Studies for the Screams from the Underground: A Tale of Total Worship

By Micah S. Vernon.

I
2005

He frames it like a Renaissance painting. A tranquil room in conflict:

Juan, kneeling atop the bed on the left side of the room, his hands pawing at sketches pinned to corkboards—technical depictions of utilitarian and prosaic objects querulous alongside sacrilegious drawings brought to life with the same pen.

Ligaya, same bed, lying unnaturally still. Her eyes her only movement as she watches Juan over her legs, bent at the knee.

(and what are you doing with your spare time, Edrio?)

Marc, to the right, the second bed, leaning forward, a bottle of Emperador in hand, a brandy-blotted towel around his neck. He witnesses rain siphoned through a muslin roof.

(and this personal project of yours, you’re doing this now?)

Leon, the floor between the beds, centred against the room’s lonely window, cigarette hanging loose on his lips. He bears forward, too, an arm outstretched to the ashtray disturbed by his feet, visage filtered by unsettled ash and alight with the soft glow of a small television upon the same floor.

(and when are you coming home again? I long to see your progress!)

And He, eyes on spilling ash, holding a bucket to catch the rain so slowly siphoned.

(Sige, ingat ka.)

If He could envelop it, they’d all sink into that painting forever, the sky growing dark outside with clouds and rain, the sewers overflowing with their blockages, flooding the streets. If He could truly envelop it, He and all his subjects would be stilled as the wind batters a lonely window in Manila.

His father’s breath chews on silence, bringing sound to thoughts like stopping trains. Edrio holds a bucket and listens intently as his father slowly arrives at the same scheduled questions, and he answers in earnest:

I’ve been thinking of working on a personal project.
Not yet, it’s still in the planning stages—but soon.
Uh, soon, Pa, soon. I’ll show you everything. Maybe once I finish all my studying.
Sige.

He hadn’t told his father about the floods, though he suspects he already knew. Placing the phone in his pocket, he walks back to the room. Leon flinches and kicks the ashtray when Edrio barges in, bucket out (a framing), and then:

the painting unstills.

Tangina p’re, linisin mo nga yan! he says, like his mother has worked her way out through his throat, all her lessons he keeps tied up within himself.

Don’t provoke him, Ligaya says, he might perform one of his satanic rituals on you.

Yeah, and when I do, I won’t have any trouble finding a virgin to sacrifice, Ligaya. Marc, towel.

Marc throws him the towel and he uses it to wipe the floor dry with his foot before he lays the bucket down. Leon, on his knees, sweeps cold ashes into his palm.

He wears a faded shirt bearing the profane façade of a band whose music was as black metal taken apart: HELLHAMMER, their chaotic youth and disjointed style revel in him, all out of time. Edrio looks at his works on the wall, all the organs of mundane life, sketched out before they ever come together—the design of an armchair, the deconstruction of a desk—and then at Juan eyeing his other sketches—the rotted head of the Baptist on a plate, some crude Caravaggio, an undead Christ carrying an upturned cross, some El Greco inversion, and all alongside them, great and detailed works of angels and demons, horsemen and war.

SATANIC RITES

They condense him with questions, speak in fearful cheer of Satan, as though being in Edrio’s presence is a dare to invoke Hell.

JUAN, THE SKETCHES

Edrio, I’ve been thinking. Who would win in a fight, Satan or God?

EDRIO

That depends on who you think your God is.

LIGAYA, THE STILLNESS

Is that idiot professor still harassing you?

EDRIO

(Sits down.)

Nah, not this week, at least, but that might just be because he hasn’t seen me in any of my “satanic” shirts.

LIGAYA, THE STILLNESS

Maybe he’s been busy preparing a raid on the dorm. At any moment he could break down the door, wielding a cross and shouting. (Forms a cross with her fingers, imitating professor) Cease your proselytising, Devil Child!!

EDRIO

That means he’d need to pull the cross out of his arse, first!

