The Namesake Series: "Aeon"

Whether it's a pretentious spelling of eon our a shout out to the helper spirits that keep the world running per gnostic philosophy, "Aeon" the song title inspires bands from a variety of genres to go big and go mystic. It's time to sit back and really think about your place in the universe. As some dude once said, "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."



Though Gigantic Brain was birthed out of grindcore, the one man band (now a duo) has never been one to be restricted by stale convention. And GB announced its liberation with the first track of the Betelgeuse EP, part of the band's post-Invasion Discography creative burst. In Gigantic Brain's hands, "Aeon" is a placid, beautiful, meditative piece that seems to have evolved from a separate phylum compared to the band's prior material. Gigantic Brain's oeuvre has always had a pensive soulfulness that's often missing from the accustomed hostility of grindcore and "Aeon" is a great example.



Probably the most famous "Aeon" would be the penultimate song from Neurosis' masterwork Through Silver in Blood. Either definition of aeon plays to the band's man and nature mystique. Neurosis get all spiritual with a tinkling piano opening that gives way to their wonted crush only to stumble into a clashing, staggering mid-section only to roil back up into a crushing finale. It's like Gustave Dore engravings being transfigured into radiant sound.

Cover Me

The cover song is a time honored tradition that probably dates back to the first couple of cavemen banging out a crazy beat on a log. Anyone who’s ever fretted a chord or thumped a drum has probably burned with the desire to emulate and pay tribute to their musical forefathers, casting themselves into the vicarious shoes of their heroes. If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance that bands like Napalm Death, Discordance Axis and Phobia probably played a pretty significant role in your musical development. However, I don’t need hear yet another cover of the “The Kill.” There’s very little chance you’re going to top the original.
Maybe it's time for all of us to widen our horizons. Thinking about the ubiquity of covering certain bands led me to brainstorm a wish list of songs outside the grind realm that I’d absolutely love to hear get blastbeaten and the band I think is the best candidate for the job.
Here are my top 10 dream parings:

The Namesake Series: Fermi Paradox

Physicist Enrico Fermi was a puzzled dude. The universe is a big place. (I mean, you just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.) So with all that space out there and plenty of stuff filling it up, you would expect to be tripping over interstellar life every time you picked up your junk mail. And yet, humanity has not made a single alien friend. That incongruity is known as Fermi's Paradox. It's also quality grindcore fodder.   



Most recently, Dephosphorus crowned the astounding Night Sky Transform with an ode to Fermi's headscratcher, a meditative blotch of gray sky paranoia intoned by guitarist Thanos Mantas.



Sci-fi and grind go together like saucer visits and ass probings, so naturally Dephosphorus weren't the first to keep watching the sky. To celebrate the (pants-tighteningly awesome) news that Gigantic Brain's two year carbonite deep freeze is over (as a two piece now!), here's Virginia's greatest digi-alien-grinder giving his spin on "Fermi Paradox" from 2009's Betelgeuse EP.

Evolved as One: When Grinders Go it Alone

In a nation of nearly 5 million souls, it's mathematically unlikely that Papirmollen is the only grind fiend calling Norway home, but you wouldn't guess that from his music. The Parlamentarisk Sodomi/PSUDOKU multi-instrumentalist prefers to operate solo. Think of it as a form of quality control.
"Bands with more than one person can have a bigger chance of low-quality results because of mass suggestion,  misunderstandings and contagious diseases," he said. "The members make each other believe they are creating beautiful  masterpieces when it truly is godforsaken stupid vomit music. When you're alone, you have a unique awareness of the  fact that roughly everything you make is tragic, unlistenable, no-quality shit, forevermore. You dislike most of your music so much that you wouldn't even play it to your worst enemy or their friends and loved ones, or anyone else. The  rest of the music you release."
The popular conception of the one man band probably involves some tortured black metal misanthrope whose Nietzschean soul shrivels at the thought of contact with the untermenschen. But the last decade has seen a boom in solo grind projects. Driven by necessity, aided by technology and pursing a single-minded musical focus, solo musicians are holding their own with full bands and pushing grindcore further into the uncharted edges of the map. Along with Papirmollen's outfits, Gigantic Brain, Body Hammer, Standing on a Floor of Bodies, Jesus of Nazareth, Liberteer, Exploding Meth Lab and Wadge have all filtered grindcore through one man's idiosyncratic vision.

