The Inferno

Do you pity the man who dies, or the man who never lives? We all know which is harder.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Nile AND Immolation live, in concert, together. It was an evening of untrammeled brutality and ferocity, easily the best tour of the year so far. I know, I know, the year is only 28 days old.

We got to the venue, El Corazon in Seattle, around 7.30. A smallish venue, but it held enough souls to make the experience enjoyable. I bought a Nile t-shirt, as well as an Immolation t-shirt from Ross himself. The man is funny, and has a hell of a roar.

First up was Evangelist, a local Seattle band. I wasn’t too impressed with them, but they were alright for an opening band. They served their purpose by getting the crowd warmed up. The lead singer had a Pharaonic headdress on, ostensibly as homage to Nile. Anyhow, they were soon done their small set and the next band came on.

The next band was The Dreaming Dead and boy, were they great! A fine four-piece from Los Angeles, the lead, rhythm and vocal duties were handled by two ladies, while men handled the skins and basslines. A refreshing change to see more women in the scene and these two could really play. They were tight and impressed everyone there. Their setlist consisted of a few good songs, but sadly I didn’t write them down. However, I do plan on checking some more of their discography out, and you might like them too, if melodic death metal is your cup of tea.

On to Krisiun. Proudly sporting a Schizophrenia t-shirt, the boys from Brazil made short work of a brutal set. Krisiun is another of those bands that produce a wall of sound that is not easily penetrated by casual fans. However, I am just that, so the setlist may be a little incorrect or incomplete. They played:

Combustion Inferno

Wrath

Refusal

Sentenced Morning

Meaning of Terror

During the set, the drummer had some troubles with his set, and we were treated to some flashy guitar wanking courtesy of the lead axeman, who distracted us from the ineptitude of the drum tech. Soon, order was restored, more invectives were hurled, the brotherhood of metal was saluted and the thrash train from Brazil was back on the tracks. After their blistering set, which set the crowd a’moshing, we had the the mighty Immolation take the stage. They were greeted as heroes and launched into their only-too-short set. We were treated to:

Passion Kill

The Devil I Know (? Not sure about this one)

The Purge (new song off upcoming Majesty and Decay album!)

Den of Thieves

Burial Ground

World Agony

Immolation is a band I’ve never seen before and they did not disappoint. I wish they’d played songs with more groove, but one cannot have everything. I’m a fan of their devastating time-shifts which are brutally graceful. Let’s face it, their rhythm section is like a panzer ballet and while obliterating everything in its path, is yet catchy enough to hum in the shower. Maybe next time, with a longer set, Immolation will grace us with a few more songs. The t-shirt I bought:

That’s right kiddies. Can you hear us, Death to Jesus. A firm stand against theistic satanism, as my friend Geoff put it.

The chronometer ticked away, it was nigh 10 PM and the one and only Nile took the stage. A sterling intro set the stage for what was coming. We see metal bands covering classical pieces all the time, but they either speed it up or ruin it with their vocals, but in this case, Nile nailed the cover of Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War. Without further ado, here’s the set that killed The Heart:

Rameses, the Bringer of War

Kafir!

Dusk Falls Upon The Temple Of The Serpent On The Mount Of Sunrise

Sacrifice Unto Sebek

Hittite Dung Incantation

Kudurru Maqlu

Serpent Headed Mask

Ithyphallic

Execration Text

Papyrus Containing The Spell To Preserve Its Possessor Against Attacks From He Who Is In The Water (easily the longest name of any song I’ve seen live)

Fourth Arra of Dagon

Return to the Underworld

Sarcophagus

Lashed to the Slave Stick

Cast Down the Heretic

Black Seeds of Vengeance

An excellent show, with a very strong finisher. A lot of superb songs off In Their Darkened Shrines, which is my favourite slab o’wax. Execration Text was an unexpected bonus, definitely not a song I expected to see live. I find the title track off Ithyphallic a bit drawn-out, but Papyrus… is a superlative track, one whose chorus had everyone singing along. Who knew that songs about ancient mutterings to escape crocodiles would be so catchy 7000 years after they were written.

If you’ve heard the last 5 minutes of Fourth Arra of Dagon, you know that the ending is anthemic. Simple but effective. Here’s a video of the last minute or so of it, the chanting is superb, we’re treated to some vocal crowd control, courtesy of the boys from South Carolina.

