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Hive – Demiurge 2xc90 (reissue)
And now, a brief history lesson from your friendly neighborhood Skeleton Dust. Brief? Yes, well. Nineteen-shitstain-ninety-five. A good noise year. Enter Niklaus Wiesend, aka Hive. Hive, one of those rare and utterly slaying urgencies, pops up from nowhere, annihilates everything in its path, and then pops right back to nothingness, never to be heard from again. But before the proverbial Hive-head gets popped for perpetuity, it blesses us with Demiurge.
Demiurge, original, is pretty much the complete package. Harsh slaying goodness, razor-sharp, dynamic, little inclined to relent, constantly evolving over a wide-ranging measure of moods and colors, many of them manhandled in piercingly vicious rough of rawhide-red ear-bleed dry-shred, pared down, butt-naked, crystalline, spiky-headed. Harsh slaying goodness, but off-kilter, different from practically everything else out there, open-ended and open-aired enough to suggest an almost acoustic, or physical, disposition. Seasoned, too, with some faux ambient-psych intrusions, sky-blottening thunder-bellows, and the occasional vocal spastic, the whole messy spectacle shifting by degrees from one extreme to the next. Nary a dull moment over the full and ferocious 100-minute course. To help guide the listener through this veritable tour-de-féroce, a lengthy tract of text comes folded neatly into the fetishizable hive-box housing, serving in part as condensation of the sonic-sensual experience in play, part of which I quote:
They stick you in by yourself in this slider and then pipe in this noise—sort of a pierce jumping back and forth between shrieks and crashes they made with machines. At the same time, green lights find your retina quick and prance away just as fast doing little zig-zag dances on the way out and yer eyes can't help but follow and yer lexicon starts to bulge all by itself, without you even raising a dirty, lazy finger. That noise they learn you with is supposed to be pure information or some trash, and yer head gets all drooly and hungry for it and just waits for the next session in the slider, cause you can start feeling what it's like being a demiurge.
And honestly, that's exactly how it hits. In kaleidescopic flashes of primary color, flooding the brainpan, multi-hued shrieks and crashes jumping about in a maddening dance that ultimately communes at a deeper, proto-informational, level, leaving the head popped, primed, panting, starved for more More MORE.
Craving more? That can be arranged. It is very much worth noting that the Demiurge originally bequeathed is a c90+c10. Per discogs, the persons responsible for this reissue would appear to have revised history in a way only a noiseperv could love: with the "full version" otherwise hidden from ear for the last two-point-five decades. Now, I did struggle a bit with the complex math here, but if my calculations are correct a 2xc90 gives us, let's see here, yes: eighty whole extra minutes of very-probably-irreproachable earhole annihilation. There you have it. Skeleton Dust: putting the vision back in historical revisionism.
What this also means is we're getting the four colors restored to their proper order, though I'm probably getting ahead of myself.
More worthy of mention, vis-a-vis the sonic-sensual experience, is that this is not merely the debut of material excised from the original, but that due to the limitations of format the material is ordered and arranged quite differently. I mean, it is unmistakably the same material, but in its full and glorious extravagance leaves quite a different and lasting impression. I am not yet ready to hold one above the other, the original or the reissue, but will say simply: the world needs both. (We'll see what's what in the course of time.)
Heresies duly acknowledged, it should be agreed that in presentation and packaging the reissue is as faithful to the original as could be hoped. Up to and including the eminently quotable tract of text penned by the demiurge himself, a second revelatory nugget of which to sample-
...there was this guy who taught us all to kill with poems. Not the special part that happens in yer brain with electricity and chemicals and trash, but the actual word part of things, the part about the lexicon that makes the juices flow hard enough to pop a head.
Side YELLOW—I am born and begin to shout slogans starts, quite literally with a bang, a bang that does not quite correspond to the banging accorded the c10 original but one that nicely prefaces the extended annihilations to come. Razor'd raw shrieking scorchleries savagely ripping 'hole with a precise and poised kinetic hammering that refuses in its breakneck pacing to let up for a moment. Or so I would have expected. In the early going, the demiurge works itself into quite the frenzy, attacks coming so swift and severe it strikes as almost percussive. Nothing hidden or distorted, nothing buried in layers of murk, everything crystal clear, the total killing in store vivid in its WHITE-YELLOW hues. Ax-chops erratically thunk off fat chunks, then hack and blast them to bits in fevered rages of char-burnt seethe. And then...a marked slowing. A more considered thunk here, a more deliberate hack there, spaces opening wide to admit near silences and crawls through downward-dragged rubble-drudge.
