Vast Chains

"Vast chains" - it's an interesting phrase when used by an artist like Jute Gyte. Could it be signifying something unbreakable - a reference to the albums predecessor Discontinuities? Could it be a metaphor for the human condition, one of inherent bondage and submission to futility of existence? Or, is the great weights of history, an existence built on top of endless suffering, with these vast chains connecting every era of man? Regardless, Vast Chains, presents its listener with the complexity and challenge of its predecessor with an accompanying sense of tension, dread, and nuance.

The opener, based on a line from Anaïs Nin's House of Incest is a trembling, plodding song that moves as a drunken Monotheist riff with accompanying microtones dot the musical landscape. It moves slowly, shifting back and forth from clean guitars to sludge riffs to death metal breakdowns. It's an exercise in patience and practice, testing the listener with its strict lashes for riffs and leads. It draws blood slowly, and with pleasure. Taking influence from a variety of genres, it's a amalgamation for Jute Gyte's particular brand of weird and a crucible for a listener's tolerance of it. "Endless Moths Swarming" is the exact opposite in pace and theme - it is frantic, panicked, and let loose - it's opening riff sounds like an animal escaping from a cage before the other lead comes crashing in - by the end of the song, it lives up to its title - it sounds absolutely maddening - like swarms and swarms are caving in your head.

Vast Chains features an incredible amount of layering - at certain times it sounds like there are four or five different guitars playing completely different things and it's not until the listener is able to take each and place it in the musical canvas that this album becomes even remotely comprehensible. It's dense and foreboding, an takes the tightened rope of the first album and begins to lash the listener with ever changing landscapes, intensive repetition, and unending twists and turns. "Flux and Permanence" is indeed living up to its title and is a good representation of the album. It features a tightly controlled chaos, with blasting sections that careen at a galloping pace, and the slower sections seem to be tripping over themselves but are in fact incredibly well composed and gently accent the craziness of each other.

It's an album of contradictions - of power and of submission, of misery and escape. It plays like a dream, floating in and out of scenes of reality as the dreamer struggles to escape from the unending maze. There are moments of beauty and melody tied tightly within the chaos and madness. There are vignettes are sanity and cohesion behind each otherworldly layer. It is an incredibly memorable album in spite of its oddness and outsider elements - "The Fire of This" features some of the most unnerving moments Jute Gyte has presented, with an absolutely demented clean guitar break that echoes over a screeching tone - ending on a gigantic heavy hitting doom riif before fading into a Jute Gyte favorite of synth and static. It's a mind-blowing closer.

Vast Chains is arguably the most difficult album thus far and proves more than worth of its challenge - it's rewarding to revisit songs and pick apart elements - it's worth the time and effort and highly recommended. This is the bloodletting, this is the pleasure in pain. The act before the climax to come in part three.

Holy heck, here comes another mighty microtonal music missive from the one and only Jute Gyte, the one-man avantgarde black metal wrecking-ball who smashes apart all the stereotypes and constraints that keep metal in a conceptual straitjacket and reveals the boundless potential of the genre for original and intense bat-shit music. JG man Adam Kalmbach recorded this 2014 release at about the same time as he did “Discontinuities” and if you listen to the albums casually, you’ll be hard put to discern much in the way of progress from “Discontinuities” to “Vast Chains”. Listen closer to both though and you'll realise the earlier album is a smoother ride and sounds comparatively sane compared to "Vast Chains".

Repeated hearings are necessary for these recordings because their textures are incredibly dense, the jangly chords have a weird, almost malign glitter tone, and the soundscapes created seem to shift constantly even as the riffs and melodies lurch about their business. There is nothing familiar for listeners to latch onto and use as a guide to explore this music. All 24 microtones of the scale Kalmbach uses are treated as tones in their own right and all the guitar chords and other sounds utilise the microtones fully with very few exceptions (and mostly ambient exceptions at that). You really have to go along with JG on its terms. Guitar chords slide about or launch abruptly into something quite unexpected. The music usually has a suffocating and demented air. Yet each song does have its own structure and riffing patterns and eventually after going a few rounds with the recording, you realise the music is very ordered.

The startlingly memorable intro “Semen Dried into the Silence of Rock and Mineral” – we can always rely on Kalmbach for head-scratching titles – is a lumbering beast of discordant chugging death metal with awkward and angular riffs, made more so by the microtonal scales used. Jarring riff and melody loops, gruff bass grunts and a vocal that simply tears your endurance apart cover over a reality of black emptiness – “the silence of rock and mineral” – that is revealed in brief interludes during which raindrops of guitar might sometimes be the only thing present. By contrast, “Endless Moths Swarming” is a speedy number that imitates the frenzy of the eponymous insects as they hover over unspeakable sights. Every so often, Kalmbach pulls away the curtain of music to show what really lies beneath: the desolation and deep solitude, too dark and deep for words to express, of a universe indifferent to the presence of humans.

