Deathprod’s “Occulting Disk” and the Art of the Anti-Fascist Ritual
By Graham Scala
Though the entirety of human history can be viewed as one large conflagration in which blazes of various size burn hot and extinguish in perpetuity, leaving a thick coat of ash from which further development can spring forth like a forest floor after a seasonal burn, one could be forgiven for feeling that in our present moment the world seems particularly ablaze. In Chile, in Hong Kong, in Catalonia, in Lebanon, in Rojava people struggle for the right to assert their basic humanity while simultaneously the authoritarians of the world do what authoritarians are wont to do, opposing them with violence as cold as the grave. However, while Nazis may march in the streets of European capitals and wage pitched battles in the streets of the Pacific Northwest, those on the right side of history are able to express solidarity in ways previous generations couldn’t have imagined, sharing strategy, tactics, and supportive sentiment from halfway across the globe in seconds. Terrifying and electrifying in equal measure, the palpable difficulty of shaking the feeling that we live in the most interesting time to possibly be alive cannot be understated. Against this backdrop, Norwegian sound artist Helge Sten - operating under the moniker Deathprod since the early 1990s - released Occulting Disk, his first album in a decade and a half. Described by Sten as an “anti-fascist ritual”, the contents may at first seem disconcerting but might well be some of the most bracing and relevent work anyone is currently making.
That Occulting Disk isn’t an easy listen should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Sten’s output. For anyone unfamiliar, the question of whether the album’s contents even constitute music per se might not be far from the tip of the tongue. “Song” feels like the wrong word to describe each track and, though eight of the ten pieces feature the word “occultation” in the title, that particular nomenclature seems a little heavy-handed for casual examination. Whatever the descriptor, each component element - whether viewed as a song, a track, or an occultation - hovers around a static tonal core, a single drone around which other elements hover and flit. The pieces with “occultation” in the title all unfurl in a similar fashion, a single tone insistently buzzing and howling as other contradictory and complementary drones weave their way around the tonal nucleus.
The titular variations appear in the form of opener “Disappearance/Reappearance” and penultimate track “Black Transit Of Jupiter’s Third Satellite.” The former - the title of which seems like it could as easily refer to Sten’s own creative output as it could the resurgence in the right wing authoritarianism to which Occulting Disk stands in opposition - introduces the album through the starkest study in contrast offered at any point therein. Sharp clusters of sound stab into otherwise empty expanses, leaving crackling tonal wisps that extend tendril-like, lashing out from each sonic ebullition into the cold void. It may be music writer cliche to praise the notes a musician doesn’t play as much as those they do, but in this case the negative space provides as much of the tonal characteristics as the assertiveness of Sten’s delivery. “Black Transit Of Jupiter’s Third Satellite” - though titled in a manner less explicit than the album’s opener - expounds upon the harsher elements of “Disappearance/Reappearance,” allowing the yin and yang of the former track’s duality to become all yang, a borderline assaultive wall of sound that only gives way to space in its final moments before allowing the album to conclude with one final “occultation.”
Listening to this off-putting assemblage of sounds both tonal and atonal (largely leaning towards the latter), the question may arise of how exactly this relates to the political project at hand. Ignoring the simple explanation that as much of art’s creation (if not more) lies in the intent as it does the execution and therefore if an artist states their work is anti-fascist then one can reasonably believe that it is so, elements of the project’s implementation underscore Sten’s purpose with a stark and single-minded efficacy .
The sheer, terrifying force of the Occulting Disk’s content, especially its opening moments, almost call to mind a totalitarian aesthetic - stark, harsh, and unrelenting. After all, the musical language that Sten speaks descends from the same common ancestor as fascism itself - Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori gave birth to much of 20th Century music’s noisiest avant-garde just as his ideas about aestheticizing the sounds of war and industry inspired a young Benito Mussolini - but Sten’s tongue is sharper, more incisive, more interesting. A closer listen to “Disappearance/Reappearance” reveals that, despite the harsh, mechanized tonal clusters that characterize the piece, each burst of sound trails off with different inflections and each appears from the blank ether at seemingly arbitrary intervals. When it appears, the listener doesn’t expect it, when it’s expected it doesn’t appear. If fascism and other right wing authoritarian belief systems can be seen as the apotheosis of conservatism’s enshrinement of the familiar and the comfortable, moments like this stand in the sharpest contrast to those worldviews.
If the actual content seems rigid and martial, the manner that Sten presents it undercuts that rigidity in subtle ways without sacrificing force. And an explicitly anti-fascist project ought not lack for force. Subtlety abounds in Occulting Disk but the degree to which the album also comes off decidedly unrestrained bears a mention. Hitler himself had said that Nazism would never have taken hold if its opponents had “from the first day annihilated with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement” and, while Sten often seems to dwell on an ambiguous, contemplative take on anti-fascist praxis, he also seems unafraid to wield his soundmaking devices like the weapon they can very much be.
