Thunder Struck

Written by Devika Brendon
Published in Ceylon Today

A review of the Stigmata album launch for 'The Ascetic Paradox' album on Saturday, October 17, at the British School Auditorium.

Paradox # 1: Sri Lanka, the tear-drop shaped pearl of the Indian Ocean, has a heavy metal music scene! Who knew? And this apparent contradiction is intriguing from the start. Yet, on further exploration, as this review of the launch concert for 'The Ascetic Paradox' will suggest, it makes perfect sense that it does.

Paradoxes are apparent contradictions: dissonances, which require energy and effort on the part of any querent to resolve into a grander harmony. Through exploration of the paradoxes that the metal music genre sets in front of us, we can seek entry into a freer, darker, clearer world.

Heavy metal music is noisy, it explodes our ear drums. It is played by people who like wearing black, are often misanthropic and nihilist, and festooned fetishistically with tattoos and diablerie. It is easy to write it off as adolescent exorcism - a throwing off of misfit rage. But let us not fall prey to cliche and stereotyping. Further up, and further in. Come with me - on the path strewn with potent paradoxes.

Metal music is what makes the ground beneath our feet tremble, and the walls that demarcate our accepted realities shiver into shards. It is aggressive, and it is often fuelled by anger, pain and human suffering. We carry the wounds of our experiences like medals, attesting to our survival. The distorted guitar chords and riffs, the screeching drawn-out wails and screams of the vocalist, give voice to the hatred & frustration that polite people cannot usually name. So it is perfect for a society like this. Kind of like the medieval method of 'blood-letting' used by the ancient healers to reduce the accumulated pressure in human veins.

But at the heart of its paradox is that its violence can lance our wounds, and produce exhilaration, ecstasy and joy, in its intensity and its assault on our somnolent selves. In some ways, a concert like this is like a religious ceremony, and in its rituals and dramatic tableaux a metal band offers its adherents a form of secular absolution from the restrictions that plague and bedevil them.

The album 'The Ascetic Paradox' portrays variants of the 7 deadly sins which afflict mankind, half-personified in the visual art of the album as humans/animals, centered on a Lady who must temper and balance all these against each other, using force if necessary, Dominatrix that she is (or is she just drawn that way?)

And so we find an interesting paradox: jovial and benign rock gods who are boys/men of the people, who after 15 years are in a sense veterans, but still only in their early 30s, who have created serried ranks and impressive synergy and who radiate an intensity which is arresting. At one moment in the middle of the performance, the chair, the floor (and the earth beneath it) were all shaking in chaotic unison. It made me smile.

The launch of this album was advertised as being for 'those who like their music with poetry, blood, fire and mythic story-telling', laced with archetypal imagery, allusions to Classical Mythology, scripture, and arcane intertextuality, expressed in primal roaring and majestic sonic thunderstorms of vocals and inspired percussion and instrumentation.

Mission accomplished! - and at a most paradoxical venue: The British School, in Colombo 8. Paradox #2! A venue shall we say NOT generally perhaps seen as a hothouse of the kind of volcanic rebellion and frenzied energy associated with metal music!

Metal music itself is at its heart paradoxical - it's generally created and performed by anti-establishment boho types who are so subversive and uncategoriseable that they are incomprehensible to the clean-cut mainstream restrained respectabiggles who, we could easily believe, breed in camouflaged, cowering, conformist captivity in conservative societies like that of mainstream Colombo.

The speakers vibrate and the lyrics reverberate. There is poetry here, and the invocation of great thematic materials. And the correlation with the shivering and screaming, pulsating sounds is intricate and cryptic, and often riven with counterpoint: as if the words are beating against the music, going up against it as if it was a duel, a combat where both strive for mastery and both mystically prevail. The wholistic sensory experience of this metal music is immersive, and overwhelming.

If the band has the experience & artistry to control the channelling of the energy they generate, it profoundly shakes everyone involved. Each song is potentially cathartic, and you are gripped and enthralled by cumulative shifts and cadences which carry you into & through what is usually an underworld, where desires and fears, repressed during the workaday lives most of us lead, rise up like a jagged serrated flood, bringing us into the core of our own awareness. Our private selves come out in public, in the generous, benign darkness.

So the experience is both shatteringly subversive and inversive: a great metal concert should turn the listener/spectator inside out and make them feel as though they are upside down. The thrumming of the drums and the power that builds from the instruments should surge straight into the audience, from the soles of their feet on the floor via a circuit of both instrumental & sensory electricity to the soul encased in their physical body. You feel hope, rising - that the lid that has been put on us without our express assent can for a short space of time be lifted off, that - to quote the main Lyricist - 'The divine reign of the gloriously mundane will surely end'. (From 'Rush Through The Twilight Silver Slithering Stream').

And most strange of all? Paradox # 3: This dark exorcism-like experience, with its conscious use of gothic symbols and horror paraphernalia, its armed and dangerous feel, its warrior-like shamans presiding, leaves you feeling washed clean, and radiant and clear. Almost irridescent. As if you have swum through 'a sea of shattered glass' ( From 'Calm'), and your reward was to be delivered ashore inexplicably and surprisingly whole.

