nothing here but four albums

issue 250 - 24th March, 2024

CJW: Welcome to a special bonus presentation. To celebrate nothing here’s 250th issue, we thought we’d put together a bonus to send to you all about some important, meaningful, or just favourite albums of ours.

With any luck you’ll find some new music to check out, or be reminded to revisit something you already love.

I hope you’re well. Keep looking after yourself and your loved ones.

DCH: Chris Whitley Living with the Law

Take you in my belly

Sure as night is black

I take you for religion

Like the skin across my back

–Chris Whitley, Kick The Stones, Columbia, 1991

I was a child of the MTV era. I committed to memory the credit block that hung in the bottom left corner of every video from the time my family first got cable to when I left for art school in ‘92. And it didn’t stop with MTV either – I consumed copious amounts of BET and, god help me, even VH1.

The video for Chris Whitley’s first single, Big Sky Country was in decent rotation on the latter in the summer of ‘91 when his first album, Living with the Law was released. Both were an amazing introduction to Whitley’s soul-bearing blues and his take on south/western gothic romance–think Tennessee Williams set to a Stevie Ray Vaughn soundtrack. The video features Whitley in Ah-ha esque animated storyboards with bursts of evocative imagery torn from his lyrics: guns, machines/gears, roses, tarot cards, cemeteries, churches, carnivals, barbed wire, and aching pagan beauties.

A lot of other music I listened to at the time – NIN, Living Colour, Nirvana – helped me navigate my feelings of rage and resentment at living in an unjust and apathetic world. Whitley, on the other hand, helped me navigate my understanding of sexuality. His lyrics were full of lust and longing and a broken vulnerability in the face of wanton passions and obsessions. They were simultaneously cryptic and confessional. Meditations of what love and happiness could be without dogma or religious/moral limits getting in the way.

His singing moved from a whisper to a tumult. From high almost falsetto melodies to low growling staccatos. At times a roiling, seething storm and others a lonely, lost voice trying to rise above the din.. 

Musically the debut album was a showcase for his mastery of the slide guitar. Whitley’s trademark instrument of choice was a National Triolian resonator guitar nicknamed Mustard due to its fading yellow colour. Resonators (also known as dobros) were developed in the 1920s as a pre-electronic guitar solution to the problem of acoustic guitars getting buried in louder instruments in dance orchestras. 

The unique sound they produce made Whitley’s music sound every bit as dislocated and devastated as his lyrics. All the more so given that he played with alternative tunings. Doing so added deep, ringing, choral sounds to the songs in the album. To cap it all off there was the slight addition of samples featuring elements like radio static and gospel music outros in some of the songs. Taken together the whole made for an sweeping, cinematic aural experience that seemed like a massive modernization of the high lonesome sound found in the very best of American folk, country, blues, and bluegrass.

A few years later I saw Whitley play at CBGBs. I can’t quite recall the date but given he played a few tracks from his second album, Din of Ecstacy it must have been around its release in ‘95. The iconic club / hole in the wall was packed with fans. Many of them were women who were positively enthralled by his mesmerising stage presence. It was intimate, restless, sultry, brooding, dark, erotic, and electric.

Din was commercial suicide for his career. Columbia refused to support it because, in their eyes the angrier, louder, electric and techno elements were not fit for the Chris Isaak market they were pitching Whitley too. I thought the album was amazing. As were the rest in his oeuvre. I’m happy to say I own them all and still listen to them regularly.

Whitley died of lung cancer in Houston in 2005 at age 45. He was near penniless and even had to sell his iconic guitar to his brother to help make ends meet. A terrible ending to a life that surged with so much talent, wisdom, and passion.

MJW: Hole Live Through This

I spent my adolescence trying really hard to dissociate my way through. I wanted to be a robot programmed for logic only, a plastic doll with a sweet, empty head who could cope with being bullied at school and at home. I wanted to be clean, smooth, cool. Instead, I was hot, lumpy, oily and teary. Human and flawed, fuck! I am doll parts, bad skin, doll heart.

Live Through This by Hole is like a pulsing zit, a ragged slip dragged on from the floor, a crying meltdown in front of a stranger. It’s the opposite of dissociated. The title is telling you. It’s grabbing you by the face and asking you to be in your body. To live through this moment, and the next and the next.