Here’s the other t-shirt I bought. Yes, it’s good to be a metalhead fanboy all over again. Dallas Toler-Wade cut his hair and looks a bit like Uncle Fester, complete with grimaces and all. The overall experience of watching Nile live was excellent. They played Sarcophagus live, which is easily one of their best songs ever, despite being one of the slower ones in their repertoire.

All in all, a great night for brutal death metal and well worth the drive down to Seattle. Here’s to the next show, may it be as good as this one.

One of the most fascinating topics is linguistics and I consider myself an armchair linguist. Several forms of consonant shift exist, and can be seen throughout the varied family of Indo-European languages, which are spoken by a majority of humans today. Let me illustrate with some examples:

b/v alternation

Seen in words like probe/prove. Even in names like Elizabeth/Elizaveta and so on. Also heard in other people’s diction. For example, whenever an accented Spanish-speaking person says “Vancouver”, most Canadians will undoubtedly hear it as “Bancouver”. This is because the sounds we make that are responsible for ‘b’ and ‘v’ are very similar, and only the slightest movement of the lips differentiates between ‘b’ and ‘v’.

t/d

t and d are both dentals, i.e., they are sounds made with your teeth. Don’t ask a toothless person to utter them, because without teeth they sound like ‘pf’. As words with t and d migrate, they alternate to give us lots of words. This is visible even within a single language, as people hear and mishear and transcribe slightly different variations of the same word. Consider Willingdon/Willington.

d/th

This applies to the soft d seen in many European languages, but which is missing in English. The closest an English-speaker can come to making this sound is the  ‘th’ sound in ‘thee’ or ‘there’. Which is why it’s no surprise that these consonants undergo an orthographic transformation to end up as th. Witness deist/theist or danke/thank.

f/v

This one is huge. One massive culprit is German, where the v is pronounced as f, which is not shocking, since v and f result from almost the same anatomical movements. Textbook example: vier/four.

b/p

Similarly, b and p are both labials, i.e., they are both sounds produced with the lips.  Over time, as words migrate between languages, the b’s and p’s alternate and give us variants. Token example: bop/pop.

v/w

This gives most non-native speakers more grief than it’s worth. Some people simply can’t pronounce the v, and pronounce everything as if it’s a w. An example of this being present not due an inability of the speakers is German, where their sounds are swapped. In any case, w is a fairly recent letter and as such, deserves little respect.

j/y/i

This can be seen in the hordes of Norwegians who pronounce Java as Yava, and the tons of languages where j is pronounced as y. Well, j itself is the newest addition to the English language and simply supplants i. An example: major/mayor. This one needs no further examples.

k/g

This applies to the hard g, not the soft g. Best example: gnos/know. Again, this is because both sounds are velars, produced by the roof of the mouth.

m/n

Both sounds being nasal in nature, it is easy to mix them up, especially since most people don’t articulate well these days. Witness the confusion when you meet someone who either talks too fast or mumbles with incoherent diction. In fact, I bet it’s sounds like these that gave rise to the whole Alpha, Bravo, Charlie code, to prevent any confusion. This one is a bit more involved and involves a rule called ‘assimilation’, where a consonant is changed to become more like the surrounding one. Consider the word ‘imbibe’. it comes about from in + bibere, which means ‘to drink’ in Latin. Since we have an n + b, the n is assimilated and becomes an m. The same holds for impossible, imbue and so on. This is a complex topic and one I’ll discuss later.

r/d

This can be seen in some Slavic tongues, where the name Mary becomes Madia, for example. A very thick, rhotacizing effect can change an r into a d, if sufficiently ‘hard’ enough.

These can also be daisy-chained, giving us quite the sequence of alternations. Consider p->b->v->f. Thus, where we had a word with p, we end up with one that now starts with f. Best example: pater/father. The link is more convoluted, probably looking more like pater-> pader-> vader-> fader-> father.

There are many many more which I haven’t covered. After all, this was just the primer. Since the primary vehicle of consonant shift up until now has been spoken or written speech, with spoken speech being the overwhelming majority, it is now time to consider the new kid on the block: typed speech.

