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Tenhi

Think globally, shred locally

This site’s readers have good taste. When I requested acts akin to nature-themed doom band Celestiial, readers had an abundance of suggestions. The non-metal ones interested me most. I spent a blissful afternoon learning about all kinds of drone, new age, and tangentially metal muic. It was a nice change from my usual aggro fare.

I especially enjoyed two acts. The first was Warduna. The band features ex-members of Gorgoroth, but is not metal. Instead, its sound is sort of tribal/ambient. Despite analog ingredients, the elemental, repetitive arrangements remind me of techno at times. Wardruna’s mission is “to explore and evoke the depths of Norse wisdom and spirituality”. How Norse is the band, really?

The second was Tenhi. (Reader Adryuu, who suggested Tenhi, won the Celestiial giveaway prize.) Sometimes people say that they “can’t stop listening to” certain music, which is usually implausible. People can stop listening to music. They just have to hit “stop”. But “stop” has indeed been difficult for me with Tenhi. I’ve had their MySpace player on in surreal, hours-long loops where I stare at the photo of the band sitting in a snowy field (see above), and imagine that I’m there, imbibing their Finnish folk vibes. I don’t know a thing about Finnish folk music. For all I know, Tenhi could be channeling Dead Can Dance.

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The New York Times recently ran a thought-provoking article by Michael Kimmelman on the local nature of art. Here are two nuggets from it:

[Edward] Hopper’s work, like all good art, remains local on some crucial level

No matter how much culture has become globalized, art retains meanings specific to a certain time and place. Good art does, anyway (which accounts for why too much not-so-good contemporary art, aimed at the global marketplace, looks generic and everywhere alike)

Generally I’d agree with these arguments. Take, for example, some of metal’s most “regional” bands: Suicidal Tendencies (Southern California), Eyehategod (New Orleans), Immortal (Norway), and Ludicra (San Francisco).

As Kimmelman would argue, one might not fully appreciate them unless one fully appreciates their milieu. I lived in San Francisco for several years before I discovered Ludicra. When I heard them, I immediately recognized them as the sonic embodiment of San Francisco’s fog, dirt, and concrete. Likewise with Suicidal Tendencies – now that I live near their Venice Beach birthplace and see sun and skateboards daily, I “get” the band much more.

But as Stewart Voegtlin cautioned in his review of Kylesa’s To Walk a Middle Course, we should be wary of locale-based romanticizing. Kylesa’s Savannah isn’t a genteel literary fantasy. It’s hardscrabble and contradictory. (The polished production of Kylesa’s latest album is a jarring contrast to its material.) Just because a band is from a place doesn’t mean it’s like that place.

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Culted: Swenadian?

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Metal, in fact, is very un-local. Its main divisions, subgenres, have little to do with place. Thrash, death, black, and doom metal aren’t dependent on geography. Sure, they have regional origins and variations, like German thrash or Swedish death metal. But we’re probably at a point where the Internet precludes any such variations in the future. The latest metal trends – deathcore, metalcore, post-metal – don’t have meaningful regional characteristics.

Even with its Norwegian origins, black metal isn’t necessarily place-dependent. Take Immortal and 1349, who have the same basic sonic ingredients: raspy vocals, tremolo-picked guitars, hummingbird-speed blastbeats. If you close your eyes and shut out all marketing imagery of them, what do you visualize? Do you perceive a cold, grim winter (Immortal)? Or do you perceive a red-hot hellfire (1349)? (Since Norwegian forests don’t have power outlets, I’m going with red-hot.) Two bands playing essentially the same music – yet they’re fire and ice.

But perhaps Kimmelman’s localism applies to metal after all. Technology has altered the notion of locale to create the globalized entity called heavy metal. (Email, for example, enables bands like Culted to have members in different continents.) The most common influence in metal is other metal. Instead of a region creating an idiosyncratic sound, the locale has become the bedroom. Teenagers blocking out everything by blasting metal: the world is both the width of a skull and the entire Internet. At worst, this creates Darkthrone clones worldwide. At best, it creates wonderful hybrids like Wardruna and Tenhi that masquerade as pure forms.

— Cosmo Lee