Post by adversarius on Mar 12, 2009 11:15:08 GMT
(I had some internal squabbling about whether to address the band in second or third person and decided to chose the former since it's primarily aimed at them, but naturally it is written for everyone in here, band members and forum members alike).
Alrighty, pretentious title: check. As you may already have guessed, I now intend to provide you all with a lengthy insider article about life inside the Axis; the life I live, the challenges I face on a daily basis, and the struggle to find 24-hour grocery stores that sell cleaning sprays strong enough to remove the stains of coagulated blood on my walls.
On a serious note; after days of continually listening to TAOP, immersing myself in the music and the state of mind as much as I can(most importantly by spamming my Facebook profile with quotes and artwork like a true 21st century entrepreneur), I thought I'd give a shot at the near-impossible task of explaining my feelings for the band in words. There are three main reasons for this; partly because of the fact that when I feel something very strong, vivid and intense I have to express it in some way, or I get restless. Also partly because I read in interviews how you are getting disillusioned with people too busy categorising you and judging you by the standards of different genres to actually listen to what you're doing(something which I'm very familiar with), and I thought I'd let you hear from a real die-hard who absolutely adores every single aspect about your work, and whose outlook on life and music has been thoroughly changed by it. When somebody creates art that moves me so much it changes aspects of my personality for the deeper and better, I feel obliged to explain my gratitude in my own words.
Also, I would like to open up a discussion in which people can exchange their personal views on the Axis, the music, and how it affects them.
I decided to split this into two parts for the sake of coherency. I possess a pedantry of Third Reich proportions, which you will all see slowly disappear as I get lost in endless metaphors and painfully long sentences. I already worry that this post will never end...
1 - The music
Of course, it's hard to draw a line between personal taste and objective greatness. Perhaps there isn't even such a line. But I do know that the main thing I admire about your music is the extreme skill with which you merge different musical style to achieve a perfect result. People who listen to you expecting black metal violence are on the wrong track are bound to get disappointed. I think that's the problem; people need to be introduced to TAOP expecting atmospheres and mood rather than headbanging and heavy riffs. That's what it's all about for me. A manifestation of moods; an inner musical painting, photograph or sequence depicting sceneries, specific places and environments in general. I think you have to be used to this way of interpreting music to truly appreciate what TAOP does. Since people are so obsessed with titles, maybe TAOP needs to start being described as ambient/industrial with metal elements rather than the opposite, as it is now. I think that would help rectifying people's expectations, if only marginally.
In which case, all the elements you include in your music succeed in every way, always enhancing the moods and atmospheres. The music actually paints solid inner pictures. Take the ambient/industrial "interludes", for example. When I listen to The Elevator Beneath The Valve, every little sound makes sense; I see myself in an old elevator slowly going down floor by floor, the thin, rusty metal bars rambling everytime they open and close while I stand paralyzed, too afraid and fascinated to exit. As the elevator descends, it's old and rusty motor screeching as it makes its way down, every floor it reaches slowly becomes darker, more sounds are coming at me from every angle, more rust and blood is covering the floor and pillars, more shadowy shapes are twisting in the darkness. More depravity; more immersion. Constantly, without ever breaking. It's an audible story, an audible short film. And it's perfect.
And then, the real music(in lack of an more abstract term; I don't think I need to further strengthen my image as the literal snob I'm probably coming across as. Which I just did with that sentence. Ah, whatever, fuck it). I don't know who composes and plays the majority of the guitar work, but I'll address both Brooke and Mike here: you are the most amazing fucking guitarists ever. I don't know how much you've practiced or exactly where you draw your inspiration from(although I read about that, with great interest, in the Influenza thread), but I've never heard anything similar in my life. That would be Blut Aus Nord, perhaps, but hands down; they can't match you. They're not chord progressions, they're not riffs, as a matter of fact I don't know what the hell they are. Just string-induced horror. And the way they accentuate the rest of the music is just too immaculate to be real. Dissonant without ever becoming really dissonant; black metal-ish while still retaining their ambience and uniquity. I don't know what else to say, they're just perfect(I need to stop ending each piece of text with that word).
