A Life In A Church: Context.
By Kjetil Nernes
I am watching the Grammys. When the orange embarrassment is back in charge preaching about fatherland and the good old values the entertainment business goes country. Even if there was a deliberate counter-reaction to this country appropriation I find it ironic and annoying in the time of MAGA. It honestly destroys my Friday night mood. But I’m not going to let it ruin the occasion. My daughter loves to listen to Charli XCX and Doechii and the rest of the artists present. For the first time I am actually well aware and updated on what’s going on in the world of pop entertainment. It has seeped through my daughter’s pink-painted Dolly Style princess bedroom and into my obstinate dark-hued Schopenhauerian gloom. It makes me think of context. My wife Karin has mentioned the need for context in music several times. A history to back up the artist and even the music itself. She says she needs the context to understand. She says everyone needs context to understand. She also says it’s impossible to fully understand the quality of an artist without the context, following up with a thought experiment: “How about this Kraftwerk song? What if Kraftwerk in reality were a bunch of hillbillies from bumfuck Sweden? What if ’Radioactivity’ was actually written and performed by a gang of synth nerds from Borlänge? Would it be as good?”
I understand, context is important. I spent weeks categorising and making notes on ’Trout Mask Replica’ to understand what was going on. I was in my student flat in Bergen listening to the CD-version with the original LP song order written on a piece of paper before me. I knew the story of Captain Beefheart and I loved the music. I had the biography. I just had to understand the whole concept. The context.
But in this case I disagree with the good wife. A bunch of snus-indulging hillbillies in winter overalls and woolen socks jammed into a pair of crocs just could not conjure up music like Kraftwerk. It needs the background, the story, the Düsseldorf, the constructivist artwork, Stockhausen and computer music pioneers and everything else. To produce something like Kraftwerk you need to feel the damp hand of post-war Germany. You need the 60s 7” pop singles the American soldiers brought across the Atlantic. You need the industrial progress of Western Germany, the factories, the wall, the Bundesliga, German diligence and lack of irony and humour and obviously the great infernal Highway zum Hölle: the Autobahn. The context is both everything and nothing at all. The magic of ’Radioactivity’ lies in the genius of the song. I can feel the music deep inside, the sounds are magical, so good I sometimes feel like crying. I don’t need the context.
Or do I? Electronic music came real slow to me. The Liars’ contribution to Holy Fuck and even Michael Gira’s involvement with ADULT. were just a mere drop of electronic in an alternative rock world. A hint. I always loved Alva Noto and The Haxan Cloak but I feel it’s a different camp. My presumed notion was that electronic music was some sort of dance music and I am no dancer. I stand still .
Smash the hegemony of dance. Stand still.
It wasn’t until Karin introduced me to Nils Frahm and we started getting into the new minimalist composers that incorporate a bit of Berlin techno that I really could understand the eternally obtrusive electronic kick. All the fuss about Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points’ ’Promises’ was in my opinion fair. It’s a beautiful album. It not only introduced me to Floating Points (‘Cascades’ is one of my 2024 favs), but also Max Cooper, Autechre and hopla - Underworld’s classic 1999 album ’Beaucoup Fish’. I finally managed to change the curriculum. The new context was now bringing me back in time to my seminal late nineties. This time with a banging iconic electronic masterpiece in my record store bag, not the Melvins’ ’Maggot’. I wonder why it took so long.
It took me a long time to get into Swans too. Swans is one of my all-time favourite bands. Their renaissance in the 2010s is a remarkable evolution of a long musical career only surpassed by Scott Walker in the history of popular music (I think). The sheer otherworldly power of the Swans shows I saw in Oslo and London around the time of ’The Seer’ are my most intense experiences of sonic force. A pure musical catharsis. After the London show we met up with friends and foes in the Norwegian music business for drinks. Even during the near three hour spectacle you could tell people had divided feelings. The younger crowd left with the hipsters half way through and by the end only a few stubborn old industrial fans with Foetus-patched jackets were left, slowly swaying their heads with eyes closed. The Norwegians didn’t know what to say either. It was hard to tell if it was okay to express your love for the performance. I loved it intensely, but kept to myself. One of the label people there- formerly a promoter –had his doubts and let everyone know his feelings on too loud and too long and too unbearable. He wished it still was the nineties when Jarboe was around. Fair enough. I heard him many times boast about the ear-shattering Am-Rep shows he promoted back in the nineties when he brought Zeni Geva and Hammerhead to Norway. I guess he grew older for a minute and forgot about the context.
