Maurice de Jong‘s latest project MASSA/GRAF has me thinking about Lon Chaney, “The Man of a Thousand Faces”. Widely regarded as one of American cinema’s most versatile and powerful actors, Chaney was (as portrayed here) “renowned for his characterizations of tortured, often grotesque and afflicted, characters and for his groundbreaking artistry with makeup”.

De Jong doesn’t have Chaney‘s fame, but he has been a person of prolific musical guises, more than 40 of them according to Metal-Archives, perhaps best known for Gnaw Their Tongues and Cloak of Altering. And many of those guises, like Chaney‘s most famous ones in London After Midnight, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, have been dark, disturbing, even horrifying.

The article linked above includes something the great Ray Bradbury wrote about Chaney:

“He was someone who acted out our psyches. He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them on-screen. The history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that’s grotesque, that the world will turn away from.”

That too resonates when listening to some of De Jong‘s musical manifestations. (Put aside the fact that all but one of Chaney‘s films were silent movies and that De Jong is a sonic artist.)

What guise has De Jong assumed in MASSA/GRAF and the project’s debut album The/Deholyfied? Continue reading »