It seems to me that the main truth of human nature is that we'll always do what we like if we can get away with it. Which is why we have laws, I suppose.
Because if we can take it and keep it, we will. Like dogs snarling over a stinky old bone. You know that thin veneer of what we call civilisation? Got it in one, we're animals with a slightly more complex language.
Talking about animals and humans, that brings me to eugenics. The National Human Genome Research Institute explains: “Eugenics is an inaccurate theory linked to historical and present-day forms of discrimination, racism, ableism and colonialism. It has persisted in policies and beliefs around the world...”
Well, yeah. Francis Galton, wiggy concepts of the “noble savage”, misinterpreted Darwinism and Mendelism. (No, I'm not. Look it up.)
Then there was the assumption that Christianity was supposed to “enlighten” and “civilise” the heathens or pagans. Sometimes called “scientific racism”, eugenics seemed to drag together all sorts of clumps of dingbats (it's a real treat to hear someone justify slavery, by the way. Hope you never get stuck in a lift or on a bus or aeroplane with someone slinging off on their favourite dingbattery).
Heathens? Pagans? They were doing much the same thing the 'civilised' world was doing not too long ago. I mean, the new Christian churches were often built on sacred sites or from pagan churches (sometimes using their altars or burying them beneath the swish new Christian one).
I mean, what part of the England's shitting on Ireland in the 16th Century was any different from the massacres of the Hutus during what we incorrectly call 'the First Congo War'?. The only difference between one lot of pagans and the others is that Christ is apparently going to save one lot, which I'm sure is a constant comfort to those being raped and savaged.
Don't Christians always look so happy? No, they look dismal, dreary, dull and grumpy. Either that or dementedly happy or just demented. Weird, they're supposed to be going to Heaven and everyone else is going to Hell.
Nope, for my money the only real difference between the heathens and pagans of the world was Christianity and more advanced weapons; having assorted binary-brained scribblers printing opinion as fact doesn't really help either. ('binary-brained': those who believe something either IS or it ISN'T)
Don't get me started on the histrionics of Wagner.
Nor that prize party bore, Adolf Hitler, one of a large group of deluded dingbats whose notion of superior humanity appeared to be based on chaps being of blonde hair, blue eyes and a hard-eyed fighting physique, with similarly ludicrous women who apparently delighted in squirting out young 'uns. Apart from being as absurd as a child's expectation that Jesus is equally blonde and blue-eyed it rather makes one wonder what emotional rabbit-hole they'd been scrambling down.
As an aside, long after Heinrich Himmler had become head of the SS, he changed the rules so that EVERYONE in the SS had to take and pass the stringent physical. While Mr Scrawny stripped to his baggy shorts and singlet,he almost-manfully attempted the physical. The big burly chaps running his test somehow managed not to snigger at this accountantlike, murderous weed as he toppled and slithered through the exercises with, ahem, “full marks”.
You'd think that any superior human qualities would have to include mental capacity, emotional stability and the ability not to be distracted by rabbit holes. Kind of rules a lot of people out, that concept.
Anyway. I s'pose politics is, after all, father like choosing the right horse for the steeplechase, eh?
Which brings me to Stafford Glover, aka Enclosed and Silent Order, and his beautiful, eerie new LP “Entrainment” (Hypostatic Union), recorded with the late John Hannon (Liberez, Understand). This is Glover's second full length solo project and ... Glover? Don't recall the name? John Peel would've remembered - and I reckon he would've thoroughly enjoyed the path Glover is currently walking. It's a hell of a journey from playing bass in Extreme Noise Terror.
Sure, he plays bass here. Also piano, synths, percussion and electric piano. Which makes him rather talented, particularly since he avoids the usual trap the solo musician topples into: being to bloody busy. There is plenty of room for the songs to walk, stroll and breathe - or stumble and drown, in fact.
I'm sure you've encountered musicians like this before. You'd swear they should be doing soundtracks for unsettling films, dark bedsit dramas or streetwise films about the transfiguration of the self. That's not how Glover describes it, but really, it's down to you how you take this on. Or, as the themes in the titles are so clearly linked, a kind ofExorcistin Surbiton (our Australian readers will screw their faces up at this - try "Exorcistin Toora"'. Feel better? Less parochial?).
There are vocals, on the second two of the six tracks. But they are (apologies, Michael Plater and Amy McKenny) the least of the enormous glowing tidal race going on here. In short, music like this could be as much shelved under “dark folk” as 'intense sidestepped metal'. But sod shelving anything, you want to play “Entrainment” and play it loud. John Hannon plays violin, trumpet and organ ... and his contribution is as strong as the guilt you feel when you make someone you love cry.
“Any actual metal?” whines a distant tool. Sure. I suppose. If you play “Purity/Penance” you'll add a couple of notches to your tinnitus (with or without high volume).
I'll not give too much away, but one part of the themes revolving herereflects the deadliest path in Britain.
Which kinda takes us back to eugenics and how the fittest survive, and how history mocks those causing mass misery by hastening down emotional rabbit-holes.
Oh, 5 bottles, Barman.
Mazel tov!
Go get it here.
