Moments In Love: Bark Psychosis - Hex

by Nikifor Morton

“Post-rock” is a multifaceted concept, its purpose depending on the listener—or their age. As I was coming into my teens, the peaks in pieces from new millennium post-rock acts meant an emotional surge, one capable of alleviating me from issues I didn’t know how to communicate properly. The valleys contributed to the craft of a generic dynamic structure that separated ‘this music’ from ‘other music’ but also provided security—a  seclusion of deceptively favoring character, actually therapeutic. I could rely on a predictable, ascending blast of distortion and a faith that everything will be alright.  

College exposed buried insecurities and turned them into a paralyzing prospect—condescending professors and an unreliable profession, a dorm with four stranger roommates far from parental shelter, the crutch ending up in a form of an equally anxious partner. Naïve faith could not hush my worries about the uncertainty of the future, and, having no coherent insight or worldview, I could only believe in what I identified with. This is when I discovered the music of Bark Psychosis, which I appreciated for its sonorous qualities and somber atmosphere, but its absence of resolution is what really struck me, since there was no resolution to be found in my own existence. Post-rock had become an object of identification and projection, not just pure release.  

Even the weirder, independent strains of pop music I grew up with carried a logical progression most of the time. The parts of a song were clearly demarcated, especially the ending, often announced in various ways.  The “fade-out” had been an exception, banal in its frequency, not notable unless timed timidly or recklessly, but even that gesture itself signified a closure. Hex built the impression that its compositions went nowhere. Not only was this influenced by their ability to stop abruptly during a loop or a ringing of an unresolved chord (as in “The Loom” or “A Street Scene”) but also the sole nature of musical events and their  flow throughout the song.  

Where other adjacent post-rock acts were obsessed with innovation and reinvention, Bark Psychosis were interested in reduction. The Bomb Squad-influenced dense and dissonant sample collaging of Disco Inferno  and Moonshake and the “intelligent”, electronic pulses and convulsions of Seefeel and Insides had a nervous if not logorrheic strive to them. Bark had gradually evolved from spitting out every frequency in the audible  range to saying as little as possible by means of the resigned sibilance of a near-whispered vocal and minimal  instrumental duties. The latter figured as an essential component, allowing the music to be ambivalent in refusing to rely on usual structures and evoke plain emotional categories.  

Imagine a sentence spoken not by a single person, but each of its words dedicated to a different voice—a  fragmented structure devoid of its logical swings in intonation, of its ‘sung’ quality and the continuity it produces. The focus shifts from the meaning to the seeming, from the semantic to the sonic. This is what the musical language of minimalism had brought into picture, epitomized in the works of  Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The words would certainly overlap in favor of obligatory cohesion, but the dominance of a single voice and its utterances were gone. With it, an implied or virtual hierarchy of a composition was gone as well. 

Whether a piece of information is redundant or not is determined by the importance it carries to its recipient. When a system is devoid of hierarchy, it means that each of its constituents is equally important, hence, their resultant cannot be redundant. This is the consequence of minimalist compositional tactics, which Graham Sutton too strived for in his own work with Bark Psychosis during their initial run. It is also highly analogous to a typical experiential glitch found in a life burdened with anxious disorder—the dispersion of attention, which gives way to constructing an unreasonable, overbearing importance of each living aspect. 

Luckily, in the case of Bark Psychosis, this mimetic quality was made possible through an inversion of life: where an everyday experience would be overbearing in stimulation, the songs on “Hex” would be economic and spacious enough to vacuum out the daily accumulation of traffic turbulence, wearing walla, the amplified gravity of meaningless encounters and unnecessary dwelling. In Absent Friend, one of the two  masterpieces on the record, a brittle tremolo guitar chime would fall an eighth note after a piano had placed its chord in a different register, the meaning of their correspondence changed by the bass brooding which shifts the song key at the moment of its introduction. The reflections of St. John's Church, a recording space  chosen by the band for both sonic and financial reasons, tossed the drum hits into the background and made them sound wet, the modest ride cymbal velocity spilling resonances over the acoustically disjointed, but harmonious ensemble. The closing track, Pendulum Man takes this economy even further, removing percussion entirely and placing its functionality in the hands of two muted, breathtakingly tranquil guitar  ostinatos.  

Beyond this concept of conciseness, there are two significant minimalist methods, which Bark Psychosis brought to striking results. One is the reliance on an uneven number of bars or bar groups for a strong repetitive effect. A certain type of symmetry in meter (bars of two, four and eight), which allows a phrase to have its cadence—or, in other words, its logical conclusion—has dominated pop music. On a closer inspection  of landmark pieces such as Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians or Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, one can  trace a weird type of meter that is easily understandable and countable, but does not conform to an average listener’s need for a resolute process. It allows the composer to insert an additional phrase or chord into a looped pattern, which does not resolve the preceding events but problematizes them and ties fluidly into the loop’s beginning, making the repetition much more entrancing and captivating.  

The seamlessness of this procedure removes the feeling of resolution and is further intensified by means of repetition—things go on and on without any prospect of ending, unless one looks at the duration of a track  or the progress bar in a player. Pendulum Man takes these tricks and places them in the hands of a  disintegrated, sonically serene but emotionally agitated three chord ouroboros, which comprises the  record’s final three minutes. When the ending was due, it happened in a personally disturbing way—it never  went back to the first chord in the sequence, anticipated by the organ ringing with equal intensity during the  final twenty seconds. It never resolved. 

The other method is the use of polymeters, found in the final section of Absent Friend. Different voices are  written in different meters, which results in incongruous timespans necessary for each of them to finish  their part and start it over. The guitar lead would play in 4/4, but one of the layered arpeggios would be in  5/4, therefore the looped phrases would interlock in different ways throughout time. It gave the music an  elusive, fleeting quality since, deceptively, none of the parts had the prevailing rhythmic gravity (it is actually  that one, unobtrusive piano note that determines the dominant meter of the section). The music managed to capture a moment in time informed only by preceding events (not suggesting where it could lead next),  rather than presenting a closed structure, a chain of events, a narrative or causality one could use for further  reference. It felt very present-tense, as if both the song and I were sharing not the same fate, but the same circumstance within which we were developing. 

I can evoke a number of evenings and nights, spent solitary or in the presence of a dear person, trying to  process why these songs from “Hex” resonated so strongly with me. My relationship with music has been  such that I would rationalize its qualities in an acousmatic manner and their generating mechanisms, moving from my preferences of melody and harmony, which I perceived to be most prone to manipulation via cultural code, to the idea of a “pure” musical territory found in timbre. A very unsentimental relationship towards music, one could notice, deriving from a generally unsentimental  perspective that deconstructs everything and preserves it by giving it a name in order to preserve a sense of security. To have been both struck and relieved this much by a musical piece was a highly odd prospect and  it took me a lot of time before I rationalized what caused this sonic impression of incertitude that  superimposed with my own uncertain feelings. It was through a structural congruence discovered in a song that I found refuge.