Grind in Rewind in 2010: The Top 10 of 2010

Looking back on another year of grind, I’ve got to share Flesh Monolith’s general sense of disappointment. This was a year that lacked a clear, breakout star. Instead, we were treated to a lot of good albums and a whole lotta meh. Keep in mind, though, my discretionary music buying budget took a brutal hit so things like the new Suffering Mind, Bloody Phoenix and even the fucking Wormrot/I Abhor split have eluded me. So I feel a little funny even doing a list since I don’t really feel like I can pull together a list as authoritative as I would prefer. But fuck it. Up front, I’m also gonna cop to padding the list so bring it to a nice round 10 to fulfill some bizarre numerological compulsion I can’t quite explain.

Before we get down to it, though, I want to briefly ruminate on a couple of positive trends I saw this year: the rise of the tidy EP (if you don’t have the material for a full length, don’t waste people’s time with filler) and bands eschewing the traditional label structure to throw their music out to survive on the Darwinian internet.

As always, feel free to call me an idiot, point out gems I may have missed, hash out the order and berate me for bands I foolishly left off.

10. Selfhate

Debasement

Self Released

The veteran Poles’ return to the grind scene after a lengthy hiatus was a welcome surprise in 2010. Nearly a decade older and consequently a step or two slower, Selfhate still bring quality riffs and perfectly poised dynamics in place of setting new land speed records. The band also stand out in an area where grind is usually deficient: emotional weight. The song “Dajesz Zycle/You Give Life,” which tells the true story of a murdered child, is chillingly grounded without giving way to typical metal posturing. Selfhate were a landmark band in the 1990s and they still have a lot to share with a new generation.

9. Unholy Grave

Grind Killers

Selfmadegod

Grind Killers was not one of the best albums of the year from a song writing standpoint and it could definitely stand to lose three or four songs to make it a tighter experience, but Unholy Grave’s live in the studio romp had a sense of spontaneity and just plain old fashioned fun that’s missing all too often. Fun? You guys remember that? Amid all the bitchnig and screaming and howling about powers that should be seiged and our extreme response to extreme conditions, it’s nice to occasionally see a band bust out a Ramones cover and just have a good fucking time.

8. Jesus Crost

010

Bones Brigade

Given the art on pseudonymous Dutch power violence/grind twosome Jesus Crost’s second album, soccer hooliganism is the easy, go-to metaphor for their boisterous brand of blast beaten noise. But I prefer to reference a far more refined, dignified and ultimately understandable sports moment: the 1994 Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver. That’s pretty much what 010 sounds like: rioting punters caught on tape as they blast, huff, puff and chuff their way through blasty-violency tunes that know just when to throw in a tempo change up or an unexpected vocal flourish like the occasional pig squeals. It makes you want to smash a window front and shit talk some cops after your hometown team blows the championship round.

7. Rotten Sound

Napalm

Relapse

I almost feel bad for including the six song EP, half of which is Napalm Death covers, but if Napalm is any kind of precursor to Rotten Sound’s impending full length, the Finns have found their footing again. Napalm was a gnarly, snarling, underproduced bit of racket that reminded me of the kind of noise Rotten Sound used to bring back during their Murderworks prime. Though it may be more gimmick than honest expression of Rotten Sound’s own ouvre, Napalm is still a fun listen that sees them reconnecting with what made grind great originally.

6. Circle of Dead Children

Psalm of the Grand Destroyer

Willowtip

That Circle of Dead Children frontman Jon Hovarth is still alive to make albums after contracting a near-fatal infection is enough to make me smile. That Circle of Dead Children recovered from the false step that was Zero Comfort Margin and barged back with the crushing, multifaceted Psalm of the Grand Destroyer is almost more than we all deserve. But there it was, that perfectly pitched blend of blasting snarl, deathly crush and sludgy misanthropy that was just as bleak and hopeless as Hovarth’s lyrical outlook. Given a light production touch courtesy of Scott Hull (thank you for dumping Steve Austin, guys), studio trickery took a back seat to a pack of guys with a handful of crushing songs that were perfectly performed.

