Bacchus Harsh: Caveat Tumultum | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Strange times down in Naarm / Melbourne, it hardly needs to be said. The people engage in acts they’d never imagined they would and their government is taking measures that previously would have been considered bizarre. It’s all come to a head in an unusual initiative, heralded by an unsettling, fierce and dark celebration.

Caveat Tumultum, let there be uproar, disruption and chaos! It’s the harbinger of an outbreak, a cavort, bodies flailing in the shadowy recesses of local laneways. The City Of Melbourne is sponsoring no less than forty artists over forty events, shooting electric currents into the local music scene, trying to stabilise its feeble life-signs. Not only that, they’ve teamed up with the Heavy Machinery label to commemorate the dark upwelling on no less than forty 12” slices of shiny black vinyl! The actual initiative is called Flash Forward and, though generous, if you thought I was making it out as something much more weird than a little very necessary sponsorship of the arts actually is, I’d just about agree. That said, the bureaucrats are injecting dosh into some really dark areas of the underground.

Caveat Tumultum is also the title of the inaugural release for the series, a record by Bacchus Harsh. It’s a new moniker for breakcore producer Xian, who brings with him his whole repertoire of dance music’s most unrelentingly intense sounds. Not only breakcore, but noise, idm, industrial, jungle and maybe even bhangra, though that could just be a side-effect of his exotic taste in movie samples. Xian calls it all post-breakcore and, sure, that’s fine; although I do like that on bandcamp he’s invented his very own tag for what he does: Disco Brut. Bacchus Harsh appears to be a mask worn specifically for this occasion and it captures his angle here neatly. Breakcore was already one of the more disturbingly over-the-top things you could do on the dancefloor, but Xian has really driven the point home by working in samples from a variety of horrifying films -The Innocents, The Brotherhood Of Satan, Eyes Wide Shut, The Devil Rides Out and more- through which there’s a thread of pagan celebration, taken to grotesque extremes.

I’ve never actually been a huge fan of fairly undigested movie samples in music, somehow it makes everything even more b-grade, cheap and exploitative than the source material usually is. I think that made me a bit hesitant to get on the breakcore rollercoaster with Bacchus, but I’m glad I got around to it. You get a full hour of beats that are surprisingly, quite diverse, really making use of all those subgenres to keep the ear invested in proceedings. You may get more from some of the sampling than me -I don’t know if I really feel the Eyes Wide Shut sampling seven minute scientology skit that is The Impossibility Of Transcendence In The Eyes Of An Operating Thetan; how did they clear all of those Tom Cruise grabs?- but on the other hand, the O Willow Waly snatches in first single Salix Babylonica make for an eerily pretty counterpoint to the speeding and grinding of the beats.

Is this kind of dark ritual what it takes to jumpstart the arts in Australia right now? I feel like I shouldn’t draw attention to it, as if the next thing I hear about it will be Peta Credlin on Sky News sneering, “THEY SPENT TAXPAYER MONEY ON THIS!?” I guess they get a bit edgy when somebody else tries to muscle in on worshiping the dark lord. Since I've gone this far, however, I might as well go all the way in. Commence the debauch! Grind the grinder! Caveat tumultum!

- Chris Cobcroft.
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=4028191363/size=large/bgcol=f…; seamless><a href="https://bacchusharsh.bandcamp.com/album/caveat-tumultum-2">Caveat Tumultum by Bacchus Harsh</a></iframe>