Gauchiste – Gauchiste (Little Black Cloud Records)
One of the more encouraging developments with metal has been its adherents' ability to move into more cerebral aesthetic realms without having to go the route of Malmsteen and Mastodon – because a road paved with mixolydian modes and finger-tapping is pretty much the fastest imaginable route to boring, irrelevant music. It's easy to confuse speed and precision with a progressive aesthetic, but artists who indulge in this sort of masturbatory excess tend, in the immortal words of Angus Young, to “wind up progressing right up their own arses.” But the inclination towards heavy music inspired by fairly arcane influences is healthy, and artists who engage in such inclinations can help push genre envelopes towards an understanding of the idea that, to really remain transgressive, metal bands need to do more than simply bang out Obituary covers in their parents' basements, that a world of strange and unsettling music exists outside the bounds of amps that go to eleven, and that pushing heavy music forward will require looking far afield of the genre's main sources of inspiration.
This is more or less the case with Gauchiste, a collaboration between Tannon Penland of the criminally under-rated Richmond instrumental metal band Loincloth and Raleigh-based electronic musicians Tomas Phillips and Craig Hilton. Gauchiste's debut release is tagged with rather unwieldy genre signifier “extreme minimalist abstract metal” (or, if you're looking at their Facebook page, “extreme minimalist maldoror metal,” which likely won't mean as much to listeners unfamiliar with 19th Century French avant-garde poetry), terminology that thankfully does more to call to mind the hordes of heavy bands who traded in their songwriting for big amps and Sunn 0)) albums than Gauchiste's music itself does. While it's difficult to fully abandon portraying their music in terms of its relation to metal – shrieked vocals will occasionally push their way through the haze of electronic atmospheres, and brief blurts of percussion will clatter away, seemingly at random, until fading into the drifting, arrhythmic miasma from which they emerged – theirs are compositions that tend to evoke some general sense of the genre more than to actually sound like it. The seven songs tend towards an eerie, unsettling mood that loses none of its power to its subtlety, and while it can be difficult to clearly articulate music working with this level of abstraction – dense tonal clusters coalesce and disperse, familiar elements slowly emerge before being torn asunder by layers of digital processing and manipulation – the emphasis is pretty clearly on the meditative rather than the abrasive.
The album is also interesting for very deliberately calling attention to the idea of a recording as a studio creation. Most heavy music attempts to give the impression of immediacy, of a handful of musicians standing in a room and running through their songs. However, the results are typically processed and modified to the extent that the end result is so far removed from the musicians' actual interactions that it might as well have been performed by robots (if you think you're hearing the actual drums on a great majority of metal albums – especially the fast ones – you're very much mistaken). Few such bands would want to call attention to the fact that the computer is as much a defining factor of their sound as any other instrument. Gauchiste, on the other hand, seem to place their synthetic and syncretic approach front and center, focusing the listener's attention on the act of sound processing and the construction of mood and atmosphere. There are live instruments and vocals providing some source material, but very little is easily recognizable. It's like hearing an echo without the initial sound that initiated it – retaining some impression of the familiar without remaining too close to it.
Unlike most heavy music, typically reliant on a sense of heft and aggression, if Gauchiste evokes a visceral sensation at all, it's one of dread and disorientation. Their music is heavy in the sense of a nightmare that can't be shaken off after awakening, or of the sort of gloom that can settle in after one too many successive cloudy days. It's a challenging release, especially for those approaching it with some expectation of conventional structure or tonality, but it possesses a depth and wealth of detail that can reward a patient listener. It acts as a reminder of how, in the right hands, heavy metal can be melted down and recast into something recognizable by its raw materials, but unconventional in the forms it assumes.