Phenomenological Description

Phenomenological Description:

Try to bracket out syntactical and referential elements:

 

The song begins with a bang, one notices the overtones in the bass region of the groove, and its grungy, biting (almost twangy) sound.  The sound is abrasive, pulsing, and relentless; a fellow classmate referred to the sound as a “jackhammer” (although this may be referential, the sound is so sonorously recognizable that the metaphor is appropriate).  The note lengths in the beginning alternate between those that sing (held slightly longer) and those that are cut short to create a chugging, lurching sound; where (early) Metallica may be said to embody the lumbering, horrific, and immense creatures from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Meshuggah may be likened to the brutal, power-hungry and paranoid totalitarian regime of 1984.

From the first note the sound is unified, as if played by one groove-machine (when introducing Meshuggah to one of my jazz professors his response was, “This sounds like it was sequenced on a computer”).  The bass, kick drum, and guitar parts are barely distinguishable as they all are mixed at the same level, causing the recording to sound cold and lifeless, devoid of atmosphere, ambiguity, or shifts in volume.  The left channel provides a cymbal pulse that drives continuous forward, while on the left channel cymbal splashes emphasize points where the pulse and the “jackhammer” collide.  The texture is incredibly dense, it may be referred to as a “hot” medium in the McLuhan sense.  Nothing is left to the imagination, and there are no spaces to fill in by the mind of the listener (like the coolness, say, of a “Sorcerer” by Miles Davis’ second quintet).

At 0:25 Jens Kidman’s angular, scraping voice tears across the density in monotonous flurries; the voice provides a continuous chanting quality, and as the groove-machine changes or increases intensity (such as 2:32) the voice becomes more heightened and frantic.  The voice hammers chillingly away, contrasting with the sustained guitar entrances (which appear out of nowhere at 1:03 and 3:47), which despite the increased length does not provide a lyrical element in the midst of compression; rather the sustained guitars present a hollow, shallow, shiny, and flat sound.  When the higher register guitars return at 3:07 the static, white-noise vocal contrasts remarkable with the transparency of the guitar tone.

The guitar solo (2:57) is an ascending, searching, winding maelstrom of tones and overtones, transforming the shiny timbre of the sustained guitars previously mentioned to a contrasting context (in terms of note sustenance and musical intent), which merges into the lurching section at 3:21.

The song ends with a gradual receding into the horizon.