Songs of the Hungry Ghosts

The “Songs of the Hungry Ghosts” covers a wide field of styles and approaches. Lyrically, there are songs like “The Fall of Pistis Sophia” or “Tara of the Liberating Knives” that are dedicated to specific world mythologies and others, like “Know Thyself” or “A Hero’s Journey” that are personal inventions built upon Joseph Campbell’s attempts to find the underling structure of human mythology. On the more personal end of the spectrum, songs like “Burning” and “Jets of Blood Coiling Up the Muddy Needle” reflect on my experiences with addiction, and another that chronicles my experience losing my father in 2020.

The music of Harmozel likewise reflects a broad range of sources and ideas. Beyond the traditional slow, doomy power chord sequences, palm muted speed metal riffs, and black metal tremolos, one can see the influence of The Doors and Led Zeppelin’s use of drawbar organs and Rhodes pianos, the deep monophonic harmony of Gregorian chant, Johnny Marr’s frenetic, reverb-laden walls of high register notes, Bob Dylan’s hallucinatory, archetypal take on the stock character, Can’s strange fusion of vamp-based repetition and free form chaos, Camel’s use of oscillating key changes, and Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew”-era experimentations in splicing and manipulating improvised music.

This may seem like a disorganized collage of ideas, and maybe it is, but I like to think that there is a unified substrate that nourishes them all. It is the kind of thing that is difficult to spell out without resorting to a lot of sterile technical language. If you put a gun to my head, I might say that, rather than simply expressing, describing, reflecting, or engaging with my life experiences, the creation of “Songs of the Hungry Ghosts” is a living piece of my struggle to find some meaning in this world beyond what I was able to measure out with those bent, charred spoons I’d been using.

Why combine Doom Metal and Gregorian Chant? Because I have a naturally deep voice that doesn’t work well with traditional, high pitched metal singing? Why wrap jazz and prog inspired improvisational frameworks in Maiden style riffs? Because I have Dyspraxia, and no matter how much I practiced tapping and sweep arpeggios I was never able to get my playing up to snuff with the big boys. However, while my hours of daily practice never turned me into Yngwie Malmsteen, it taught me the true extent of my limitations, and because I had a firm understanding of what I could and couldn’t do, I was able to devise a style of soloing that is conceptually ornate without being dexterously complex. Each of the dozens of odd accretions that make this album unique is also an expression of my drive to create music that is my own, and because of the central role that music has played in my journey towards growth and recovery, I think I can truthfully say that this album is a living fragment of my personal struggle.

01: Thich Quang Duc

On June 11th, 1963, the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức sat down in the middle of an intersection in Saigon, doused himself in gasoline, and lit himself on fire in protest of the oppressive rule of Catholic President Ngô Đình Diệm. Thích Quảng Đức’s actions that day, and the videos and photographs of the event, had and continue to have a profound impact on my own life.

I couldn’t say when I first encountered the images of his self-immolation, though a good bet would be the standard Vietnam War curriculum of one of my high school history classes. However, like the bamboo plant, whose tendrils spread deep underground before the first sprouts begin to show, those images burrowed into my subconscious and re-emerged firm and immovable years later, at the height of my addiction.

You see, every heroin addict has their own personal last resort: a kind of signature desperation move for when all of their normal, safer hustles have dried up. For some addicts, this is just a more aggressive take on whatever they usually do to get money: if shoplifting isn’t getting you anywhere, they’ll go out boosting, smashing out people’s cars and all that shit. Other addicts might use that as an opportune moment to stab a friend in the back or even just hit someone at an ATM. Every time you see a news story about some dopesick lunatic doing something incredibly desperate for a fix, what you’re looking at is their personal last resort after it’s all gone tits up.

As for me, though, I never much liked any of that shit. I won’t pretend that I didn’t do some nasty fucking things to get money back then, but when I could help it I preferred to steal from large corporations, or, when things got desperate enough, my own dealers.

