Jordan Vauvert
Avec Ressentiment, Adam Kalmbach complète la trilogie de black metal microtonal enchâssée dans l'immense discographie de Jute Gyte.
J'ai pu dire que Discontinuities contenait les pistes les plus dérangeantes d'Adam Kalmbach : les morceaux de Ressentiment pourraient les faire passer pour des berceuses — oui, on en est là. Si la technique est totalement folle ("The Central Fires of Secret Memories"), elle est aussi très déroutante et irrespirable.
"There is desolation in the midst of music".
Favorite track: The Central Fires of Secret Memory.
In the bleak wind blown from space
In the dark, alone, unwilling, we embark
Hanging from the hidden roof of night
The black interim, the folded poppy
Mansions of fear, mansions of pain
Crossing the frontiers of darkness
To summon that which may consent
To be delayed, but not to be denied
No phoenix rises from the ruined walls
I ponder now the grief of many rooms
The shadows, the colors turning
The vestal moon, the violating sun
Oh soft embalmer of the still midnight
You call to me from across the rotting sea
Rain suspended in the sky
The central fires of secret memory
The privilege of inner life self-fashioned
The small white tapeworm of the soul
The desolate gift of liberty
No marble cenotaphs
We choose the vast of dereliction
Frail as summer flowers
Yellow wasted leaves
The dust upon the paper eye
And the burst stomach like a cave
Grappling hands slid deep into rotten flesh
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Your blood and soil are piss and shit
Your honor and glory vanity’s refuse
Like the deepening of frost in the slow night
When birds are dead in the morning
There is desolation in the midst of music
Silent hammers of decay
The reddest rose is a ghost
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours
The slow approach of winter after winter
The turning seasons wither in my head
The weary fluctuations of time and distance,
Forgetfulness and dying
The grey king no longer clings to that which dies
The imagination is lonely at the great thought of death
Black void of loneliness
Worms rob the honeycomb
about
Notes:
"The Central Fires of Secret Memory" is the most contrapuntally complex track in this trilogy of albums and strikes me as a precursor to the pervasive imitative polyphony of Ship of Theseus. "Central Fires" begins and ends with four-voice canons using the same material, with voices entering in the same order but separated by different time intervals.
"O Soft Embalmer of the Still Midnight" is a line from Keats. "The Central Fires of Secret Memory" is a line from Ivor Gurney. "Like the Deepening of Frost in the Slow Night" is a line from Laurence Binyon. Reading wartime poets and contemplating the deaths of Edward Thomas and Alun Lewis provided the inspiration for "Your Blood and Soil Are Piss and Shit", but I would like to take this space to suggest that, per Voltaire, we are all insects devouring one another on an atom of mud, and, per Augustine, inter urinas et faeces nascimur.
"Jute Gyte is more like the work of a forgotten master, hanging in the corner of the gallery where most with only a superficial interest in the museum can just ignore it. Sort of like the classics he mines to represent the face of the music. You might also think of this as an Erich Zann transcribed into our shared, non-fictional universe (I know, that's a bold assumption on my part)... On a base level, Ressentiment is resplendent ugliness set to gnarled, visually stimulating poetry, but the twisted mind can invert it right side up to something of both abstract melancholy and fractured beauty, reactions constantly being generated for me throughout the six tracks and 56 minutes of unhinged escape... Jute Gyte remains one of our most creative and challenging American black metal extracts." - From the Dust Returned
"Ressentiment is a study in microtonal shredding and odd doomy turns. When he goes into hyperblast, it’s an industrial nightmare not too far off from Blut Aus Nord. In a way, Jute Gyte fits with the individualism that defines some of the bigger names in USBM, but Kalmbach is in a class of his own. What better way to knock the wind out of a armchair nationalist than the ending lines of "Your Blood and Soil Are Piss and Shit"? 'Where is it now, the glory and the dream?/Your blood and soil are piss and shit/Your honor and glory vanity’s refuse.' Thank Satan a dude like this puts his stuff on Bandcamp, else tracking down his limited releases would be a descent into Discogs torture." - Pitchfork
"Jute Gyte has always left me feeling quite bleak about things; it simply does not let you draw any other conclusions... Jute Gyte is music stripped of typical listenability, leaving only the raw guts (from which we largely shy away) to inhabit the entirety of its space. This is truly otherworldly music, as caustic as it comes, and twice as vitriolic as what you’re probably listening to. Ressentiment exudes an aura of horror that burrows deep, transmitting its unsettling nature into your mind with the efficiency of a sickening virus intent on poisoning you to death." - No Clean Singing
"Ressentiment works, ultimately, as one of those rare albums that begins with a bang and manages to sustain its initial momentum all the way to the end with nary a misstep to be found. Though not a “pretty” or “pleasant” album by any means, Kalmbach’s genuinely alien approach to harmony and composition coupled with a greater emotional weight than much of his previous work makes Ressentiment one of his best albums yet, and one of the best this year." - Toilet ov Hell
"It's maddeningly off kilter, to untrained ears (and likely some trained ones too), it sounds out of tune, or more accurately, like it's constantly changing tuning, the first flurry finds the band seemingly slowing down, when in reality, the pitch/melody are in flux, making the whole thing sound like it's melting, it's woozy and warped and seriously WTF,,, It definitely takes some getting used to, but for folks into damaged outsider heaviness, this will totally push all your WTF buttons. Otherwise, JG deliver some seriously orthodox black buzz, it's just that the black buzz here is so bizarrely tuned it sometimes makes stuff like Deathspell Omega and Blut Aus Nord sound like AC/DC... Heavy and damaged, tripped out, fucked up, psychedelic and extremely experimental black metal that will likely have you scratching your head while banging it like crazy. Awesome!" - Aquarius Records
credits
released September 1, 2014
All music, lyrics and design by Adam Kalmbach
Created Fall 2011 - Fall 2012
RIP E. Thomas, A. Lewis
Swirling guitars, furious drums, vocals that at the same time howl from infinite distance and are right up in your head; everything put into dissonant form with the help of unconventional songwriting. This album is my personal key to the icelanding black metal madness that I've ignored for way too long! Lukas Kaufmann
PSA: if there was an album you heard a couple years ago and thought it was ok, listen to it again and you might love it.
That's what happened to me with this album. I cannot fathom why it didn't stick with me back then. Same thing happened with Decoherence's Unitarity for that matter. Matten