MARC, THE EMPERADOR

Edrio, all this blasphemous shit—you know I’m an atheist, too, right?

EDRIO

You’ve told me. But I’m not an atheist.

MARC, THE EMPERADOR

Yeah, of course, I just mean, I’m not Catholic either.

LEON, THE ASHES

(Opens the window. Blackout.)

II
2006

We set two scenes:

ABOVE

Our Edrio nurtures discomfort. The room is as he remembers it. Watercolour paintings pinned to walls, j-cards from old cassettes plastered over the bedhead, stacks of CDs against the desk, the evocation of exuberant youth. Worship music starts. The muffled sound of the cheerfully mourning congregation. His right hand clasped over his left atop disorganised papers.

BELOW

Benjie sets out food for guests, mourners. Rhea sits by her husband’s casket, candles lighting it on all sides. There’s a stillness in her form that’s reflected by the man inside the casket. Worship music starts. The lightness of her smile as people tell her stories and wish her well. Her hands held by her heart.

The scene BELOW loops in suspension, manipulated magnetic tape. Worship music plays. Stillness and lightness. Hands over heart. ABOVE, we see slight deviation. A similar stillness echoes through floor. The nurturing of discomfort. Our Edrio looks around the room—as he remembers it—and sees the j-cards pinned to the bedhead. Centred, one in particular draws his attention. Can you see it, too? RMD Records, 1992. Bright yellow in colour, band names in red, title logo and crude hand-drawn artwork in black: SCREAMS FROM THE UNDERGROUND. He received the tape in a trade, years ago. He doesn’t remember what the music sounds like anymore. A compilation of music from Filipino punk and metal bands, their legacy a lost tape in a box under a bed. But it isn’t the music that draws him to it, it’s the crudeness, the colour, the title, the dedication, the screams from the underground. Can you hear them, too?

ABOVE

Our Edrio gathers his sketches, his minutia of small ideas scattered over vast, empty pages. He leaves them together on one side. Rock music starts. He centres a blank page, begins to sketch out words, scrawling dozens of iterations of the same phrase. Aimless, jagged letters within negative space, or the complex structure of perfect symmetry.

BELOW

Rhea’s head hangs solemnly, in prayer, perhaps, or simply because she is tired. Ahead of her, relatives and friends play card games on a small table, gambling. Rock music starts. Benjie is looking through a few of his father’s old records while the turntable spins. Distant scraps of comfort to guide a lost soul. Worship music.

III

Imagine, for a moment, while ABOVE and BELOW remain tethered on strange loops, that Our Edrio’s thoughts were omnipotently translated into Our narrative. If such an abstract coagulation were to take place—to bring the ephemeral into focus—how might it read? this theoretical collation of transient data?

Here, We stylise it as our own linear text:

“Pa drove me to an underground[1] gig in 2004—Demisor[2]. I told him he didn’t need to come, but he wanted to see what the fuss was about, so he came in, he paid, he stayed back and watched. The detail of the music mostly escapes me, a whirlwind of guttural vocals, pounding drums, distorted guitars, but the texture of it is all still there. An above ground burial in amplifier worship and white noise. The venue was small and the crowd was dense and together we circled the band, caught up in that whirlwind. At some stage in the evening, Mark Sawickis joined them on stage to play ‘My Lai’, which is the one detail that’s hard to forget.[3]

“This is what underground means to me. It isn’t about a particular sound or song. It isn’t about streamlining with modern trends. For these guys, this band, it was about playing the type of music they loved, with the passion they had, for a bunch of sweating diehards in a bar in dry heat, just to express that passion. There’s a power to that type of music or attitude. It was refreshing to see people dedicate their life to something as cosmically meaningless as metal and punk music. They worked for it. I think Pa appreciated that, too. There was a work ethic to it, a work ethic to controlling the power of this art, this noise.

