WOLD: Working Together for Our Privacy
CLVRSKLL or I’ve Got Some Things I Want To Maybe Say About Black Metal
A Smalldoggies column by Matthew Simmons.
I try not to Google WOLD. I used to Google them sometimes, but then I made this decision that I wouldn’t anymore. I decided instead I wanted them to remain kind of empty to me. I wanted them to work as a vessel instead of a suitcase with a lock I could pick or break.
I want to place things in WOLD instead of discovering the things that are already in there. And I think to an extent that what WOLD would like me to do with them, too. There are, I think, two members of the band. They are Canadian. They use pseudonyms. I don’t think they have done many interviews. (But I have stopped googling them, and won’t do so now to confirm this. And they are newish. That helps to keep them empty, too.
They have been around long enough to have multiple recordings one can buy, but not so long that the enigma of them has become the story of them. Like, say, The Residents. The Residents—who I love very much—have been around and mysterious for so long, they have filled themselves up with the aspects of that mystery. They have speculations about their identities. They have stories. Rumors and lies. They are all filled up at this point. And they have lyrics and movies and a vast language of them. A language made of images. A language made of sounds. If you love The Residents, you gather all their images and all their sounds together in your mind, and you have a vocabulary of understanding.
WOLD has the beginnings of such a vocabulary—Black Metal, Noise, Ambient, Radically Self-Contained, Occult—but we’re only now learning it. So, we only know a few words. We don’t know how to form sentences that explain WOLD to us. We don’t quite know the grammar. Or, I don’t. And I’m doing what I can to remain in the dark about the grammar. I’m not Googling them anymore.
Because something I’ve realized is that I prefer the experience of Not-Knowing. I prefer the feeling I have when I discover an artist—a writer, a musician, a painter, a filmmaker—and haven’t quite got them figured out. I want the searching.
How strangely like the experience of listening to a WOLD song. Like, say, the three songs on Working Together for our Privacy. The first track, “The Secret,” counts off with a digital chirp before the guitars, a drone—that changes pitch twice, higher, slightly lower, and then back*—a maelstrom of noise begins. No drums? I think I hear drums. But I might only hear the cords on my earbuds rubbing against my ears. I turn it up and swear I hear a clattering of drums buried deep within the guitars. So deep as to make you unsure if they are there. At some point, I think I hear them stop.
I can’t quite figure the song out. But I can’t concentrate on anything else.
I resist the urge to Google the record.
“Death Spiral” fades in. This one is all guitar. And bursts of static. I swear in the back there is a melody. A guitar walking down a half step. Like a train whistle dopplering. Traps open.
“Lovey Dovey,”: low electronic sounds and a loop of feedback breaking apart into little stutters of noise. Another guitar drone layering on top. Again, vocal-less, and drumless. (This is not the norm for WOLD. In fact, Working Together stands out strangely in a catalog of very good, hugely noisy Black Metal records because it has no vocals or—maybe—drums. See 2007’s amazing Screech Owl. Or this year’s Freemasonry.)
It’s all so tiny. All the little changes in the noises. It’s so rewarding to follow the little noises around within the fields of sounds. To discover them, and to find a pattern within.
And to know that there are so many tiny changes and so many layers, that you will spend all your time with Working Together for our Privacy in the discovery phase of the relationship. And discovery is the place where you fill in gaps. Where the recording acts more as a vessel than a suitcase with a lock you can pick or break.
So, I try not to Google WOLD. You should try not to as well. Except to buy their records.
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Shrine, Cloister. From 2008. "Field recordings of monks chanting with bells in a Harlem monastery, short circuited USB port, vocals, guitar"
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* I’m no musician. I found an online pitch pipe, though. G? A#? A? Probably not. Sounds sort of like it, though.
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If you have something you would like Matthew Simmons to listen to, you can drop him a line at his CLVRSKL email here. Experimental one-man (or woman) black metal bands are near and dear to his heart. Paranoid, possibly crazy weirdos are dear to his heart. He says Thanks.
Matthew Simmons is the author of, among other things, a very small book of stories called The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge. More info here: Matthew J Simmons Official Site.