THE CRAWLING CHAOS
THE CRAWLING CHAOS is a concept album about the violent and inevitable death of the entire universe, personified by god-like entities from beyond the cosmos.
This hellish vision was forged into words by acknowledged American writer Andrew Hughes (who has been collaborating with Morean for some years), resulting in the present six songs and one central invocation (“Xenoglossy”).
The Crawling Chaos is also a passionate hymn to the irrelevance of man, his world and his gods, in the face of forces infinitly larger than man-made heaven and hell. Writers like H.P.Lovecraft can be seen as a
thematic reference, but where Lovecraft resorts to fearful crouching and vague hints, Hughes’s detached observing eye becomes a dehumanized point of perception in a genuine and very personal vision of cosmic desaster.
Besides the familiar Death / Thrash metal orchestration, oriental instruments, a choir, a string orchestra, modest electronic soundprocessing as well as new sculptural instruments built by German artist Ralf Fischer are used on this album to enhance its psychotropic character. The aim is to achieve maximum musical momentum and variety while staying true to extreme Metal at all times.
YOU CAN ORDER THE CRAWLING CHAOS FROM
Songs:
Noneuclid-Worm Clip
Noneuclid-The Digital Diaspora Clip
Noneuclid-The Digital Diaspora Full
Noneuclid-Coming In Tongues Clip
Noneuclid-Void Bitch Clip
Noneuclid-Xenoglossy Clip
Noneuclid-Time Raper Clip
Noneuclid-Murder Of Worlds Clip
total duration: 41:56
Liner notes on THE CRAWLING CHAOS
by Morean
As previously mentioned, this music is for all lovers of more extreme art. You don't have to know what's going on musically in order to enjoy it. Nevertheless, those few of you that are interested in compositional details will find many layers of intricate stuff happening under the surface.
I'd like to mention some things about every song here.
Worm:
The album starts out pretty fast with this song, and in principle slows down with every song. This is symbolic for the advancing process of dying of the cosmos. The bpm numbers through the album are 222 - 180 - 166.5 - 140 (both Void Bitch and Xenoglossy) - 100 / 75 (yes, the verses and chorus of time raper are actually at 200. Every System needs a bit of entropy) - 42.
So Worm is the fastest song of the album. The first riff symbolizes the crawling of worms through the fabric of the universe. It's so fast it becomes slow again (a bitch to play, by the way...). At the very end of the album, this riff comes back in a different context to complete the full circle.
The end of the riff becomes a motive which is developped in the solo, the bridge and the chorus riffs.
The lyrics allude to how humans would react to the news that the world is about to end, namely the reaction we always display when confronted with something new: instant insanity and mayhem. It will not make any difference, though, because neither we nor our homemade gods can do anything when the worm awakes and eats the universe. We are nothing, and always have been in the big picture.
The sample on top of the word "sleep" I recorded in bed in my wife's house in Sarajevo, from the mosque next door which inevitably terrorizes sleepers at 4:30 in the morning with the usual megaphone torture. Interestingly, there is nobody up there in that tower at that hour - it's a fucking tape! If I went round to the imam's bedroom window in the middle of the night, playing "Equimanthorn" at full volume, I'm sure I would have about five seconds to live. If nothing else, Allah is loud...
The Chorus is in eighth triplets, which give it in fact a tempo of 666 bpm. No further comment.
The Digital Diaspora:
The verse riff is introduced in 4-part-tapping, doubled in both guitars and imitated in the bass, before it drops two octaves at the start of the verse. We wanted to try melodic singing over a blast beat, which works quite nicely if you're not a black metal purist. The first bridge ("many-headed hydra") introduces the chorus riff in a preliminary form, the second bridge ("the sun will lose its tongue") an intricate three-part counterpoint over the same blast beat. The beat that follows is a crossbreed between that blastbeat and a halftime downtake and took half a rehearsal to explain. The rest of the song is the same material developped further, and the flamenco guitar outro is the same like the second bridge, just played on different guitars. Sometimes the borders between genres can be hardly more than technicalities.
Coming In Tongues:
The intro riff uses harmonies from Worm, in accordance to repeating and permutating lyrical lines which are found throughout the album. Rhythmically, I like the ambiguity of the song's beat which is at the same time 6/8 and 3/4, but transmits a 4/4-feel. Shifting a single snare hit can sometimes alter the perception of rhythm completely, and convey the illusion that the song went into a totally different part, while eveything except the snare drum in fact stays the same.
