WRNLRD’s Death Drive
CLVRSKLL or I’ve Got Some Things I Want To Maybe Say About Black Metal
A Smalldoggies column by Matthew Simmons.
Thoughts on WRNLRD’s Death Drive
If you remove the vowels from words and leave the consonants sitting around, you remove all the go sounds and have nothing left but the stops. You make words that can’t be said aloud, because they are nothing but pressure inside the throat. You hide words
inside the throat. You make them into secrets. You put them in to heads and take them out of the air. You make them occult.
And so it is with Wrnlrd, a Virginian with musical instruments, a black metal mindset (which mindset is, in my own personal head, today maybe something very different tomorrow), and possibly a small electronic box between his instruments and his recording
device that creates the tonal equivalent of Flannery O’Conner’s southern gothic grotesqueries and lays it over a song.
Now available from Wrnlrd is an EP called Death Drive, a muck-caked, experimental, black metal car crash concept record. Like the best experimental music and the best
music at the edges of black metal, Death Drive pushes against a listener: rattling, rumbling, changing a groove the moment one gets one’s head around it enough to have it all figured out. Like the best car crashes, the pushing away is a quick airbag shot to the nose that eventually gives and your head can sink in. And like the best occult documents, it comes with a brochure that both illuminates and confuses key concepts involved in the making of and sequencing of the record:
Operator's Guide To The Death Drive of Wrnlrd
Where the car crash in a work of fiction has become for many a writer a cliché way of waking a character from her or his passivity, an insta-epiphany machine, Death Drive’s car crash is in slow motion. Drawn out. Every windshield crack a beat, every crumpled tin fender a guitar screech. No epiphany. Visceral learning. Autonomic knowledge gathering. A secret the body keeps from the head.
You should get this.
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This is Dan of Earth. I helped him come up with the name. Actually, I think maybe I might have told him to go with Dan of Earth and he listened to me. He’s bananas.
Please enjoy this Dan of Earth video:
Dan Of Earth at Milwaukee Noise Fest 2010 (Day 3: 9/25/10) from Bullart. on Vimeo.
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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.