The Transcendental Black Metal project Liturgy interfaces with physical, sonic, and cerebral forces at Songbyrd Music House
As a former classical musician, part of what draws me to independent music, alternative music, or whatever you want to call it, is a certain simplicity of experience. Anyone can attend a show, dress however they want, move as compelled by the spirit, and even spontaneously add to the noise. I learned music through an intensive study of a set of rules, flirting with rebellion only often enough to distinguish myself from the pack while maintaining that critical stamp of approval from the Classical gods. The life-affirming music and philosophical depth of Liturgy have forced me to take a step back and notice the somewhat dogmatic anti-intellectualism that has crept into my enjoyment of non-Classical music. Last Thursday night, the band performed alongside industrial hyperpop artist Dickgirl and hardcore punk trio Muscle at Songbyrd Music House for an enthusiastic and age-diverse group of fans.
A familiar whiff of fragrance-free soap and essential oils hung in the air at Songbyrd as Dickgirl wove through the crowd with her wireless mic, quickly dissolving any barrier between performer and audience. Hailing from Baltimore, Dickgirl’s music is angry and ecstatic. It’s like a Ballroom queering of early nineties industrial rock à la Nine Inch Nails, trading that ridiculous masculine stern sexiness for an unabridged tirade. Her 2023 album, Yeen Supreme, bulldozes through themes like race, sexuality, and shame without taking itself too seriously. Physicality is clearly an integral part of Dickgirl’s performative approach; she writhes on the floor and uses her body to produce feedback. In this case, the music more than lives up to the grandeur of her live act. An active member of the Women of Noise community, Dickgirl gravitates toward higher frequencies, using the discrete popping of static to inspire complex beats that often form glitchy polyrhythms against the vocals, which flow more like slam poetry than lyrics. Yeen Supreme is just as well suited for a dance party as it is for a deep listening session with your best set of headphones.
When Madison Coan, Quentin Gibeau, and Adam Farkas formed the Baltimore-based hardcore punk band Muscle, their goal was to “sound like a trash can that fucks.” Notably, the band doesn’t have a guitarist. Instead, bassist Gibeau is in the driver’s seat melodically, providing a wide range of color by including harmonic overtones in many of his leading riffs. Farkas applies his classical chops to hyperactive grooves, lending creative fills that punctuate Coan’s contemptuous wailing, like a Vaudeville punchline in a George Miller film (ba-dum-tss!). Despite their tight ensemble, Muscle achieves a sound that is grimy and libidinal. Coan removed her shirt before the band ripped into their set, pausing to reassure members of the audience who had awkwardly discontinued their photo- and video-taking. The lead singer performs every show shirtless. “I remove this garment that hides something I don't want to care about,” she remarked in a recent interview for Bruiser Mag. A former dancer, Coan contorts her body into uncomfortable shapes, eyes wide like a traditional Chinese dragon, delivering lines like, “You’re gonna hate how much of your trash I just ate.” Though there’s nothing particularly new about their musical style, I appreciate that Coan uses simple language and metaphor in her songwriting to tell stories that seem to come from a deeply personal place. Albeit, a place of unfiltered rage.
An excerpt from Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s Transcendental Black Metal manifesto
Both of the opening sets that night got me thinking about women and performative expression. Historically, women have been readily accepted as performers, or, in other words, entertainment. Composers like Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and even Caroline Shaw found success in a cisgender-male-dominated field by marketing themselves as composer/performers. Composer Kay Rhie said it best in her 2015 paper on the embodied feminine in music: “Men have traditionally been associated with mind, the rational, intellect, culture, and creation and women with reproduction, nature, body, the physical, and emotional.” Through this lens, it’s reasonable to posit that frontwoman-ism at large is not such a subversive phenomenon. Enter Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, creator of the project Liturgy and author of a seven-page manifesto outlining the emergence of a new affirmative style of metal that embraces the finite: Transcendental Black Metal. Hunt-Hendrix is flipping the script with her philosophical approach to the queering of metal and the reclamation of the eternal feminine in music.
I was surprised to see the small and intimate Songbyrd, of all venues, hosting Liturgy—a band known for its face-melting, larger-than-life performances. However, the setting really worked. Drawing on classical minimalist influences like Steve Reich and John Tavener, Liturgy basks in the divine intersection of the discrete and the continuous. After cleansing the venue with incense and looped angelic vocals that erupted into glorious whistle screams, the band played the rapturous track “Hajj” from their 2019 release, H.A.Q.Q. The four musicians of Liturgy maintained laser focus throughout the five-song set, having totally internalized the music’s inherent complexity and emotional arc. The bagpipe-like constant tremolo of “Hajj” meditates obsessively around the Lydian mode. Drummer Leo Didkovsky uses the flexible burst beat to travel between different planes of rhythmic impetus. Hunt-Hendrix coined the term “burst beat” (as opposed to the standard “blast beat”) as the central technique of Transcendental Black Metal. She writes, “Consider the horse as it switches from walk to trot to canter. Consider water as it switches from ice to liquid to gas. The moment of the rupture is the moment of transcendence.”
Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion
Hunt-Hendrix’s songs come across more like through-composed entities; they gain momentum through the aforementioned moments of rupture rather than through repetition. Since I was introduced to Liturgy, I’ve admired their innovative approach, due in no small part to the depth of meaning behind each of their artistic decisions. It was a moving experience to see the crowd at Songbyrd reacting to these moments of musical transformation in real time.
Another highlight of the set was “Generation,” from Aesthethica, released in 2011. “Generation” is an exercise in harnessing rhythmic energy without the help of melodic tension. Hunt-Hendrix led the ensemble through three minutes of a hypnotic octave ostinato before the harmonic austerity of the track began to relax. The band closed their set with the title track of their 2023 album, 93696. The song is a 15-minute epic pilgrimage that unfolds like a classical theme and variations. Aside from a striking halo of glockenspiel, the instrumentation of “93696” aligns closely with that of the black metal genre. At around the five-minute mark, Liturgy transforms the song’s exploitation of isorhythm into one of the most nasty, driving guitar licks I have ever heard.
Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix sees the history of metal as an art form in pursuit of the Haptic Void, or the arrival point of maximum intensity. According to the manifesto, “[T]he promise made by the Haptic Void is a lie. Only its absence is ever present.” Transcendental Black Metal, at its core, worships the “penultimacy” of life. As in, “the inability of any concrete song to measure up to the inspiration that gave birth to it.” Worship the “not yet,” because the “yet” is nothingness. A beautiful concept.
Honestly, I would have loved Liturgy without knowing a single thing about the manifesto. However, it's disheartening to think that some folks might be deterred by the intellectual rigor behind the project. I would encourage anyone who feels this way to examine the source of that discomfort.
Thank you, Haela, for sharing your ideas so freely with your fans.
