Late afternoon the sky is thick with grey and yellow-green and brings the trees and houses in close. We have left Waitangi Road, now with laundromat and takeaways in the left distance. On the radio comes a song, we're now passing Te Papapa School, the lights on the field seize moisture in the air, I go to change it and Worm says No keep it on, have you heard it and I say No and he says It's heavy. And it is heavy. #0, who is driving, you can see the tension in her jaw. We have all accepted Korn into our lives. Korn is heavy because they play slow and thick and leave spaces open and the singer's screams are more cowardly than his whines. We all know this song is different. It's called Spit It Out, and it's heavy because it's fast and sharp-sounding and the singer's voice is muscular as a professional wrestler. The song's both very macho and science-fictional. There is no way to settle into it. Worm looks over and informs me the band wears clown costumes. I ask Is that not silly and he says No it's scary, it's like a horror film. We're now passing the observatory. It's over and #0's face and shoulders have already reset to weary.
This song repulsed me that evening and it continues to repulse me now. I can only hope that, as I continue to listen to Slipknot, that same repulsion remains. The record is a disease. It clings to you, and its only happiness is that it knows itself to be clinging.
Seabird is working on a mix of Slipknot's self-titled for its twenty-fifth anniversary. I've heard it, and it adjusts the levels on the drums and voice and brings back many of the samples that were cut from the finished product. It splices the record with parts sourced from demos and live performances. Seabird tells me there is no such thing as a finished product, and that a record captures a fairly arbitrary moment in which things are still being worked out but are, for whatever reason, left to be. I recall the point that the artist's work could go on indefinitely, and the drawing or painting or sculpture you see is the moment they decided to walk away from it. The record promises the listener the certainty of the concrete artefact, but it's a have. Should the musician refuse to ever play what they've recorded again, the process of mixing could go on forever. And should the musician continue to play their songs, every performance becomes the opportunity to either fail at replicating the idea indexed to the record, or to continue working on that idea live. Slipknot were, for a few years, unwilling to let the idea go. Seabird says that one way to demonstrate art as a process is to include the development of ideas before and after the release, and that's the idea behind this new mix. I hope that when the mix is released it comes with a document explaining not only what's been added, but also the provenance of the sounds included in the original. This is because, with enough listens, even the original record is so clearly a collage. It could never have even pretended to stand as a concrete artefact, it's so brittle, mercurial.
I've been talking to Seabird about Slipknot for a year and a half now. Having never liked Slipknot, I was less curious to hear Slipknot again than to hear about their interest in Slipknot. We'd written to one another about music for almost a decade, and before June 2023 neither of us had mentioned nu metal. Three months into our conversations about Slipknot, Seabird informs me that Camembert likes Slipknot's self-titled and thinks it sounds like Levitate by The Fall. I laugh out loud, because it really does sound like Levitate by the Fall. The sound of a band falling apart, the Levitate sessions yielded only meagre recordings, which were then salvaged and assembled by Julia Nagle, who took the kinds of producer liberties you'd associate with Lee Perry or Weatherall. Encouraged by the freedoms afforded by digital workstations, the central focus of the Fall, the bassline and drum, is not blurred but shattered, moved behind and sideways. Keyboards no longer chime but gurgle and envelop, punctuate, determine the movement of the whole. Now everything's a sample to be moved around, without any definite relationship to anything else. The vocal is only as much an intrusion as a kick or cymbal. To be clear I've never asked what was meant by Slipknot's self-titled sounding like Levitate by the Fall, and Camembert likely meant something completely different.
It's strange to think of the Fall and Slipknot occupying the same time, but 1997 saw them both in transition and stumbling into similar methods. The year Levitate came out was the year Slipknot decided to wear jumpsuits and masks, and to eschew the metallic gravitas of Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. for an emphasis on sonic clutter. Everything on Slipknot sounds reconstituted, rotted, sewn together with frayed edges gaping. The vocal is dry but the mic's fastened to mucous membrane, transducing the appearance of blood in the throat. It sounds like the sticky, raw flesh beneath burns or frostbite. Drums burst under tin can percussion and breaks clearly sampled give the impression of 'breakbeat' and 'jungle' and 'techno'. Guitars are the memory of some ancestral metal group, coming in and out of prominence. The future cannot make sense of them, but then it can't make sense of anything here so the guitars are no different. No sound appears entirely necessary, and the concomitant to that is everything is equally important. There is a desperation to the thing that has it insist on itself, particularly when it appears to disintegrate. It appears to propel things forward, and every sound fires off in its own direction, returning to us a moment of urgency rooted elsewhere.
