OKKULTOKRATI

The band known as Okkultokrati were an unknown entity to me up until a few years ago. During the height of The Covid Years, in between lockdowns, a customer asked me to order their latest album for the shop. After he repeated the band name and spelt it out to me a few times, I finally got the gist of it, and my curiosity was piqued because of its peculiarity and the fact that the recording was on the Southern Lord label. During said lockdowns, I went through some strange musical phases and tangents. In 2021, I listened to a lot of contemporary death-metal of the crustacious varietal (Tomb Mold, Mortiferum, Witch Vomit, Blood Incantation, Voidceremony et al) and electronic music (Future Sound Of London, Squarepusher, Amon Tobin, even friggin' Underworld), the change in lifestyle and housebound activities twisting my sonic proclivities in strange ways. 

One album I was rather obsessed with during this period was this one, Okkultokrati's 2016 LP, Raspberry Dawn - perhaps ironically, not the one said customer ordered, but the one that most hit home w/ me. The band are nominally viewed as a punk-metal band from Norway who are heavily influenced by Black Metal, and that description sounds fine and dandy to me, though I think that pegging them as merely blackened punk-metal does them little justice.

The vocals howl a Nordic grimness and the guitar textures and tones are not trad-metal but more in line w/ the lo-tech world of BM and even a hint of scratchy twang thrown around, the drums mostly keep a mid-tempo d-beat throughout. Most of this doesn't have the BPM or sheer aggression to be called hardcore or Black Metal, so I'm calling it a refined form of Death-Rock. "Leave And Be Gone" is pure, dark-synth coldwave, taking yet another detour, but the bulk of Raspberry Dawn is pure high-energy death-rock bliss which sounds like little else I know. Shades of Bauhaus, Christian Death and early Venom collide and create some ravishing fucking grimness. Two years on, and I remain convinced of its greatness.

ROBERT FRIPP/LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN 

Robert Fripp has a rep for being a bit of a prickly mofo and very protective of his music and IP, not signing up to Spotify and other streaming services until the price/deal was right, though I still can't figure out why this all-time classic of all time from 1981 remains out of print. In fact, it was never even later reissued on CD in the '90s, let alone been given a 21st-century run on the 12" format, and unlike many/most other Fripp-related releases, isn't available in the digital sphere. If they can be bothered tackling the likely legal minefield/hellhole such a venture would entail, I would heartily recommend the likes of Superior Viaduct give it a good old college try and attempt to give this excellent slice of No Wave rock & roll a much overdue reissue, and if they do, I will surely get it (my copy is kinda crackly).

Fripp was always a lot more hep to The New Music than many of his prog peers, getting on stage w/ the Screamers in NYC in '79, playing w/ Talking Heads on their best record (Remain In Light) and hanging around the No Wave scene at the time, soaking up the new musical possibilities. The band here features various sundry New Wavers who would later do time in everyone from XTC to the B-52s, though interestingly, there's also Danielle Dax contributing vocals to the second tune, "Inductive Resonance" (well, interesting to me...). 

Fripp with the Screamers, NYC

There's 13 other cuts here, all of them instrumental (other than vocal samples), and while the sound is of its time - herky-jerky post-punk and No Wave-influenced avant-rock that brings to mind everything from the aforementioned Talking Heads to first-LP Feelies to Rhys Chatham's extended 'rock' pieces - none of it is conceding anything to the marketplace, and I'm gathering that, despite Fripp's profile, it probably didn't ride high on the charts. All of which is fine, coz it's these cult classics that make it worthwhile having ears. A remarkable album, and you can hear the whole thing here.

SCENIC

The band Scenic released music between the years 1993 - 2003, and were the musical outlet for Bruce Licher and others once his band Savage Republic called it quits. SR were a fairly well-known entity (relatively speaking!) whom I wrote about on this blog several times back in the dark ages, and maybe I even wrote about Scenic at some point, too, but since I've been revisiting them of late I'll give them another run.

2002's full-length swan song, The Acid Gospel Experience, is the one I've been listening to the most lately, finding my copy of the CD in a box just recently which has finally been unpacked after several years in the wilderness. I definitely had their two earlier albums, 1995's Incident At Cima and '96's Acquatica, at some point, and may even have them still! They made their stamp, though perhaps it was a little one, during the post-rock boom of the mid '90s, despite never receiving the wider recognition of, say, Tortoise or Dirty Three. I guess Bruce had already done the legwork in the '80s with the proto-post-rock - which makes them 'rock'? Good grief, just bear with me here lest I tie myself in knots - of Savage Republic, and while Scenic never reached the dizzying musical heights of Dirty Three or Cul de Sac [two contemporaries they certainly resembled], their instrumental stew which brought in elements of spaghetti western scores, surf, Indian ragas, Rembetika, space-rock and music of the Middle East, certainly has much to recommend.

The Acid Gospel Experience has a much more expansive sound than the two previous albums, with a mere 9 tracks over 73 minutes. Sure, the last track is nearly 19 minutes, but since it was The Golden Age Of The Compact Disc and it's never been issued on vinyl, bands were given room to move and indulge (sometimes recklessly). The 7-minute opener, "Year Of The Rat", has a lush, synth-heavy sound augmented with fuzz and a bass hook that provides the money shot, and wouldn't have been out of place on a Slowdive album, given its shoegaze sheen. Following that is "Lightspeed", which hits it running w/ a Neu! beat and outer-space ambitions, complete w/ electronics and sitars. Minimalist music god Harold Budd makes an appearance on track 4, "Under A Wing", and while none of this is reinventing the wheel of post-/space-rock as we know it, it's a recording which got lost in the pile that shouldn't have. Everything by Scenic is worth your time & trouble, and w/ everything at your fingertips, it's not much trouble at all.