5. Cellgraft

External Habitation

Self Released

Cellgraft got all up in your guts in 2010 with their self released, biologically tinged 11 track album External Habitation. The Floridians channel Assuck attack and visual tropes by way of Jouhou acceleration and refinement for a 21^st century brand of science-minded aggression. Intelligent, articulate, fiercely DIY, and most importantly, armed to the bicuspids with a passel of quality songs, Cellgraft are a young band with brilliant future ahead.

4. Gigantic Brain

They Did this to Me

Self Released

To call the final Gigantic Brain album “grindcore” would not only be woefully inaccurate but would also trivialize the one man band’s affecting space opera of twisted electronica and drum machine stuttering. Yes, there are still grind elements, but Gigantic Brain has evolved so far beyond ordinary grind since the Mars Attacks/Nintendo-core days of The Invasion Discography. Now the grind elements serve as a substrata to emotionally churning layers of affecting keyboard swaths and plaintive yowling. The paranoia is palpable and the moments of transcendence and even joy are fleeting, making They Did This to Me an emotionally suffocating workout and the perfect capstone to an adventurous outfit.

3. Wake

Surrounded by Human Filth

Hearing Aids

Canadian crushers Wake got their Carl Sagan worship on with a nail studded grindcore bat on the Surrounded by Human Filth EP. Think of it as the musical equivalent of Nietzsche’s philosophizing with a hammer. Taking all the best, ugliest components from grindcore, death metal and power violence, Wake set their sonic phasers to stun (they could probably lecture on why phasers wouldn’t work according to phsyics). Not overstaying their welcome at a tidy 11 minutes, it’s the perfect grind amuse-bouche (to radically change metaphors) that leaves me craving a full course of their sonic smorgasbord.

2. Kill the Client

Set for Extinction

Relapse

That client has done been killed good and dead by the Texans on third full length and Relapse debut Set for Extinction. Though it’s not much of an advancement over Cleptocracy, don’t underestimate a band like Kill the Client that does all the small things relentlessly well. Grind is not about singles or standout tracks and Set for Extinction is a ferocious blur of madman howling backed by the tightest – and probably most overlooked – rhythm section working in grind. Everything just clicks into psychotic place like an Ed Gein jigsaw puzzle carved from human flesh.

1. “The reason that people sing songs for other people is because they want to have the power to arouse empathy, to break free of the narrow shell of the self and share their pain and joy with others. This is not an easy thing to do, of course. And so tonight, as a kind of experiment, I want you to experience a simpler, more physical kind of empathy.”

Everyone in the place was hushed now, all eyes fixed on the stage. Amid the silence, the man stared off into space, as if to insert a pause or to reach a state of mental concentration. Then, without a word, he held his left hand over the lighted candle. Little by little, he brought the palm closer and closer to the flame. Someone in the audience made a sound like a sigh or moan. You could see the tip of the flame burning the man’s palm. You could almost hear the sizzle of the flesh. A woman released a hard little scream. Everyone else just watched in frozen horror. The man endured the pain, his face distorted in agony. What the hell was this? Why did he have to do such a stupid, senseless thing? I felt my mouth going dry. After five or six seconds of this, he slowly removed his hand from the flame and set the dish with the candle in it on the floor. Then he clapped his hands together, the right and left palms pressed against each other.

Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

1997

Grind is the ultimate expression of emotion played with every fiber of the player's being straining until it literally tears the people apart who make it. I think this is one of the reason true grind bands can never last. You are literally tearing yourself down and rebuilding yourself everytime you play those songs - practice or live. There's only so much of that you can endure as a creator, challenging yourself to raise the bar every day. Believe me it takes a toll...

Jon Chang in a comment here

Hayaino Daisuki

Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell… Or Did You Mean Hawaii Daisuki

Hydra Head

Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell… Or Did You Mean Hawaii Daisuki may be a rounding error short of actual grindcore BPMs, but the thrashtastic alter ego of the almighty GridLink is not some side project goof. The band brought every bit of the passion and urgency you would expect from the grind collective on their second EP. Packing four times the energy of Reign in Blood in half the time, Invincible Gate Mind is an exhausting, exhaustive expression of pure sonic abandon. I said it then and I’ll repeat it here: when Jon fucking Chang is the most improved aspect of an album, you know you’re performing in front of a world-beating collection of musical bad asses. Hayaino Daisuki pretty much shamed everyone else who set a blastbeat to tape or byte in 2010 with four body-rending songs of screaming catharsis.