The ferocity of Slipknot as a collage is a thing born of corrupted holism. Ross Robinson would physically attack band members during recording to ensure takes had a nervous vitality. He'd also sit everybody down and explain the alchemy of music production. For Robinson, every tap of the cymbal, every ring of distortion, will convey the spirit - and here 'spirit' is meant as an actually existing entity - of the song, for all sounds are alive and must be collaborated with rather than used or subjugated. It follows from this method that the sonic clutter of Slipknot presents a rejection of spatial order for a nonpositional field writhing with ugly life. Everything is perceived as a sample-unit before it can be read as 'live'. This has the effect of elevating the nonmusical and incidental to a key component in song, the inanimate to the world of the living. The vile animism of sonic clutter is the thing that defines Slipknot, both as an album and as a disease.
maxcoombes
11/07/2023 3:04 pm
have you ever been to iowa?
Seabird informs me that the midwestern landscape plays a major role in Slipknot's debut. I ask whether Seabird has been to Iowa, and I'm told it's a lot like where they live. Where Seabird lives is landlocked, which is to say, surrounded on all sides by horizons so vast as to form a wall. Because the infinite has become a wall, there is little to do but stare at the walls inside the house. They are at least honest about the fact they are walls. I enthusiastically relay something I'd read about Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip - that the book so emphatically declares poverty, pestilence, and superstition defining factors of midwestern life, the reader is left to infer that someone like Ed Gein was wholly consistent with the rural Wisconsin landscape. I use my phone to make and send these promotional postcards, with stills lifted from the film Landscape Suicide:
I recall what Worm said fourteen years ago, that Slipknot's masks aren't silly but are "Scary, like a horror film." This became more obvious for me the more images of Slipknot spread through magazines and television. It was good timing: 2003 saw the release of prominent legacy horror reboots, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy vs. Jason. Both films made a point of rejecting the look and concerns of the Scream-era slasher, emphasising instead the grimy physicality of costumes, and the spiritual connection between horror-entity and the landscape that birthed it. Just as Leatherface had Texas, Slipknot had Iowa. They appeared to have been buried there and to have just climbed out of the grave, still covered in its dirt. The ersatz boogieman claimed real history by appealing to place.
A few years ago Wilx wrote an excellent piece about the connection between horror boogiemen, class, history, and place. They used the term 'ontopology' to bring these things together. When I asked what it meant, they sent me a pdf of a chapter called 'Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands', and Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. The term begins with Derrida, who defines it:
an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general. (103)
For Derrida, this is an ethnonationalist phantasm, relying on the myth of a stable and 'natural' relationship between people and territory. This myth stems from a group's fear of displacement, and imaginatively covers over their memory of having displaced another population. Put into practice as genocide it is one of the "ten plagues" accompanying the hollow triumphalism of the End of History (100). "It is not only time that is 'out of joint,'" Derrida writes, "but space in time, spacing" (103). It dawns on me that I've no knowledge of the pre- or colonial history of Iowa, much less the way the memory of ethnic cleansing, agricultural recession, and urbanisation has produced Iowan identity as such, and where Slipknot fit within this.
Camembert asks whether insisting too much on a connection between Slipknot and place risks repeating the fascist doctrine of blood and soil. I'm ill-equipped to respond convincingly that Slipknot actively make the possibility of 'world' and 'habitation' impossible in their version of Iowa, thus opening the space for landscape to communicate through broken and unwitting human actors. But even if I could make this point, I'm still not from the region. Anything I say about how the landscape manifests in people will rely on cliches from Wisconsin Death Trip. Seabird tells me again about staring at walls, how infinite horizons form a wall, how Slipknot stand in fields and hit things with sticks because that's what people do when there's nothing else to do.
J. A. Baker makes the point that describing landscape in excruciating detail tends to make all places appear the same, and it's only with love that we can articulate the particular. It's love that allows you to say things like This place is shit, the smell of dead leaves gives sunburn of the brain. We start drinking at four because if we're outside past four we go blind due to the placement of sun. It's love that encourages you to make a grotesque spectacle of all the anxieties of where you're from and maybe get enough cash together to leave.
