May 192017
 

 

The brutish compulsions and unforced vices of daily life pour us like hot clay into forms. We move and solidify into shapes, and twist into shadows. Never quite as solid as stones, but at risk of freezing in our steps. The poison of implacable cell death leeches us from our first breaths, but provides a bargain — there is glory to be found in those breaths, if we can only find it before it is too late.

All of this doom, and all of this potential for exultation… art has ever sought to capture the experience. Probably, the intensity of our creeping and bounding on the edge of the precipice can’t really be captured by art, but Dødsengel come very close. Perilously close.

 

 

Walt Whitman coined a beautiful phrase in the name of his poem, “I Sing the Body Electric”, and followed it with these verses:

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

I don’t claim to fully understand these words, and I damned sure don’t claim to understand the full panoply of what Dødsengal have wrought on this new album you’re about to hear, but I do believe that, like Whitman, they have stretched to capture the terror and the ecstasy, the hopelessness and the exultation, the frenzy and the futility, of our chaotic lives. They’ve stretched further than most, and they’ve come closer than most.

And with that, I’ll leave you to dive into this evocative well of emotions. It may fuck you up, and it may also snap some of the chains that tie you down. Either way, it’s an intense, dramatic, unpredictable, glorious experience that shouldn’t be missed.

This is Interequinox. And this is more of Whitman:

“Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable….”

The album is available today (May 19th) at the Debemur Morti Productions webshop on digipack CD, 12″ LP, and special edition 12″ LP at this address:

http://www.debemur-morti.com/en/61-dodsengel-discography

And on Bandcamp here:

https://dmp666.bandcamp.com/album/interequinox

  7 Responses to “AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: DØDSENGEL — “INTEREQUINOX””

  1. Haven’t had a chance to get all the way through this album, but the reference that Whitman poem struck me, as I just recently came across it as an intertext to Thomas Mann’s 1927 novel The Magic Mountain, about which I took a class during the winter quarter. It’s an absolutely fantastic and viscerally evocative poem, well worth immersing oneself in. What I’ve heard from this Dodsengel album certainly seems to evoke an emotional, physically stimulating exultation similar to that which the poem employs.

    • You are very nice to say that. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sober when I wrote the introduction (which is an understatement) — the poem popped into my head as I was thinking about the music, and I sort of got carried away. In the cold light of this morning, I wasn’t sure about whether what I had done made any sense. 🙂 But it is a great poem.

      • Some of the most perceptive associations, and best writing, comes from not-entirely-sober states of mind 😛

        • Thank you again… and I hope you’ve been well, though I think I have no idea what you’e up to these days.

          • You as well! I’ve been a bit quiet around here lately, but I still check back every day to see what’s been posted. Adding a second major in a language I’m still in the process of learning has really done a number on my time management, but hopefully sometime soon I’ll find a bit of time to cobble together another guest post of some sort.

      • Damn! You should experiment on doing that more often, and mixing in more liqueur into the equation 😛
        This album is one heavy motherfucker to wrap the head around.
        Also, “Dödsengel”? Shame on you!

        • Well, shit. As I’ve possibly remarked before, a person who acts as his own editor is on a fool’s errand. In other news, I was so wasted last night when I wrote this that I seriously considered hospitalization today. Having ingested the hair of the dog at a late lunch, however, I think I will survive.

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