ON SEEING MESHUGGAH

In Sweden looming out of the fjords…oh well according to trickepedia it doesn't really have fjords, lets say looming out of the…uh….mountains?…. comes abba, comes malmsteen, comes draken, and also come a penta-sapien based Music Unit called Meshuggah. Chunk. If its possible to solidify sound and throw it extremely hard at people, these guys are top candidates.. I couldn't  destroy, erase or improve their sound if I tried. I'm trying to convert it into an orchestral environment at the moment but it's a bit like trying to turn concrete into daffodils or semtex into a packet of teletubbies. The Meshuggah fix just makes me explode. A song called New Millennium Cyanide Christ. Please don't tell me that sequence of words doesn't display intelligence or doesn't hold your interest. Some of their music features custom eight string swedish Nevborn guitars, which have strings tuned so low you can hear the trolls under the fjords…sorry, mountains -  plotting, building, constructing war ensembles for the greater good. 

Perpetual black seconds reside in the overwhelming concatenation of their ideas.

I was a teenager when I saw Meshuggah on a stage in Dublin a long time ago...

I never met Thor until then I suppose. On walks Mushuggah…

There is something overwhelmingly swedish about their music. I cant believe that ridgity of sound could even come out of industrial germany. I cant believe I just wrote two statements as ridgidly ridiculous as those, but anyway. An industrial sound, a synthetic sound, an electric sound,  strobed chunks of noise bullets…smack, clunk, chunk. Just attach lead weights onto those three words and throw them at people very quickly. Thats Meshuggah. Love it. Math metal someone coined it: I cant stand that. (I met bachyesterdaybemoaning"baroque". Barking mad).

SMACK.

It's like being punched, except…well, their concert was like being a punchbag except you enjoy it. I'm not a masochist. Its hard to explain really. Apart from perhaps permanent ear damage, there were no side effects. Meshuggah are insane. I saw them in 1994…was it really then? maybe 95, maybe 96?  In Dublin. I loved it: a gift, a surprise event. They were opening for Machine Head. I ran out the next day and bought DestroyEraseImprove. 

Aztec 2 Step. 

Yes, they have a song called Aztec 2 Step. They take you places, Meshuggah do. Maybe they give you a headache, maybe its deep into disappearing pyramadicites, but they will take you places. And before you criticise them, which is understandable judging by the fact that their music, like so much metal, is made far less popular by its absence of actual singing (its always throaty, growling), try viewing them with an open mind. 

(I've written tons of stuff on how there is a sort of parallel between how the music classical elite often frowns on 'metal' music and how the literatti trendies often frown down on science fiction writing. Another time, another place, another write up). 

One of my sugar's songs is called Choirs of Devastation (worst title for a song ever, but hey, it was an early album, if not their first) and opens with a simple acoustic guitar, in slowly paced notes in a minor key. This then gets punctuated, actually no: repeatedly PUNCTURED, actually no, REPEATEDLY STABBED by Meshuggah. Check it out. I just played it to Someone Good for her reaction. No. It's usually No with many people and this music. There are obvious reasons for this but I couldn't be bothered going into them now. (Those obvious reasons are actually fascinating to me but I better leave it till another time). As I type this Someone good is playing Tchaikovsky, no its Chopin, her own Meshuggah I suppose, on the piano. Love hearing her play. And I'm wrong!! Its Rachmaninov!!! Definetley her Meshuggah. haha, yeah write, right.. but it was the rach with the really heavy stuff, I just asked her the name but we're in differant universes as I type and she speaks. 

That opening, the Choirs of Devastation one..its acoustic plaintive perfectly combined with and eventually subverted by the Stabbing of Paiste and Ibanez and Electricity and Nevborn. Nice one, the Meshuggers. I'm wrong about Nevborn, those are standard electric guitars they must have been using on that album…ah well you always get the idea.

Always listen to Meshuggah with good bass. Concatenation. Perpetual Black Second. 

you gotta love it.

All hail my sugar. 

Meshuggah is the Yiddish word for insane. What more could you possible want?

well, I want more. This is directly nicked from nickepedia: 

• meshuga, also meshugge, meshugah, meshuggah: crazy (Yiddish משוגע meshuge, from Hebrew məšugga‘) (OED, MW)
• meshugas, also mishigas: madness, nonsense, irrational idiosyncrasy (Yiddish משוגעת meshugas, from Hebrew məšugga‘ath, a form of the above) (OED)
• meshuggeneh, meshuggene: a crazy woman (AHD, OED)
• meshuggener: a crazy man (Yiddish משוגענער meshugener, a derivative of the above משוגע meshuge) (OED)

thankyou wikipedia, we wanted more, and you gave it. Etymology. Love it. 

teehee

Meshuggah have an album (EP?)  called "I" and its a slab of goodness. Just walls of noise. Not white noise. Meshuggah noise.

elements of blatant anti-eugenic sentiment seeps through their regimented sonic intelligence. That effort was an effort at referring to eugenics in order to spice up this write up. Thing is I am way to lazy to go into their songs that frequently refer to the many tragic aspects of eugenics. Would be interesting writing though.  Future breed machine: a civilized person's  hatred of of social conditioning is best expressed by a fused Kidman, Hägestrom, Thordendal, Haake. Thomas Haake, their drummer, my elder self other met him after a gig in New Zealand. Nice to see my older elder other smile. And I just noticed Thordendal contains the word Thor. Love it!

Back then (and stilI) I was a huge fan of the eccentric, liquid, violinic tone of Alan Holdsworth , so it was nice hearing some of Meshuggah's solos with his influence. It's one of the admirable features of their earlier albums: the extremely heavy tension of the mesh-shu-gah-chunk-cut-mesh rhythms trolling away underneath the liquid holdsworth…ok I'm lapsing into trash poetics now but I can assure you there are many guitar head people out there who will know exactly what I'm talking about. 

I've been tinkering with this essay on-off for ages, and I just played Choirs of Devastation to Cnythiaus. She hated it. 

Love it. 

Meshuggah is best used when forcing oneself through the duller parts of life. eg, most of the time. teehee. harhar. hoho. fefifofum. A PULSE OF FLASHING HATELIGHTS…..love it.