Now I had a couple tricks up my sleeve when it came to beating my dealers. Some of them were quite clever, like when I’d fill up empty dope bags with sand, deliberately short the dealer more than he’d be willing to take, and then when he was counting out the money and arguing with me I’d switch out the two bundles. A lot of the time, however, it was simple brute force grab and runs.

Anyway, the reason that I brought all that up is that, when you make a habit of beating drug dealers, the world quickly becomes a much more dangerous place. Before I got clean back in 2017 I’d built up a nicely little list of angry connects who wanted my brains splattered onto the pavement, but because I was a heroin addict I was compelled to keep going into Hartford every day to cop. This meant that, by the end of things, I was dodging multiple dealers who were actively hunting for me on each of my multiple daily trips into the city.

Now, as you can probably imagine, having to constantly be on the lookout for people who are trying to end your life is a rather stressful experience. I was living in this animal state of terror, constantly looking over my shoulder, wondering whether every passing car was gonna be the one that did me in. To make things worse, I was living on the streets at the time, so I didn’t have anywhere safe to go at night, and all of the crack that I was smoking was really honing my issues with paranoia to a knife’s edge, which created a kind of perfect storm that kept me in a state of constant terror, which in turn made me even more desperate and unhinged.

So that was the soil from which the images of Thích Quảng Đức's heroic end blossomed forth. I’d look at the videos of this Vietnamese monk calmly sitting there as his entire body was consumed in flame and I’d compare them to my own jittery dread. I’d fixate for hours on what it was that made this man so utterly calm in the face of that agonizing pain. I was a militant atheist at the time, but in that video I found proof that Buddhist meditation had the power to transform the consciousness to the point that the mind could remain poised and calm even as it was burned alive. Of course, all I really wanted back then was to get rid of the endless fear so I could go on robbing drug dealers without having to confront the consequences of my actions, but it was an important starting point for me, and one that would eventually bear tremendous fruit. Thus, I thought it was fitting for the opening song of “Songs of the Hungry Ghosts” to be about that fearless, immovable monk.

02: Burning

Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” is one of my favorite songs of all time. It had profound effect on me from the first time I heard it to today, and back when I was an addict it acted much in the manner of Bukowski’s bluebird: the last, desperate gasps of a deeply beautiful thing that I never had the heart to kill, but that was far too much of a liability for me to be carrying around for everyone to see. Springsteen at once raised the criminal struggles of everyday New Jersey to the realm of high drama with lines like “Man there's an opera out on the turnpike / There's a ballet being fought out in the alley” or “The street's alive as secret debts are paid / Contact's made, they vanished unseen / Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades / Hustling for the record machine”, while simultaneously reducing the usual suspects of his lyrical underworld to their archetypal core.

Inspired by Bob Dylan’s cerebral, surrealistic take on the stock character a la “All Along the Watchtower”, Springsteen’s Magic Rat is at once deeply complex and yet timeless and universal. A poet who doesn’t write anything at all, but sits back and lets it all be. Not content with mere words on a page, he waits for the moment to make a heroic stand of his own, only to wind up “wounded, not even dead” as even a noble end eludes him.

Yet for all of his distinctive characteristics, the Magic Rat, like Dylan’s Joker and Thief, is archetypal at his core. He is the voice of a million other street poets, musicians, and athletes who were never able to clear enough of the smog from their eyes to see a way past the violence and the struggle. And he is joined by others just like him: the Maximum Lawman, who doesn’t even need a description, so apt is whatever image popped into your head the moment you heard his name. Without doing anything more than naming Barefoot Girl, Springsteen calls forth the images of millions of similar woman whose impulsive streaks and tastes for danger leave them standing beside the ambulance as it pulls off into the night or worse. His jungle is just as real as the thousands of others that we turn our eyes from as we move along the highway, content to let the images of the evening news define our perceptions.

“Burning” is my attempt at a “Jungleland” for the age of drug cartels and gang warfare and financial elites as concerned for the consequences of their actions as they are of the fears and aspirations of their cleaning staff. A world where the poets don’t even try to make an honest stand anymore, but do, on occasion, when no one they might get locked up with is around to listen in, find themselves coming back to an old classic from the days of hair grease and juke joints.

