SF Gospel

Awfully quiet around here...

It's been a while since I've posted here, as you may (or may not) have noticed. July was a mixed-up month, between Cornerstone and a week-and-a-half vacation, and now I'm on another week-long trip that's basically a working vacation. I'm in Ithaca, NY, processing (among some other things) a collection of 2,000-odd science fiction magazines for Cornell University's rare book and manuscript library. Which is about the best job ever, yes? But while I'm up here my Internet access is somewhat limited, hence no likelihood of more posts until next week or later.

In the meantime, one neat thing: at a used bookstore in Ithaca today (I don't recall the name offhand), I found an Ace Double that I didn't have (F-215, John Brunner's Listen! The Stars with Jane Roberts' The Rebellers). And on the first page of the latter title, what do I find? An inscription reading "To Rod Serling -- Jane Roberts." Mr. Serling was an Ithacan, so it's very likely this actually came from his collection (though whether or not he ever read it-- who knows. There's some wear, but no actual stress lines on the spine, to which Doubles are particularly prone if they're read). Ace Doubles? Awesome. Ace Doubles inscribed by their authors to SF television's first and greatest master? VERY awesome.

In any event, I never posted links to my second and third video reports from Cornerstone, both of which were posted at Religion Dispatches last week. Video #2, in which I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of Cornerstone's bands, is here. Video #3 (easily the best of the three) discusses punk monks, the place of spiritual ambiguity in Christian music, and the moral struggle over throwing up the horns to Christian metal; that one is here.

Not science fiction (and mostly not religion, either): Some recent music.

It ain't all science fiction here. I've been enjoying some music lately, too.

First, one of my favorite bands, maudlin of the Well, released Part the Second, a free reunion album. motW was an odd sort of post-metal group, with complex composition and instrumentation, masterminded by Toby Driver (with whom I went to college, but I assure you I'd love this music even if I hadn't). Their twin albums Bath and Leaving Your Body Map, which are basically a big concept album about astral projection and Kabbalah, remain some of the best music I've ever heard. (For example.) It was a finite project, giving way to the more experimental Kayo Dot in 2003. This new album, available as a free download directly from the band, is a gathering of odds and ends from the band's brief career, recently completed and mixed. It stands as a sort of missing link between their final albums and Kayo Dot's abstract first one, so it works as a good introduction to both. You can download it here.

My other favorite band, Current 93, also has a new album, Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain. C93 has gone through a number of transformations over the year, starting as experimental noise and gradually turning into something resembling folk music, with lots of detours along the way.The group is the project of David Tibet, whose theological yearnings have gone through a similarly expansion over the years—beginning as a Crowleyan and possibly Satanist, he flirted with Tibetan Buddhism before settling into a form of apocalyptic/gnostic Christianity as idiosyncratic as his singing voice. Tibet is, for my money, probably the best living poet we've got. His lyrics are complex tapestries of hallucinatory imagery, forming an ever-growing body of mystical literature that's well worth exploring for anyone interested in religious visions. This album, for instance, hints at the mystical history of a character named Aleph, who seems to be some sort of embodiment of violence and murder, or something like that. The music is surprisingly rockin', with unexpected levels of guitar distortion and riffage. "Not Because the Fox Barks" even approaches Sabbath-y metal (though, admittedly, a better point of reference for the album as a whole comes from the Yes belt buckle Tibet is wearing in his sleeve portrait). But despite the absence of compositonal master Michael Cashmore on this album, Current haven't left acoustic prettiness behind entirely—"UrShadow" stands out in that regard. Nevertheless, this is one of the biggest shifts in sound the group has had since they put down their tape loops and picked up guitars in the late '80s. My favorite general overview of the group's career is at the no-longer-updated Soft Black Stars. Some samples from Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, plus a more detailed review, are available at Brainwashed. And you can order the album from Jnana (in North America) or Durtro (in Europe, or for downloading, for those of you who don't like lyrics booklets and so forth). 

