Anatomia - Ossuary gig in Bologna, October 2024 @ Freakout Club

Anatomia / Ossuary concert in Bologna

To seldomly leave the comfortable four walls in order to attend a gig is still something I am extremely reticent to do, albeit there are indeed perfect storms that unerringly manage to lift my heavy ass from the couch. And to have Anatomia, which is my favorite current Death Metal band playing half an hour from home, with free ticket and trip, well, who am I to challenge the gods of Death?

Ossuary

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen Ossuary live before. I’ve definitely listened to a few tracks online, but as far as I can recall, it wasn’t an experience that left a lasting impression. When I entered the venue, the band had just started playing, and I grumbled a bit, overhearing some not-so-impressive screams over equally not-so-memorable music. However, once I settled in the back with a cold beer in hand, I have to admit, the overall experience wasn’t actually that bad.

Their intentions are honest and clear, and in line with their name: to recreate obsessive deathly chants, with an otherworldly, croaking voice drenched in reverb, layered over a cyclical and relentless backdrop typical of many Death/Doom approaches from recent years. On that level, the band works well, in my opinion. The vocalist truly seems possessed by some form of otherworldly force, and the thick layer of reverb they add to the dead’s agonized screams blends the sonic experience into an interesting package that, while not stylistically, reminds me of something like Tryptikon trapped in a never-ending maze of mirrors.

As a near-death experience, these Ossuary aren’t bad at all. Their only real problem is that there’s nothing riff-wise that sticks in your head, not a single moment when you could touch the beyond. This is only made worse by the fact that they’re touring with perhaps one of the very few bands that never miss a single great riff. While Ossuary doesn’t have it, the band coming up next certainly does. And boy, do they have it

Anatomia

I might be biased when talking about this band because I have been respectfully obsessive about their works. A few might remember that they formed in a time when we did not have Autopsy and nobody really stood, apart from a couple of attempts on Razorback, to take the crown of the dead from the podium of the best Death Metal band around. Death Metal as in “ultimate form of extreme horror music”, I mean. The Death Metal that grabs you by the throat and licks your face with a rotting tongue.

Honestly, my grasp of the language is not solid enough to describe how Anatomia represents in my opinion the perfect embodyment of this genre, at the moment. Even thinking of an Autopsy-minus-Abscess formula doesn’t do complete justice because they have trascended that some time ago alrady. They just sit and drag you in a red and black japanese hell of grotesque deamons with bulging eyes, tearing flesh in endless SLOW agony. You don’t hear a band when you see them live, you experience a slow drag into a netherworld of pain. I don’t need words here, just listen to any tracks by this band, like this one that was on the split 7″ i released on my label in 2017, and hear how it is to have it, what you can do when you find the perfect formula.

I’m not sure if the choice of bands was intentional, but thinking about it on the way back, for once, I could see some sort of design of things. If the first band was the revelation of otherworldly horror, with Anatomia we reached the second act, where you’re taken straight into the depths of hell.

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An unfiltered good night of beer and music

I’m not particularly eager to write these days, but I’ve promised myself to regularly update my blog (no, I won’t say when). If more than twenty-four hours pass, I tend to forget what I wanted to say, so I might as well post right away. Hence, here’s your black metal concert review. You don’t get this many after all-

I was mentioning that it’s been a while since I went out just to enjoy a beer that wasn’t work-related, taking a break from the immense pile of troubles accumulating day by day.

Also, Nuclear Abominations has been a part of my life for almost thirty years but was never really a personal outlet. It represents, more than myself, the part of me that back in 1995 wanted to express something without writing for other publications. I loved that level of bold, unrestrained intimacy so much that I continued to consider myself an active writer, even during months when I wrote nothing. Once a writer, forever a writer. There were times, especially in the early 2000s, when I wrote daily. These days, I find it increasingly difficult to write about music as it seems everything has already been discussed somewhere on social media or a well-organized website in some remote part of social medias. I now treat music as a personal matter, something to discuss with friends or occasionally mention here in these pages. But above all, this fanzine or blogzine, whatever you prefer to call it, showcases a specific persona that isn’t always consistent with my other selves. Nuclear Abominations is the identity I adopt when discussing these topics, and I enjoy using its voice. That said, I still like to write when I get the proper motivation, and this unexpected plunge into the local undergound “scene” somehow stirred something, deep inside of my tiny roid rage brain.