Written speech was limited in the damage it could cause, since it was usually proofread and corrected by legions of editors, only too happy to wield the red pen like the sword of Tamerlane. Alas, typed speech on the internet suffers no such restrictions. Let us ignore non-English, non-standard keyboard layouts for now. Since the majority of English communication on the internet occurs via the humble 104- key keyboard, we can focus on this particular specimen.

Here are a list of common mistakes people have made when writing me emails or in instant messaging. I’ve described them in terms of the same notation above.

b/v

m/n

k/l

g/h

w/e

r/t

s/d

c/v

u/i

c/x

We notice right away that b/v and m/n already exist. Typing mistakes can only make them stronger. We can also discard the ones with vowel/consonant pairings, since on being read aloud, it is likely that they will be dismissed as being improbable. This leads us to discard w/e.

We’re left with k/l. at this point, we have to decide if such jumps are possible. k is a hard velar sound, while l is a soft liquid sound. Try saying a word with k in it after substituting l for k. Let us consider cake -> cale -> lale. Or kiss -> liss. How about kilometre -> lilometre? That just sounds silly, as does lale. But kiss -> liss might work. It seems that a soft word like liss, composed of a liquid sound like l and sibilants like s might actually do a better job, onomatopoeically speaking. So perhaps we need to amend the rules. k- > l, iff l precedes sibilants? How about the other way around, l-> k? Liter -> kiter or lion – > kion. Seems doubtful, but you have to understand it’s very hard for us to do this. Most of us are too far entrenched in English to think of these as anything beyond laughable. But to someone who is unaware that lion sounds right since it derives from leo and so on, why, kion for a big yellow cat might make perfect sense.

G -> h could succeed on a very slender stem of probability, but even I must admit it’s unlikely. Many words have a ‘gh’ combination in them, and simply deleting one or the other might still leave the meaning unchanged. The biggest obstacle here is the fact that h is an aspirant, a sound made by breathing out air, something g is most definitely not.

R -> t probably has the biggest chance of succeeding. Since r/d occurs already, and so does d/t, we can easily get r-> d.

C -> v also has a moderately good chance of succeeding, simply because they’re so similar. The labial v might be a little hard to overcome, however.

U -> i is probable as well, since throughout history vowels have been shuffled around. We’re focusing on consonant shift here, so we’ll leave this advanced topic for later.

Finally c -> x awaits. We need to remember that the letter x is simply shorthand for ‘ks’ or ‘cs’, with a hard ‘c’ of course. Words that are spelled ax can just as easily be spelled acs or aks. However, does this mean that c -> x is probable? Consider ax -> ac, or mix -> mic. All that’s missing is the final s, which could be forgiven, if and only if the non-s word wasn’t an already-extant word. Ac would work for this reason, but mic wouldn’t. How about the other way around? Spic -> spix or nick -> nix? The addition of the s leaves the original word’s meaning almost unaltered, except for imposing a plural definition. This is something that might be coped with, especially given the current decline of plural usage ubiquitous today.

One must remember that I’m an armchair linguist and this is merely my hobby, but it should be exceedingly interesting to see which of these, if any ever come to pass. After all, languages are living things and only imbeciles seek to control them. The most we can do is marvel at their beauty and see which way their inky wonders flow.

Here’s the funniest sign we’ve seen in a while. Spot on and not sparing the satire!

This is a truly horrific excerpt from Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. You can find it on Page 864.

On Diwali night, young Bhavani was picked up by the police in the village of Rekhan. Bhavani was deep in a drunken sleep in the house of a woman, a widow, when the police found him. And so handsome Bhavani disappeared into the grinding jaws of justice, and Natwar Kahar was left raging. The police had obviously received a tip-off, a very specific one. Natwar Kahar examined his suspects, all the villagers, and he finally settled on Bhavani’s woman. She was the only one who knew that Bhavani would come to her bed that Diwali night, that he had a weakness for good rum. She had sent her two children to her mother’s house, and that on Diwali night. So Natwar Kahar had her seized and brought up to his camp. He asked for her name – which was Ramdulari – and then he asked her for a confession. Ramdulari protested, she was innocent, she would never do such a thing, and especially she would never betray Bhavani. She was a tall woman, Ramdulari, not beautiful but with a long, lush body and a fast walk. Her husband had died of kalazar during a flood some eight years ago. She had raised her two boys, and maintained the house and survived. When she spoke to Natwar Kahar, she had her head covered but she looked very directly at him and did not beg, or tremble, or look afraid. Natwar Kahar insisted on a confession, and she shook her head, and spoke back at him impatiently, saying that Bhavani was dear to her, as much as he was to Natwar Kahar.