As the ears acclimate to their less than ripped-to-shit surroundings one is forced to speculate. Suggestions of scandal emerge. Overzealous-if-possibly-visionary Plague In Perspective label boss cuts material deemed less annihilating. To fit the resulting format he then deliberately mixes up the colors. The poor suffering artist, in a fit of pique at the heavy-handed intrusions into his magnum opus, goes ape-shit, and the head, it just...snaps...crackles. Pops. Whatever the case, color me intrigued by the more broad-brushed perspective. The patience, the feeling things out. Holding back the wack. Centimetering along. Playing close to vest. And moments of genuine, say it, drag.
Then, inevitably, the unloading of the requisite holy hell, the unbridled ferocity that much more impactful and resonant. Several such episodes are sprinkled into the narrative, none of them really defining the whole but offering a sort of collage of complimentary impressions and exertions. Toward the end a not unwelcome bit of Maso-ish vocal-spastication, revealing that perhaps Mr Voice was there all along, driving the harsher severances, and in fact coloring many of the more rabid-flecked flavors on tap. The final episode does again carry on for a bit, this time in rasped and ruptured mid-shizzled shreddings, but with a filthed and blotchy atmosphere that convinces the attentions to stay the course.
RED—Stretching to Yawn, I Crack the Ceiling of Heaven. Now this, is harsh. Brutal. Vicious. Nothing quite so arty or episodic, fuck no. The penetrations are almost without exception delivered straight through Skull Central, drilling with severe and single-minded intent to damage hole. Kicks off in dramatic fashion, ruptured bash of echoing rhythmic distortions suggestive of Incoming. And then the harsh. Again very percussive in its unceasing ice-pick-through-the-eyeball stabbing insistence, quite minimal in its range of materials deployed. On the original YELLOW fronted c10, you'd automatically flip over for some GREEN, hard to be arsed to bother according the colors their the prescribed order. Here in the REDzone, the contrast couldn't be sharper. Simple, but highly effective, not particularly fast-paced but just completely unrelenting. Or better: unforgiving.
Some minutes in, the demiurge piles on the scorch tones, seemingly headed for massed and layered oblivion, but then abruptly pulls back and enters a fantastically twisted dialog of crudely hacked blurt and more whitened blister-spasms. Open invitation, then, to wider-bodied psych permutation, brute belching insinuations gradually softening along the distorto-curve, soon to grow utterly incinerating in a pointed slathering meddly of severely-pitched dental scree, grinding shriek, screeching ear-scision. You could perhaps say RED, per YELLOW, is also somewhat episodic in unfolding, as each micro scorchout session tends to break into pauses for breath, ratcheting up the tension, promising that much more Ear Rape. But it just doesn't fucking matter. The 'holes are utterly fucked however you slice 'em. The ending sequence here is simply divine, wide open spaces lacerated by tremendously violent slashes cum more mangled and ripped-raw mutilations.
Fuck. Got another ninety minutes to go. Earholes are fucking good as-
GREEN—Garlic Trembles From My Tongue. Yes I'm sure it does you pervert. This one sounds familiar. The sound of the earholes getting pummeled into submission. Look, they submit already fercrissake. This is the FULL GREEN, the c90 version, so question as to whether the rabid intensity can be sustained throughout as it is in the original abbreviated format. Well, certainly for the first few minutes it comes swinging: spine-ripping violence and abrasiveness hammering at the poor abused skull with merciless force and fury. After that, yes, well. Still pummeling rabidly away. An almost ambient underbrush suddenly pokes into the substratum, but hard for the GREEN'd grey matter to notice or care under all the incessant hammering. At one point, portly buzzing drone rolls onto the field but I don't know if that's the best of ideas. Just gonna piss the rabid pummeling off.