03: Know Thyself

This song is very much in the tradition of Bathory’s “Enter Your Mountain”, with lyrics that tie mythic images to our individual struggles for meaning. While many overly arrogant modern scholars believe that ancient people used mythology to explain the unknown or as a vague approximation of what we today call history, Quorthon understood quite well the same truth that Joseph Campbell spent his life trying to convey: that these stories offered blueprints to members of a given culture so that they, as individuals, could embody the very values that sit at the heart of their myths. While the Black Metal community have sometimes struggled to wrap their heads around what Quorthon was aiming at, mistaking his very real yearning for a spiritual and ethical framework that was not corrupted by modern greed and excess for a ham-fisted attempt to start worshiping Odin with the same nauseating literal-mindedness of the Christians that he was pushing back against, a single listen to “Enter Your Mountain” makes his purpose quite clear (and if you don’t believe me, and you happen to be a bit of a masochist, you can check out my exhaustive analysis of the album here here.)

Another thing to note is the solo. Now I wouldn’t call myself much of a jam band guy. With a few exceptions, I tend to prefer jazz to rock when it comes to improvisation. However, one of those exceptions can be found at the end of what I consider the greatest jam album of all time: The Allman Brother’s “At Fillmore East”. I continued to be absolutely enamored by the twenty three minute rendition of “Whipping Post” that closes out this masterpiece of an album, and given that I’d chosen to go with a hybrid studio/improvised approach to solos on Songs of the Hungry Ghosts, the song was a natural choice for a case study.

Now, there is no one single factor that makes the Fillmore “Whipping Post” the crown jewel of jam band music. You could fill up an entire book taking that one song apart, but one thing that really stuck out to me was the pitch range of the bass line. Now, as far as metal goes, two of the basic rules for what the bass and rhythm guitars are supposed to do during a solo are that they should stick to as narrow a range of notes as they possibly can and play as low as they possibly can. On paper, this gives the lead guitarist the widest range of notes for his solo without having to worry about being drowned out by the accompaniment. For a great example of what this looks like in action you can turn to Geezer Butler. If you listen to any of the classic Sabbath albums you know that he really likes to go at it with his signature fills that run up and down the range of his bass, but when it’s time for Tony to take a solo he always goes back to playing a sparser version of the main riff to let the guitar come to the front of the mix.

The Allman Brothers, by contrast, do exactly the opposite on “Whipping Post”. The bass riff that Berry Oakley plays covers a huge range of notes, sometimes leaping as much as an entire octave at once. Because the bass riff jumps back and forth between the high end of the bass guitars register and the low, Duane and Dicky also had to hop around a lot more than they were probably used to, but this limitation also pushed them outside of their comfort zones, allowing them the freedom to find new ways to play that would not be available to someone trying to solo over a more conventional riff.

With the solo of “Know Thyself”, I tried my best to come up with something that captured the sprawling range of the “Whipping Post” bass line, but also fit in well with more traditional metal riffs. Like most of these endeavors, it didn’t turn out exactly like I imagined in my head, but I’m guessing that those Allman boys would have said something similar on the eve of their most famous gig.

04: Tara of the Liberating Knives

I have been fortunate enough to have had the privilege to study under a Rinpoche from the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. During that period, I also had the opportunity to participate in initiations for the self-generation practice of White Tara. If all that sounds like a lot of gibberish then that’s perfectly okay, because one of the things that stood out to me most about that ritual wasn’t so much any of the technical aspects, but the improvisatory approach used by the Rinpoche.

During these initiations, just as the ceremony was reaching it’s apex, the Rinpoche would begin a free form group visualization where he would describe White Tara as this vast, cosmic being. What I found fascinating about this experience was that these visualizations were completely improvised on the spot. If you went one time he might describe Tara as celestial divinity with thousands of world systems orbiting around her. Other times he would describe millions of chained hooks shooting out from Tara’s body, slicing through the veils of ignorance and illusion that bind us to our cycles of misery.

