Chepang-Swatta

Chepang are a mostly Nepali grindcore band. On Swatta, Chepang get a little crazy. The way they do it, a slow-motion, frenzied collapse of their furious machine through the gradual opening of the insanity throttle over 50 minutes resonates pretty deeply, given the various cultural crossroads we find ourselves at. The gleefully frenzied envelope-push of Sides B, and especially C, are grandma’s cozy cableknit sweater knitted from miles of talent and that wonderfully punked-out grind desire to get completely batshit. The hay we could make of Side D’s absolute fuckstorm of an AI driven genre disintegration could feed the entire farm. But Chepang’s thrills ain’t cheap, and even when they’re immediate, they’re well earned. There’s a carefully thought-out progression to their program, to their gradual rattling loose of all but the barest ideas of structure and composition and the tropes that make up the genre. It’s a program that tries, patiently and gradually, to shake off all order, to leave just the boiling cerebral fluid of the genre formerly known as grind. By the end of this thing, the feeling arises that punk is dead, grind is dead, humanity is dead, the idea of grind as a category characterized as the sum total of its musical elements has been fed through a wood chipper and glued back together like a grotesque humanoid meat sculpture. Things get a little crazy sometimes. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy and all that. Sometimes our obsession with order, with arranging into neat little boxes of identity, organism, species, genus, etc. all feels like it’s about to cave in on us, that clinging so desperately to the criteria we’ve chosen to give a sense of identity to the world is what’s brought us into this whole alienated mess. What Chepang seem to have mapped out, intentionally or not, is just how those sets of criteria, blast beats, power chords, sneering attitude, guitar or sax solos, can in fact be chopped up, compiled, mashed together and spewed out by a machine into a demonic simulacrum of what we call a genre. It’s just a bonus that they make it sound completely rad.

–DadKungFu