The landscape in Slipknot is articulated by its very groundlessness - the group know they are trapped in it, but for all its agoraphobic confines there is nothing to orient them to any kind of meaning. It's tempting then to characterise it as a strictly inner landscape. Indeed its lyrics are preoccupied with psychosis, as though the influence of the outer landscape can be shut out through retreat into fantasy: "Inside my shell, I wait and bleed" (Wait and Bleed), "Tearing myself apart / From the things that make me hurt" (Tattered & Torn), "I haven't got time for the living" (Diluted). This is what it wants most, but it's the desire for psychosis that precludes its arrival-proper. It's all performance, and so a common source of anguish across Slipknot's fifteen songs is the group's inability to escape into total delirium.
Concerned as it is with base materialism, its innards are always in the process of forming themselves in reference to the outer. We see this expressed in the motif of permeable skin - "It's hard to stay between the lines of skin" (Scissors), "I can't see, I can't be, Over and over and under my skin" (Surfacing) - and in the permeability of self and other - "I see you in me" (Diluted), "Someone behind me, someone inside me" (Scissors), "Tearing me inside" (Inside). The outsider needs their outside-ness to be witnessed and affirmed by the other, and a strictly internal landscape defines itself through its barrier to the external world it seeks to deny completely.
The self is proven to require world, even or particularly when it does not want to recognise it. It's for this reason the group alters its strategy, redirecting their efforts from the elimination of world to the elimination of self: costumes as skin, and numbers replacing names. This seems to work. The listener of Eyeless is compelled to "Look me in my brand new eye" - an eye that is effectively eye-less, in that it no longer betrays the presence of soul, personhood, inner landscape, and so on. The mask presents the effacement of self. In a curious twist this "brand new eye" is in fact genealogically inherited: "I am my father's son 'cause he's a phantom, a mystery / And that leaves me nothing." This means the nonself is not newly invented as a means of dealing with the world, but is already there at the point of origin. Put another way, it is the self as a coherent identity that is fiction, emerging in response to the negation from which we are all born. The costume in Slipknot is a means of abdicating selfhood and returning to the nothingness that precedes and follows life. In one sense this appears as a rejection of life, the experience of which so pains the group. In another sense it appears to redefine life as negation - something that will need some unpacking.
Let us begin with the 'nothing' to which Slipknot desire a return. One of Sigmund Freud's more enduringly provocative theories is expressed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In it he argues that all organic life emerges from, and returns to, its originary inorganic state, being nonlife or nonexistence. The death drive or Thanatos, Freud writes, is the "powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state, which prior state the organism was compelled to relinquish due to the disruptive influence of external forces" (76). According to Freud, every living thing desires the nonlife that was disrupted by external forces, demanding it take on a name and face and language, to live in the world. Alenka Zupancic describes how this process renders death a precondition of life:
(An organism) becomes capable of filtering the continuous and potentially lethal torrent of external stimuli by sacrificing part of itself in order to erect a protective shield against excessive influxes of excitation. In so doing, it effects a definitive separation between organic interiority and inorganic exteriority. The separation between the organic inside and the inorganic outside is thus achieved at the price of the death of part of the primitive organism itself (144)
As discussed, Slipknot desire the authenticity of the origin without external pressure, and without world as such. They finally manage to reject the external forces that compel them to life, by claiming to have already returned to nonlife, or their originary negation. The skin separating "organic interiority" from "inorganic exteriority" is torn and liquefied. This way the nothingness Slipknot know resides at the centre of their being can be claimed as the foundational truth of the world.
It's important here to attend to an alternative view of Thanatos, as provided by Gilles Deleuze. According to Deleuze, if the inorganic state preceding life is a form of death, then death must be the site of original affirmation. It follows that the desire for the nonexistence of the origin is not meant as a return to the inanimate, but as an affirmation of being. Pertinent to our discussion here, the productive energy of Thanatos is understood by the philosopher as a play of masks:
Death has nothing to do with a material model. On the contrary, the death instinct may be understood in relation to masks and costumes (...) The masks do not hide anything except other masks. There is no first term which is repeated (149)
When Slipknot declare they've found a new emptiness in masks, they are really heralding the repetition of the emptiness inherited by all organic life. In the Deleuzian picture this is not an abdication of life, but an affirmation of its wellspring. By the end of the album this radically emptied-out mode of being is championed as something more real than the self. The self after all emerges from, and is built as, a guard against originary negation: "Can't be real no more, your mask is skin and bone" (No Life).