Now, as it happens, I’d written a song called “The Four Signs” whose lyrics I thought were a bit too pontifical for a metal song, and I decided that the Rinpoche’s improvisations might be a better starting point. Of course, because this is a metal song, I had to add my own twist to things, so I split the lyrics between a light side, the chorus lyrics, which is pretty much just my own take on what the Rinpoche was doing, and a dark side, the verses, which use similar poetic techniques to describe a world engulfed in suffering and despair.

05: The Fall of Pistis Sophia

For a number of years now, I’ve had a real soft spot for the Gnostics. The trove of manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi has proved a fertile ground for a number of my creative endeavors, particularly the “Under the Burning Tower” series. However, while the world of Aios takes quite a bit of inspiration from the Gnostic myth, “The Fall of Pistis Sophia” is a direct treatment of their creation story.

While sometimes classified as either a Christian sect or a heresy, the Gnostics differed from ancient and modern Christians alike in a number of key ways, the most significant being that they held the god of the Old Testament to be a petty, malicious demon, and felt that the reason this world sucks so much was because he did such a shitty job creating it. Jesus, from the Gnostic perspective, was a celestial being who incarnated himself in a human-esque body to warn humanity of the dangers of worshiping Saklas (the Gnostic name for the Old Testament deity) and to give mankind a path to escape his clutches, only to find his message co-opted by the very being he came here to oppose.

It’s obviously a bit more complicated than that, and the problem is only made worse by the early church’s brutal repression of Gnostics and Gnostic texts. So thorough was their destruction that our only firsthand accounts of what the Gnostics actually believe come from a handful of badly damaged documents which vary wildly in content and ideology, alongside a few quotations from incredibly hostile church fathers. “The Fall of Pistis Sophia” draws from two of the most significant Gnostic creation texts, “The Apocryphon of John” and “Pistis Sophia”, to assemble a narrative of the Gnostic account of this world’s creation. Again, there are a fair amount of contradictions between the two texts (which were written by two separate spiritual communities that modern scholars both identify as Gnostic, but which were not formally aligned in any way that we know of), such as on the matter of whether Sophia accidentally created Saklas or simply had her powers stolen through his trickery, but I tried to be as faithful to both accounts as I could.

So here’s the story: Way up above us, things are going pretty fantastic. There’s this whole celestial kingdom where wise, powerful beings go about living a harmonious existence with one another. There are a whole shitload of these beings, which the Gnostics called Aeons, but the three most important for our purposes are the Barbelo, Christ, and Sophia. The Barbelo is the most powerful of the Aeons, and among all life is second only to a being known as the Self Generated, a kind of ultimate divinity. The Christ (which is just a Greek world meaning “The Annointed”) is another incredibly powerful Aeon, while Sophia is a little further down the totem pole (though still a cosmic being whose power dwarfs anything that can be found in this world).

Somewhere far away from this wonderful little place, a malformed being named Saklas looks on with hatred and envy. Having power only over the matter in his shitty little corner of existence, he uses the reflective power of his water to disorient Sophia and lead her into his clutches, where he draws out the sacred light from her body and hoards it all for himself.

But Saklas was never a particularly bright being, and once he finally got his hands on Sophia’s light, he wasn’t even sure what to do with it. Sophia, meanwhile, returns to the Barbelo with news of what had happened, and together they devise a plan to trick Saklas. Realizing that he is attempting a piss-poor recreation of everything he sees in the Self-Generated’s kingdom, they go about creating another class of celestial beings. These beings, called the Adamas (roughly “the primordial Adam”) were created from the light of the Self-Generated, and when Saklas sees what they are doing he immediately imitates them.

This, of course, is all part of the plan. As soon as he uses his stolen light to animate his clay facsimiles, he grants them free will. Now it is a little known fact that the account of creation featured in the biblical story Genesis has an oddly ambiguous set of passages where it appears as though God creates a single, androgynous human being before making up a second batch that he divides between men and women. While most modern Christian and Jewish sources attribute the anomaly to clumsy wording, the Gnostics thought differently. They believed that the moment Saklas created his first, androgynous human, it took one look around and realized that he had come into existence in a flaming shit heap, and immediately rebelled. To solve this problem, Saklas split humanity in half, dividing their positive qualities between two genders so that they would forever be at war with one another and would thus never realize the true source of their suffering.

