An Excruciating Task: Hell and the Path to Suffering
“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.” John Milton, Paradise Lost
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I have an addiction to a certain sound. Its forces are malevolent. They are nightmarish, they are harsh, they are beautiful. They are bass-heavy and fuzz-heavy and the drums are bombastic and the sound is claustrophobic and so warm that it makes you cold, like the feeling of a cold sweat when you wake up under twisted covers after a nightmare.
I love this sound in music and there is no band that perpetrates this crime upon the aural pathways better than Hell.
Hell, some would say, is nothing more than a place you go to suffer when you die. Simple as that. It is “eternal damnation” amidst red skies and sulphuric air. It is an idea to some, a myth to many. Hell, to summarize, is the nightmare that you don’t wake up from.
Hell is also a person. For many of us, it’s someone that has torn us apart and left us broken in some way. For a growing tide of listeners, Hell is most especially a man from Salem, Oregon named M.S.W.
Hell is purposefully shrouded in mystery. M.S.W. gives few interviews and his sound is almost unbearably difficult to categorize. Is it doom? Is it black metal? The answer, for me, is somewhere in-between, that devilish pseudo-genre called blackened doom. The riffs are caustically slow and the bass rumbles like the strings are rubber bands.
When you listen to Hell, you hear the sound a mirror makes when it screams.
Every sound you hear on a Hell album is created by M.S.W. himself, a veteran of the Salem scene who grew up around the inhabitants of the Burial Grounds (a house that contributed to the birth of Blood Incantation, Mania, Unto Others, Mizmor, and more). His iconoclastic approach to music is at times harsh and uncomfortable, at times beautiful and unbearably emotional. He is that rare beast that emerges from the depths, capable of producing the full gamut of emotions from joy to fear to love to hate.
M.S.W.’s music is the sound of the gaping maw of Lucifer beckoning you closer while he looms simultaneously 500 feet above you and five inches behind your neck. You can smell the sulphur, the rotten food, the iron of blood and offal. You can feel fire rising and rising, starting to burn, starting to singe. You can feel true emotional depths, the real hell that so many of us avoid at all costs.
You can feel everything you don’t want to feel and the lesson that Hell is here to teach us is that there’s nothing wrong with enjoying that.
Because there are few, if any, that write a heavier riff than Hell.
A Mirror Screaming
What is dark within me, illumine. This horror will grow mild, this darkness light. – John Milton, Paradise Lost
When you listen to Hell, you hear the sound a mirror makes when it screams.
I asked A.L.N. of Mizmor, often seen behind the drums of Hell onstage and his collaborator on the upcoming album Alluvion, what Hell means to him in particular. They’ve known each other for twenty years as musicians and, above all else, as friends. A.L.N. said several things that stuck out in my mind.
The irony, of course, is that music such as Hell is what drives me onwards
First, he said that it represented “oppressive, hateful heaviness.” Oppressive and hateful may sound like negative terms to many, but when applied to the onslaught of Hell, they are certainly positives. Hell is what happens when sin becomes reality, when forgiveness is forgotten, when hate triumphs over love.
Hell is what happens when the murderer is set loose to kill again. Hell is the triumph of evil over good. Hell is everything you dread come to life.
Musically, these are traits that create – as mentioned above – a terrifying claustrophobia from which there is no escape. M.S.W. almost literally chloroforms you into musical submission. Take, for example, the extended intro of “Mourn,” my favorite of his compositions, from the album Hell III. It is seemingly beautiful and wonderful and exploratory. It is an instrumental masterpiece. Then it descends into the deepest dregs of musical expression, bludgeoning you over and over and over until you beg for mercy.
Take “Sheol,” from the album Splits, perhaps the most abrasive and dare-I-say catchy of his songs – it begins with shrill screams from the depths of idolatrous research into Lucifer and descends into an immersive hellhole of bass and guitar and drums.
Secondly, A.L.N. said it was “the distillation of pain and suffering.” When I listen to Hell, I don’t think of the good things in my life. I don’t think about the fact that I have a home, a car, a job, or a girlfriend who supports me in writing these diatribes. I think instead of the misery that resides in my heart. I think of the darkness in my heart and how it seems interminable to go on. The irony, of course, is that music such as Hell is what drives me onwards. That “distillation of pain and suffering” is the greatest salve I could possibly think of. It is the ointment to my suffering, the bandage to my wound. It is so unbearably dark that the light seems that much brighter.
Third, A.L.N. said that it was “all of my friend M.S.W.’s personality traits and idiosyncrasies embodied in musical form.” This reminded me of the first time I met M.S.W., when he was touring with Mizmor on lead guitar and the band crashed on my floor.
At first, I was stunned by the fact that these musicians that I admire so much were staying in my apartment in Phoenix. Gradually, I came to see them as the beautiful and flawed human beings that they are, beautiful and flawed just as any others are that you come across in this wonderful world we call music.
M.S.W. is kind, soft-spoken, and oftentimes quite funny. He’s genuine, whether in light or in darkness. The shadows under his eyes are not meant to scare you, but are a reflection of the complexity that resides behind his eyes. He is the bearer of both good and bad news, just as his music is beauty and destruction in one horrific conglomeration. You get the sense that, despite his existence as a hero to many, he wants none of it.
What does M.S.W. want? Maybe I’m wrong here, but I think he wants you to listen, to observe, to feel. But above all else, to listen.
Hell: A Plea for Help
“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” – John Milton, Paradise Lost
In a plea for help to finish this, I reached out to Andy Black of Litha, live bassist for Hell and live lead guitarist for Mizmor. I asked him what Hell meant to him, what the sound does to him, what it says to him.
I have descended into Hell and emerged changed. The Hell that I live in is ever present. But at least the soundtrack is better than yours.
“For me, Hell will always have a special place in my heart. It’s a project born from one of my best friends – I love it for that. Sometimes it sounds like grief, sometimes an immense weight, sometimes it just plain rocks. The different flavors of Hell all say a different little bit about who M.S.W. is and his backstory.”
Hell is just that – it is grief, it is weight, it is rock n’ roll. It is the explication of the backstory to a monolith of a creator. For me, Hell is the weight of life brought to the forefront of the psyche. It is the onslaught of emotion made real when emotions are so hard to explain.
Hell is nothing and everything, something and everything. Hell is the beast that lives within you, the beast that you must let out to live as whole. Hell is a monument to grief and suffering and sometimes a monument must be let alone to come to life, to breathe, to suffer and to be. Hell is no myth – it is human, unbearably human.
“The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven” – John Milton, Paradise Lost
I am listening to Hell in a dark room lit only by a candle and the light of my computer screen. The amber glow of flame mixes with the harsh white of digitized experience to create a truly uncomfortable aura. Somehow, when I listen to Hell, I feel like this is the intended vibration of the soul – discomfort, emotion, a plunge into the very depths of the psyche and the human experience.
The first Hell album blasts from the speakers. It is the rawest of his albums, simultaneously unbearable and perfect. I can feel the rumble of the bass in my bowels, the larynx-shredding vocals deep in my brain like a tickle from a parasite. Hell has become the soundtrack to my nights and for the nightmares that result, I am greatly indebted to M.S.W. I don’t know that he would hope for nightmares from his listeners, but I also don’t think he would mind.
The reason for that is simple. To live in Hell is to live in a nightmare, M.S.W.’s nightmare, a depraved dark experience without the hope of redemption. “Brutus” is ending in its glorious climax and along with it, so is my night. I have descended into Hell and emerged changed. The Hell that I live in is ever present. But at least the soundtrack is better than yours.
