Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, frontman for the theory-forward black metal band Liturgy, is a big fan of continental philosophy—Nietzsche, the German Idealists, and psychoanalysis—and he’s used the lessons from his readings to craft an entire mythological system to drive the writing of his music. In his music, if you choose to believe it, there are messianic figures, divine life sources, and origin stories, one of which gives him the name for a new electronic side-project called Kel Valhaal.
The Sparknotes for his mythology goes something like this: A powerful deity/force of energy called 01010n gave her “light” to a messianic figure called S/he/im (us paltry mortals at our highest perhaps) who couldn’t handle all that power, so was destroyed immediately. So 01010n leaves the universe, leaving a flicker of energy called “The Genesis Caul,” guarded by two figures, Reign Array and Kel Valhaal. Their task for all of eternity is to produce “poetic/cultural/symbolic structures that might work as prisms so as to refract and reflect 01010n’s light.” Hunt-Hendrix’s debut album as Kel Valhaal, New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala, is supposed to be the first “poetic/cultural/symbolic structure” that will help us come to grips with the awesome power of 01010n. The way for us to see this light? Apparently, it is through what Hunt-Hendrix has described in an interview with *THUMP *as an “art shaman character—a rapping art shaman.”
According to Hunt-Hendrix, the music is supposed to mix acid house, industrial noise, and glitch with Southern rap. A best-case-scenario result might be “Tim Hecker meets Bone Thugs-N-Harmony,” or somewhere near Dälek or Death Grips. It opens with “Mea Culpa” a short instrumental intro, that sounds like an action sequence in a Z-grade sci-fi horror film: Jason X, maybe, or Battlefield Earth. After this inauspicious start, we're treated with the first track with, uh, art shaman rapping, “Tense Stage.” It’s almost impossible to catch what he says, and once his voice enters, notes and noises get splattered like a bucket of paint thrown from a skyscraper window. If you expect to glean any knowledge from Hunt-Hendrix’s lyrics, perhaps in order to harness 01010n’s light ....don’t, because as he’s said in the past: “I just free-associate prophetic nonsense, and then I find a way to deliver it.”
The album’s two best songs are very short tracks like “Bezel,” which utilizes washes of static paired up against claustrophobic keys and spare organ notes, or “NMWE” the only palatable vocal track because it is completely muted. The greatest musical offense that can be found in *NILOTSOTQ *is its centerpiece “Ontological Love.” It is the album's longest song, coming in at ten minutes, and the most Southern rap influenced and rap heavy piece on the album as well. Strange approximations of Mike WiLL Made-It’s murky drum machine whacks and whimsical synth arpeggiations occupy the entire space of the first three minutes. And when he does start singing, almost five minutes have passed by, and his badly processed voice comes off as nasally and out of focus. He screams the chorus (“Ontological love!”) in a robotic monotone that is equally lifeless and clownish. It’s purposefully confusing and uncomfortable, without any actual goal in mind.
Hunt-Hendrix’s interviews have indicated that in some ways, maybe, he is in on the joke. But if that is so, why is this project so self-serious and utterly humorless? He is bold enough to say that his music, his career, will be a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork so engrossing and multivalent that it speaks to all walks of life. And yet his music, time and again, is treated like an afterthought, just another piece of a larger and more pointless scheme of self-aggrandizement.