There is hope, however. According to the Gnostics, the serpent in the Garden of Eden who compelled Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge was none other than the Barbelo, guiding humanity to a true understanding of their circumstances. Likewise for the birds that lead Noah to safety to escape Saklas’ attempts at flooding the world away. While the Barbelo makes a handful of appearances in this world to guide humans away from Saklas, Christ chooses to physically incarnate itself in the body of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. Anyway, “The Fall of Pistis Sophia” tells that same story from Sophia’s perspective.

One last thing to note is the solo, which is the only bass solo on the album. It’s one of my more unique flourishes, so I figure it’s worth mentioning. The biggest inspiration for this section came from the 1970’s Centerbury prog group Camel. Camel have some of the most interesting uses of key changes that I’ve ever seen, and it is really on display in their 1974 masterpiece “Mirage”. I actually draw from a couple of different technique on that album, but the most significant can be seen at 3:35 of the album’s opener “Freefall”. In that section, they take a very simple three chord progression and shift it through this kaleidoscopic sequence of key changes. I really loved the effect so I tried to do something similar in more of a metal context here. I stripped it down from three chords to two and sped up the key changes, using an electric piano to just vamp the chords while the bass does this kind of walking-bass-by-way-of-Geezer-Butler style of improvisation.

06: A Hero’s Journey

While Joseph Campbell’s writings have had ay deep impact across the “Songs of the Hungry Ghosts”, this particular song is the only one explicitly framed around his monomyth. For those unfamiliar, Joseph Campbell was a scholar of comparative religion who was fascinated by Carl Jung’s ideas of mythology as an expression of the collective unconscious. He undertook a detailed study of world mythology that spanned the full length and breadth of the globe, showing that the same fundamental mythic structures appear in every human society with only minor variations in surface detail. The most compete treatment of the monomyth can be found in Campbell’s magnum opus, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, but you can see a rough sketch of it in this image.

Now one thing that a lot of metal songwriters probably know is that it’s really difficult to write out lyrics about an epic journey over the span of a six minute song. In thinking about this problem, I realized that I could use Campbell’s monomyth as a kind of template so that, rather than trying to narrate the entirety of my protagonist’s journey, I could just focus in on the key aspects, with each of these stages corresponding to a different section of the music (with some allotments for things like a repeating chorus).

“A Hero’s Journey” tells the tale of a man whose homeland has become barren and lifeless, who undertakes a journey through such dangers as the Twin Colossi of the Gates and an Apotheosis duel between the hero’s guitar and the adversary’s Rhodes piano, and then triumphantly return with the gift of life.

08: Jets of Blood Coiling Up the Muddy Needle

This song is drawn directly from my experiences as an addict. The verses deal with a lot of my experiences in the winter of 2016-2017, which, even as far as that period of my life went, was particularly brutal. There were about half a dozen dealers actively hunting me down, the car that I was living in had completely fallen to shit, so I was driving around all day with warrants for my arrest in a car without a bumper. I was spending all of my money on dope and hard, so I was rationing my gas out to the minimum amount to get in and out of Hartford each day. That meant that I had no gas to heat my car during those cold Connecticut winter nights. Sometimes I’d wake up with the cold sweats from the dope withdrawal frozen to my body, and I wouldn’t even be able to turn on my heater for fear of falling asleep and waking up stranded without the gas to get back into the city.

Of all the lyrics I wrote for this album, the bridge section for this song is probably my favorite. It recounts one of those winter nights, when I woke up on the verge of freezing to death and found myself in the middle of an unexpected snow storm. What I remember most was the awe-inspiring power of it. Now adays, we’ve become so accustomed to modern luxuries that the snow has become the sleighbell wielding harbinger of holiday cheer, but that wasn’t always the case. As I lay there in my car, completely resigned to living or dying by the awful majesty raining down on me, I understood exactly what it was that had inspired the ancients to sacrifice their own children for the sake of appeasing that terrifying power. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to put into words, but that’s where the music comes in.