And then, Brooke, your vocals. When listening to parts as the last 2-3 minutes of Heaving Salvation or just before the lounge part in Pendulum Prey, I can't even sense the world around me. So genuine, so intense, such a vivid manifestation of horror. After years of listening to metal, it's fairly easy to hear who screams because they're completely immersed in the feeling they're trying to evoke, or who screams because it's what they're supposed to be doing, given the style they're playing. I don't really have to say which category I put you in. I'm even at the point of asking you if you're genuinly afraid when recording these vocals; are you recording them alone at night in an abandoned factory on a bad drug trip? Do you, completely by willpower, set yourself in the mood needed to record these vocals with such feeling in a studio in broad daylight? If so, hats and various extremities off to you. Not only are you a visionary mastermind, but a musical one as well.
The drums deserve a mention as well. How the hell do you program the drums with such perfection and detail? Maybe they aren't even programmed; in that case I've made an arse out of myself. But come to think of it, they have to be programmed, such speed can't be achieved by a human drummer. Or maybe it can, nobody can ever know the full extent of what the Axis enables people to do... Hrrargh. Anyway, I can't imagine how many hours you must have laid on the programming. Such elaborate fills, and so many of them. Such a great imitation of how a real metal drummer would play, maybe even better. Who does the programming? It has to be Dan, hasn't it? I figured that, since he's the drummer... You need to know your way around a real drumkit to be able to do such great and realistic drum programming.
2 - The Axis
Alright, so here comes the hardest part. Trying to translate my feelings about the aesthetics and the Axis universe as I percieve it. What the hell, I've come this far, might as well give it a shot.
Once again, personal preference and taste. For a devastatingly long time, I've had a deep fascination for urban decay. I can't really pinpoint what that fascination is derived from; the filth, the rust, the stink, the fear, the metal and the industry; to me they all signify human failures as well as the coldness, death and "machineness" inherent in the world. The environments symbolize all the paradoxes that affect my way of looking at life and humanity; continuing failure disguised as illusionary progress, billions of people running from ugly truths and the filthy backsides of our reality. The smell of our own burning flesh as we continue to unconsciously rape the world and our own minds, moving towards annihilation, happily unaware; actually believing that we're creating something, embracing life and celebrating ourselves and our intellect, instread of recognizing destruction as the ultimate force. Something which takes millions of years to create can be evaporated in a second, and we're too fucking feeble to understand what that even means and the impact it should have on the way we percieve the world. Always the cosmic perspective on EVERYTHING; never embracing the abstract, everything possible in other dimensions than this time and this space, how we would react if suddenly faced with everything else, all the things outside of our existential laws, which we view as the center of everything. Anthropocentrism, I believe it's called. Thus, this kind of aesthetic symbolizes my feeling of disconnection from the majority of human beings. My feeling of deviancy, deriving pleasure and fascination from things that most people would see as ugly, filthy and disturbing. The Axis manifests this, it gives me a mental outlet. An inner sewer in which I can vomit out all my feelings and watch it mix with the filthy, muddy and contaminated puddles of water on the floor, far away from obligations, manners and norms. It soothes my inner longing for these milieus; I can paint them up inside myself through sound and thoughts, and be rid of the fear that would essentially damage the sense of fascination I would feel if physically being in such a place. Or, rather, it enables me to control the fear and turn it into a part of the whole experience. A true immersion in everything needed to escape from the unbearable feelings of disgust I have to deal with on a daily basis when observing the pathetic society I live in, as well as the people, restrained and robbed of their dreams and ambitions. I sit down, I breathe in Brookes words: "With the scream of the air raid sirens I know, I know I'm finally coming home". I close my eyes while the sirens wail in my head, and I know that I am coming home. Home to my personal utopia/dystopia where at last I can escape all the enervating itches and general uncomfortableness I can never get rid off when existing in reality. All the sides of me which I can never show, never put into words, never express; they are embracing me and filling my whole being with a sense of completion and identification. The music enables me to be me on a level which I've never experienced before, and my life would look so fundamentally different without it.