“After the show, I talked with a few people, shot the shit. One of them wore an Abominations of Desolation[4] shirt, which prompted our conversation. After we spoke, he handed me a business card with an address for a record store and a contact email. I still have the card lying around somewhere in my desk drawer. I don’t think I ever contacted him again—there was something ugly about the idea of sharing this stuff over the internet. It gave it permanence. I don’t like that. I like the idea that everything can be lost to history, buried deep in old tape collections and memories. This show, it wasn’t digital, it wasn’t safe, it wasn’t fake, it wasn’t recorded. How many people would know, or care, to share it? How many people would tell of the underground grindcore show in Marikina in 2004, where they saw Mark Sawickis play ‘My Lai’? There was no internet forum there, no forced-culture emails, no correspondence that started with INFERNAL HAILZ, BROTHER and ended with AVE, LUCIFER.[5] No scalpers charging hundreds for t-shirts or tickets or rare test pressings, collectors losing their minds for a first-pressing LP from a second-rate 80s band. No long discourse threads asking for opinions on different albums, no faceless users clawing for cult superiority over the most elite takes they could regurgitate, no conservative posers attached to carefully-crafted online personas espousing ‘underground purity’ in order to vie for some misguided political influence. The constant showboating, grasping for attention, the rise of relevance, it’s all so undignified. The underground is not your agenda.

“When we drove home that night, my ears still rang and my feet felt a little numb. Pa leant over and told me that he didn’t quite understand the music, but it had the same energy he felt from the bands he loved growing up. He tapped the steering wheel to the rhythm of Uriah Heep’s ‘Look at Yourself’.[6] I think that was the last time we ever spent real time together in the years before he died.”

We regard Our two scenes:

ABOVE

Our Edrio gathers his thoughts. He gathers his music. Box of tapes under the bed, CD stacks beside the desk. He picks them apart for information, wherever he can find mailing addresses for bands and labels—their booklets, inserts—and he writes them all down. PO boxes to be mailed, interviews to be requested. He gathers.

BELOW

Rhea, still, tires. Benjie helps his aunt Pia in the kitchen, preparing food for the night’s vigil. His hand is slapped away with a Hoy! as he picks at it in hunger. Danilo gambles with cards and tells stories of his brother, how the cigarette salesmen succumbed to lung cancer. The ways in which God laughs.

ABOVE

Our Edrio makes his way down…

BELOW

…stairs. He goes to his mother, so valiantly still.

Edrio, she says. Did you sleep alright?

Didn’t sleep, he says. Couldn’t.

Go back upstairs, she says. Your brother can watch over Datu while you rest.

It’s okay, Ma, you need it more than I do.

Edrio signals for her to rise and, eventually, she does. He holds her steady while she tries to find balance and when she does he watches her recede from the room. He takes her place coffinside amongst flickering candles and nurtures his discomfort. He locks eyes with his uncle across the room. Danilo lays his cards to rest and walks over.

ABOVE

BELOW

It’s good you relieved your mother of her post, Danilo says. That woman will work herself to death if you let her. What have you been up to? Datu always spoke fondly of your work. Last we spoke, he said you were working on a personal project.

A zine, Edrio says.

A what?

A zine.

A zeen?

Like a magazine.

You’re making a magazine?

Sort of.

What’s in it?

Art, photos, interviews.

And who do you interview?

Bands and record labels. Artists, maybe.

Right. And you’re doing this now?

He doesn’t reply. Danilo’s words simmer in silence.

Nakikiramay ako, Edrio.

He holds onto Edrio’s shoulder hesitantly for a few moments, then leaves.

The scene ABOVE plays out emptily in seeming perpetuity, Our Edrio’s tools for creation all but abandoned. It hears nothing in its current state. Sees nothing. BELOW, We see a yawning deviation. Edrio listens intently to the sounds of early-evening mass from the chapel across the road. Can you hear it, too? Edrio heard it three or more times a week as a child, attended Sundays. If you mute the distractions—chattering guests, worship music, Danilo’s laughter among mourners, Pia’s instructions to the helpful Benjie—you can hear them give sermons in the chapel just outside as the sounds from mass bleed in through the open doors and windows of the house. There is something pure in that type of worship. The prayer, the song. Out there. The word of the Lord. Can you feel Him, too?

