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Stalaggh: Projekt misanthropia
03/06/10 || Khlysty
Your attention please: I would like you to know that, to properly appreciate Stalaggh and this review, you should, like, TOTALLY DISREGARD THE SCORING AT THE END OF IT, okay? Don’t even look at it. It’s there because it’s a rule that we score our reviews. But, this time around, I don’t think that there’s a proper scoring system for what Stalaggh aimed to create. Actually, I have a feeling that most people who read and adore GD will find nothing of interest in this kind of recording. Anyway, for the couple of readers that are left, I’ll try to elucidate some things.
Stalaggh is/was supposed to be a project of some black metal/noise/avant musicians form Belgium and the Netherlands, the identity of whom was kept a secret (even now, no-one really knows who were the members of this “collective”). Stalaggh takes its name from Nazi concentration camps (stalag) with the added “gh” standing for “global holocaust” and their aim was to create the aural equivalent of pure and raw hatred, psychosis and human degradation. To advance their goals, the bandmembers used as “vocalists” people who suffered from serious mental illnesses, putting them into extreme conditions.
According to the Stalaggh saga, 2003’s “Projekt Nihil” featured a killer and an anorexic, whom the band put into a basement and let them destroy everything there, while recording them for two days. For 2004’s “Projekt Terror” Stalaggh used the “vocalizations” of four mental patients, left to rampage inside a small dark room, and the band upped the ante for 2007’s “Projekt Misanthropia”, by installing microphones, themselves and seven mental patients inside an abandoned factory and a ruined monastery and recording their reactions. After each “recording”, the band edited it, added noise, some drums and guitars and unleashed it to the unsuspecting public.
Supposedly, “Projekt Misanthropia” was the last installment, with the band changing its name to Gulaggh and preparing some more psychotic mayhem. This recording lasts almost 35 minutes and if you thought that Abruptum was crazy, you just don’t know what crazy is. For the whole of the recording, coming out of the noise and static, there are wails, screams, howls, screeches, cries, moans, roars and other unintelligible “vocalizations”, layered one upon the other, to create an unholy and sometimes chilling din. Even if one doesn’t know that these noises are coming from the mouths of tortured individuals, one cannot but feel a deep unease by the psychotic ambiance coming from the speakers.
Of course, this shit is definitely NOT black metal, even though something of a riff makes its appearance somewhere near the last third of the record. Fuck, this ain’t music, except if one considers the harshest recordings of Japan-noise, or Sissy Spasek as “music”. This is noise and after the first shock of listening to it, the whole affair starts to become boring and irritating (I mean, for how long can one listen to a static-slathered sound of a jackhammer and crashing, overlaid with tortured –and, probably, tweaked- screams of people who shouldn’t participate in such an endeavour in the first place?).
Also, I have a feeling that the whole mental-patients-as-vokillists schtick is gimmicky –to say the least- and exhausts whatever morbid curiosity it can provoke to the listener pretty soon. Yes, a thrill may creep up to the listener’s mind (“wow, dude, this is, like, aural snuff, or something!”), but, without any music or anything else that might work as a hook that ensures multiple listens, “Projekt Misanthropia” turns into something of a novelty that, sadly, has no real lasting power and effects towards the public. I wouldn’t call it a failed experiment –it does what’s supposed to do…-, but even if successful, its effects seem less than impressive.
- Information
- Released: 2007
- Label: Autopsy Kitchen Records
- Website: Stalaggh MySpace (fan page)
- Band
- No definitive evidence about the members’ identities
- Tracklist
- 01. Projekt Misanthropia
