Julian Cope’s Album of the Month
HaareThe Temple
AOTM #87, August 2007ce
Released 2004 on Freak Animal
- The Temple (20.01)
- Satori (19.37)
Note: Despite its initially terrifying sound, such were the instant spike-o-logical FX of this Haare album on my melting plastic brain that I have - for nearly four years – stood on the verge of making it an Album of the Month. As its freshness receded, however, and as newer and almost equally novel Ritual Cuntedness plopped itself onto my CD player, it became difficult to justify Haare as my choice. However, when this month two brand new discs of similar musical direction arrived at my door1, I knew that I should be doing Haare’s leader Ilkka Vekka an enormous disservice if I chose either of them ahead of his startling oeuvre. Humming and haare’ing about the house, I finally remembered that IlkkaVekka had, on the record’s inner sleeve, so righteously declared ‘DESTROY FASCISM’. Of course, this statement of intent immediately forced my hand… THE TEMPLE’s time had finally come.
Ilkka Vekka at the controls
A Sort of Conduit; a Wormhole that provides you with Answers to Questions you’ll never Know
The astonishing ritual music of Finland’s Haare sounds as though it was commissioned by Mother Nature herself as the officially approved soundtrack for the creation; y’know the kind of thing – the rending of u-shaped valleys by titanic and unstoppable glaciers; the abrupt rising of the oceans by some distant planet’s having suddenly been knocked out of orbit; the unexpected displacement of ancient peoples by an instant inundation of their traditional homelands; or perhaps the sound of the over-packed and heaving floors of the mythical Ark filled to the brim with terrified animals wailing piteously, as Noah the great Biblical patriarch and his legendary sons struggle seemingly endlessly to raise the venerable hulk’s sagging bottom from the muddy floor of the Mesopotamian Plain. In Haare’s world, analogue synthesizers boil and simmer, Theremins shriek and funeral bells toll for some long forgotten calamity, as freeform bass and electric guitars wriggle and ancient cassettes half-caked with the detritus of untended playback heads struggle to project their sacred encoded messages.
To call THE TEMPLE orgasmic would probably call into question this author’s sexual needs, but its gargantuan presence is so totally mind-manifesting, so debilitating, so brain-crushingly complete that any description short of such purple prose would render the effects of this review far short of Haare’s musical FX; indeed, Metaphysical Orgasm would be closer to a true description of this music’s worth, or my name’s not John Donne. For, in the presence of Haare’s music, even Time stops short and draws back to contemplate, whilst Eternity kicks its heels and wonders just who is this human pretender, this sorcerer’s apprentice whose music dares to emulate the very sound of the Big Bang itself? Like some giant roadie tearing off a piece of five-mile-wide gaffer tape in order to plug temporarily the hole in speaker cones the size of the weather station telescope at Jodrell Bank, Haare’s kosmische noise is to me as enormous as was the terrifying wilderness of Cumbria to Daniel Defoe’s desperate-for-orderliness 17th-century mind. No, it’s not a casual listen and that’s a fact. But then, when was ritual ever intended to be casual, except perhaps to the good old Anglican Church wherein all the mystery (along with every archaic poetic phrase) has been excised and substituted with a chat, a matey parable and a nice hot cup of tea…
Underworld recordings that offer a similarly intense level of near oblivion:
MNEMONIC INDUCTION by Troum & Yen Pox
RED BUDDHA by Stomu Yamashita AKA Yamash’ta
IN OCEANS ABANDDONED BY LIFE I DROWN… by Nordvargr
MUSIC FOR AN UNTITLED FILM… by Lngtché
FOOTNOTES:
- The two records are Nordvargr’s IN OCEANS ABANDONED BY LIFE I DROWN … TO LIVE AGAIN AS A SERVANT OF DARKNESS (Essence Music 008) and MUSIC FOR AN UNTITLED FILM BY T. ZARKKOF by Lngtché (Etude Records 012).
- I know of (but have never heard) Haare’s debut 7” single ‘Sacred Mushroom Clouds’, which was released (in the highly limited edition of 270 copies) on the excellent Finnish label Kult of Nihilow, best known for their three excellent doom albums by Fleshpress and another excellent LP by Tyneside’s glorious doomsters Marzuraan.