Our narrative would be small were We to avoid breaching another thought. From deep inside Our Edrio’s head, We find ourselves (perhaps in vain) rearranging instantaneous thought on a dozen lines of ticker tape as it bleeds out in real time.

We translate once more:

“The chapel is small, but significant. As a child, on approach, it was as though formidable white pillars rose mightily from the ground at its entrance. The cross at its head stood tall in its salute of worship, and it was like staring up at the house of God. To open its doors was to step into a holy place. When you’re young, it can be intimidating to face something so much bigger than yourself—not only physically, but spiritually. Have you ever thought on worship? The word has a weight to it that not many do. A house of worship. Drawn-out monologues by men in robes, the solemn silence of all in attendance, the simple nodding of Pa’s head as he listened and prayed. Was to worship to revere morbidity? The hanging body of Christ, hands nailed to the cross, crown of thorns upon his head. Receiving his body and blood in Holy Communion.[7]

“Pa once said to me, ‘It’s beautiful, Edrio, how his death stands for so much, still.’

The word ‘beautiful’ stood out to me, an anomaly in the abstract. It’s a word I thought reserved for great works of art, or my mother on her birthday. When I was older I understood the essence of art was inherent within struggle, on scales both small and large—the way La fornarina[8] nurses her left breast in protection or exposure, her clothing a dichotomy of two halves. The self-characterisation among disintegrating ruin in Dürer’s Adoration of the Magi[9]. Or perhaps something a mite less interpretive: dragging the bodies of dead gladiators in Luna’s Spoliarium.[10] Remnants of struggle and conflict and beauty resonate from all things.”

“and so, Witness this!

our Beautiful Worship!

in the house where our Saviour hangs!

his moribund eyes so intently still…even now, they watch me.”

“Hell Awaits[11] was the first extreme metal album I came across, a strange inversion of religion and art, its unrefined cover art sharing vague sensibilities with classical Baroque works, reminding me immediately of Rubens’ The Fall of the Damned[12]—the exaggerated form of figures, struggle, colour intensity, the offset framing of all those falling bodies. Though where The Fall of the Damned was almost in reverence with its religious implications, Hell Awaits was the inverse, a sacrilegious exploration of the same imagery, a deviation. It was abstract and dilettante, the provocative cover and song titles and themes perfectly matched the sloppy and imperfect music, itself an abstraction of traditional rock and metal music. It was noisy and visceral and surreal in its completeness of its image and insurrection. It was real and it was ugly and it was beautiful.

“When I showed Pa a sketch of mine a few years ago—an image of a goat-headed Satan holding the decapitated head of Christ, reminiscent of Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath[13]—he said, ‘Fascinating work, Edrio.’ There was no repulsion, no comment on its grotesque nature, no insulted attitude about its blasphemous stance towards the religious imagery that it lampooned. Instead, he seemed impressed—interested, even. I can’t imagine it was anything about its sacrilegious nature that appealed to him, but instead it was its realness. No posturing. It wasn’t the blasphemy he admired, it was the passion and the effort I put into it.

“Posers online may criticise Tom Araya[14] for being religious, or Quorthon[15] for turning from satanic imagery, but it was never the subject matter that made them real. It was a vision, an execution. No number of young bands or fans who dedicate themselves to Satan or dedicate themselves to mockery will understand. Metal is not a platform for props and gimmicks. It is not an image or an idea or set list of requirements. The metal underground is not for your social othering, it is not for your cultural appropriation, those who would use it as nothing more than a vehicle for their ideological pus, those who would use it for political shelter, finding safety through obscurity—fascists like pill bugs curling up or scuttering away when exposed. We do not need their bad-faith support. We do not need their spineless, gutless dedication, all in the name of their own nefarious purposes.[16] Metal in all its abstractions of the world around it is not just the sum of its parts. It for those who feel its influence in every inch of their bodies. It is something can only be felt or expressed. It is ancient and timeless, spiritually uncontrolled art.