There is profound innocence (which is I think particularly male) at the heart of it: the insistent creative expressive desire to rise and push through and emerge in the driving rhythmic music, and the herding coralling gestures of the 'band of brothers' onstage, who channel and mediate this ritualistic experience.

The song 'Cadence Of Your Tears' (Freedom's Chains), which was co-written by the Frontman, Suresh de Silva, and Sanjeev Niles and released on Soundcloud, is the only song I had heard before I attended the launch concert & was given my CD - and it was a revelation to me - a song that I have recorded on a continuous loop so I can traverse its sonic & lyric landscapes at will, or rather let them move through me unconsciously and with a view to summoning a more instinctive and visceral and less trained or reactive self, to experience its sequential and cumulative power. It starts off tenderly and gently, and the voices harmonise roughly and imperfectly and then rise and fuse and meld and strike the inside of your being and make the bells within you ring. You feel renewed - as if each of your frayed nerves has been individually and specifically restored by the application of intense radiant energy.

To quote Suresh, the Lyricist, 'What once was asunder is whole once again' (from 'Let The Wolves Come And Lick Thy Wounds').

The band played the entire album through in one intense stretch - which they called 'brutal'. It may have been brutal for them - although they seem to have a lot of stamina - but to me it was like being picked up by a monstrous, gentle hand and lifted to an exalted state. Many of my fellow metallics that evening knew the classic songs from previous Stigmata albums by heart, which I did not. But several songs ignited the darkness of my ignorance: from The Ascetic Paradox album, the 'Rush Through The Twilight Silver Slithering Stream' and 'Axioma' with their carnivalesque anthems and caravanserai exotica spirals of sound interspersed with medieval morality play notes of bleakness. Some of the songs sound sacred, like hymns, only the cathedral here is made of living & immediate sound, and not hollow stone.

There is a maturity, a certainty and a soaring feel to the shape and arc of this work. It makes me want to explore their previous albums, and trace the terrain that they must have traversed, to attain this authentic mastery of a complex artistic medium. The Lyricist/ Frontman Suresh's comments on the structured intention of the way the album has been crafted, show the integration they have achieved:

'Everything is synchronised, everything meticulously detailed, and conceived: musically, lyrically, conceptually... a mind-blowing Concept that will be unravelled image by image, song by song, painting the full picture'.

'Voices' (an older song from a previous album) to me was the most stirring song of the whole set, a chant which gave enormously powerful musical & lyrical expression to the degradations inherent in the experience of child abuse and sexual assault. The drums and guitars articulated very evocatively the suppressed anger & intermittent anguish, paralysis & powerlessness which accompany such violation, and left an auditory residue which was black and red and purple like a bruise, like nail polish that changes colour according to your mood.

The last song they played was incredible - the 'And Now We Shall Bring Them War' one. I knew nothing of its history and could only sense what fuelled it - with all my awareness. It was like being spun on a tautening wire, fraying as it extended.

I appreciated the sweet and childlike contrast of the food supplied outside before the music started - the hot dogs and the rumours of sweet milkshakes. Black gothic cupcakes and illegal shots of absinthe and those spirits that stain your mouth blue would have defused the paradox of the experience!

So the band are now about to go to New Zealand for the international release of their new album The Ascetic Paradox. They have over the past few years played huge venues in Australia, Dubai and in Dhaka, and are clearly feeling the excitement of the beginning of critical mass and exponential adulation.

Paradoxically, they seem not to be madly acquisitive - not driven to seek international acclaim. They clearly intensely all love making & performing their music, and they are rightly proud of it, and their love of their craft and desire for mastery and pure self-expression keeps them grounded. They seem entirely and remarkably free of false modesty. They are not brash, posturing, crass, 'unapologetic' (translation: rude) or 'unashamed' (translation: shameless) either. They seem to inhabit a well-wrought space, between earth and heaven, as all true creators should, if they are to connect their fellow humans to the creative energy of the universe: the music of the spheres, the electricity that flows and surges through all living & feeling beings.

These men understand what they are doing. They take it seriously. I was interested to read the Frontman Suresh's views on this in a post he had put up on Facebook in August:

'I have a responsibility as a Performer and a Vocalist to consistently "up the game". I have a responsibility as a Vocalist to always deliver my finest talents: creatively, traditionally, experimentally, extraordinarily, transcendently and diversely. As a Frontman it is my responsibility to ensure that every living organism on stage & off stage have the time of their lives, every single time. As a Lyricist I have a responsibility to carve evocative pieces of poetry that deliver the narrative of any song's theme or concept, but touch or move people as well.'

Well, if Metal is a religion, this is a creed. And I say, Amen.

There is a saying that there are 5 elements that make up the material world, which co-exist in dynamic equilibrium: Fire, Water, Earth, Air - & Metal. And the greatest of these on Saturday night was Metal. Metal - ductile, malleable and an excellent conductor of energy - of heat and electricity. Metal as it should be played, which takes us and ungently scours us, and - with great & generous kindness - leaves us clean.