Also, it helps me to reduce and disarm these feelings in public. One of the most fascinating things is that when I, in a casual social situation, look at people, I can see the Axis. I can see it in their joyful and shiny eyes. It's there and they know it, they just won't admit it. I can see the fear that would take over these eyes in the fragment of a second, should darkness suddenly envelop the whole room around them, everyone disappear, scary noises come floating from indiscernable directions, and coagulated blood stains appear on the walls, roof and floor out of nowhere. I don't know these people and the structure of their minds, but somehow I feel like part of something they don't know, something larger; which is after all a basic human need. I feel like I've embraced the duality of life in its fullness and acknowledged how everything is structured based upon it. I know that should the Axis ever take me, I'd be as hopeless a victim as anyone; I am, after all, only human. And that insight is sweet. There is something bigger, more frightening and incomprehensible than any of us can ever grasp. And through the Axis, I can access a small fragment of that, the utmost limit of the universe as I know it. And that is endlessly empowering amidst all the shit I'm forced to watch. In every situation in my daily life, I know that I can mentally apply the elements of the Axis to everything I see. I don't even have to hear the music; sometimes it's enough just to know that it's there.
As always, I've rambled on way too much; when trying to explain something this monumental, I always end up stumbling over my own words in one way or another and turning everything into a huge, blurry word soup(without looking back, I guess that the second person/third person rule changed somewhere along the way). Plus, I was supposed to be somewhere a good deal of minutes ago, and I can hardly even remember where. Nevertheless, I hope that my message has gotten through. I could go on forever, but what's written above is essentially the source of my admiration of TAOP, your uniquity as I see it, the way you've changed me, and the way in which you affect me on a daily basis. So, thank you. I'm out, you're in.
Alrighty, pretentious title: check. As you may already have guessed, I now intend to provide you all with a lengthy insider article about life inside the Axis; the life I live, the challenges I face on a daily basis, and the struggle to find 24-hour grocery stores that sell cleaning sprays strong enough to remove the stains of coagulated blood on my walls.
On a serious note; after days of continually listening to TAOP, immersing myself in the music and the state of mind as much as I can(most importantly by spamming my Facebook profile with quotes and artwork like a true 21st century entrepreneur), I thought I'd give a shot at the near-impossible task of explaining my feelings for the band in words. There are three main reasons for this; partly because of the fact that when I feel something very strong, vivid and intense I have to express it in some way, or I get restless. Also partly because I read in interviews how you are getting disillusioned with people too busy categorising you and judging you by the standards of different genres to actually listen to what you're doing(something which I'm very familiar with), and I thought I'd let you hear from a real die-hard who absolutely adores every single aspect about your work, and whose outlook on life and music has been thoroughly changed by it. When somebody creates art that moves me so much it changes aspects of my personality for the deeper and better, I feel obliged to explain my gratitude in my own words.
Also, I would like to open up a discussion in which people can exchange their personal views on the Axis, the music, and how it affects them.
I decided to split this into two parts for the sake of coherency. I possess a pedantry of Third Reich proportions, which you will all see slowly disappear as I get lost in endless metaphors and painfully long sentences. I already worry that this post will never end...
1 - The music
Of course, it's hard to draw a line between personal taste and objective greatness. Perhaps there isn't even such a line. But I do know that the main thing I admire about your music is the extreme skill with which you merge different musical style to achieve a perfect result. People who listen to you expecting black metal violence are on the wrong track are bound to get disappointed. I think that's the problem; people need to be introduced to TAOP expecting atmospheres and mood rather than headbanging and heavy riffs. That's what it's all about for me. A manifestation of moods; an inner musical painting, photograph or sequence depicting sceneries, specific places and environments in general. I think you have to be used to this way of interpreting music to truly appreciate what TAOP does. Since people are so obsessed with titles, maybe TAOP needs to start being described as ambient/industrial with metal elements rather than the opposite, as it is now. I think that would help rectifying people's expectations, if only marginally.