We never get much rest between tracks: as soon as one ends, we’re thrust straight into another as if even Kalmbach himself is afraid of the closeness and finality of death. Even the title “The Inexpressible Loneliness of Thinking” suggests that for all our attempts to thwart the inevitable with elaborate mental and social ruses and technology, we will ultimately fail due to our nature and feeble genetic inheritance. “Flux and Permanence” is a seesawing lurch of nauseous riffs and rhythms with choppy low end and disorienting mood. As it continues, the guitars become ever more shrill (as if they weren’t already bonkers) and bring you close to the edge of insanity. The same could be said of the entire album overall actually.

Each track has its distinctive riffs and melodies and thus its own identity yet they are all united not just by the particular style of demented music with its stress on jagged bass lines and the most awkward and uncoordinated riffs – there are also those quiet moments within each track that peel away the apparent cacophony and show you the real chaos of unending darkness and the silence of non-life. One odd thing about this album is that for all the dense delirium of the music, it’s all surprisingly steady and even, and no one track is head and shoulders above the others: as a result, there’s no real stand-out track to point to as typifying the album. Also for all the music’s apparent “heavy” quality, the percussion on the album is surprisingly light; the heaviness comes from the bass and the extreme range of the guitars in tone, volume and riff / melody structures. All tracks represent the entire album in microcosm, in slightly different ways.

This album is definitely for the fans; those unfamiliar with Jute Gyte are best directed to hear out earlier recordings before tackling this one.

You know, one day I'm probably going to make a weekend out of revisiting these DVD-shelled Jute Gyte albums, and when I do, it's not likely that Vast Chains will rank as the favorite. Yet this is hands down one of the most fascinating and fucked up products he's produced, memorable not for that alone, but for Adam Kalmbach's continued ability to stretch at, and tear through those amorphous membranes of stylistic convention that so dearly require disintegration if extreme metal is to overrun the roadblocks it often seems to set up for itself. Perhaps the most accurate means I could summon forth to describe this would be as a grand disjunction of black, death, thrash, doom and post-punk aesthetics as translated by a deep schizophrenic so beyond treatment that he or she was locked in the asylum basement and nearly forgotten...only the Bizarro World of that situation.

You'll recognize the use of microtonal riffing if you've experienced last year's Discontinuities, only rather than repeating that album, he's interpreted the technique into a more unpredictable, angular geometry that throws you curve balls in almost every track on the album. Songs are divided into harsher passages of insectoid, bristling dissonance, or springier and cleaner riffs set off against distorted dementia, with the tempos fluxed between the faster black metallic rushes of his prior works and a slower, creepier miasma of impenetrable doom that is compounded by the fresh intervals being picked and strummed. I couldn't even begin to accurately compare this to anything outside of Jute Gyte's own body of work, but strange word puzzles like 'Philip Glass being filtered through the unwashed demos of the stranger LLN bands' seem to pop into my imagination as I'm listening. That this is a difficult experience goes without saying, he's never been all about the comfort of music but rather in seeking that comfort through unusual circumstances, and yet there is certainly a consistent set of traits (certain rhythm guitar tones, drum tracking) that fasten these Chains into a fairly cohesive album...or at least as cohesive as any strain of madness I've encountered.

Probably my favorite tracks were "The Inexpressible Loneliness of Thinking", which was like having a few gallons of effluvia dumped upon my head after being pumped through an Escher-designed sewer sytem, and "Endless Moths Swarming" which becomes so bonkers nearing the bridge that it's almost comical. In fact, this sense of black humor permeates the entirety of the disc, but not for cheap laughs, for unbridled horror. It would also be remiss to not mention how damned excellent the lyrics are...it's pretty early on in 2014, and I've often enjoyed Kalmbach's words as much if not more than the compositions they represent, but these are superb even among the esteemed crowd of his past releases, and the best I've read so far this year. On the flip side, there are definitely a couple riffs here that simply aren't ugly enough to live up to others, so there's a sense of clashing and contrast which doesn't always subdue the listener levelly. I also thought his raving snarled vocals were superior to the death grunts, as you can compare in the first tune "Semen Dried into the Silence of Rock and Mineral", but it's strange to say that these are the most sanity-tethered components of the album, which is just this tornado of disjointed nightmares whipping across the plains of Missouri. Recommended with the lights on, but without...you're on your own there, friends.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com