Noise Pollution #22: Tho’ Gold Always Rises: The Lovecraftian Madness of “Cacophony”
We’e just a hair off from Halloween, albeit the most boring people on your social media timeline whose entire personality revolves around this holiday, pumpkin spice coffee, and missionary sex with the lights off have been celebrating it since mid-August, which our consumer nightmare of a world has begun accommodating by shoving cinnamon and nutmeg into everything from muffins to lube up our ass while it’s still fucking 94 degrees and sunny. I tend to resist this unnatural shifting of the seasons as long as I can, especially these days with it being summer deep into December, but once we’re further into September my mind wanders to the autumn, the changing seasons, and the celebration of the dead. Plus a healthy dose of Samhain.
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Look! I’m fucking FAMOUS!
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If you’ve made it this far with me and this column then firstly: I’m sorry. Secondly: you’re aware of my somewhat ridiculous obsession with seasonal listening. And C, Rudimentary Peni is one of my favorite bands ever… and while I’ve written about the various EPs that band has released over the years, I’ve never really gone into the record that took me from casual fan to obsessive, the horror laden landscape of Cacophony, a deliberate side step from their anarcho past into HP Lovecraft saturated experimental madness.
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“…that which is not dead can eternal life, and with strange aeons even death may die..”
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Going back to 2007, I was really branching into different genres as much as I could, thanks to the combination of a failed suicide attempt and a percolating drug problem making my mind not just wander but splinter into a million directions. I already had the early EPs and Death Church when I took to the Internet (eBay probably) to find more of Peni’s work. Fast forward to whenever the postman delivered Cacophony and my partner in shared misery opened the package and scrawled an “s” next to Peni because defacing my shit was always funny, I sat down to give it an initial spin. From the opener, “Night Gaunts,” you could feel something different in their approach. Post-punk maybe? Death rock? It’s a difficult feeling to pinpoint for sure.
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Released half a decade after their debut full-length, Cacophony is incredibly ambitious and frankly unexpected from the band in the context of their earlier work. The record, while having many songs that stand alone, works best as a full listen. Lyrically it’s based deeply around the world of HP Lovecraft’s life and writings, and the band does their best in presenting an audial vision of each story. An anarcho concept record? I mean, I guess Crass did it, but that never interested me no matter how many attempts I’ve made to get into them, but Peni manage to utilize all kinds of phantom sounds and background spoken word across the entire record which truly tie the whole thing together while giving it the creepy atmosphere the source material demands.
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Being that I had been involved with black metal for well over a decade by the time I first heard Cacophony, I understood that you were lumped into two different camps: Tolkien or Lovecraft, as far as your literary inspirations were, in theory, supposed to come from. I’d read Tolkien in the late ’90s and enjoyed it, but never took any kind of band name or concept from it and I was only passingly familiar with Lovecraft from Cthulhu and the Necronomicon, etc. Neither formed any core of my identity in black metal and I didn’t really give them much of a second thought, but Cacophony made me reevaluate that a bit which caused me to hop in my car and venture out into the world in search of a book of his stories to satiate my own curiosity.
And yes, I know Lovecraft has a heavy stigma attached to him now and was a terrible person and all that other shit that will get posted to metal Twitter upon seeing even the title of this piece. I’m not here to address that, that’s for the scholars of the Internet to debate. I have no interest in adding or subtracting anything from that conversation.
As stated earlier, I’d just gone through a wee bit of a rough patch in my life that had caused my grip on reality to slacken. I was anesthetizing myself with various pills, several packs of cigarettes a day and an excessive amount of escapism via “World of Warcraft.” The introduction of Lovecraft’s literary universe into that kind of mental environment was one of those rare moments of (forgive the pun) providence where you come across something that just fits. Lovecraft’s tales of detachment from reality and the existence of incomprehensible horrors were a lightning rod for me and I quickly absorbed everything I could find. For years after I would re-read the majority of his written works, always during the gloomier months. I found that with the growing clarity that putting my mental health crisis (of that time, anyway) in the rearview allowed my imagination to really wander in and focus on new details every pass. The general aesthetics of his worldbuilding fascinated me a lot more than I had expected it to, especially since I could pull in comparisons to my own musical meanderings through dreamscapes.
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I had been planning to post this song somewhere in the piece. It’s an act of cosmic irony (or providence again) that it’s Warcraft themed, albeit fucking stupid.
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Cacophony works best if you’re familiar with the source material but that’s not a prerequisite by any means. The frenetic nature of the record can (and probably should) also be considered a case study in vocalist/guitarist Nick Blinko’s burgeoning mental illness as the music truly has a schizophrenic nature to it, which comes to a head in the Pope Adrian 37 Psychristiatric album which followed Cacophony a few years later, albeit in a much lesser musical form in both adventurous nature as well as cohesion and quality. Cacophony is the last time we saw Peni successfully experiment, creating a perfect album.
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For the years after my own mental troubles, I began to listen to Cacophony in different ways, paying very close attention to the sound design and layering. What had originally begun as a journey in tandem with the period of my life where my grasp on reality was tenuous at best became an almost academic approach to my enjoyment of the record. It really stands out to me as one of the rare instances of music transcending itself and becoming something greater. Now, fifteen years or so after first hearing it, I still can find something new on each repeated listen. And, unlike many of their contemporaries, Cacophony doesn’t feel dated in the slightest. It’s a difficult record to emulate and I’ve yet to hear anyone truly manage to approach the sound aesthetic and not come off as camp, or a cheap copy. This is probably why it was smart for Chelsea Wolfe to change so much of her cover of the album’s closer, “Black on Gold” (though the entirety of her Peni covers record, “Prayer for the Unborn,” is significantly different from the originals, and is possibly the best thing she’s recorded.)
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So, since we’re headed into Halloween, I ask you to consider adding Cacophony to your playlist. It’s far more interesting than whatever Misfits song you’re getting ready to post on your timeline. If you have the interest, The Quietus has an excellent overview of Rudimentary Peni’s history that is absolutely worth your time.
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In the spirit of transparency I did write the second half of this piece while drinking a Starbucks Apple Crisp Latte.
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Hopefully this whetted your appetite for October. Next column I’ll be writing about a sadly overshadowed Peni adjacency as well as some other spooky shit. See you in two.