“While I may struggle to define something indefinable, I believe Pa understood better than most. He took no offense to my religious detachment, and instead understood my art as less of a statement about religious belief but more of a dedication to the fury of my technique. Even now, the nature of worship consumes me.[17] The chapel is significantly small.”[18]

Two scenes:

ABOVE

…stairs. He attends his desk finds a page that reads:

SCREAMS FROM THE UNDERGROUND
Vol. 1

In Memory of Datu Puyat

He lays another page down. He writes upon its centre a simple creed:

METAL IS NOT YOUR TREND
IT IS NOT YOUR IMAGE
IT IS NOT YOUR BOOTS AND YOUR JACKET
OR YOUR BOOTLEGGED BAND SHIRT

METAL DOES NOT NEED YOUR THOUGHTS
IT DOES NOT NEED YOUR OPINIONS
IT DOES NOT NEED YOUR “SUPPORT”

*
THE SCREAMS FROM THE UNDERGROUND
ARE THE CONSEQUENCE OF ACTION
THE DEATH KNELL OF THOSE BELOW
UTTERED BY THOSE WHO KNOW
“ONLY DEATH IS REAL”
*
– E.P., 2006

BELOW

Our Edrio makes his way up…

Our two scenes do not exist anymore. After the wake, Our Edrio helps carry his father’s casket to the chapel. The days bleed into one another. The house has gone quiet. Our Edrio eyes his father’s guitar. The first one, the discount electric. It sits in the corner of the room, gathering dust the way a busker gathers coins: alone. Rhea brings it up without being prompted.

You said you wanted to learn guitar, she says. Datu got so excited, he went out and bought that guitar the next day.

I don’t remember that, Edrio says.

You were still very young, I think he just wanted an excuse to buy one for himself.

Edrio stays quiet like the house.

VII

A final translation:

“I remember sitting by Pa’s feet in the long nights and listening to him play guitar softly, old rock records playing in the background—Gun, MC5, Budgie.[19] In the days when he worked I took the guitar and played it myself, poor imitations of power chords for a power fantasy I never had the patience to learn. The other guitars hang stoic on the wall now, the classical acoustic, the steel-string dreadnought, the mandolin I never saw him touch—Ma says that was his favourite in his final months.”[20]

VIII
2005

He’s pulled back into the room behind a lonely window in Manila. This tiny drama unfolds. The window has been opened. The storm tears His sketches from the wall, collecting art and ash in its path. His four subjects unfocused in His composition:

Leon, dropping the ashtray.

Marc, taking a drink.

Ligaya, covering her face.

Juan, pawing at sketches unpinned.

In this bizarre twist of fate, Edrio’s art has been pulled out and into flooding streets.

Kainis naman, he says. He marches towards the window and the room coughs as he slams it shut. He looks out into the streets and watches sketches float on a steady current. He doesn’t say another word as he pulls the mattress from underneath Marc and drags it out with him as he leaves the dorm and rushes downstairs. The ground floor is thinly flooded with grey water and he pushes his way out into a narrow alley and drags his feet into the main street, where the water rises considerably. Mattress floating by his side, he wades deeper into the flooding rains and rising sewage. Plastic waste drifts past and he prays under his breath that he won’t encounter anything rotting or dead. His shoes almost swim away as he pulls each foot forward. His hair drips down his face as the winds and rains fly in from all angles. He looks up into the dorm and sees his friends watching him through the window, four heads compressed together just to see. In the open, he expands. He struggles against the current and the wind. He tries not to lose hold of the mattress as he struggles to find stable footing. He sees cigarette butts and dirtied papers ahead of him, face down in the deluge. He angles towards each one and picks them up, slowly, his great and sodden works. After a few minutes, he makes his way back to the spot where his friends can see him from the window. He holds aloft a stack of drowned sketches in the middle of the flooded street.

