After creating his Black Square painting in 1915, Kazimir Malevich couldn’t eat or sleep for a week. Based on a previous iteration for an opera of poet Velimir Khlebnikov, Malevich’s black square represented the year zero: the destruction of all modern values. Paradoxically, the work was also embryonic and opened him to all future possibilities, an infinity of night. In June 2014, a laboratory known as Surrey NanoSystems, unveiled a new super-black coating known as Vantablack, one of the darkest pigments ever released. The paint gave three-dimensional objects the appearance of two-dimensions or void space.
What is void space? Entering this tenebrous space are Vantablack, a cross-pollination of Sunn O))) bassist Stuart Dahlquist, composer Nick Hudson, and writer Chris Kelso. On their first self-titled release for Merigold Independent, the trio inject soundscapes with nightmarish fragments from Kelso’s novel V0idheads, published last year on Schism Press, and read to striking effect by guest vocalists Elle Nash, Timothy Jarvis, Graham Rae, and Brian Evenson. V0idheads tells the story of a group of adolescents with an amputation fetish and feels reminiscent of the queasy worlds of Charles Burns’ Black Hole or Junji Ito’s dizzying Uzumaki. At one point Nash describes how, “He knelt with his jeans tight over his thighs, exposing gaping void hole to trapped girl,” before bursting into laughter. These blistering ero guromoments take one to something like the recently reissued Love, Emily; Kathy Acker’s spoken word collaboration with industrial band Nox. Total annihilation.
Vantablack opens with lush strings and choral chanting, Hudson utilizing a Tbilisi choir to haunting effect. His compositions feel ritualistic and expansive. Serpentine horns weave throughout creating a chaotic, jazz-like tapestry. Often melancholic, he peppers the soundscapes with chiming percussion and bells, before Dahlquist’s stygian bass drops everything down into a smoke-filled Lethe, liquid swamp of reverb and broken vocals. Burroughs-esque, a voice intones: “Black body pulsed on streets of this town, absorbing electromagnetic radiation with hunger and black bat jackal.” Pipes shudder prettily over obscene descriptions of bodily mutilation. Another voice describes a colonoscopy and seeing, “the fluttering pink islands floating inside us.” On the beautiful artwork from Carmen Palth, a teenager cradles a kitchen knife. The album crawls through the butchered bodies of its adolescents who explain with dry humor, “The more body parts you shed, the more popular you became.”
On the second side of Vantablack, a narrator briefly describes Cartesian dualism: the separation of the material and non-physical. He sees intestines as, “a palpitating nest of worms.” The album builds towards its monolithic endpoint as Dahlquist’s guitar pushes on, pulsating and hypnotic, before splitting into a thundercloud of electronic pulses. The bass returns once more for its sombre epilogue but soon nothing remains except fog. As nocturnal explorers Coil once declared, the universe is a haunted house. Malevich’s Black Square was originally conceived as a coffin of the sun. Where does the internal meet the external? What are the entrails of the sun? Vantablackcaptures a collective investigation into gaping darkness, similar in collaborative spirit to works like the 1980s no wave compilation A Diamond Hidden in the Mouth of a Corpse. Vantablack’s many players approach a hole in the wall that eats and eats, the sun devoured beneath a black lake. Its many pleasures manage to emulate the seduction of a darkness one can never escape, or as Nash explains, “Whole color spectrum of light lived in this void space, each shade dragged to their darkest gradient, spectrum or radiance. Total light colonization.”
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