I recently started reading the excellent book Black Metal Rainbows. It is a very insightful collection of essays from people involved in the outer-fringes of black metal (As if black metal itself wasn’t fringe enough!).
The book’s official blurb accurately describes what it contains:
Beyond its clichés of grimness, nihilism, reaction, and signature black/white corpse-paint sneer, black metal today is a vibrant and revolutionary paradigm. This book reveals its ludic, carnival worlds animated by spirits of joy and celebration, community and care, queerness and camp, LGBTQI+ identities and antifascist, antiracist, and left-wing politics, not to mention endless aesthetic experimentation and fabulousness. From the crypt to the cloud, Black Metal Rainbows unearths black metal’s sparkling core and illuminates its prismatic spectrum: deep within the black, far beyond grimness, and over a darkly glittering rainbow!
Highly recommended!
One of the essays is by Haela Hunt-Hendrix, frontperson of the wildly experimental band Liturgy. Hunt-Hendrix, who has recently come out as transgender, has been confounding black metal purists for many years.
Liturgy first reached prominence with their album Aesthethica in 2011. It was a black metal album, but taken to the absolute extremes. Extremely complex and intricate songs but with an unbelievable power and precision from all the players.
Here they are performing “Tragic Laurel” from the album in 2012:
Around this time Hunt-Hendrix wrote a controversial paper called A Vision Of
Apocalyptic Humanism explaining the band’s M.O. as “Transcendental Black Metal”. It is a pretty technical and difficult read, but definitely worth digesting.
Soon after, Liturgy expanded their sound beyond the strict confines of black metal. They incorporated more electronic elements and free jazz influence in the completely bonkers The Ark Work in 2015. The music video for “Quetzalcoatl” accurately sums up the direction of the album pretty well:
One of the highlights for me of the band through this era was drummer Greg Fox, who plays at a practically inhuman level. He was even interviewed by The Washington Post around the release of The Ark Work! This is pretty incredible considering how underground his music for the typical reader of The Washington Post.
He also performed cool solo material by adding complex triggers to his acoustic drums essentially making a one-man band. Here is a video where he explains how he made that music:
Here is a video of an actual song with these concepts in action:
Unfortunately tensions within Liturgy broke up the original band. Hunt-Hendrix put out an electronic solo album called New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala under the pseudonym Kel Valhaal in the meantime that was even crazier than Liturgy. Here is the video for “Tense Stage” from that record:
Liturgy eventually pressed on. Drummer Leo Didkovsky, formerly of the grindcore band Vomit Fist (formed with his dad Nick Didkovsky, the guitarist of prog rock weirdos Dr. Nerve) joined Liturgy.
Liturgy started incorporating full orchestras into their already overwhelming sound. They put out an “opera” called Origin of the Alimonies a couple years ago and played live with an orchestra at the Roadburn Festival in 2022:
They recently put out a new album called 93696 which takes all the previous disparate elements of their sound and manages to mash them all together into an incredible fusion. It is probably one of my favorite records of 2023 so far and is today’s pick!
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93696 supposedly translates to “Heaven” according to Thelemic numerology…I’ll take Hunter-Hendrix’s word for it!
There’s plenty of highlights throughout the 80+ minute runtime of the album. Some of them include “Djennaration” which is 8 minutes of fury with flutes and heavy guitars fighting each other and eventually drops into a hip-hop inspired breakdown. Wild!
There’s also softer moments like “Angel of Sovereignty” with its soaring choir and the simmering “Red Crown II”.
The centerpiece though is the title track. A 15-minute epic that basically throws the entire kitchen sink at the listener in an awesomely overwhelming way. It is definitely a career highlight and I doubt they’d be able to top it in the future….but here’s hoping.
If you want to read more of the writings of Haela Hunt-Hendrix I highly recommend their Substack which is updated pretty frequently. The latest post is titled “A Note on Eucharistic Transubstantiation and the Politics of Gender” which is obviously some light, breezy reading to go along with listening to 93696.