Mastery — VALIS

After existing for a decade, slinking amidst the depths of the American underground, Mastery finally unleashed its debut album to the world in February; an LP out from The Flenser titled Valis. The first pressing sold out in a matter of weeks, and the label announced a repress with red jackets was due in May. The press release that accompanies Valis proclaims the album to be “the most extreme record The Flenser has ever released.” And that’s no lie. This is certainly some of the most extreme, distorted music I’ve ever come across.

It’s also a steaming pile of shit. Dizzyingly complex and extreme, sure, but still shit.

I actually went an entire week without realizing that this was the same Mastery that did a split with Palace of Worms despite owning the tape for a couple years now. I gave the tape a play to jog my memory, and I realized immediately why the band was unfamiliar to me – I always skipped Mastery’s half. While the punishing track is comparable to the output on Valis, the new album takes up the bizarre thread running through “Egregorian Synapse” and cuts it up, scattering the pieces to the four winds.

I’m going to leave you with another little sample from the press release.

“With tracks with upwards of 100 riffs per song, Valis is akin to a free jazz black metal twisted and complex.  Eschewing traditional songwriting or conceptual form, Domignostika creates music through spontaneous composition, cut ups, and free performance…”

Yup, that’s right. If this pretentious little blurb is to be believed, this album is the product of Ephemeral Domignostika heading into the studio unplanned, wanking the shit out of his poor guitar, and then cutting up all of the little dissonant noodlings and stitching it all back up again. And we thought this was a good idea why, exactly?

It’s not like this type of demented, manic music is inherently bad. Jute Gyte’s recent Vast Chains is a good example where it can work when given proper planning and thought. But this is not planned. This is a mess. It is an incoherent pile of atonal tremolo riffs, thrown unthinkingly together, one after the other. The album twists and turns randomly, without rhyme or reason, as riffs spiral into nothingness before being abruptly cut off and replaced with another, just as random. There is no time to think, as this discordant noise is stuffed piecemeal down your throat, with just two short ambient/electronic tracks to act as a reprieve.

It’s not surprising Pitchfork and co lapped up this garbage. Indie label? Check. A possibly ironic, post-black metal, deconstructuralist, Krallice/Liturgy outlook?  Yeah. “Challenging”? Uh-huh. But what’s the point? To create the most irritating, random “black” metal on earth? Well, good job, I guess. Good for you, Mastery. You did it.