The Blight – Meditations On Insignificance: Cassette Release Show July 29th at the Icehouse
Meditations On Insignificance (Tridroid, 2017)
If the old axiom is true, and an individual indeed never hears the bullet that kills them, then congratulations – you’re not dead. But by the end of the Blight’s latest cassette release, Meditations On Insignificance, you just might wish you were.
With their first release on New York-via-St. Paul metal label Tridroid (which crashes to Earth on July 28th but can be secured through cassette pre-order), exuberantly misanthropic Minneapolis noise outfit the Blight successfully turns an instant of violence into an hour of evocative…well…meditation. Tim Glenn (drums), Travis Bos (synths/effects/vocals), and Jesse Whitney (modular synth) craft harsh noise and rock-and-roll sounds into a mantra of madness that is as compelling as it is hostile. Hints of Lustmord would place us in space, but the inherently caustic nature of this music will not be denied its material pedigree.
“Self” and “Humanity” explode at the onset like a testimony, a soundtrack to self-immolation. Embers of conventional instruments scream forth from a furious fire of electronic noise, ravishing everything they touch, roiling like a snowball from Hell into a cacophony of ashes. What’s left is something far more malevolent than star dust.
“Planet” hooks us with a swirling loop of feedback, easing us farther and farther from the light until we realize, ‘Wait—this is no current; it’s a riptide.’ You’ve drifted so far into space you’ve developed your own gravitational pull. Now you’re yanking comets out of orbit, maligning whole cosmos, becoming more and more and more and more.
But every planet has a “Star” indicative of its nature. This world in uninviting, so it should be no surprise that steel strings shape the undulating tides of guitar and drums barely holding the planet’s surface together. Building into a miasma of pure energy, “Star” shines its brightest at its darkest points.
But all stars die. And this one goes bigger than a red giant— it becomes its own fucking “Galaxy”. Time, space, ether, matter, self, other, light, darkness, day, night, good, evil – if you think this is going somewhere you’re wrong. But you’re also going everywhere.
What’s the meaning of it all? Is there a meaning at all? Fuck.
What has four letters, sometimes has nine letters, but never has five letters.
The voice of “Humanity” drifts aimlessly through the “Galaxy” as wrought as ever, confused and afraid, as it should be. Because there is nowhere that swirl of feedback is going, no end of the rainbow or crest of the horizon. What’s dead is dead; what’s gone is gone.
As it should be.
The Blight brings its doomsday diametrics to the Icehouse at 2528 Nicollet Avenue South Saturday, July 29th, with special guest Jesse Matthew Petersen on guitar. Farout jazz provocateurs Fanny Hill and dancey electronic priestess RRA will woo the audience into attendance before being decimated; records will be spinning between sets courtesy of Matthew St. Germain. Everything should get rolling around 11 PM with a $5 cover at the door.
Adam Johnson lives in Minneapolis with his wife, cats, and guitars.
