Review Summary: The most delicious mouthful of glass you will ever chew
At some point, I decided I would become an unlikely champion for the creations of Jute Gyte. I had already engaged in multiple bouts of self-flagellation for having failed to enjoy
Oviri - and then I realised, far too late, that I was in fact a masochist.
Perdurance is ever so slightly more tuneful than
Oviri, though it stays true to its microtonal black metal roots. It’s certainly enough to put a Glasgow smile on my face.
Perdurance is built on layers upon layers of mathematical intricacies (“33-beat hypermeter”, “process-based gradient structures”) which really showcase Jute Gyte’s attention to rhythm and detail. Not that my opinion on that matters, of course. You’ll be lobotomizing yourself without anaesthesia to the tinnitus-inducing hums of “I Am in Athens and Pericles Is Young”, spasming and flailing your limbs to the disgusting grooves of “At the Limit of Fertile Land”. How Jute Gyte manages to inject groove, out of all things, into his needle-ridden sandpaper riffs is beyond my comprehension. It is all grating, so inherently revolting, but I can’t help but reach for seconds, and thirds, and fourths until I’ve established my 7:8 ratio of pleasure to pain.
If I’m sounding a bit insane, it’s because I am. Some amount of insanity is essential to the Jute Gyte experience - one half to begin listening in the first place, and the other half to lap up an entire record with glee. I’ll gladly trepan you if you consider yourself to be too sane for this record, but then
Perdurance does a pretty good job of that itself. “Consciousness Is Nature’s Nightmare”, "we are damned by the will to live”, so why not carve out your own brains with the jagged knife that Jute Gyte has so kindly provided you? The succession of notes that concludes “Consciousness is Nature’s Nightmare” is positively nauseating, so harsh and unrelenting is the dissonance conjured by Jute Gyte’s sadistic guitarwork. And the man himself, well, I’ll let him screech to me until I’ve lost all memory of human language. Interestingly, Jute Gyte is quite well-informed when it comes to his academic references. He borrows from all sorts of literature for his lyrics and song titles, but the irony isn’t lost on me that I can distinguish very little of what he says and will probably forget how to read by the time I’ve finished my 10th listen of
Perdurance.
Underneath all the hell-raising, though, lies an oddly beguiling thread that is omnipresent throughout
Perdurance. There are moments of almost-harmony - the sinister saber-toothed twangs of “I Am in Athens and Pericles Is Young” are grinning nonetheless, and “The Harvesting of Ruins” actually features chimes. Eerie chimes, of course, but chiming can only sound so dissonant. But even when it isn’t so evident that the songs contain actual pitches, there is a perceptible logic to the way that the notes are arranged. The demons are wrangled into their place, so to speak. For instance, the rising sequence in “Consciousness is Nature’s Nightmare” is calculated to evoke “dark” up to “bright”, and for once, application of an abstract concept translates into sensory cognizance. The tracks of
Perdurance, despite their sprawling lengths, are packed with buzzing ideas to which you cannot simply habituate; for a whole lot of noise, it’s very diversified noise. Even better, the noise gets a lot of room to breathe - there’s a generous amount of dynamic contrast that was surely intended to scare those who turn the volume up during quieter parts.
In order to compensate for my past transgressions of judgement, I’m issuing a formal apology to Jute Gyte. For my punishment I will float in a sensory deprivation tank, because I clearly can’t be trusted around weapons.
