Diapsiquir – A.N.T.I. (End All Life Productions, 2011)

As an unfortunate byproduct of growing up in the asshole of the Midwest, I live in a city, but I’ve never truly experienced The City. I’ve spent pretty extensive amounts of time in places like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, but I’ve never fully immersed myself in the everyday chaos that is living in the clutches of of a wasteland dominated by skyscrapers and surrounded on all sides by unforgiving concrete and steel. I’ve never lived in that grotesque, hyper-active human funk that I imagine city life to be; I’ve only been a long-term guest at best, a lame-ass tourist at worst. Fortunately I can live vicariously through Diapsiquir’s A.N.T.I., an album that epitomizes what I imagine existence in the bowels of urban Hell to be.

For those unfamiliar, Diapsiquir is a French duo whose music is typically classified as industrial black metal or experimental black metal, but those feeble descriptors don’t even begin to do justice to the musical cluster-fuck that is A.N.T.I.; an album where the most meager hints of black metal collide with industrial/electronic music, punk/hardcore, hip hop and whatever else Toxik and SXC feel like throwing into the mix. It’s a schizophrenic sonic brew that takes numerous listens to adjust to; songs change direction with seemingly no warning, let alone any rhyme or reason, sound piles upon sound piles upon sound, ad infinitum.

So what is it about A.N.T.I. that characterizes the dark side of urban existence? In short: everything. As you listen to the album, there seem to be a hundred different noises fighting to be heard at any given time; a hundred voices shouting over each other in the maelstrom. Every few minutes something new and unexpected happens; sometimes that something is a pleasant surprise, but it’s more often jarring and violent and completely fucked up. It is crowded and dense and beautiful and ugly and sinister… if these things don’t describe life in a major city (at least based upon my admittedly limited experience) then I don’t know what does.

Unfortunately I don’t speak French, and we all know what an incredibly dicey proposition those free online translators are, so in truth I have no idea what Toxik is singing about on A.N.T.I. What I am able to glean from Google Translate seems to indicate deviance, decadence and depression as the album’s prevailing themes; lines like “love and friendship are to be avoided like the plague or diarrhea,” “I kill my guts, dissolving them in pure alcohol” and “I screamed scratch me, cut me, suck me / let me fuck you” are largely self-explanatory. I’m not saying that I believe every part of every major city is a gigantic slum crawling with lunatics, addicts and sex maniacs; I know better than that even with my limited exposure. But, there is something about the idea of The City that takes my mind to those places. When friends from big cities tell you to never ride such and such train after dark, to never get off the freeway at a certain exit, or to avoid an entire neighborhood all-together, one can’t help but imagine crack houses and red light districts and urban war zones.

Any city-dweller reading this probably finds me to be frightfully naïve; they’re likely even laughing at me. But to the outsider, The City is intimidating and full of hideous wonder; especially when the bulk of your life has been lived in an environment that is for the most part squeaky clean and completely free of even a hint of danger. It isn’t my intention to propagate urban stereotypes here, but those stereotypes are so often depicted in popular culture; it’s difficult to avoid them when one grows up with the likes of New Jack City, Scarface or even The Godfather trilogy. Film, television and literature are rife with scenes of someone taking a wrong turn down a dark alley in a strange and hostile city, only to be raped/robbed/maimed/killed or otherwise terrorized. They become impossible to escape, irrevocably burned into your brain. A.N.T.I. is the soundtrack to those scenes and Diapsiquir are the thugs gang-raping your girlfriend and kicking the shit out of you.

All stereotypes and extreme examples aside, A.N.T.I. captures very real, very dark and frightening feelings that aren’t uncommon even to a one-horse town such as the one I live in. The claustrophobia of living in an environment where things are constantly being built and developed and torn down and paved over in an endless vicious cycle, the paranoia of a world where people are constantly climbing over/pissing on each other in order to “get ahead,” the isolation and loneliness that comes with your own neighbors and coworkers rarely (if ever) acknowledging your existence; it’s all present and accounted for here. Yes, even in the asshole of the Midwest you can find fear and loathing; you don’t have to be getting violated in some dingy Chicago back alley or shooting up heroin on a shit/piss/vomit/cum-stained mattress in a New York City drug den to feel the Hell. Perhaps in the end it has nothing at all to do with living amidst urban squalor and decay; maybe this is the human condition circa now, no matter where it is you happen to hang your hat… or yourself.