To be clear, sometimes, I don’t even agree with what I write.

Be it War or Death or Black Metal concert review

About last night, I went out to drink some beers and see what’s happening in places where people talk about what used to be underground music—though it hasn’t been underground for at least twenty years, fairly speaking. There was this very young band of guys who are passionate about the genre I call Black Metal, which the rest of the world has perhaps mistakenly lumped in with themes of “War” or “Death” Metal. The evening was Black Metal themed, and although other bands played, I honestly forgot about them after about 60 seconds of listening.

But this band, IGNOBLETH stood out. They are genuinely talented, and my praise extends beyond just stylistic or aesthetic coherence. They show real passion and commitment to the music they create. They talk about music with enthusiasm and ignore the typical social dynamics, much like I did at their age, outliers in a world obsessed with politeness and mutual flattery.

Musically, their influences, including bands like ARCHGOAT, are evident, but they blend their music into an 80% grinding slow mid-tempo with occasional faster blasts making up the remaining 19%. Thankfully, within that last 1%, there is IT, that spark of otherowrldliness streaming from the inside, and I really enjoyed the way that kind of social unease takes the form of horns, chains and rotting corpsepaint. Sporadic incursions of Nordic harmonies sometimes poke in a controlled manner, not enough to lead us onto dangerously slippery shores. They also slow down, ut in a scary DISEMBOWELMENT way, not spleen-infused doom . I think the gem is still rather unrefined and I really hope it stays this way, in a world of controlled bonfires, be the burning nursery.

Midjourney renditions of Voivod and Carnivore (and special guest)

I decided to join the Midjourney crowd by using lines from Thermonuclear Warrior and Korgull the Exterminator as baselines. Here’s the result.

Thermonuclear Warrior

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And for some reason I always associated the Tapping The Vein blue barbarian gunman with this song, so here’s the result.

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Korgull the Exterminator

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Gatekeeping is shit

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On a superficial reading, the last post might seem like an ode to gatekeeping: “let’s keep our passions among ourselves,” in short. It wasn’t. It was an ode to the pursuit of the spirit of things and an invitation to eschew everything that is proposed by the masses. It was an invitation to search for the magic that was inherent in the activities we love and that united generations dispersed around the world before they became public knowledge. It is not about hiding, but placing, contextualizing and not watering down.

Those who know me know that I have no interest in hiding anything of what little I know and have collected. If that were the case, I wouldn’t even be writing in this blogzine. If someone shows enthusiasm for something on which I believe I have some expertise I am pleased to help swell the ranks of this legion. As I daily discover new things that interest me and thank the disseminators for sharing their knowledge. I am getting interested in cocktails and historical fonts right now, to say, and it is wonderful that there are thousands of more or less technical or informative papers on these topics.

The sick gatekeeping is that of insecure people who think that having bought a Sepultura CD in 1996 grants them some form of authority in the genre. These are people who have always been in the shadow of those who were really active and have suddenly found themselves with a lot less hair (I would say by the way that I am not wrong if I assume they are 100% male) and 25 years of militancy in the genre that for some reason should qualify them as veterans (“tell me three song names of the band you have on your T-shirt”) which they are NOT. They are not even now that they have jobs, a few hundred CDs and can browse Discogs from their smartphones, let alone back in the day. They were lucky that in 1993-1994 when the Black Metal phenomenon exploded and most of the extreme metal bands were under 30, the gatekeepers back in the day were still lost in Hard Rock, because if they weren’t, recruit training course bullying would have passed them by too.

I genuinely don’t conceive stupid gatekeeping, it doesn’t really emphasize anybody. Making people think you were tapetrading when you know full well it wasn’t true (and how many I hear today who betray themselves in the details-“a scovà gli infami’ so na spada”, cit.) I can even understand if you can’t find recognition as an old man, but leveraging the younger generation to inflate your ego, that doesn’t serve shit.

At the end of the day, those who do this kind of operation are driven by the frustration of not being in their twenties anymore, of seeing new generations (and a lot of pussy NONE of us had foreseen) enjoy endless technologies and availability of documentation, and in the past few years even several essays on the subject that help to bring razor-level clarity to the most minute details of any corner of the underground. Masking all this with a spirit of altruism is just an exercise in style. If you didn’t do your homework when you were supposed to, you’ve missed the train, and no 5-figure collection will make up for the fact that even today you have nothing to say. The world is progressing, technologies are expanding, and even extreme metal has come to the crossroads of interdisciplinarity just as has happened in so many other disciplines. If one knows how to adapt, the challenges of the new era can expand what has been before on fronts never imagined.