It came out when I was 12, and I got a taped copy when I was 13. The first time I heard it, I was staggered that a girl could sing like that. Was she allowed to sing like that? Seemed like she wasn’t, because people fucking hated her. Cut to me at 15, listening to a boy tell me all the reasons why Courtney Love and by extension, Hole, were shit. I refused to agree with him, even though I desperately wanted to kiss this boy, and maybe that’s why he didn’t kiss me then and didn’t kiss me until years later. I gotta shut my mouth with you…

The album is a perfect soundtrack to being imperfect. It’s about all the most disgusting parts of being a person: embodiment, anger, yearning, aching. You’re hungry, but I’m starving. It’s the ideal album to PMS to, then get period blood all over your underwear. Some day you will ache like I ache. It’s a collage with sticky fingermarks on all the pictures, a girl’s dirty bedroom and all the secrets inside it. I’m sleeping with my enemy, myself.

Live Through This is the antithesis of aesthetic perfection, yet it’s almost a perfect album. Courtney Love describes Hole’s first album Pretty on the Inside as ‘unlistenable’ (I beg to differ), whereas Live Through This is extremely listenable (a trend that continues upwards towards the poppy topping out in Celebrity Skin.) It dips and rises – opening with feminine rage and that snarling gravel voice in Violet, but by the very next song, Courtney is sweetly singing the first lyrics of Miss World. There’s the almost-tenderness of Softer, Softest, followed right up by the punk as fuck She Walks On Me. You think you know what kind of album it’s going to be, then it takes a turn, and another and another.

You associate an album with the era you listened to it most. It’s only natural. Music is almost sense-memory. For me, Live Through This is a time warp to being sixteen. Being hurt, being embodied, in the process of being damaged but dragging myself through. And I did. I did live through it.

CJW: Black is the light that shines on my path…

I first discovered Refused thanks to Punk O Rama Volume 4: Straight Outta The Pit – a compilation of songs from artists on the Epitaph record label (it was also the first Punk O Rama to include tracks from the affiliated European label Burning Heart, hence the appearance of Refused and other Euro acts). On the whole, the compilation was solid, but for whatever reason the Refused track Summerholidays vs. Punkroutine was the one that stood out to me, even though it was pretty fucking far from the sort of straightforward punk rock I thought I was looking for (the compilation also included Tom Waits’ Big in Japan, so quality and label loyalty were far more important than musical genre).

Eventually I was able to get my hands on the album the track was lifted from – The Shape of Punk to Come – picking it out at the Sanity store at the Pacific Pines Shopping Centre on the Gold Coast for my girlfriend to get me for my birthday. The album was originally released in 1998, just prior to a short and disastrous tour that led to the band breaking up (before an eventual reunion more than a decade later). I distinctly remember going online – this requiring a modem connected to the phone line and the screeching digital handshake that sang of untold promise reaching to my suburban home from all over the world – and looking to see when my new favourite band might be touring Australia, only to learn that they’d broken up almost 2 years prior. The news was devastating, but would have been worse if the last album they left us with wasn’t perfect.

Back in those days, music piracy required painstaking hours of watching the kilobytes come down via Limewire or similar, or otherwise grabbing masses of awful music from the chuds at your local LAN. There were no streaming platforms, and you were lucky to hear the main single from a band like Refused on an alternative radio station, let alone any other tracks. So, for all I knew the album could have been a stinker with one great song on it. Instead, it was – and still is – a solid 10/10, the tracks dynamic, energetic, angry, and broken up by odd radio interludes and electronic beats. I still remember looking up the album online and seeing the comment: “If this is The Shape of Punk to Come then why don’t I just start listening to fucking Korn and Limp Bizkit now then?”

It was indeed the era of numetal, but beyond some shared elements – screamed vocals, distorted guitar, the aforementioned electronica – there was nothing numetal about the album, no rap or hip-hop influence, no D-tuning, and none of numetal’s hollow braggadocio or depressed juvenilia. (The real link is to the following decade of hardcore – especially the emo, screamo, and adjacent varieties, much of which is directly inspired by Refused generally and The Shape of Punk to Come in particular.)

By now you might be thinking, “But, Corey, haven’t you written about this album before?” I have! (Maybe even for this newsletter.) What I actually want to write about is what came next. That’s right – The (International) Noise Conspiracy!

No, I’m fucking with you. Nothing could have disappointed me more than hearing T(I)NC when I went to hear what Dennis Lyxzén’s new band sounded like – throwback nostalgia rock ‘n’ roll, with the sometimes-intellectual, righteously furious anti-capitalist and anti-hegemonic message of Refused watered down into little anti-capitalist ditties.

