Use your head, take control, use your head, no gods no masters
Chapter I: The Discovery, 1986
I found "Arise!" in our local recordstore "Plattenlädle" sorted in the Punk division of their sortiment. This small recordstore managed to get imports, bootlegs and some other weired stuff. You could sit in a kind of loomchair and have a cigarette while listening to records. Actually, you haven´t to smoke any cigarettes, because everybody smoked in this store. The fact that this record was published by Alternative Tentacles and I already owned the "Fresh fruit.." album from the Dead Kennedys and The first "Bad Brains" album, made me curious. The cover doesn´t look like a typical Punk cover and neither like a Heavy Metal or a Thrash Metal cover in this time.
I bought this reord after having listened to it one time. Everything was new with this record: the lyrics, the music and the missing band picture on the sleeve. My first feeling towards this record was a deep spiritual feeling, an acoustic bible out of a "Mad Max"-movie.
"Arise!" felt in a period of my life, when I finished my school and my military service, when I wanted to study natural science and earned my money by working in my village´s sawmill. I lived almost one year with all the contradictions between being adapted through school, army and university and my deepest inner will to unleash my different personalities to study what I want, to travel where I want to travel and to live how I ever wanted to live.
This ended up in alternating between living in an occupied house in Stuttgart, working in the sawmill in my little village to earn the money to travel and studying chemistry, physics, mathematics.
"No gods, no masters!" was the ignition to become critic towards the aims and the ignorance of social life by the natural sciences, the bourgeois and bohemian life-style in the occupied house which had no political and social impact, the incredible low wage for my work, the school-like university-life and -system, which was and is far away from any creation of an open spirit.
I wrote to Alternative Tentacles to get the lyrics for the record and they sent them to me. So, what I felt instinctivly, was confirmed by the lyrics. To do it yourself.. to liberate yourself, to inform youself, to educate yourself and to maintain your moral point of view in a Kantian way. This record was lightyears ahead of only being angry about politics and corruption, this record taught me to change the handling with problems and to see the solution in the archaic behaviour of mankind.
Yes, and then was "The Monolith".., typical second album, not bad, not good, not new and not different enough. I bought it anyway, "Nobody´s driving", "Falling from Grace", "Coming Home" and "Last Will and Testament" still are great songs.
Chapter II: The Epigones
1991
I deceided to create my own Amebix-Shirt, because there were no possibilities to get them or buy them in Germany. This picture was taken during an excursion in the Tunisian Sahara in 1992.
This is - and since November 2020 - was Jörg Schelling, just called Tschelle, who joined many times his friend Nolde -Martin Arnold- who lives in the occupied house in Stuttgart. Once I entered the "Casino" and he was begging for my self-created Amebix shirt. He couldn´t believe that anybody knows this band or even wears a shirt from them. So I created him an equal one, which I gifted him in the "Stuttgarter Kickers" football stadium.
Some weeks later, Tschelle told me that "Zygote", a band with ex-members of Amebix will play in Stuttgart. The "Casino" didn´t get the licence to play so the concert took place in a former World War 2 shelter und the autonomic center for unemployed people in Stuttgart. There you could have good meals for around 1€ and three levels deeper, there was this huge shelter, completly humid and moist and smelly. A good place for an apocalyptic soundtrack.
I had a talk with Stig, Spider and George. I guess they won´t remember it, a bit of too much speed. So they really had a lot of fun on their tour.
Chapter III: Arise! 2.0
Amebix released their "Sonic Mass" album in 2011 and each and every usual band would have done the usual things like go on tour, do the promotion hell etc. But Amebix split up again. In 2012. It could have been easy to write a review on my own. But I was curious about other reviews how they anticipated with this record. And it took longer to find an almost comprehensive journalist who talked about to feel or to understand this album emotionally and intellectually.
Rob Miller, as is his right, has declined to provide lyrics for the new Amebix album, Sonic Mass. Therefore, I am left to my own devices to discern what it's actually about. Unfortunately, I have not yet succeeded. I do not understand what "God of the Grain" is about, nor how it is connected with the "Shield Wall", or "Here Come the Wolf", or, really, any other track on the album.
I may not comprehend the album, but I do think that I feel what it means, that I apprehend it. For me, old Amebix created a feeling that was unlike anything any other band produced. Within the same album, often within the same song, the lyrics and music were angry, melancholy, disgusted, sad to the point of desperation; yet the tone could suddenly turn to one of empowerment, righteous defiance, even hope. I think that Amebix is the sound right before a man dies, right before Man dies. It is the sound of giving up to the inevitable, mourning the loss. But it is also the sound of a person saying, "I will not give up. Though I may suffer, no one may take my dignity or my rights. I am free, I know what is true, and I cannot be broken." Old Amebix is a gutcheck for me. It makes me stop and think about where I am and who I am, about where and who I want to be, and then it boots me in the ass, down the road to improving myself and the world around me.