Around the same time - maybe 2010? - I couldn’t make it to Swans’ Stockholm performance but sent Karin and a friend instead. I was expecting texts in caps after the show but got nothing. Even the next day nothing, so I called her up and asked about the experience. “Not much,” she said, “it was nothing special, just a bunch of old guys making noise. There wasn’t even a lights show!” The context null and void. An ethereal sonic purge, a physical and mental transcendence reduced to noise without meaning. It wasn’t Karin’s lack of understanding, it just wasn’t backed by any context. This was when I really started thinking about the concept of context. Back in the nineties I had a couple of Swans records, double CD-releases, long and boring. Swans was then a digression in the world of heavy. They had a song called ’Failure’ that resonated well and even if ’Children Of God’ and 'The Great Annihilator’ now are considered classics the moany syrupy grunge music of Swans often had a hard time standing out. Especially in the early nineties they most often sounded like a drawn-out unbearably doomy version of Crash Test Dummies.
I have always been in need of a fix of something properly heavy. Back then I sometimes got my kick out of early Swans recordings, but most often fell back to my favourites Melvins and Earth when listening to Black Sabbath got boring. You could tell on the damn CDs. After every party the CDs were full of scratches and sticky bits that made them skip. The Melvins CDs always skipped, the Swans ones never.
I feel bands back then (late eighties, early nineties) weren’t particularly heavy. I mean HEAVY, as in real deep and ponderous and sludgy. Heavy like a muddy tidal river. The metal bands were aggressive but not slow and churning. They had a lot of mid but no bass. Slayer and the rest of the headbangers had a different agenda. Swans was heavy. Heavy and relentless. Black Flag had the ’My War’ flipside and the Melvins were always interesting, but other than that not much was really heavy in the early nineties unless - lo and behold! – you had camouflage pants and dreadlocks and were into Korn. Before they became the nu-metal monster they truly are they were pretty damn heavy for an in-demand band. I remember waiting outside the local record store in Haugesund for them to open when the new records by Korn and Deftones were released. The heavy fix. I was fifteen. The nu-metal context didn’t matter. I get shivers even writing this. I hope I have lost those Korn CDs now. I hope they burn in orange hell with the Trumps. Fortunately my ex-wife stabbed a hole in most of my CDs. Yeah, long story…
After the Grammys we follow up by watching music videos. It’s Saturday night. We happily consume popular entertainment in the company of our children who dance around the room. It’s fun and nice and we have drinks. I sneak in a little Run The Jewels and Kendrick Lamar between the Doja Cat and Taylor Swift numbers. YouTube algorithms make the playlisting easy. The songs flow automatically and I don’t pay much attention. There is a Childish Gambino Gambino video coming up next. Childish Gambino is an interesting artist. YouTube plays his infamous ’This Is America’ video next. The video begins with the artist dancing to gospel-infused blues music. Then he pulls out a gun and cold-bloodedly executes a blindfolded figure tied to a chair. You see brains and fragments of skull explode. The 2010s have no patience for anything ambiguous. The film carries on juxtaposing the best and worst of the United States. Extreme brutality are drilled into a seven year old mind, burning her retinas with disproportionate violence. Childish’s music video is great, it portrays America perfectly, but it is not for a little child. The worlds collide. The context is shattered by tech company algorithms. We try switching to Eurovision to ease the damage done but it’s too late. A few days earlier I had captured Karin throwing herself naked into the snow. I shared the video accompanied by our latest single ’We Want Blood’ on Instagram. The video got instantly banned by King Meta. Pure murder is delivered on a plate by YouTube, a little bare skin expurgated by the censorship.
I often get so angry with the world.
Then I remember the context. I remember why the world needs Melvins, Swans and the rest of the heavy sludgy soul-wrenching motherfuckers. I remember why I need them. I remember why I need the context. Karin was right.
Kjetil Nernes is the vocalist, guitarist and songwriter of the Norwegian band Årabrot.
Listen to them on Bandcamp or Spotify.
Kjetil was recently a guest on the famous Norwegian podcast ‘Feedback med Egon Holstad’ (episode #50!), listen to it here (in Norwegian).
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