So Natwar Kahar convened a people’s court that very same evening. Ramdulari was tried, the evidence was examined and she was convicted. She again refused the chance of confession and self-criticism. The sentence was, of course, death, as it always was for betrayal. But Natwar Kahar wanted to make an example of Ramdulari. Instead of proceeding with the customary beheading, he cut her a little at a time. The next morning, he called the squad together, and in front of them he cut off all her toes and fingers. He did it with a small knife which was kept about the camp for stripping poles and saplings. She screamed, and bled, and Natwar Kahar laughed and had the camp doctor attend to her. ‘Keep her alive,’ Natwar Kahar said. The doctor was not really a doctor. He had once been a compounder, and he had never encountered multiple amputations. But he had some experience with bullet wounds and cuts, and Ramdulari survived. She was given food regularly, and it became something of a camp amusement to watch her try to eat with the pads of her hands, and bend double to lick up grains of rice from the dirt.

Aadil saw Ramdulari three weeks after her trial. He hadn’t believed the story when he had first heard it, about Natwar Kahar’s punishment of the informing whore. He thought it was good propaganda, effective in preventing the Bhavani Singh situation from occurring again. Even when Aadil came to Natwar Kahar’s camp, to pick up a delivery of cash, he did not think to mention the woman. He thought she was dead and the matter closed. He had finished putting the plastic-wrapped stacks of notes in his jhola when Natwar Kahar asked, with a grin, ‘Do you want to see Ramdulari?’

Aadil didn’t know whose name that was, and Natwar Kahar explained with a proprietary pride. Aadil followed him, the bag heavy over his shoulder. The stench from the pit pressed at Aadil’s face, but Natwar Kahar walked on, unconcerned. They stood, overlapping the sloping hole. At the bottom, in the moist yellow and brown mess, there was a large moving object. Aadil couldn’t make out what it was. It was neither human nor animal, nothing that he had ever seen before. It moved in sideways jerks and spasms, something like the little crabs that popped up from the sand on the river’s edge. Then Aadil’s head swam softly and lifted, and the sun shifted its arc, and he saw that below him was a woman, but strangely attenuated. She was not complete.

‘We cut her at knees and elbow four days ago,’ Natwar Kahar said, chopping at his arm with the edge of his hand. ‘I thought for sure she was gone. There was too much blood. But the bitch won’t die.’

Ramdulari was looking at Aadil. He felt himself swaying, unable to look away. Her eyes were enormous and dark and remote, and he could read nothing in them, not pain or sorrow. The dark hair wrapped around her face and her lips drew back. She was saying something. But what? He was sure she was speaking. He couldn’t hear her, not past the roaring that came from inside his body, everywhere, his arms and legs and stomach, like the flapping of a thousand wings. Natwar Kahar was saying something. What?

‘If we put food and water on the other side, over there, she crawls. It takes hours, but she gets there. She just won’t die.’

Hearing Natwar Kahar’s voice, hoarse and low, broke Aadil’s trance. He was able to look away. Natwar Kahar was watching Ramdulari, and he was almost admiring, almost respectful. He was rubbing his chin. Aadil heard the scrape of his fingers over his white stubble. Natwar Kahar said, ‘She’s as strong as a horse.’

Aadil reeled away. He found the support of a tree and vomited at its roots. He finished, and Natwar Kahar was waiting for him, one arm folded across his chest, the other smoothing out his moustache.

I know it`s yet another book excerpt, but with school out of the way, I`ve been catching up on my reading. The book is full of other tragedies and mind-numbing brutalities. I picked it up because of its Slumdog-Millionaire-esque qualities, being the biopic of a gangster slumlord from Bombay and so on. This book is excellent and infinitely more gripping than the Slumdog movie. It`s a bit hefty, but that`s good, since there`s more to enjoy.