There are, indeed, big problems inherent in the new model, in my view primarily that perverse and demented desire to insert moral and progressive lessons inside of everything, but the opportunities that open up are immense and exciting. Fortunately, music remains an intimate concept of personal enjoyment; no fad can really undermine it at its root.

On abundance and scarcity

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I was sweeping the floor this morning, picking up the hair of three giant dogs and one fluffy cat reflecting of the state of misery in which we live or will live. Same old middle-aged talk in short. Between passages I caught myself thinking how fertile the soil of necessity really is, in short, scarcity of means at first sends you into crisis mode, but it is when you are starving that your metabolism speeds up and your body becomes much more effective in fundamental needs. Boxing grass does not grow in the garden of the wealthy, they say. Coming out of the dichotomy misery = ugly, abundance = beautiful the new perspective reveals that even absolute deprivation actually hides unthinkable opportunities. The ecosystem of even the most barren desert under a microscope reveals a multitude of organisms capable of coping with extreme temperatures and lifestyles. To the keen eye, billions of bacteria are hard at work. Reptiles, insects, fungi live and multiply in the environment.

Then, when you adapt to an emergency mentality, after a while even the idea of abundance begins to change and that sandwich full of sausages and onions makes you crave it in a completely different way. You no longer want to shove it in your stomach, you want to taste it slowly and get a good feel for the flavor of the mince and spices. Then you are surprised by a thought you never imagined. That maybe you don’t even need to eat it all anymore and maybe half of it you can even give to a friend, or others who are hungry.

Living “without” then leads you to stop looking at the “with” with the same eyes.

This applies to everything from personal relationships, to financial stability, to music and entertainment. It is the evolution of yesterday’s discourse, that gonzo way of shelling out by accumulating and showing off that has become typical of our genre can only be the result of a bulimia now out of control, a victim of the clusterfuck mashup that occurred with the advent of the Internet.

It is, as always, grognard talk, which I am, but I still think it’s time to go back underground and recreate little ecosystems within this big mass of shit a bit like it used to be done in the 80s/90s before certain genres born in the mid-90s made everyone believe that they too could have the experience of that “alternative” spark that united people from all over the world through a real passion. And let’s be clear, this applies to music, to writing, to illustration, to role-playing. Everything.

Which then, is also why even historic labels are making piss poor choices to try to pick up what they had abandoned years ago. I know them. I see. AND I JUDGE. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, the lack of consistency creates situations that ring as false as a 3 euro coin, getting out of one’s identity may bear some fruits, but they are not the fruits of necessity, but the rotten fruits of opulence.

Selecting, believing, reflecting remain the cornerstones for the production of TRUE works both by the artist and by those who are in charge of promoting them in some way as we fanzine editors or small labels do.

Consistency only lives and bears fruit when you do things right, with attention rooted in the things that matter. A genre that is born out of a fascination with the morbid and anger, the discomfort of Man, can only live in that dimension. Use this music to show off and the result can only be crap.

On Metal and Horror and Humour

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“METAL SHOULD NOT BE SELF AWARE” – NUNSLAUGHTER

As with all true things in this world, there is a contradiction in terms that makes Death Metal and its satellite genres something three-dimensional in my opinion. It’s kind of like when you bring two sheets of paper together on a table and they curl up. I have never hidden how much I appreciate as a fundamental element of the genre it being rooted in adolescence, both from the point of view of aesthetics and the very way of conceiving a piece of primitive and muscular music that draws energy from a fascination with the morbid. It will come as no surprise, that the genre was created and had its fullest expression in a completely spontaneous way all over the world (on the silly paradox of accusations of being a racist and not very inclusive genre we will get to in a future post) by the fertile pimply energy of teenage boys and reached all and I mean – all – the compositional and message peaks through the hands and throats of people who were unlikely thirty years old. Don’t think that I am here criticizing a genre I adore above all others, on a primal level people have been eating and fucking since forever and I don’t see anyone so far getting tired of it (although there is some counter-message in the air). One can play and create Death Metal even after the age of 30, as long as one maintains that spirit of enthusiasm of youth. This is music that maintains you young. There are also the experimentalists, such as the jazz musician of The County Medical Examiners, but of course, these are special cases that reinforce the concept.