I also had the opportunity to see my other other favorite band, Opeth, live a few weeks ago. I had seen them once before, and they remain one of the greatest live groups I've ever seen. You'd think that a progressive death metal band would have some difficulty recreating the complexity of their recorded compositions live, particularly when they cover as much dynamic and textural range as Opeth. But the high highs and low lows are all recreated pretty well perfectly in person.And it doesn't hurt that the opening act on this tour was Enslaved, who are pretty great. \m/

In absolutely not metal-related news, I was also fortunate enough to be present for a rare live performance by Scottish-born pastiche artist and satirist Momus about two weeks ago. It was a three-hour chronological career retrospective, giving the whole evening a sense of finality Though I was a bit disappointed that he didn't bring out the guitar for the early songs—it was just him, an iPod, and perfomance artist/interpretive dancer Aki Sasamoto—I was very pleased at the breadth of material.

...So that's what I've been listening to while taking some kind of ridiculously extensive notes for my Cornerstone seminar!

Apocalypse Online: Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero

The new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, comes out on Tuesday. It's a science-fictional concept album (probably the first such thing since David Bowie's Outside, though I may be wrong about that), and the story are of particularly interest for both its critique of conservative religion and its broader eschatological themes.

The nonlinear story has been unfolding in a viral marketing campaign (or "alternate reality game," or "interactive experience") made up of websites, mp3s, and toll-free phone numbers starting earlier this year, establishing the history and atmosphere of the dystopia in which Year Zero takes place. In a nutshell: 15 years from now, the United States has become both a police state and a theocracy. This government has used nuclear weapons on Iran, required all Muslims to register or face execution, and drugged the populace into submission with tranquilizers in the water supply. The Year Zero backstory takes a bleak view of the future of American religion, summed up by the logo of the "Faithful Civil Patrol" organized by the First Evangelical Church of Plano: a crucifix emerging from the barrel of a gun.

This type of dystopia is not the most original—it's reminiscent of the worlds of Katherine Kerr's story "Asylum" and the film Children of Men, just to name two. The medium in which it has been revealed is a novelty, though, and there's a definite thrill to be gained from exploring the sites, a sense of uncovering a mystery. This is especially true in the case of Year Zero's most interesting concept: "The Presence," a mysterious vision/hallucination of an enormous, ghostly hand descending from the sky. The idea has appeared earlier in Trent Reznor's oeuvre (in the song "The Wretched"), implying that the remainder of the Year Zero story grew from the concept. There are a number of versions of the image available (including one on the album's cover—see right), but the most chilling one is the trailer for the album currently up at the official album site.

The Presence gives Year Zero some theological depth. The story's attitude to religion goes further than the straightforward critique of evangelicalism: the Presence proves that God is not on the side of those who claim divine guidance. In "The Warning," one of the strongest songs on the album, the ghostly hand speaks:

you've become a virus
killing off his host...
we have come to intervene
you will change your ways and you will make amends
or we will wipe this place clean

The Presence is a warning against our tribalism and selfishness. Year Zero is apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word: if we don't get our act together, it warns us, God will end the world for us. In this regard, there's something remarkably traditional about the eschatology of Year Zero. Though its political origins are the opposite of, say, Left Behind, its attitude towards the relation between God and sinful humanity is the same. We have strayed from the path of righteousness, it tells us, and we are blundering into divine retribution.

The religious themes don't end there, though. The backstory refers to both New Testament apocalypticism and Old Testament prophecy, and one interpretation of the cryptic numbers that appear throughout the Year Zero sites claims that they refer to Jeremiah.

The album itself should be better than it is. Reznor has stated that much of the music was improvised, and it shows—there's more than a little meandering, a lot of by-the-book structuring rather than the tight composition that made The Downward Spiral and Broken work so well. Interestingly, the songs that sound the best are the ones with the most apocalyptic lyrics, particularly the album-closer "Zero Sum," which seems to describe the Presence's destruction of humankind. Nevertheless, after being intrigued by the way in which the cryptic websites set up the story, I couldn't help but be disappointed by the somewhat lackluster way in which the album's lyrics describe that same world. Thankfully, though, the last few songs are good enough to make up for the more unremarkable ones.

There are currently several listings of Year Zero-related websites, the most thorough of which is at NIN Wiki. Several of the listed sites don't go live until the album is released, and the story is expected to continue for three years (probably encompassing another album and possibly even a movie). A good overview of the earliest sites describing the Year Zero world was published in February by MTV.com. The album comes out in the US on Tuesday April 17th from Interscope Records.

For more on apocalypticism in SF, see chapter 10 of The Gospel According to Science Fiction.