Music Review, tētēma, geocidal

By Natalie Zina Walschots

There is not a single aspect of tētēma that is easy to pin down. Even when talking about the contributors to the project, things quickly become complicated. Billed as a duo—a collaboration between Mike Patton (who is beautifully credited with “voices,” a gesture towards plurality that attempts to take account of the breadth and depth of the Faith No More singer’s extraordinary talent) and Anthony Pateras (of Thymolphthalein and Pivixki)—the list of artists who contributed to geocidal is much more extensive.

Rather than a strict hierarchy, the tendrils of collaboration branch out rhisomatically, from the drumming of Will Guthrie, to brushes of field recordings and cello, glockenspiel, and startling soprano vocals. Recorded in several countries, in locations that include a convent in rural France, and across many years (the project saw its inception back in 2009), the material that has gone into making geocidal accreted over time, not unlike the way matter accumulates around the gravity of a black hole.

If the composition process evokes the way forces move in the depth of space, the music does even more so. The songs, such as they are, behave much more like celestial bodies than narrative song structures, vast and volatile. This is conceptual aggression at its most unfathomable, not disordered but simply huge and complex on a scale that is rarely seen and difficult to easily grasp.

The closest thing the listener gets to a guide through the void is Mike Patton’s voice. Not that following it is any guarantee that the experience of listening to geocidal will make any more sense or be safer, but it is the closest thing to the recognizable and human in the sea of brilliant alienation. It’s a lot like traveling through space with a robot navigator programmed with a human voice; you know you’re speaking to a different consciousness, but the brushes of familiarity in the vast uncanny valley are comforting.

First single “Tenz” has a supermassive heaviness that still manages to be weirdly nimble, a kind of gravity-defiance that is commonplace throughout the record. There’s a rhythmic anchor to the track, conjured in part by Patton’s incantatory performance, which gives the song a nucleus of sense that the rest of the music spirals out from. “3-2-1 Civilisation” is perhaps the most comforting, centered on a heavy throb and populated with digital bleeps and crackles that have an inhuman, electrical joy.

Geocidal is something closer to aural sculpture or star map than a record, something huge and strange to explore. If you’re interested in compositions that push the boundaries of heavy music, and Mike Patton at his most untethered and weird, then geocidal is exceptional.

Geocidal was released by Ipecac Recordings on December 9.

Natalie Zina Walschots is the Aggressive Tendencies editor at Exclaim!, a PHD candidate at Concordia University studying video games and feminism, and has often been in the newspaper for swearing.