A Life In A Church: FREEDOM
By Kjetil Nernes
FREEDOM
The cold stings my face as I walk my daughter to the bus stop at 7am. Early mornings are called for as we live far into the woods and school is in the nearest city. As spring is slowly approaching, the days get brighter and there is in the far east a slit of pink which minute by minute expands into a full-blown apricot-coloured sunup. It’s a glimpse of hope in the darkness, a spark of light in an otherwise bleak reality. I wonder why we forget most of our early childhood. There is an obvious biological explanation as the brain is hard at work connecting its wires and preparing us for the slap in the face called existence. But we don’t really forget, do we? Everything we learn or experience – good or bad – is contained within us and we carry this carcass with us till the end of times. I do remember a few things from early childhood, a few flashes of memory which I am sure is an amalgam of old photographs, stories told by my family and what I actually experienced. The carpet in our first house in Haugesund, the gravel in the driveway, me laughing for my mum and grandma’s attention when I was four. The rest is kept secret in a Pandora’s box within me which only opens up when in terrible distress, for instance the mornings waking from a drunken blackout and finding 30 missed calls on your phone from your boss (yes, this happened to me).
“Today it is bad,
and day by day it will get worse-
until at last the worst of all arrives.”
The rosy anticipation of a life ahead is so depressingly crushed to bits when you enter the system, i.e. school. And from there on we are pawns on somebody’s chess board –god or king – whether we like it or not. To be able to do anything outside this system I think you have three choices. Either you spend your eternity fighting it, or you jump in the river and flow along with it, or like a snake coil your own path on the precipice of the system’s bone hard borders. A career in the arts is usually path three. Spending more than twenty uneducated years in a noise rock band is definitely route three. It is a struggle, but if you actually manage to hack the system you are up for a thrilling mischievous feeling of tricking life, and it is life-affirming in a way only a band like The Residents can make sense of. The Residents is one of my all-time favourite bands and they seem to overrule the system. Captain Beefheart is the same way. They both go outside the rules of music and they are like children, free and open-minded. They are closer to the source. The source that is the palingenesis which no one can explain but which both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche believed in. A recurrence of all things. We all swirl round and round in the wheel of life and death. ’On The Suffering Of The World’ is an interesting read for any aspiring misanthropic. And ’Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ is an obvious must, a poetic masterwork.
Once these things dawned upon me in my mid-thirties my outlook on life not only expanded but cleared up and became more positive. I could look into that sunup and find it beautiful and uplifting. I’m also more cautious of things. The sun is a beautiful thing but will blind you if you stare at it. There’s a complex irony to that dualism which Bataille wrote about. I was very inspired by Bataille’s surreal mythologies and eroticism and wrote a whole album about it. The album even won a Norwegian Grammy. It’s called ’Solar Anus’.
Bataille writes about the regression of things. Huysmans is touching that subject too. We (Årabrot) have worked with not one, but two women who find giving birth revolting. It must be a modernist approach. It definitely fits Huysmans’ ’Against Nature’. The other day activists hung up dead chickens ready for the slaughterhouse in a supermarket. The customers fled the place revolted at the sight. The journalist reporting even admitted to feeling sick. A customer said she didn’t feel for poultry and went for ox instead. Bataille and Huysmans (and more recently Julia Kristeva) wrote about this a long time ago. It pinpoints a symptom of modern times. I am in no way opposed to this type of modernist regression but I am eternally fascinated. You can do a lot of things that go against nature in the modern world and that is great. But I wonder if one could reverse the natural order of things. If Man opposes the actual origin of where He comes from (and even finds it revolting) then maybe it’s possible to revert the path from adulthood back to the original freedom of childhood, not framed by any governing law? Maybe you can then accomplish total freedom?
The freedom of The Residents and Captain Beefheart can be found in some other bands but they are few. It is so hard to free oneself from the dogmas of… well, everything. Even down to what we eat for dinner. We might cook spaghetti and meatballs for our kids to find out they already had it for lunch and also got it served at their friend’s house the day before. Out of the abundance of food available we go for pasta and meat again and again. We record our drums and guitars and bass guitar just because we really can’t think of any other way of conjuring up some good old noise. We don’t even question these things.
Nurse With Wound is a beautiful example of an artist with the freedom found in The Residents. A freedom very specific and very rare. Free-wheeling acts such as Merzbow are in my opinion progressive and thought-provoking, but not free. Merzbow is still governed by the physical laws of electronic pulses and currents. Noise. A flamenco guitar would seriously sabotage the mood. At a push maybe Ornette Coleman’s free jazz or John Coltrane at his most metaphysical is free. Or Miles Davis when he stops playing on his ‘70s period records. But not really. Cage’s ‘4.33’ should be free, but it’s not. It’s governed by location. It loses power when moved from MOMA to Berghain. Same goes for Stockhausen. The Residents have a number of guitars in different tunings playing a Beatles riff on top of what might be a Rolling Stones song on a record called ’Third Reich ’n Roll’. It makes no sense but it doesn’t matter because it’s free.
Freedom is elemental in a way that goes against the laws of nature. It’s not the waves grinding the shores of the Norwegian west coast or the massive waterfalls that crash into the deep fjords ruled by universal laws. It coils around the periphery much like the snakey life-hack of a surviving independent DYI noise-rocker. Beefheart is a band impossible to navigate or replicate. No AI can ever reproduce the same rhythmical brilliance. Much of the freedom lies in rhythm. Give a kid a bongo drum or a pot lid and you’ll see. Give a classroom full of kids flutes and bring out your earplugs. It’s a rhythmical deliverance. I have asked for deliverance so many times. I have been granted a few and my mantra – repeated over and over in my mind – is that there is the tiniest mote of hope in the pastel sunrise on a cold February morning.
Soloppgangen er ikke annet enn bølgelengder
Av elektromagnetisk stråling som forårsaker
Synsinntrykk i det menneskelige øye
Kjetil Nernes is the vocalist, guitarist and songwriter of the Norwegian band Årabrot.
Listen to them on Bandcamp or Spotify.
Check them out if they’re playing near you:
August 27: Vienna, Austria at Arena
September 18: Stockholm, Sweden at Hus 7
September 19: Oslo, Norway at Parkteatret Scene
September 20: Trondheim, Norway at HAVET
September 26: Bergen, Norway at Kulturhuset i Bergen
October 4: Stavanger, Norway at Stavanger Konserthus
October 9: Tromsø, Norway at Blårock Cafe
October 25: Montpellier, France at Maison des Chœurs
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