Naretha Williams: Blak Mass | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Melbourne Town Hall’s Grand Organ has given a few performances, recently, that its builders could hardly have envisioned (Sarah Mary Chadwick’s lugubrious trip across those keys immediately springs to mind). Really though, none of them could stray further from original intentions than that of Naretha Williams and her latest work, Blak Mass.

As a Wiradjuri woman working on the pipe organ -the whitest of white man’s musical toys- the theme is obvious indeed. An indigenous person is employing an instrument indelibly associated with the classical music of very old and starchy, European high culture; not to mention its connection to the church, the imperial institution of which black people in Australia have, perhaps, the worst recollections of all. The metaphorical angles abound: taking over the corridors of power, using the weapon of the enemy, repurposing the culture of the oppressors to tell a new story. The question is, then, what story does Naretha Williams tell?

Williams is an artist, an interdisciplinary one primarily, before being a musician, who invests heavily in concepts and these go some way to linking up the various strands of her craft, as well as informing everything she creates. Blak Mass is actually part of a larger project she’s been working on called CRYPTEX, which imagines connections between human biology, place and music. It has employed, among other things, DNA codes translated into music for performance on another epic Melburnian musical artefact, Federation Bells. Incorporating scientific elements imparts a cerebral, dry, avant-garde quality to the music but, in one of the many binary oppositions of Williams’ work, the use of powerfully thunderous instruments galvanises the composition, bringing what run the risk of being lifeless intellectual exercises to life in no uncertain manner. It can be a little alarming and if I’m working in a bit of a Frankenstein allegory here, Williams’ herself is also deliberately soundtracking her own horror movies.

That is again clear, with Naretha doing her best Bela Lugosi, arms raised theatrically and glowering from out of the album artwork to Blak Mass. If she's not wholly a musician, neither is she, first and foremost, an organist, but more a producer and a soundscaper, which are both things that are immediately illustrated in the music on the record. Getting back to horror, the fairly basic beats and lashings of both synthetic and pipe organ harmony, make a fairly obvious connection to the much-loved work of director / composer John Carpenter (with maybe a bit of Goblin rolled in).

Interestingly, although First Nations’ artists have a long connection to electronic and dance music, there isn’t, to my ears at least, a lot that’s stereotypically associated with indigenous music in Blak Mass. Instead, it’s more a meeting of the gargantuan, historic sound of the organ and beats from the late part of the twentieth century. This being the case Williams gets across a lot of her conceptual payload in the titles to the tracks like Collective Consequences, Chaos Country or Servitor For The Stolen. To unpick those a little, when she was offered the opportunity to work on the organ, Williams stood back and looked at the Melbourne Town Hall as a whole: an office of records, an instrument of control, dividing up the country and erasing the marks of indigenous peoples. Blak Mass, then, is a kind of return-of-the-repressed, a witchy ritual, remembering forbidden history and playing dark music to unleash it in a hallowed cultural institution; making the town fathers roll in their graves. Dark and forbidding it is, Blak Mass is nothing if not surging, roiling, cascading waves of pipe organ thunder and while it must have been at its most terrifying live, the recording of it will still deliver plenty of chills.

As an experiment, Blak Mass, to me, seems just so tempting you’d have to go for it. Like I said, the concept is obvious, it’s begging to be made into reality. It’s a bold, even rudely forthright statement, stealing the means of production to say something that would, previously, never have been allowed. As is often the case with new work and unauthorised statements, there are a few rough edges and in Blak Mass specifically, moments where the artificial quality of the beats and the sonorous richness of the pipe organ fail to gel. In a way that only makes the message stronger: tectonic layers of history grinding against each other in a work that isn’t always easily digestible. Wringing truth out of the historical record isn’t meant to be, but here, backed by the blast of the pipe organ the music seems to be winning a fight with history, stealing from it the power it often seems to own, that of being monolithic, crushing, unstoppable.

- Chris Cobcroft.
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1729711401/size=large/bgcol=f…; seamless><a href="http://heavymachineryrecords.bandcamp.com/album/blak-mass">Blak Mass by Naretha Williams</a></iframe>