Now about Orphan…

…and my sexroids…

G&P Review: Gigantic Brain

Gigantic Brain
They Did This to Me
Self Released
Gigantic Brain is dead
Long live Gigantic Brain.
The evolution of one man Virginia band Gigantic Brain from Nintendo-core blip-grind origins through its cosmically-tinged grind opera denouement has been nothing but staggering and a career trajectory plenty of bands would seize with envy. Very quickly after the Invasion Discography’s battery to the ’nads assault, it became quickly apparent that mere grindcore was not going to be enough to constrain Gigantic Brain’s increasingly cosmic vistas. The grindcore increasingly became the icing on a dense cake of ambient electronics and expansive emotional catharsis, culminating in They Did This to Me, easily the Brain’s high point and sadly also its epitaph.
They Did This to Me barely qualifies as grindcore anymore, given more toward ambient passages than raging beaters that is just as often instrumental than not. Gigantic Brain gives pride of place to carefully sculptured electronic passages that have been hewn to a single emotional core, often fear, paranoia and even fleeting moments of rapture. The album is graced by surprisingly delicate moments that sparkle like diamonds among Gigantic Brain’s typical electronic wasteland. “Crop Circles” is a scintillating soundscape that likely would pass unnoticed on a broad minded pop album. They Did This to Me’s emotional center, however, is the stunning emotional ambience of “Abandoned,” which could grace a Jesu album – one of the better ones – with its keyboard crescendos and plaintive Broadrick-style wails of abject despair.
This is stunning in its ambition and flawless in its execution, guiding listeners through an electro-grind equivalent of the stations of the cross. This has to be heard. It’s easily one of the finest releases of the year, and you have no excuses since it’s free. As a farewell gesture, GB is giving away damn near every moment its ever recorded at its MySpace page (linked above). I’d highly suggest getting while the getting is good because this is music good enough to pay for.

Bring the Noise: A Crash Course in Electrogrind

Like a chocolate covered cadmium Witman’s sampler, consume at your own risk. Side effects may include cerebral hemorrhages, pissed off neighbors/roommates/spouses, expanded musical horizons and exorbitant Radio Shack bills as you attempt to recreate the sounds contained with in.
You’ve been warned.

1. Winters in Osaka – “Flowers in the Bodies”
2. Body Hammer – “Digital Direct Drive”
3. The Endless Blockade – “Perfection”
4. Exploding Meth Lab – “Exploding Meth Lab Soup Kitchen”
5. Napalm Death – “Harmony Corruption”
6. Gigantic Brain – “Dehumanize (Ninja Gaiden NES cover)”
7. Origami Swan – “Castigating Leukemia”
8. Jesus of Nazareth – “The Shame of Being a Child Track 11
9. Agoraphobic Nosebleed – “5 Band Genetic Equalizer 2”
10. Man is the Bastard – “Steak Eating Boss”
11. Discordance Axis with Merzbow – “Alzheimer (Live)”

Blast(beat) From the Past: Gigantic Brain

Gigantic Brain
Invasion Discography
Razorback
2004
Fuck this (amusing) exchange on Metal Archives; grind is metal and Gigantic Brain is grind as all fuck.
I have a real soft spot for drum machine grind bands and short of Enemy Soil and Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Gigantic Brain is the style’s leading practitioner (what’s in the water in Virginia?). While Nintendo-core is likely to evoke horrific images of Horse the Band, Gigantic Brain stripmines the classic console brilliantly, offering up grinding covers of Shinobi and Castlevania themesongs while seamlessly incorporating the same eight-bit spirit into original Mars Attacks-infused songs about anal probes and cattle mutilation. The Brain also leaped ahead of the digital music revolution, releasing an EP exclusively on the web before it was collected here.
With a new album, World, (tentatively) set for release this winter, there is no better time to exhume this underrated platter from the Brain. The songs may lack Nosebleed’s catchy, psychotic edge or Enemy Soil’s political bark and an hour of digital grind will try even my patience, but Gigantic Brain has its own infectious sense of fun, deftly weaving the throwback (NES and back 1950s flying saucer films) with cybernetic pillage and purge at land-speed record BPMs.
The perfect soundtrack to a round of Destroy All Humans.