Hunting Lodge
Part 2 - Hunting Lodge
Today we go back to the early 80s for a true taste of 2nd generation DIY Industrial. Not to be confused with the mid-00s UK post-punk nostalgia band (reusing names is wicked confusing), this is Hunting Lodge from Port Huron, Michigan. Intentionally following in the muddy footprints of Throbbing Gristle and SPK, Hunting Lodge gives us what i consider the single most important aspect of the Industrial genre, so integral and important that it was Peter Christopherson's actual nickname: Sleazy. We'll get to what that means in a bit.
I ordered a copy of Shack yesterday, and you can hear some of those early tracks on bandcamp, but youtube's gonna have to do the heavy lifting for their other albums. They have a few, but let's just focus on Will, Nomad Souls, and 8-ball.
Will is perhaps the most authentically Ambient of their albums, a front to back tour of catacomb-like rooms wallpapered in black mold and rotting plaster, possibly even that hallway of razor blades those old, blind people constructed in the 1972 Tales from the Crypt movie ("Blind Alleys," Tales from the Crypt #46, Feb/Mar 1955). There aren't any discernable vocals on this album, but if there were they could only be expressing the agony of eternal, yet unidentifiable, torment. You could probably dance to some of it if you had an appropriately shattered pelvis.
From a technical standpoint, yes you feed some horrible distorted sound into a low-fidelity sequencer, loop it in various ways and make other equally ghastly sounds while that's happening, but that's like saying you play the violin by dragging hair across a string and chaotically flapping your fingers at it for a while. See how that's not a useful description? We need some proper artwork to give it some more coherent meaning. This one appears to be a terrible black and white photo of giant electric towers like you see disappearing off to the horizon from the interstate, but close up so you can actually feel the transformers humming before they spontaneously discharge and electrocute you. Good stuff.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kb0pzwtKS5vAXWdG90Q4g3Bvx6ZbspbIE
Nomad Souls is much more percussion oriented, though there's still the all important drones and scrapes and wheezes. It sounds hot and dusty and a little frightening, like at any moment a guy carrying an AK-47 will walk around the corner and offer to swiss-cheese your torso for you. It also contains things that we can't really avoid calling "songs." More chanting or sloganing than poetic verse, but inarguably lyrics, albeit often unintelligible. That's of course to be expected, the overall aesthetic is screaming to be heard above the non-stop mechanical pulverizing force of modern industrialism.
So 8-ball, that's a mostly all songs album. Every Industrial band eventually went that direction, because what other direction is there? I mentioned that way back with Modern English and Mr. SPK himself. I don't understand why you aren't allowed to evolve out of a highly specific type of noise into some type of popular musical output. I like Mertzbow a lot, but at a certain point the notion of "one-trick pony" is going to bubble up to your frontal cortex no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Hard to say Hunting Lodge has lost any of their potent abrasiveness, in spite of being able to legitimately dance to it. Clearly there are some nefarious goings on in the back room of this delapidated pool hall. This is very much Ministry/Front242 territory. Is there a Michigander segment crying sellout? I hope not, this is awesome stuff and i might have to wade into the discog sellers lagoon for a surprisingly cheap copy. Not important.
What is important is that Hunting Lodge is pretty fantastic. They run the gamut from early noisetastrophe to late dancepocalypse, all served with a side of moldy gravy and dessicated wasabi paste. A feast for the ears that would make Vincent Price tear up with pride. Terrifically horrible in all the best possible ways.
Well then, now that we've mistaken the twinkling light on top of the sewage treatment plant for the Christmas star, let's see what Cousin Eddie, i mean the double digit pages of bandcamp, uses to surreptitiously spike tomorrow's egg nog.
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