As a pubescent dumpling with shitty puberty problems and an ass full of nothing in my pocket, I had a ritual. I spent the summer hanging out with friends at the lake, we drank, listened to dumb punk, and talked shit; that wasn’t the ritual, just the frame. I swam out into the lake, far from the shore, drew a deep breath, and dove down to the point where the refraction of light dissolved into darkness. It was just below the invisible temperature boundary between the warm surface and the icy-endless bottom. There I screamed a dull, empty guttural roar into the murky cold, exhaled air screaming from my lungs. Then I watched my hair pull streaks into the nothingness, lingered between cold and darkness, and felt the lump of missing breath in my throat until the pain—not the lack of air—propelled me to the surface.
Begräbnis captures this moment, the pressure of possible threats from the darkness, the muted roaring of fear, pain, and grief, the hell of a sluggish, murky undulation like the water pressure on your ears. The result vomits out a confused, dirty industrial-funeral. With Begräbnis, there are only a few Japanese bands that can be unreservedly assigned to the genre and are known. Funeral Moth with one, in which the level of abstraction from Bohren & der Club of Gore converges in a play of emptiness and silence; Aeternum Sacris with indulgent ambient funeral; and finally this madness embodied by Begräbnis: A chaotic, noise-stomping-sneaking trio presenting songs—allegedly in German—with drum machine, chime, and theremin, plus two guitars. I’m not even sure if what Fumika Souzawa, seemingly possessed like an underworld creature, growls and breaks into the microphone even corresponds to a language or is just deep, gut-level gurgled sounds.
Despite all the noisy power that evokes faint memories of early incarnations of sludge, drone, and post-metal, there is a thinly underlying jazzy feeling of abstraction and emptiness, of decay and decline between the tones. Dying, drowning, being buried, screaming out one’s own confusion deep in the nothingness of a lake. The ultimate end of life is the thematic framework that Begräbnis sets for Izanaena, and accordingly, this piece feels malevolent. Hardly any observer or narrator, more the direct emotional expression of conscious ending. A few sad melodies sneak around the edges of the noise, while a muffled and heavily distorted guttural moan and scream emerges from the center and is framed by sluggish, hammering, drawn-out riffs. Whenever this smoldering pressure seems about to tear apart, the theremin or a synthesizer or the chime becomes perceptible, just briefly, just a panicked inhalation of air, no rest, to then dive again into a lake of dirty pressure and screaming.
(ffo Sektarism, early Doomslut, Wormphlegm)
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