"Under Diana" (2014), Mystical Ecstasy, and the Futility of Music Reviews

I have spent a good deal of time wondering uselessly about how to approach writing for this blog. Not in the trivial "how does one sit down and type words?" sense (although such things are indeed both difficult and unintuitive to ADHD-bearers such as myself), but in the stylistic, artistic sense. One thing that the internet oft obscures, due to its now over-a-decade-long traditional subculture of repackaging other people's art under the guise of a "review" that amounts to nothing more than a summary and some jokes at the expense of minorities and artists, is that reviewing can feel as aimless as it feels purposeless, both on the reviewer's end and (more importantly) on the audience's end. Reviews are rarely art in themselves, which is to say, their content is rarely expressive, and only adds anything to the experience of the original art being commented on once every geological aeon. As an artist, I am mildly repulsed by this, and generaly feel constrained and disgusted by "formal," "impartial" reviews that do not say anything that is of use to anyone other than pedants and sticklers; hence, I wanted to experiment with something altogether more schizophrenic.

I have recently listened to Ill Wicker's 2014 LP, Under Diana. This album is deceitful: it has only six tracks, but runs for almost an hour; it presents as folk, but is actually something else. Like a hairless dog one might encounter in the outskirts of Patience, Maryland in the kalends of February 1995, a bit too long-limbed and a bit too dexterous and a bit too loud, Under Diana is folk that isn't; it is music that uses the colors of folk to paint a more subtle picture.

We have reached the first roadblock of this thing people call "reviewing music:" it serves no objective purpose at all. There is, stricto sensu, no such thing as bad music, as even music composed with the intent of being "bad" is artistically effective in communicating ideas and intentions from the author to the audience. Bad literature can be construed to exist; there are authors that use the wrong words, that by lack of skill construct things that are boring and inefficient, that say the wrong thing (or perhaps the harmful thing) entirely by accident due to unfamiliarity with the medium. Bad music is as likely as anything impossible to be impossible; unfamiliarity with music produces outsider art; wrongly-messaged lyrics interact with willful, composed instrumentals; harmful lyrics, or harmfully-inclined artists, still make music that may well be enrapturing, interesting, danceworthy, or in the worst of scenarios, instrumental. 

So, one must be confronted with the challenge of writing "reviews" as a piece of literature; as something whose purpose is not strictly to provide customer-facing feedback on the quality of a piece, but instead to hold its own artistic value. This is the object, largely, of this article; to comment on Under Diana in a subtler fashion, on its effect subjectively on the psyche of the writer. Let's begin.

On Mysticism

"Mysticism," in the religious studies context, is a technical term. It refers to the direct experience of the transcendental by an immanent observer; i.e., to a "supernatural" experience a subject has connecting themselves directly to divinity. Often, mystical episodes involve a sort of altered state of mood or thought; more often than not, this altered state is one of "mystical ecstasy," a manic episode of sorts where one's spirit is lifted into activity and strong compulsions are received to speak in incantatory gibberish (glossolalia), to dance expressively, to scream, or to indulge some other urge. In this way, the body is engaged in the divinity observed by the mind; the ecstatic extremity of the activity expresses itself involuntarily in the flesh. 

I was born to a devoutly Pentecostal mother; this has brought me many misfortunes during my lifetime. However, alongside those misfortunes, it has also brought me a breadth of experience with the mystical. Of course, Pentecostalism is traditionally defined precisely by its "encouragement" (really, requirement) of mystical experiences in its adherents; it is simply expected that all Pentecostals will, at the very least, "speak in tongues" more than once, and allow themselves to be "filled with the Holy Spirit" often enough that they will also do other things (notoriously, dancing or discoursing about theological matters). 

However, for this to be seen as "constructive" and "legitimate," the mystical experience in question must be manufactured to fit a certain set of criteria: it must be religious, for one, and decidedly "Christian" according to the interpretative guidelines of the collective Pentecostal community; it must be incited by a "filling up by the Holy Spirit," ideally in a religious context, i.e. during prayer, or worship; and it must be "authentic" without being overtly shocking, i.e. conform to expectations (speaking or interpreting tongues; spontaneous but "chaste" dancing; healing, visions, loss-of-consciousness, etc.). If your mysticism does not conform, or involves any sort of "twisting" of these criteria, it must be demonic, or at the most charitable interpretation "untrue" or "put on." Reactions to such episodes range from shock to abjection; often those in the latter camp will proceed to request exorcisms and such of the individual undergoing such experiences.

I find this curious and more than a little disturbing, if not for anything else then for that old adage that "God reveals Himself in mysterious ways" being completely ignored. There is an inherent cognitive dissonance in Pentecostalism; it accepts a uniquely personal God that communicates mystically with people and reveals to them hidden truths, but prescribes all "legitimate" means of communication and proscribes those seen as "incorrect." In doing this, Pentecostalism both diminishes God --- from an entity of extreme breadth and adaptability to a box of stock attributes that are well-known by people --- and offends the core subjectivity of the humano-divine relationship that it preaches. 

This is all to preface the statement that Under Diana is, to me, a mystical album. It is mystical because it induces mystical experience; its layered compositions and haughty musicianship, the harmonics-laden vocal harmonization and difficult-to-interpret lyrics, these things enrapture me and lift me from my seat without failure. The first time I listened to Under Diana, I felt entranced; before I knew it, I was singing loudly along, dancing around my small apartment, completely taken up by the purity of the music in a genuine saturnine ecstasy. It was wonderful, intuitive, complete; what else ought folk be? Folk music is the common language of humanity; the way that people used to communicate their thoughts, their myths, their philosophy and their stories around fires in the dawn of our species, extant in the blood of mankind long prior to the invention of writing. That Under Diana immediately and instantly produces such an effect on the listener is about the highest form of self-evident excellence that it could ever hope to achieve; and yet, that very excellence makes it challenging and shocking. If common, secular music recorded in some European studio with perfectly ordinary performers and instruments can raise one's spirit to the divine, bring one to sing in tongues and dance freely with abandon, then what higher value is there in the prescribed, rigid rituals of the world's churches and denominations?

Under Diana is a favorite among the albums I have listened to in recent months; it is raw, unafraid, at once melodic and dissonant, traditional and boldly modern, inspired simultaneously by Irish folk and modernist classical music, full of heavy and difficult chords that resonate intensely into sensefulness. It is loud and quiet; overjoyed and deeply depressed. It is in a word a perfectly human album; an excellent addition to the pantheon of contemporary folk music.

Please listen to it.