Jesus weeps as the ink runs.

See this? he says. Shouts. This is your fucking God!

Notes

[1] ‘Underground’ in this instance referring to the obscure movements of the extreme metal and hardcore music scenes at the time.

[2] Demisor is a death metal / grindcore band from Singapore.

[3] Mark Sawickis was the guitarist for American death metal / grindcore band Impetigo, ‘My Lai’ is one of their earliest songs. The impetus for Sawickis’s presence at this show is unclear.

[4] Abominations of Desolation is the first studio album recorded by American death metal band Morbid Angel. Recorded in May of 1986, the album was not officially released until September of 1991.

[5] Expressions like “hails” and “infernal hails” are common greetings amongst the black metal underground. More recently they are often used facetiously in regards to the scene’s comical self-seriousness.

[6] Uriah Heep is a hard / progressive rock band from England, ‘Look at Yourself’ is the opening track for their 1979 studio album of the same name.

[7] One of the seven sacraments of the Catholic faith, the Holy Eucharist, or Holy Communion, is offered at mass. Catholics receive consecrated bread and wine, believed to be the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

[8] Created between 1518 and 1519, The Portrait of a Young Woman, or La fornarina is a painting by Italian artist Raphael. The painting depicts a half-nude woman partially covering her left breast.

[9] Created in 1504, Adoration of the Magi is a painting by German artist Albrecht Dürer. The painting depicts three kings paying homage to an infant Jesus Christ. Though this Nativity scene has been depicted by hundreds of artists over the centuries, Dürer’s painting stands out for his self-characterisation as one of the three kings.

[10] Created in 1884, Spoliarium is a painting by Filipino artist Juan Luna. The painting depicts two dead gladiators being dragged away by Romans.

[11] Hell Awaits is the second full-length studio album by American thrash metal band Slayer.

[12] Created in 1620, The Fall of the Damned, or The Fall of the Rebel Angels is a painting by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens. The painting depicts a mass of bodies being cast down by archangel Michael.

[13] Created sometime between 1605 and 1610, David with the Head of Goliath is a painting by Italian artist Caravaggio. The painting depicts a young David holding up the decapitated head of Goliath by the hair. It is notable for Caravaggio’s self-characterisation in the piece, and its potential manifold interpretations.

[14] Tom Araya was the vocalist and bassist for American thrash metal band Slayer. Araya is openly Catholic, despite the use of Satanic imagery in Slayer’s music.

[15] Thomas Börje Forsberg, most commonly known by his stage-name Quorthon, was the only consistent member and sole songwriter for Swedish metal band Bathory until his death in 2004. Initially using Satanic themes in an attempt to rail against Christianity, Quorthon later discarded Bathory’s Satanic imagery, believing it to be a hoax invented by Christian church, and instead focused on anti-Christianity through Norse mythology and themes of the Viking age moving forward.

[16] It is likely that both here and in Our previous translation, “conservative posers attached to carefully-crafted online personas…” (s. III), Edrio is primarily referring to metal music forum and website American Nihilist Underground Society, abbreviated as ANUS. In the ‘90s and early 2000s, ANUS was one of the few online avenues to find underground metal music discussion and information. Later rebranding as DeathMetal.org, ANUS was known to be filled with conservatives, nationalists, fascists, and neo-Nazis, and commonly used the platform to spread these political ideas with their coverage of underground metal music. It is unclear if Edrio’s distaste for fans using underground music as a vehicle for their political rhetoric extends to musicians as well, but with statements like “it was never the subject matter that made them real”, we can venture a guess that Edrio is more forgiving towards artists with either problematic or entirely artificial views, focusing his attention instead on the conviction with which they create their music.

[17] Is it possible that nothing is genuine?

[18] and so, witness this! Our foolish worship! in the house where Our heroes hang! their fanatical eyes so intently still…even now, they judge Me.

[19] I flicked through discount art books I had found on Pa’s bookshelf while Race with the Devil played.

[20] He never saw what I would do.