Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about two things recently: puzzles and prosecraft. Both of these are tightly connected for me. Prose, done well, is a series of connections, mapping out potentialities and weighing them against each other, piece by piece, until suddenly the shapes on the page demand specific patterns to thread them together. Puzzles likewise are similar; there is a poeticism to them, something lyrical, especially when you catch the spirit of the puzzle maker so to speak, learn to feel how they feel so you can anticipate the turns and shifts of a well-designed puzzle before they come. It’s funny to me, in an ironic sense, that this is the inverse of life, a thing of webbed interconnectedness to profound degrees that we instead impose these logical rubrics that do not really exist. This is a classic problem in philosophy that extends to math, science and language; are we witnessing real implicit structures in the world or have we, per Wittgenstein, made a kind of language game which then necessitates by its legal moves certain realities? This seems flippant until you nudge at things like Russell and Whitehead’s failure to codify math after Goedel blew a hole in their bow.
As for the relation of this to music, music itself rides this fine line of being of both worlds. Improvisational music, spirited music, is something unfettered that we in analysis and criticism and even lay listening impose a kind of structure onto. In its pure form, its color and field, abstraction in the absolute. The human mind, however, while infinitely capable of experiencing the unformed and unshaped has a hard time cognitively manipulating it. We must descend into language, dirty the world with words, assign genres and describe riffs and tone color to explain what for us is a raw and immediate experience. But music is also from that other world, a kind of puzzle assembled once we have attained a theory of music (be that the traditional Western academic one, a non-Western one, or the lay theory that blues and punk musicians pick up naturally by playing). We see genres and moods as templates, structures to fill in, and thus work outside-in on this greater compositional puzzle, putting the right thing in the right place.
Logic and experience, rationality and being, thus get thrust to two opposite sides of our lives but never seem to sever themselves from one another. The most cerebral of progressive, experimental, and avant-garde music still feels a certain way, provokes certain emotions or delights in the people who love it, while the most wild and naturally emergent music reveals layered relational rhythms, structures we can learn to emulate consciously or seek consciously. Each thing explodes out of the other; the order of rationality seems to automatically assemble within the world, and all that is ordered at some point deconstructs in a Shivic conflagration, revealing a seething organic core that precedes that rationality. It makes me think: As an art critic, what am I doing? But also, in its inverse, that the more I think about art, the more I experience it and attempt to hold both worlds at once, this detailed intellectualism and this raw experientiality, I feel this slipping away of the ego, this quiet sublimity. Which, Jesus, I need. Have you read the news? Oh my god.
— Langdon Hickman