The context in which Sten frames Occulting Disk deserves a mention as well. The repeated use of the word “occult” in both album and track titles and the description of the album as a “ritual” lean heavily on the manner in which esoteric belief systems have become a part of the psychosocial battleground between authoritarianism and its opponents. Much has been made of fascist occultism - some based on actual documented evidence of Nazi interest in the paranormal, the mystical, and the fortean, some based on cheap pulp novels and internet conspiracy theories - and (to the extent to which it was evidence-based at least), these tendencies were a powerful motivating tool. Fascism operates in a slim nexus point between our fascination with and our fear of modernity, and that same modernity often divorces us from the rituals that have characterized the vast majority of human history.
Fascist occultism conveys on its believer a weighty gnosis, an inarguable place in the spectrum of right and wrong, and the greatest success of Occulting Disk comes from offering the same to those who oppose fascism’s infernal machinations. But instead of relying on UFOs, secret societies, or Holy Grail mythologies, Sten offers us something immediate, something largely divorced from historical precedent, and ultimately something possessed of an oblique character that leaves up to the listener what the ritual element of this music entails to them. Unlike authoritarian ceremony, Sten dictates no terms of engagement apart from the project’s general ideological bent, offering something more destabilized and democratic.
Also, while it lacks the exotic sheen and may be far less documented than Nazi occultism, the manner in which the more contemporary (and ever so slightly less fringe) modern Right utilizes means of operating less in line with consensus reality bears mention as well. While much has been said of the post-truth era in which we live, the time when any sort of objective grounding for an argument gives way to the subjective hermetic bubbles of bias provided by internet algorithms that feed ravenously on hyperpartisanship, many - especially on the authoritarian Right - view their part in this as a sort of chaos magic or magical thinking. One only has to recall the 4Chan posters who claim to have “memed” Donald Trump into a presidency (to use one example) to see the alchemical elements to their worldview. Rather than creating gold from base metals, however, these modern-day John Dees form concrete political power from misinformation, disinformation, and outright fiction.
Though putting an exact inception date on the current iteration of Trump’s current political activities might prove inexact, his fixation on Barack Obama’s supposed Kenyan origins was one of the earliest sparks of controversy that fed the conflagration of his current presidency. The “birther” conspiracy started off as fiction but became a fiction so widely believed that it assumed its own agency and its own real-world ramifications. If the common denominator to consensus reality lies with the degree to which actions are subject to ramifications, then this fringe bit of paranoid political theatre demonstrates the degree to which right-wing magical thinking might not will fiction into literal existence but can at least force their non-truths to be considered with the same gravity as objective reality.
It may seem like a stretch to elevate the sharing of a frog meme or an ungrounded conspiracy to the level of occult ritual, but the end result is the same (if not more effective). These symbolic actions, largely cloaked in the internet’s anonymity, are able to transmogrify and destabilize the very nature of what we consider to be real simply through the force of repetition and belief. While an argument could be made for not wanting to stoop to the level of internet trolls, it also bears consideration that allowing them sole provenance over tactics like these provides them the advantage of dictating the terms of engagement.
The material Left’s disinterest in (or distaste for) occult and esoteric matters may spring from a variety of understandable sources - the perception of any hidden gnosis as being fundamentally undemocratic, the idea that less tangible undertakings might not carry the pragmatic weight of more direct praxis, the religious overtones implicit to many of these belief systems, or just that these processes can be tainted by an association with dilettantish New Age pseudospirituality - but the power of ritual, a process long-absent from the lives of many, can prove an atavistic motivating force, providing simultaneous grounding in the present moment and existential connection to something larger than the present tense.
In its deep listening drones and violent discordance, Occulting Disk provides a psychological space both singular and ever-shifting, devoted to a general idea but never settling for a single means of expressing it. It may not necessarily be stirring or didactic in the way most explicitly political music is but it neither rests nor settles and this ephemeral quality stands at the heart of all anti-fascist belief - that the future is yet unwritten, that the best may be yet to come, that the pillars that once stood immovable might yet crumble, and that the end products of these various hopes might exist for the benefit of everyone in equal measure. As everything turns to ash around us, we need a sanctuary in which to retreat. While Occulting Disk may be a strange shield to raise against the slings and arrows of those who would only advance their position in the world with a boot on the neck of those they deem inferior, its density and impenetrability provide some small safe haven where, as the world’s fires intensify, we might take shelter and steel ourselves for whatever might come next.