Now the rabid pummeling is joined by whitened bristles and the occasional hawking blurt. The field starts to distort, perspective warps, erratic percussive blasts resolve into straighter stuttering lines, the faux ambient underbelly starting to resemble choked and strangulated flatulence. The general sense is of an industrial-grade blender full of knife-blades all grinding twisting and whittling away at one another, edges dulled, broke off, bent, shattered. In the more overloaded intervals there is a genuine resemblance to traditional harsh noise, but then things go off-kilter again, indulging in swirling squeal and shriek even as the chopped stutter starts to resemble a pocked and seizure-racked engine-deathspasm.
Nevertheless, halfway through, a distinct grinding down of the gears, plowing straight into muddied fields of crumpled distorto-grits. Being that this is the demiurge talkin' you know it ain't gonna last, but still a good chance to enjoy the deviation from the unbridled ferocity that has been mercilessly raping hole for the better part of two hours. Naturally, when Ear Rape returns, none too much later, it is with fantastically white-hot stuttered incisions, breaking into pure waves of scorching fire. Yes, traditional harshnoise here, no question, but. Just. Brutal. In the closing minutes, false respite in the form of gasps of air, painfully sweet contrast of whitewashed searings flashing GREEN, charring BLACK.
Seriously folks, do I have to continue? I'm seriously going to have to give up noise for the next two-point-five decades at least. Seriously.
BLUE—My Red Heart Bruises Black, but we already knew that. Ditto the utterly scorched holes. Now, all that stuff I've been diarrhetically rambling on about, above? Well, you know it's just the set-up for the main course. These could just be the ramblings of a sorry sod with earholes ready to give up completely, because, well, they are, but here the most piercing intensities seem just that much more...intense. Harsher, sure, but balanced quite precariously on a knife-edge of control and complete spastic-frenzied, eviscerating, bloodbath, the piercing intrusions continuously poised to fly off the handle, then driven deep into the sonic-sensual entrails, twisting, wrenching, jerking with willfully sadistic abandon.
The intro seems to set the tone. Not particularly harsh, but kind of...hinting at what's to come. Thundered and rupturing stutter-belch wracked with little needle-sharp points of stinging heat. It's just a question of when the stinging heat is going to erupt to outright inferno. In very short order the stutter-belch evolves into strings of rapid-fire percussive drilling rips, broken up among open-aired echoing blasts before driving furiously toward flattened scorch-curves. There are, in fact, quite a lot of open airs pock-marking the BLUE, serving more often than not to convey that spasmodic demi-urgency, the seeming ready willingness to blow clean apart without ever really letting go the raging white-knuckled jerk-o`-stab
Sudden slide now to galvanized psych-chambers, strands of lickety-spit liberally slathered about the metallic interior, deep dives to de-harshed grey-edged de-compressions, but not long before the demiurges get all scrunched and screechy-scorch hot again. On the home stretch here and piston-like PURPLE-headed knob-slobbery mimicking, shit you not, the sound of the damaged ears on the receiving end of harsh: all the pointed edges and piercing peaks roughly sanded off in vaguely sludge-drizzled remove, to learn us that, truly, there's more to it than just scorching hole. The noise told me so.
Digest spew
Nineteen-shitstain-ninety-five was a good noise year, for several reasons including this one: kaleidescopic flashes of primary color, flooding the brainpan with multi-hued shrieks and crashes, razor sharp, dynamic, piercing, vicious, pared down to butt-naked, crystalline, tacks. Harsh slaying goodness, but off-kilter, the precise and poised kinetic hammering almost acoustic in disposition. There are, perhaps, a few let-ups in the unceasing frenzy of breakneck blistering attack, but principally to emphasize the incandescent raging ferocity of the next round of over-violence. And the next round always inevitably comes due. Praises be to the bringers of this rare wonder, going the extra mile in providing a "full" 3-hour version that is more than sufficiently different in its sonic-sensual unfolding from the 100-minute original. The world clearly needs both, so perhaps somewhere down the road some enterprising spirit could entertain reissue of the original in original format. That is, if the demiurge's head doesn't pop.