In which case, all the elements you include in your music succeed in every way, always enhancing the moods and atmospheres. The music actually paints solid inner pictures. Take the ambient/industrial "interludes", for example. When I listen to The Elevator Beneath The Valve, every little sound makes sense; I see myself in an old elevator slowly going down floor by floor, the thin, rusty metal bars rambling everytime they open and close while I stand paralyzed, too afraid and fascinated to exit. As the elevator descends, it's old and rusty motor screeching as it makes its way down, every floor it reaches slowly becomes darker, more sounds are coming at me from every angle, more rust and blood is covering the floor and pillars, more shadowy shapes are twisting in the darkness. More depravity; more immersion. Constantly, without ever breaking. It's an audible story, an audible short film. And it's perfect.
And then, the real music(in lack of an more abstract term; I don't think I need to further strengthen my image as the literal snob I'm probably coming across as. Which I just did with that sentence. Ah, whatever, fuck it). I don't know who composes and plays the majority of the guitar work, but I'll address both Brooke and Mike here: you are the most amazing fucking guitarists ever. I don't know how much you've practiced or exactly where you draw your inspiration from(although I read about that, with great interest, in the Influenza thread), but I've never heard anything similar in my life. That would be Blut Aus Nord, perhaps, but hands down; they can't match you. They're not chord progressions, they're not riffs, as a matter of fact I don't know what the hell they are. Just string-induced horror. And the way they accentuate the rest of the music is just too immaculate to be real. Dissonant without ever becoming really dissonant; black metal-ish while still retaining their ambience and uniquity. I don't know what else to say, they're just perfect(I need to stop ending each piece of text with that word).
And then, Brooke, your vocals. When listening to parts as the last 2-3 minutes of Heaving Salvation or just before the lounge part in Pendulum Prey, I can't even sense the world around me. So genuine, so intense, such a vivid manifestation of horror. After years of listening to metal, it's fairly easy to hear who screams because they're completely immersed in the feeling they're trying to evoke, or who screams because it's what they're supposed to be doing, given the style they're playing. I don't really have to say which category I put you in. I'm even at the point of asking you if you're genuinly afraid when recording these vocals; are you recording them alone at night in an abandoned factory on a bad drug trip? Do you, completely by willpower, set yourself in the mood needed to record these vocals with such feeling in a studio in broad daylight? If so, hats and various extremities off to you. Not only are you a visionary mastermind, but a musical one as well.
The drums deserve a mention as well. How the hell do you program the drums with such perfection and detail? Maybe they aren't even programmed; in that case I've made an arse out of myself. But come to think of it, they have to be programmed, such speed can't be achieved by a human drummer. Or maybe it can, nobody can ever know the full extent of what the Axis enables people to do... Hrrargh. Anyway, I can't imagine how many hours you must have laid on the programming. Such elaborate fills, and so many of them. Such a great imitation of how a real metal drummer would play, maybe even better. Who does the programming? It has to be Dan, hasn't it? I figured that, since he's the drummer... You need to know your way around a real drumkit to be able to do such great and realistic drum programming.
2 - The Axis
Alright, so here comes the hardest part. Trying to translate my feelings about the aesthetics and the Axis universe as I percieve it. What the hell, I've come this far, might as well give it a shot.
