Sounding 008 — The Colour of Tar

For a week I have lived inside three Urfaust songs — a Dutch duo who kept the devil and the light in the same throat — and the feeling still refuses its name.

This week I have played almost nothing but three songs by Urfaust, over and over, until the room took their shape. They were a Dutch pair, IX and VRDRBR, who laboured for twenty years — 2003 to 2023 — at a ritual black metal that slowly shed its rawness and grew toward the sacred: an operatic voice, guitars drowned to the colour of tar, a drone laid like a floor beneath everything. Some music asks to be heard. This asks to be entered. And the three, taken together, carry the whole span the band was capable of — from damnation to transfiguration, and the drowned threshold that lies between.

Offerschaal der Astrologische Mengvormen, which opens their late record Teufelsgeist, is the luminous one — operatic, almost weightless; my partner heard progressive rock in it, and he was not wrong. Nothing demonic remains in it. I keep seeing a single figure bent under an immense load, hauling it up some interminable slope — Sisyphus, if you like, but Sisyphus granted the summit at last — and at the top the light does not fall upon him but passes through him, through the whole lit interior of the soul, so that the labour is not rewarded but transfigured, burned clean into its own completion.

And then Geist ist Teufel — “Spirit is Devil,” the title track of their 2004 debut — terrible and beautiful in the same instant, and nearer to the marrow than almost anything I know. Where the first song ascends, this one presses you into the ground: a wind with no origin, and the listener down in it on both knees, interrogating the earth for an answer the earth has no intention of surrendering. The same operatic throat that bore you upward will, in another song, bury you. That contradiction is the whole engine of the band, sealed in a single breath.

Verächtung Wird Einen Messertragenden Schatten, dredged from the raw early work gathered on Ritual Music for the True Clochard, I love for its texture before anything else — muffled, submerged, low and lo-fi, the sound of a head held under water, or of both ears stopped with wax, until somewhere behind the pressure the dreams begin to seep in through the seal. It is scarcely there, and it is total.

Perhaps that is why the feeling keeps slipping its name. Urfaust is not music one listens to but music one goes under — the way one goes under water, or anaesthetic, or prayer — a rite that can damn and exalt you inside the same half hour and set you down again, ears flooded, in the narrow country between the terror and the light. I have given up deciding which of the two it is.