(desperation + noise)

Photo by: Gergana Antonova, licensed through Creative Commons.

I put the fire out. Its purpose had been served. My clothes, my tent, my food—all were now a black vision of themselves.

The only visible bodies now are the silhouettes of dark trees. Mountains distorted by fog and sky. The yawning mouth of hell.

I stumble toward a hillside. It regards me with disinterest, giving way to my wretched stomp. As I walk, my nerves feel nothing but noise—the muffled panic of drifting blindly through foreign terrain, everything oppressed by shadow, every shadow teeming with untapped howls.

The mouth swallowing.

I kneel. I dig. You have left me this way. Wanting nothing more than to be buried.

Ebben’s words briefly penetrate the noise, reminding me of how Dear Astronaut evolved. How what was once a mere observer of horrors could suddenly emulate them, allowing them to echo internally, eternally.

“As we wrote as a band more, the songs got more interesting,” Ebben says. “More sort of ramshackle as well.”

And eventually interesting and ramshackle enough to forge a space in which comets of thought may explode and incur casualties. It is impossible to say where this echoed darkness originated, one can only trust Ebben’s word of its natural arc, but it is not comforting to know that something that feeds so heavily off the human psyche came into being through natural causes.

“I started playing with this guy Frank Knaebe,” Ebben says. “He’s also in a wonderful sort of apocalyptic folk band called Partisan. And my good friend Scott Emmerich who used to be a guitarist in a hardcore band, a crust band called Legion of Doom, and he started playing the drums, so everything sort of just came together. We started playing together a lot. We recorded an album kind of right off the bat and it’s The Dark Forest.”

The Dark Forest is probably the first folk-doom-black metal record, I don’t know, there may be antecedents, but if I had them they would be burning anyway, they wouldn’t matter in all this storm and din. The chords are all oil-thick, a murk of endless depth, but they sound as though they were recorded through something thin, high and lonesome, like a box of rain.

Here Ebben’s gone mad on mountaintops and he’s come back down to tell us of what he saw. And worse, what he did not see at all. The whole affair like Black Sabbath walled off in the wood, reading William Blake from the hills of dying meadows, their brains hissing from drugs and scenery.

And the title track with its opening thump like beating the inside of a skull until broken, the exploding guitar-and-cymbal chaos like all the colors that emerge when even the faintest light shines on cracked bone—this is the kind of music whose predatory shrieks freeze your nervous system, for it is easier to be devoured alive while disconnected from your all-too-feeling components.

Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging. Digging until my limbs go limp from fatigue. Unearthing rotting roots.

And The Dark Forest would be enough to give violent birth to this scene I’ve made were the record just the sound of human life thrashed in jet engines.

But no.

Your father’s fingers were thick and short
And calloused on the tips
Your father’s lips were thin and dark
And spiders fell from them!

“The Dark Forest, the songs on that, are part of a song cycle which I think at this point is never going to be completely realized,” says Ebben. “Originally when I just was playing by myself it was going to be a full length called Dandelions… and it’s sort of this song cycle about a couple… basically their relationship is falling apart. It’s falling apart particularly because of drugs and this shared history of terrible, traumatic things having happened.”

It is the kind of trauma born of fathers shaking cameras in their thick hands, the flash burning the memory in. The kind that causes us to drift toward a bliss both forced and needled. The kind that will blister any positive threads to others.

Our hands will adhere to each other but they will sweat a growing resentment. And I will feed my shadows with false contentment so as to keep them wall-bound.

“I would say in a lot of ways ‘The Spider’ is sort of key to all that, the centerpiece to the trauma of psychological terror,” says Ebben. “When it comes down to it I would say The Dark Forest and the Dandelions songs are about, above all else, emotional and sexual violence… trying to figure out these subjects as they relate to my own life and the lives of people I know and just sort of trying to wrap my head around something that’s completely un-fucking-fathomable, how people do these things to each other.”

At least half of “The Spider” is dedicated to breaking down. Once Ebben indicates the perch from which spiders descend, all instruments fall into chaos, lost in the black space between upturned photographs. Pictures of a trusted figure’s sickness.

All acting as ankle weights by the time we reach “The Black Lake.”

I went to the lake
I was thinking of you
And the way your limbs fell
And the way we’re all just animals.

These limbs are dead, numb, gone pale green like sea water, for someone saw a vision of disconnection so ultimate and sweet that nothing else could possibly live up to it, so everything within had to drown itself, had to contract and let once-warm connective vessels blissfully ice over.

You have this and I wish you well. All I have is this hole I’ve dug, which is now body-sized. I slide in and let the dirt cascade from above.

I hear the new record, Escape from Rainbow Mountain (release date undetermined), in the distance and it is all space colonized by darkness, mountains staking out new territory translated to expansive metal fury. Guitars set to war. It is lovely enough to make even self-made elaborate death traps irrelevant.

I hear the deathless rush of “A Whisper Growing.” I feel warmth return to my fingers despite being surrounded by cold earth. I try to scream my way back out.

My mouth is full of dirt.