Once again, personal preference and taste. For a devastatingly long time, I've had a deep fascination for urban decay. I can't really pinpoint what that fascination is derived from; the filth, the rust, the stink, the fear, the metal and the industry; to me they all signify human failures as well as the coldness, death and "machineness" inherent in the world. The environments symbolize all the paradoxes that affect my way of looking at life and humanity; continuing failure disguised as illusionary progress, billions of people running from ugly truths and the filthy backsides of our reality. The smell of our own burning flesh as we continue to unconsciously rape the world and our own minds, moving towards annihilation, happily unaware; actually believing that we're creating something, embracing life and celebrating ourselves and our intellect, instread of recognizing destruction as the ultimate force. Something which takes millions of years to create can be evaporated in a second, and we're too fucking feeble to understand what that even means and the impact it should have on the way we percieve the world. Always the cosmic perspective on EVERYTHING; never embracing the abstract, everything possible in other dimensions than this time and this space, how we would react if suddenly faced with everything else, all the things outside of our existential laws, which we view as the center of everything. Anthropocentrism, I believe it's called. Thus, this kind of aesthetic symbolizes my feeling of disconnection from the majority of human beings. My feeling of deviancy, deriving pleasure and fascination from things that most people would see as ugly, filthy and disturbing. The Axis manifests this, it gives me a mental outlet. An inner sewer in which I can vomit out all my feelings and watch it mix with the filthy, muddy and contaminated puddles of water on the floor, far away from obligations, manners and norms. It soothes my inner longing for these milieus; I can paint them up inside myself through sound and thoughts, and be rid of the fear that would essentially damage the sense of fascination I would feel if physically being in such a place. Or, rather, it enables me to control the fear and turn it into a part of the whole experience. A true immersion in everything needed to escape from the unbearable feelings of disgust I have to deal with on a daily basis when observing the pathetic society I live in, as well as the people, restrained and robbed of their dreams and ambitions. I sit down, I breathe in Brookes words: "With the scream of the air raid sirens I know, I know I'm finally coming home". I close my eyes while the sirens wail in my head, and I know that I am coming home. Home to my personal utopia/dystopia where at last I can escape all the enervating itches and general uncomfortableness I can never get rid off when existing in reality. All the sides of me which I can never show, never put into words, never express; they are embracing me and filling my whole being with a sense of completion and identification. The music enables me to be me on a level which I've never experienced before, and my life would look so fundamentally different without it.
Also, it helps me to reduce and disarm these feelings in public. One of the most fascinating things is that when I, in a casual social situation, look at people, I can see the Axis. I can see it in their joyful and shiny eyes. It's there and they know it, they just won't admit it. I can see the fear that would take over these eyes in the fragment of a second, should darkness suddenly envelop the whole room around them, everyone disappear, scary noises come floating from indiscernable directions, and coagulated blood stains appear on the walls, roof and floor out of nowhere. I don't know these people and the structure of their minds, but somehow I feel like part of something they don't know, something larger; which is after all a basic human need. I feel like I've embraced the duality of life in its fullness and acknowledged how everything is structured based upon it. I know that should the Axis ever take me, I'd be as hopeless a victim as anyone; I am, after all, only human. And that insight is sweet. There is something bigger, more frightening and incomprehensible than any of us can ever grasp. And through the Axis, I can access a small fragment of that, the utmost limit of the universe as I know it. And that is endlessly empowering amidst all the shit I'm forced to watch. In every situation in my daily life, I know that I can mentally apply the elements of the Axis to everything I see. I don't even have to hear the music; sometimes it's enough just to know that it's there.
As always, I've rambled on way too much; when trying to explain something this monumental, I always end up stumbling over my own words in one way or another and turning everything into a huge, blurry word soup(without looking back, I guess that the second person/third person rule changed somewhere along the way). Plus, I was supposed to be somewhere a good deal of minutes ago, and I can hardly even remember where. Nevertheless, I hope that my message has gotten through. I could go on forever, but what's written above is essentially the source of my admiration of TAOP, your uniquity as I see it, the way you've changed me, and the way in which you affect me on a daily basis. So, thank you. I'm out, you're in.
Gave inspiration, hinted few good ideas. It trully appears to be a corrupting entity that is able to "insinuate" into ones live as they say. No joke 
I don't know any other band/project that would sparkle imagination in such way as The Axis do. Of course there is much more to it but i just lack graphomanic skills to write posts that is at least one third as large as yours. For now... 
