first movement’s mood is of edgy adventure, of progressive storytelling; the mood the reader is left with on the second movement is of depression, that the world is a bleak place with no outcome, that no wrong is righted, all of which is communicated with a strong lack of closure.

Today, in research for this article, I looked up the story of this series online, and discovered an interpretation that Loisel’s intention with the inclusion of Jack the Ripper was to stipulate that Peter Pan and Jack the Ripper were in fact one and the same, which, if accurate, is a major plot point that I was utterly clueless to until having read that (though it helps explain some things). This does little to change my opinion that Loisel’s “Peter Pan” is one of the most irresponsibly wasted efforts I’ve come across in my comic reading life, one whose rampant disregard for its own craft and narrative tone soured my mood for some time after. Considering its horrific procession from interesting work to obvious cut-and-burn job, it is my vote for Worst Comic of All Time.
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Otrebor is a musician from San Francisco whose most notable bands are Botanist and Ophidian Forest.

 
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