Earlier I described how the sonic clutter of Slipknot refuses to differentiate the nonmusical from the musical, the inorganic from the living. I called this a 'vile animism'. It's up to the listener whether they see this as a radical affirmation of life, or as an undead depletion. Whatever the case, this 'nothing' Slipknot inhabit persists, and comes into contact with its listener as sound. Their being transduced into sound is presented as an occult phenomenon on behalf of Robinson, and an existential strategy on the part of the band. In this state they are formless, spectral, and all the more capable of interfering with the world that thinks itself alive and well. As ghosts they become the external force. "I am the push that makes you move," Taylor declares.
There's the belief that everything you are and ever will be is going into the thing you're making. You cannot let yourself believe there's anything after it, or you will stop working on it and move on. The thing becomes the ground and the horizon. Eventually it happens that you finish working on it, and to your dismay things move on anyway. And you are only a vague outline of before.
I had experienced this many times drawing comic books that took up to eighteen months to complete, but grew even more sensitive to it at the beginning of this year, which was the end of a three and a half year project, and the start of the project's long afterlife. Being now only a vague outline, it seemed a kind of wholeness must have existed prior to the project's completion, or perhaps even to its beginning. I became enamoured of a line in a letter written by Rainer Maria Rilke following the publication of his only novel: "nothing is possible for me any more, not even dying". In the wake of his novel's completion, Rilke felt that he had left his double in the work, and that this entity now followed him around, watching his every move, and waiting for him in death. The completion of the work meant transgressing a horizon the author thought to be final. He had in a sense seen beyond life, but had not passed over. He had, after all, only completed a novel. Residing now in the afterlife, unable to live or die, the work becomes the doppelganger of the one who made it.
This is of course not the idea. If you have tricked yourself into believing that the thing you're making is both the ground and the horizon of everything you are, then you anticipate dissolution into the thing, insofar as the ecstasy of the thing is now everything. Maurice Blanchot describes this dissolution as a wish for metamorphosis:
Metamorphosis, then, appears as the happy consumption of being when, without reserve, it enters into the movement where nothing is preserved, which does not realize, accomplish, or save anything, which is the pure felicity of descending, the joy of the fall, the jubilant word which one unique time gives voice to disappearance, before disappearing into it (145)
It is not that you disappear per se, but that what you are now disappears. As in the picture of radical affirmation described above, you continue to make so as to return, again and again, to the nothingness that preserves nothing and from which everything springs. The poet above fails to disappear, to experience "the pure felicity of descending", and so returns from the bound of nothingness caught now between that and the dead past.
This same curse hangs over Slipknot, only their laments come from inside the work. The group at various points on the album are already dead, waiting to die, unable to die. "I can't die" Taylor screams over and over in Purity; "I don't want you to pay anyone when I die" he advises on Scissors; "How many times have you wanted to die?" he asks on Eyeless before bemoaning "It's too late for me". The metamorphosis into sound was a success, and now, like Rilke, neither life nor death seems possible. Alongside the fact that undeath is being expressed from inside the work, what's interesting is they directly address the listener. It's too late for Taylor to die now that he exists in sound, but even so "all you have to do is get rid of me" - if there is no one to play the recorded traces of the group, then they will be left to disintegrate in the storage systems that house them.
The enduring transmission of Slipknot - as sound - to the listener - as living - is the thing responsible for their undeath, and the thing that gives listening to Slipknot the sense of parasitism, or disease. Its disease, alive in the listener, is what makes the thing real, its fantasy real, its whole negotiation of landscape, of masks, of violence and disappearance, real as skin and bone. Most telling in this shift to the real is the adoption and alteration of a lyric from their maskless debut. There, as a group of ordinary people, they intone to anyone listening "You can't see me, for I hide within the Umbra" - whatever that means. Three years later they speak as a disease "You can't kill me 'cause I'm already inside you" - something immediately recognised to be true. In hindsight this appears to speak to legacy, but in context it is the nearest thing to some kind of connection.
30 December 2024