It is a matter of recognizing in his freshness of thought and his exclusively hormonal passion the creative matrix that leads one to smell blood, hate, and dead things.

Acknowledging, however, the pulsating core of the genre does not mean that I accept that it should be approached in a cheesy or, worse, demented way. I’ve never had much sympathy for groups like Lawnmower Deth or Spazztic Blurr, then later early CSSO with the Japanese comic books on the cover, crap like Akercocke’s fancy suits or that whole world of groups at Gronibard. There’s more than one reason why I’ve never gone to an Obscene Extreme show, certainly one of them is that I can’t stand people in their underwear doing ballets dressed as Pokemon. That kind of American movie dementia just doesn’t work for me in this context. I mean, it amuses me OUT of Death Metal. The arrival of the Internet and Social Networking has meant the arrival of an iconoclastic wave made up of memes designed specifically to desecrate a genre of which very few have a clear vision. There are excellent cases, such as Birdflesh and Macabre, even the early Carcass had a morbid ironic streak, but the Gabibbo and Tenerone on stage, I’m sorry but it really tired me beyond tolerance. That is, it has tired me for well over 20 years, well over.

The truth is that Horror and Death Metal once again prove to be one and the same. The humorous and goliardic vein of ’90s horror fucked it all up as the arrival of the Internet brought the generalist audience first through the Black Metal beachhead (more identifiable and manipulable for tabloids) and then to all the other genres of the extreme underground with the advent of the Internet. It was not a random happening that the best horror of the 1980s was that of Fulci, Bianchi, Soavi, etc. To find some decent horror once more, even outside the more underground market, we had to wait some twenty years, and in the end it is not surprising that today we are left with extraordinary almost self-produced realities even in the world of gore and splatter, somewhat the equivalent of gorenoise as far as music is concerned. This kind of irreverent humor is annoying not so much because it comes from people who entered this world more out of boredom than interest as because it tends to be totalizing. It seems that NO ONE today is allowed to pretend a project created to be taken seriously. It amazes me to read that some people think this genre must be gonzo crap to laugh at, just because this is the post-2000 geek culture that has opened all the drawers and made everything available to everyone.

At the root of the topic, metal must be primitive and RAW, and just like every beast, should not possess “self awareness” as mentioned in Don’s quote at the beginning of the post. It may be a bit counterintuitive to bring an adolescent soul to life with a pretense of seriousness, but it is the contradiction that makes these genres potentially inexhaustible.

Of Metal and Beer

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We all know that Metal = Beer (John McEntee’s quote, not mine*), but have you ever thought how similar these two worlds actually are?

Most good beers give their best when fresh and unoxidized, and more importantly, give their best when just bottled and should be drunk within a few weeks. Like all those bands that lose their polish and energy after a demo, or a few albums. When beer has reached proper fermentation it is bottled, when a group has reached compositional maturity it starts writing its own pieces. The majority of the most interesting groups peaked within 5 years of their formation, just as most beers peaked within the first few weeks. Some, very rare ones, such as certain Belgian beers, withstand the passage of time even improving, but eventually they all come to a meager end. Some groups, even rarer, need a moment of refinement and after an album or two discover their true identity, somewhat like certain beers that need to mature a few years to reach the roundness of their flavors and fragrances. Like the beers, most groups could just follow the production specification with barley malt (or other grains) before getting into some bullshit with honey, flavorings, and herbs that in most cases don’t work. As with bands, most beers that try too hard suck dick. Making a beer with modern, experimental methods often serves only as an exercise in style especially if you don’t know their past just like groups that experiment the fuck out without having a solid identity yet. As one for beer that no one feels like criticizing, the concept also applies to top groups that are very clever and very trendy but underneath prove once again that the king is naked. As with beers, some groups that manage to find their own identity then overdo it, get caught up in an omnipotence complex and screw it up. Then there are the sours, which rediscover flavors forgotten for decades, but you have to be very good to make them critically and have a lot of taste as well as technique, but which then when the chemistry is right discover a niche of true admirers. Just like some groups. Just as with beers there are the periods when one or the other is in fashion, and they all try to do the same thing but few manage to make something that works without too much pretension, just as with musical genres, perhaps fishing randomly from the past.

Ultimately though, as with beers, everyone will appreciate whatever the fuck they like at home because a beer, like a record, is a moment of relaxation and evasion.

*Nuclear Abominations #1, 1995