Vampillia – Alchemic Heart (Important Records)
It can be an unfortunate fact of life that our conceptions of things are sometimes inexorably guided by first impressions and snap judgments. To an extent, the ability to ascertain a quick impression of a situation is likely a hard-wired survival mechanism – if you see a guy with a hockey mask and a chainsaw, you probably are just going to run rather than trying to get his whole life story and worldview. But it can also be problematic, and can cause perfectly reasonable, well-meaning entities and forces to be written off from the start. It’s the driving force behind almost every form of discrimination and persecution in history, but it takes less openly malevolent forms as well, such as the sort of snobbery that comes when an individual thinks that they have another individual or their efforts figured out, the former writing off the latter without any real effort to determine whether their impressions were accurate.
It’s a hard trap to avoid, and I really do my best to sidestep it when writing about artists and their various pursuits, but sometimes it just happens. Like with Alchemic Heart, the recent release by the Japanese group Vampillia. I mean, the band’s name alone sounds like the worst mall-goth imaginable. Of the eleven members, at least one wears clown makeup and several others look like they should be hanging out in the darkest corners of an anime convention. Then there’s their description of themselves as a “brutal orchestra,” a tag possessing a delicate balance of pretentiousness and the Metalocalypse-style absurdity of referring to your own work as “brutal.” But despite the various strikes against it, I noticed Vampillia created Alchemic Heart with the help of Japanese noise pioneer Merzbow and former Swans vocalist Jarboe – enough incentive to at least give the album a quick perusal.
Vampillia – Alchemic Heart (Important Records)
It can be an unfortunate fact of life that our conceptions of things are sometimes inexorably guided by first impressions and snap judgments. To an extent, the ability to ascertain a quick impression of a situation is likely a hard-wired survival mechanism – if you see a guy with a hockey mask and a chainsaw, you probably are just going to run rather than trying to get his whole life story and worldview. But it can also be problematic, and can cause perfectly reasonable, well-meaning entities and forces to be written off from the start. It’s the driving force behind almost every form of discrimination and persecution in history, but it takes less openly malevolent forms as well, such as the sort of snobbery that comes when an individual thinks that they have another individual or their efforts figured out, the former writing off the latter without any real effort to determine whether their impressions were accurate.
It’s a hard trap to avoid, and I really do my best to sidestep it when writing about artists and their various pursuits, but sometimes it just happens. Like with Alchemic Heart, the recent release by the Japanese group Vampillia. I mean, the band’s name alone sounds like the worst mall-goth imaginable. Of the eleven members, at least one wears clown makeup and several others look like they should be hanging out in the darkest corners of an anime convention. Then there’s their description of themselves as a “brutal orchestra,” a tag possessing a delicate balance of pretentiousness and the Metalocalypse-style absurdity of referring to your own work as “brutal.” But despite the various strikes against it, I noticed Vampillia created Alchemic Heart with the help of Japanese noise pioneer Merzbow and former Swans vocalist Jarboe – enough incentive to at least give the album a quick perusal.
And despite the various ridiculous facets of the band, the music they make is an intensely beautiful and unsettling experience, devoid of the affected faux-evil camp one might expect from the image they project. Ironically, the only really questionable facet comes from Jarboe, one of the main selling points of the album, who spends most of the its first half making gasping sounds and dramatically whispering about various aspects of pain and suffering (and I say “questionable” rather than outright corny simply because she was in the Swans and therefore can do pretty much whatever the fuck she wants). The band itself, however, borrows liberally from various styles – gentle ambient piano passages start the song, eventually building into an extended workout that features doom-metal guitars (only the guitars though, no drums or anything) overlaid with morose violin passages, subtle dissonant textural elements (provided by New York Godflesh acolytes Inswarm), and multiple vocalists – some opting for a quasi-black metal scream, some for a more operatic approach, some working closer to a Boredoms-style ululating.
The album’s second half essentially reconfigures the elements present on the preceding portion but seems neither derivative nor redundant. It begins with a string section overlaid with an uncharacteristically subtle Merzbow contribution, a dichotomy that works surprisingly well, with the orchestral elements preventing the song from turning into pure noise and the noise elements preventing the song from treading too close to easily digestible ambience. Like the first song, once the heavy guitars are introduced, things tend to remain static for the remainder of the piece, dwelling in an area too heavy and dissonant to be post-rock or ambient but too melodic and textured to align itself squarely with metal. The only real variation is that the noise influence comes through stronger on the second piece (as would reasonably be expected, considering Merzbow is arguably the best-known performer in his field, however arcane that style may be). It creeps in gradually over the course of the song, building from the spare textural elements during the first few minutes into a crackling, hissing veneer that covers all the other facets without subsuming them completely.
Vampillia’s music succeeds by employing a slowly-building approach that doesn’t rely on standard emotional appeals – there are no steep crescendos (unless each of the two songs is to be counted as a crescendo unto itself), no nods to the sort of cognitive dissonance typically encountered when seemingly disparate aesthetics are transposed. It’s difficult to discern how much of the music is improvised versus how much is composed in advance, but in either case the result is impressive. If the music leans more towards the improvisational side, the interplay is extremely well-organized and works toward a singular goal (no small task for an ensemble this size), but if it’s composed, it possesses a free-flowing quality rarely found in regimented music, an ebbing and flowing that transcends any single facet of the sound and helps to meld the influences into a cohesive entity. Vampillia’s abilities can’t really be understated – they’ve straddled aesthetic borders with seeming ease, created music that’s as satisfying emotionally as it is intellectually, and made a good argument regarding the old adage about books and their covers.