Also in the chorus, the instruments play in different rhythmic cycles; the drums play 3/4, the singer sings 6/8, and the guitars play in 5/16. I am proud of the fact that despite this undoubtedly "progressive" approach to composition, the listener is not necessarily aware that these things are going on and can enjoy (fairly) straight songs.
Void Bitch:
Musically the most complex piece on the album. The intro in its first round appears completely atonal, which is enhanced by the fact that the interval structure of the first four bars is exactly inverted in the second four bars before they repeat (meaning half a tone up becomes a major seventh down, a minor third down becomes a major sixth up etc); to the ear however, the two halves sound like two totally different things while being exactly the same notes.
When the guitar solo comes in, it colours the clean guitar into a much more straight-sounding, kind of "tonal" progression - an attempt to illustrate that the endless dispute about tonal / atonal music is in the end completely artificial and unneccessary.
In the verse, both drum and vocal rhythms are shifted a quarter note from a normal 4/4-bar. Because they are both shifted, the rhythmical feeling creates the illusion of a normal beat which is nevertheless strange without being obvious why. The riffs, as in many sections in other songs, are built around and developping along with the rhythm of the lyrics, which were ready before the first note of the album was written.
The chorus is in fact Reggae, albeit rotten Reggae from hell. Bruce is the world's biggest Reggae-hater, so I was a bit scared to do this to him...
The bass solo was initially written as a fourth layer in the intro, but even I had to admit that it's too much, so I gave it its own place.
The middle part seems to come out of nowhere; the story behind it is that when I worked on the lyrical concept of the album with Andrew and he gave me the finished texts two days later (amazing!), I had a commission for choir and string quartet for which I needed lyrics, and since it was going to be recorded anyway I thought, why not use that piece for the album as well?
Since we knew we wouldn't have any budget to record guest musicians, I had to resort to working "around the corner".
So in fact this middle part was the first thing there was of this album, and when I wrote the music of Void Bitch I first added the metal band to the choir and string quartet, then built the rest of the song around it.
Like Coming In Tongues and Time Raper, this piece is structured symmetrically, meaning the development until the middle is reversed till the end (ABCDCBA-form). I'm tired of the same old song structures and chords.
Xenoglossy:
Xenoglossy means "the ability to speak a language one has never heard". In the other songs of this concept album, two perspectives had been used: one from beyond the cosmos, from the eyes of the forces that destroy it (Void Bitch, Murder of Worlds), the other one watching the consequences of this destruction on earth (Worm, The Digital Diaspora, Coming in Tongues, Time Raper).
What was missing was the view from the eyes of the ones that awakened these forces. Xenoglossy gives an intimate look into a secret temple of an unspeakable cult, which celebrates a ritual of communication with entities from the outer chaos, crowned with a sacrifice. It is presented without further explanation.
Time Raper:
When I read the lyrics of this song, the vocals and drums were immediately clear to me; but what to do with the guitars? There were three versions with exactly the same drums and vocals as now, but each time different riffs underneath.
The other problem was that however I stretched the lyrics, even with three repetitions of the chorus the damn thing was only a minute and a half long. So the raping of time became a necessity, and the fact that both intro and outro are entirely out of proportion (because they are both as long as the whole actual song) are only justified by the subject and title of this song.
(Only when I heard the mixed and mastered album version did I believe that this actually really is a song - I made the intro and outro, which are in fact exactly the same, at 5 in the morning, three days before we had to go in the studio, just to put something there. Now, ironically, this riff is one of the highlights of the album for me.)
Murder of Worlds:
The final death throes of a dying universe, watched in peaceful horror from an impossible outside perspective. It's too late to get upset - everything ends, here and now. As all matter in space and time is crunched up and crushed in the ultimate vortex, the world shows itself one more time, dancing ecstatically into oblivion.
The first half of the song (vocals) describes the undescribable Final Truth, the second half (solo) the ecstasy of all existence when meeting its exact and impossible opposite. The slow chords of Xenoglossy form the harmonic basis of this song, reflecting the vastness and spasmic distortion of a world folding around itself. The anyway low 7-string guitars are tuned down further to G; the bass had to be played on a specially constructed instrument (because not even a 5-string-bass reaches these frequencies) and is still an octave below the guitars. (This would be the G under the lowest note of a grand piano, and the lowest note the human ear
can identify as pitch).
NEW
Paranoid Alkaloid
Premiered on january 6th, this is the first song for our upcoming second album.
It is a 7-minute hymn to the revelations of lysergic acid, and the classic incomprehension this divine gift is confronted with in a world too scared for its own potential. And yes, this is Thrash Death Metal.