What I actually want to write about is what the rest of the band did next. 

Kristofer Steen, David Sandström, and Jon F Brännström from Refused came together with Fredrik Bäckström to create a project (early communiques were adamant that it was not simply a band) by the name of TEXT. In 2001 they released a self-titled album, rumoured to be based on music they’d been writing for a next Refused album prior to that band’s implosion.

I believe the rumour because much of the music on TEXT has the same dynamism, energy, and audible passion of The Shape of Punk to Come, but at the same time it’s approached from a slightly different angle. It’s jangly and discordant, and feels looser. The hardcore is also a smaller element of the album - where on The Shape of Punk to Come it was the bulk, with odd diversions and moments of quiet to add contrast to the heavy pulsing energy on display, on TEXT it’s the hardcore that makes up the diversions. The bulk of the album is dedicated to a three-part history of torture (and more) presented in spoken word over a chilling and haunting soundscape, and in other places a folk music influence comes through. 

The entire album is an eclectic sonic journey from start to finish, which might not sound like something one would be interested in as a follow-up to The Shape of Punk to Come. But that’s the thing - TSOPTC was special because it was new, unique, and original, still sounding contemporary more than 20 years later. I might have thought I wanted TSOPT 2 (which would probably be Freedom from 2015, Refused’s first post-reunion album which is good, but only good - a flat Hollywood sequel to a groundbreaking original), but TEXT proved that what I really wanted was something else that could impress and inspire me in the same ways.

Sadly it was the only full album released by TEXT, and it was the only release that featured all members. But again, it’s hard to be disappointed when the album they left behind is perfect and timeless.

LZ: Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness

Back when I was 23 or so (as in 10 years ago), a good friend of mine introduced me to Have a Nice Life. As for most people who are into sad stuff, this name for a band wasn't really attractive, but there goes the irony. This became a cult release in similar ways to Sunbather by Deafheaven, an album that could never be surpassed (though the second one, The Unnatural World, was very good too).

It starts with two guys playing in a bedroom and writing sad songs because, of course, depression was the magic ingredient in the cake. Lots of reverb, lo-fi feelings (which are possibly not intended, but because they lost the high-quality copy), Joy Division vibes, but there was also a booklet. In this booklet, you learn about an ancient religion called Antioquianism, which argues that death is the only truth in life.

The booklet was apparently written in collaboration with a history professor who didn't want to be identified, so it feels like an actual history text as it also blends actual references. I guess many people, like me, thought this was an actual religion for some time. However, the term or the combination of the words death and consciousness don't necessarily resonate in the lyrics of the songs… so what then?

Turns out that since then I have lost very important people to me. Though I was always into dark, goth stuff, I didn't particularly focus so much on death – or at least not so consciously when I was studying transhumanism and mind uploading. 

But at that time I was getting my MA degree and reading a lot of Vilém Flusser, Ivan Bystrina, Freud, Jung… somehow, I ended up reading different sources that led me to the insight that death could be one of the sources of culture creation. At least, that was my take on Bystrina's lecture on topics of culture semiotics. But I didn't explore much of that as I got a bit distanced from academia after getting my degree.

In the meantime, I was really into science fiction and cyberpunk. Mind uploading was still something that resonated (if not disturbed) a lot, so I kept trying to read more about what it means to upload your mind, what is the mind, what is consciousness, when it starts and ends, what is death etc. Well, the circle formed again.

And, well, my way to cope with grief and things in general is by reading, researching, writing, and making it scientifically productive and plausible. So my PhD was about that; I would use four years to dedicate to understanding the relationship between death, consciousness, and art. 

But, of course, in the meantime, I lost more important people in my life and my only way to deal with that (besides therapy, which I was already doing), was reading a massive book on the history of death in the western world. And then, it all makes sense to me; the supposition that we are only conscious because we know we are going to die and acknowledging that has made us evolve to the level of consciousness that we have. Funnily enough, some AI researchers think that they need to teach AI to fear death in order to make them smarter and possibly conscious, so… yeah.

That's how I also got my first tattoos: death on one forearm, consciousness on the other. Separated they are already powerful enough, but it turns out they might tag along. I told my mom when I got the tattoo (she didn't like them) that this was my way of processing our loss, so she understood me. So… in the end, HANL's Deathconsciousness has grown bigger than what the album really is to become maybe a motto, an inspiration, a belief, a personal religion that I invented and have been pursuing since then.