On the basis of my emotional understanding, Sonic Mass is the best record Amebix have ever created, shattering my expectations. It feels like Monolith and Arise! and everything else they've released, but it feels stronger and more alive, and it must be treated as an album rather than a collection of songs. Amebix rode 'The Chug' like no other band before or since, turning it into art, rather than just a crude sonic device for inducing moshing or headbanging. With Sonic Mass, they finally have a production with both power and clarity, and, though I feel bad about saying this, they finally have a drummer to match their ambitions. Through age and experience, or a shift in mentality, or perhaps a combination, the songwriting has tightened, and yet the band's attack has been leavened with measures of subtlety and calm, widening the music's emotional range.
It is entirely appropriate that Sonic Mass feels like Amebix always did, because so little has changed in the last two decades. How little we have learned, how little we have grown! We spill our blood in the sands of the Middle East, the jungles of South America and south-east Asia, the mountains of Afghanistan, a thousand other places. Still we slaughter in the name of gods, hollow principles, political differences, the color of skin, make-believe lines on maps. Still we squabble over precious resources, only to squander them. We slowly murder the only home we have ever known.
We still gas ourselves in death camps.
Are we worth saving? Can we save ourselves from ourselves?
Amebix have created a rare and precious thing: a piece of art that makes us think and feel. We need to feel disgust and disappointment at ourselves, and at our rotting, violent excuse for a civilization, but we also need the tiny seed of hope that has been planted. There is a better way.
Sonic Mass, 2011
9. The One
Before the Earth was born we travelled from the stars
We fur like Comets from the Universal Mind
We fused the elements within the rising sun
We are the North, The South, The East, The West, One!
All Sense of Separation, This is your illusion
Allense of segregation, Just Leading to Confusion
We watched the Mighty Fall and Empires Turned to Dust
The cities crumbling into the raging sea
We entered into life that took the human form
We are the air, The Water, The Earth, The Fire!
All Sense of Separation, This is your illusion
Allense of segregation, Just Leading to Confusion
All Sense of Separation, This is your illusion
All Sense of Separation, This is your illusion
Allense of segregation, Just Leading to Confusion
All Sense of Separation, This is your illusion
We are the one
Spoken: Oh Man Look Upon Your Works and Despair
The fundamental essence ever was the same
Born of our Mother Moon, Our Father Sun above Us All Days
Thesis Principles Ever Were the Same, We are in everything and all is part of you
As it is above, so it is below
Open Up Your Eyes, Stand AT the Center of the Earth and Look Around You
The North, The East, The South, The West
The Water, The Air, The Earth, The Fire!
The essence of all Amebix lyrics: this is close to quantum physics and buddhism
Chapter IV: The end of the witch-hunt
Rob Miller´s statement for sacking him out of a contract with Relapse Records by having just another opinion than other people is still a proof of the actual movement of cancelling. By the way; the oldest way to cancel another one are religions. Opinions coming closer to religious obedience than to a diversity of opinions. Actually there´re about 8 billions of different opinions which aren´t controllable. So the aim is to create a mass of conformists and dumbheads to get control about them. There´s no trace of freedom anymore in countries of freedom which aren´t the countries of love like Italy or Spain or Greece. So the only abstract "freedom" which glued mainly protestant countries together has to disappear to separate the societies and also the families. When the binding ties were dropped, the individuals search for another kind of mass or movement to connect. "Give all the idiots a brand new religion!" That´s what Bad Religion sing in "I want to conquer the world". About the hypocrisy and double-standards applied by those who actually want to fight this.
So we are far away from a critical theory, which we were taught in the 70´s and 80´s in school and it was a must to learn it in each and every subject to study. It´s called philosophy of science where you learned to think about the origins of your subject and its social aims. It´s gone now.
A short definition of Critical Theory (Wikipedia)
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to reveal, critique and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. It argues that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, sociology, history, communication theory, philosophy and feminist theory.
Specifically, Critical Theory is a school of thought practiced by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them". Although a product of modernism, and although many of the progenitors of critical theory were skeptical of postmodernism, critical theory is one of the major components of both modern and postmodern thought, and is widely applied in the humanities and social sciences today.
We are far away from this state of a modern society.