Spirituality is something we often associate with a variety of things apparent in everyday life, from the most mundane natural pattern observation to the most detailed esoteric practices, and everything in between. One medium somewhat collectively and often linked to that, is music, and for very explicit reasons. I don’t think I need to spell out what kind of an experience it is to listen to something and feel one with it; to hear and feel things differentiated from the norm and hovering in elevated thoughts. This type of spirituality can of course present itself in equally vibrant and distinct ways, some in a more positive manner, and some in, well, the opposite of that. Today we focus on the latter.
Sutekh Hexen is an Oakland-based collective focusing on the aural dark arts, conjuring fever dream level mystical dreads through their unique blend of black metal, noise, and dark ambient, amongst other stylistic leanings. Being our Weekly Featured Artist for a reason, Sutekh Hexen is a rather unrestrained phenomenon, and in the following wall of text I aim to shed some kind of a light to this pitch black mass, or at least offer a perspective on it.
Sutekh Hexen was formed in 2009, and aside from a few demos, have released at least nine full-lengths, a handful of EPs, live albums and compilations, as well as singles and whatnot specialties. That is a pretty swell pace for a band that has been active for the past seventeen years, fully dedicating themselves to their own identity with various collaborators along the way. Being prolific is one thing, but adhering to consistency is something else entirely, and Sutekh Hexen are a living example of how to excel on both, without compromising either regardless of what tumultuous winds are blowing in the shadows or who is brought on board to do what. Holding oneself to only the highest standard is a luxury only few of us can afford, after all.
As is perhaps obvious, Sutekh Hexen fits to the image painted during the opening paragraph on the more dismal and abysmal end of it. There is no light here, but something visceral and disgusting, that’s both repulsive yet unbelievably addicting, something that gets under your skin without you noticing it until it’s too late. When you do, you are already paralyzed and just feel something crawling in and out of yourself, transfixed on horrors, but enjoying every second of it in some perverse manner. I know how absurd that is, but hey, I don’t make the rules.
Inspecting each of the band’s releases would be a stygian task not maybe entirely fit for this purpose, so I’ll just pick apart whatever I think is necessary to convey the act’s artistry in the most eloquent fashion possible.
Luciform, the band’s first full-length that tailed a bunch of demos and EPs, came out on 2011, to strike caustic daggers into the hearts of an unsuspecting wider audience. The opening track “The Great Whore” kicks in with an insanely abrasive and raw ethos, that the band has circled around since, and acted as a primal vessel to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The remainder of the album is overall less band oriented and aims to build more abstract structures, as you can hear on tracks like “In Worship They Weep His Name” and “Serpents”.
The abovementioned abstract approach has always served Sutekh Hexen (or the other way round) to an extremely successful degree. Most of the instrumentation evades basic understanding of musical notions, half of their song titles are indecipherable or too specific to mean anything to anyone external, the structures are something completely bereft of any standardizations, and the songs themselves tend to be of the longer kind, some running for over thirty minutes and constituting single-track albums, some going significantly longer than that. A good example of all of the previous would be the 2017 release (44.947089, -123.031742) (45.521560, -122.527929), which is made up of two tracks, “]A[” and “]B[“, clocking in over two and a half hours combined.
The album was, according to the band, manifested during a total solar eclipse and document the re-envisioning of the original source material previously released on Salem, a live album from the previous year. The result quite extraordinarily evokes the sight of an unfathomable shadow slowly creeping across the Earth and engulfing everything in darkness, and through eardrum-shattering sub-frequent drones, crackles, and pulsations, only a barren wasteland remains.
The mentioned collaborative aspect has always introduced some new hues to Sutekh Hexen‘s invoking deconstructionist agenda, and while all of them are noteworthy, the ones I’ll raise above the rest are One Hundred Year Storm with Trepaneringsritualen and P:R:I:S:M with Funerary Call, the latter of which I reviewed over here.
While One Hundred Year Storm heavily revolves around dynamics and the ebb and flow of all things natural and beyond, P:R:I:S:M oozes an obsidian sludge in an acrid, more song-oriented manner. Each of these albums are completely different from each other apart from some underlying red threads that are woven together in Sutekh Hexen‘s grand tapestry, where the collaborative artists melt together to form something entirely new. That would be the very essence of a collaboration exemplified, I think.
While the methods and tools vary, Sutekh Hexen has always had a very organic and tangible sound to them, which is why it was quite surprising that the prospect of performing live only came to be as a second thought, albeit then quickly evolving into an important aspect in the act’s existence. I generally find it disgusting as fuck when bands refer to their live shows as ‘rituals’, but at the same time, there are instances where the word is an apt descriptor of something shrouded emerging momentarily in a shared place and time, instead of just being a buzzword concocted by some doll-faced buffoon’s marketing agency.
The ritual aesthetic has been present in Sutekh Hexen‘s doings since day one, and within, it actually bears meaning and significance. While the live albums are great examples of this and, frankly, worth listening due to the immaculate material they conceal inside them, I’d personally lift the 2012 Become and the 2019 S/T as the essential ‘I wish I was there in the room to see what kind of a cacophonic abyss these things were summoned from’ releases. Once again, each has very little to do with the other, but both just carry that particular something that carves so fucking deep.
Meditative and hypnotic, the self-titled album (also being the band’s first studio album, for those who care) is probably the one I’d recommend to anyone not familiar with the act’s abysmal ways. The ten songs make up for what I’d dare to say is their most fully-realised and sovereign album, mostly due to factors that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe that’s the exact reason for that, who knows. What I know, though, is that stuff like “SubStratus” or “E Siel Enna Lechim” will ravage the souls of even the most snobbed out connoisseurs of this type of music to a violent end.
On that train of thought, particularly the ‘this type of music’ bit, I wonder how effective it is to call things of Sutekh Hexen‘s nature music to begin with? Yes, of course the musical aspects are there, duh, but at the same time it just feels like so much more, that a simple term like that, no matter how obvious, falls rather short. The grim world the band and its primus motor Kevin Gan Yuen have built is indeed so much more than just music; it’s a state of mind, an experience, the haunting feeling of your past mistakes joining hands with the ones you’ll make in the future, each and every piece of lint in the corner of your soul magnified thousandfold, and so much more. Spiritual? Yes. Just not exactly in the dandy way.
With last year’s magnificent, tortuous, and bleak Primeval slowly finding its way out of my stereos and into the physical realm as yet another demon I’d rather not face, I’ll bid you farewell and thank you for reading on my musings about these forsaken things that matter very little to most yet mean the world to us. Go follow Sutekh Hexen on Facebook and Instagram, and get acquainted with their massive discography over at their Bandcamp. Prepare for one messed up hellish ride and to empty your pockets while you’re over there.
