Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
There is a sort of ruthlessness that Massa Nera have found when communicating with the world, a raw and profoundly visceral translation of the information that they’ve taken in from the state of things. Perspiring with a type of indignation that is not uncommon in their discography, with each release the Linden, NJ, band manages to find a way to capture the feeling of the festering state of the world as it crawls across their skin and ours.
The group exhibits all of this in their latest single “Lavender.” Contorting and convulsing, the track explores the vile state of things, pulsating through each hit of the tom and plucked chord. The middle section of the song changes pace, thrumming and pumping like a sludgy heartbeat quickening and catching a pace that it can’t quite understand or keep up with. (Not to mention a raging feature from Tony Castrati of Crippling Alcoholism.) Lyrically, the band stares directly in the face of state sanctioned and enabled violence, stripping any veneers away of government bodies lending weapons and agency of destruction, giving unmitigated permission for wholesale death and hell before turning to the arrogance of self-gratification through lecture and posturing.
Below you can listen to “Lavender” exclusively and read a brief interview with guitarist/vocalist Chris Rodriguez and percussionist/keyboardist/vocalist Mark Boulanger.
There seems to be a commentary on the military-industrial complex enacting violence and this idea of academia enabling this, was there a specific example or instance of this you had in mind while writing this?
Mark: Yes indeed. Chris already had the first lines of the song written (“Shrapnel sears through skin / eclipsed by the black moon”), which really set the tone. I knew that I wanted to build off of those starting images. The initial impetus for my lyrics was research done on the environmental toll of armed conflict, specifically research on Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The title comes from an AI-program used by the Israeli army to designate bombing targets. There was an extensive article about this program in +972 Magazine, authored by one of the directors of No Other Land. There’s something uniquely queasy and dehumanizing about such a horrific tool being given a rather placid, ostensibly pleasant name.
Originally, I hoped to include more lines on the environmental cost of both AI and armed conflict, but the music dictated a less-wordy approach. Hence, the more succinct phrases about computers crunching commands, the heavens suffocating, names being named, etc. The lyrics also originally had more specific references to the genocide in Gaza, but that honestly felt a bit exploitative, so I tried to make my lyrics more general without sacrificing the specificity of each image. Keeping “Lavender” as the title felt sufficient in that regard, anyway. It helped that Chris’ lyrics were so elemental and evocative of conflict the world over. Pivoting from those lines to something overly specific wouldn’t have worked, or at any rate would have taken a better writer than me.
As for the idea of academia (and the broader mainstream intelligentsia and forces of cultural production) enabling this, I also had an extremely specific example in mind. Namely, a former professor of mine by the name of Shai Davidai. He was my Judgement and Decision Making professor at The New School of Social Research, where I was pursuing a masters degree in psychology. He was honestly a great professor, at least in my experience, and I always understood his politics to be left-leaning. Imagine my shock when, years later, I saw him listed as one of the speakers at a Zionist conference being held somewhere in Texas. I subsequently learned about his tenure at Columbia University, his “alleged” harassment of students, his transformation into something of a Zionist troll, etc. Obviously, tribalism has a funny way of complicating or eradicating whatever beliefs someone might otherwise profess to have, and this was no exception.
The self-pity, smugness, and delusional self-righteousness needed to play the victim and claim to be some liberal advocate for peace and decency while “allegedly” harass students protesting a literal genocide struck me as downright ghoulish (and a fitting snapshot of the vast majority of ostensibly “reasonable” mainstream political discourse), so I tried to write lyrics that were appropriately absurd and grotesque. This is all public information, by the way. A simple inquiry on any given browser or search engine would pull all of this up.
The cover conveys a type of distress that I’m sure many can relate to these days. Were there any sort of central themes that aren’t necessarily connected directly to the album that you wanted to convey?
Chris: When it came to conceptualizing the art and design for the record, I allowed a few (but crucial) themes or concepts to dictate my decision making. The choice of implementing mixed media, collage art, calligraphy, mosaic tiling, cyanotype and photography was integral to the concepts of overabundance that we (the human race) have created for ourselves. Within each of the techniques used, I explored this blend of classic American art in the vein of Edward Hopper as well as Gordon Matta-Clark and Anarchitecture. Picking up from Derramar Querer Borrar, we were pretty intentional when it came to concepts, and aesthetics for the cover.
The Emptiness of All Things took things a step further by expanding on the ideas of decay, collapse, and erasure through the lens of hauntology and Jacques Derrida’s ideas of deconstruction. I took deconstruction in both the literal and Derridian sort of sense. I’m by no means an expert on the subject, in fact, I’m probably way off with how I attempted to portray the art in this way.
What interested me especially was the use of binaries. Trying to incorporate that in the cover came to me in the way the subject, or business man, is juxtaposed with the canvas piece in the art. The image of a man that is ravaged by an amalgamation of all things created by man.
Listen to “Lavender” below.
The Emptiness of All Things is out October 31st.
––
Elias Amini | @listentohyakkei
The Alternative is ad-free and 100% supported by our readers. If you’d like to help us produce more content and promote more great new music, please consider donating to our Patreon page, which also allows you to receive sweet perks like free albums and The Alternative merch. And if you want The Alternative delivered straight to your inbox every month, sign up for our free newsletter.