Endless Dismal Moan – Lord of Nightmare (2006)

Beneath the contemporary face of its “culture of cuteness”, Japan has throughout its history revealed a remarkable tendency for the macabre, from the darker contours of its folklore to the highly successful wave of Japanese horror cinema that pretty much inaugurated a style of its own in the late 1990s/early 2000s, rapidly attracting international acclaim and a series of remakes from the American film industry. With some of the most popular cultural output reflecting what seems to be a natural fascination with the morbid (plus the fact that we’re dealing with one of the developed nations with the highest suicide rates, with a particular forest infamously associated with the act), we have a classic case of a dark underbelly of an otherwise seemingly happy high-tech neoliberal utopia.

From this context emerges Endless Dismal Moan as the one-man black metal project of Takuya Tsutsui (Chaos 9), who would commit suicide in 2008, leaving behind four full length albums and a few demos that, although sadly underappreciated, are highly celebrated by the few who have come into contact with them. Our first paragraph about the band’s geographical and cultural context is not purposeless, since the idiosyncratic music of EDM presents a visceral vision of despair that sounds distinctively Japanese. In contrast with the almost romantic melancholy of the Norwegian black metal bands and their gothic motifs, EDM opts for an explicitly maniac and deranged mode, more indicative of urban horror than any other setting one might associate with the genre. The music on display here is much less likely to remind one of the dark forests so entrenched in the genre’s imaginarium than the scenario of going insane in an apartment from Osaka and proceeding to go on a murderous rampage (perhaps in the style of Japanese cyberpunk films?). The frequent use of synthesizers lends the music an almost industrial edge that is even more salient in some of the band’s other works, where certain transitions and percussive elements are drawn from the industrial and electronic vocabularies. The high-pitched vocals deserve praise for their appropriately anguished and abysmal quality that the music naturally demands.

The band being clearly skilful, it consciously opts for structures primarily designed to let the listener dwell on each moment and absorb it properly. Thus, the songs usually stick to a single mood articulated by few themes, like the third track with its constant, distant blast-beats and equally subliminal guitar riffing over which the tortured screams glide, the ominous keyboards providing the main melodic intrigue. Besides this indispensable role that is often assigned to them, the ghastly presence of the synths seems to contribute with a nearly supernatural suggestion that complements the more “straightforward” brutality provided by the drums and guitars. Discordant chord progressions, like in “ISLNWD”, are generally favoured in order to further the atmosphere of alienation and insanity. The album’s experimental tendencies find consummation on the last track, where the more conventional riffing and frantic pace of some of the preceding songs give way to a 10-minute doom-paced piece made of screeching guitar feedback and the typically agonized vocals taking center stage, backed as usual by haunting keyboards.

For those tired of the stale imitation that seems to seems to dominate in the genre, Endless Dismal Moan provides a refreshingly unique alternative, presenting a world that is clearly a personal creation, with little regard for tropes and conventions. Although we have chosen this album as a representative and a good option for a start, it is the band’s discography as a whole that we seek to pay tribute to and recommend.