The Bollard Bulletin: December 23, 2024
Local Music Monday: Peace Mountains of Peace defy the suited psychopaths in power
LOCAL MUSIC MONDAY
There is no song to express the bottomless sorrow and white-hot rage evoked by the brutal annihilation of Gaza and its people; only sounds can do this. Discordant notes buzzing with electric feedback, building into giant walls of cacophonous static. Mournful, plodding melodies morphing into screamed anthems of defiance. Cymbals crashing over and over and over again. A persistent hiss.
Peace Mountains of Peace, a collective with members of Maine doom-metal, drone and punk bands past and present (War Animal, Apis Malfiore, Purse, and Conifer), released a live demo tape recording in October that endeavors to express the indescribable sadness and anger this U.S.-backed genocide stirs in the guts of anyone still capable of compassion. In this act of aural protest, they succeed beyond measure. May We Love In Ways That Devastatingly Disrupt State Violence is a terrifying yet glorious testament to the power of solidarity against hate.
A 13-minute track titled “tikkun olam: death knells into birth pangs” commences this harrowing journey, establishing the theme, tone and dynamics we’ll encounter throughout — a succession of sonic storms between stretches of exhausted contemplation of the ruins. The towers of noise this collective erects are staggering to experience. They swirl and soar and screech, making the sounds our fleshy throats and stubby tongues are incapable of creating when our brains bid them to do so in response to the news of each new day’s atrocity.
The next track, “bodies fall not ideas,” restates and extends the opening overture, but what follows is a different animal. On “rutgers suits/fuck your decorum/gleaming fall,” a muffled recording of a woman calmly but firmly berating Rutgers University officials over their refusal to divest from the war machine crushing Gaza to dust is heard over low swells of drone tones.
“You motherfuckers in suits, you're all psychopaths, and you're actively manufacturing a shitty fucking world for us all,” the protester tells them. “I don't know how you live with yourself, honestly. I see you. You hold dignity for yourself and no one else. Do you feel that? Do you? Fuck your norms. Fuck your notions of decorum with your glasses of water.”
This protester speaks for me. Just the other day I was reading a piece in the New York Times in which they asked all the incoming members of Congress whether they were cool with Trump having sole authority to destroy civilization with nuclear weapons. Most blithely declined to even answer the question (including Maine Senators Angus King and Susan Collins, though King did offer, “These aren’t binary yes/no issues or questions, I’m afraid”), and the few who did hemmed and hawed a little, offering the usual, casual, contingent support for mass murder, like Rep. Chellie Pingree, who’d approve of Trump singlehandedly incinerating millions of human and animal bodies if he thought nukes were heading our way.
All these fuckers are straight-up psychopaths, active accomplices to mass murder gleefully smashing bottles of booze on the bow of billion-dollar destroyers docked at Bath Iron Works, never uttering one sincere word about the imperative for immediate global disarmament and peace. Suits and titles and TV lights can’t hide their black hearts from anyone with eyes to see them. As the protester quoted above made a point of saying, “I see you.”
The dark atmosphere of May We Love lightens slightly at the end, beginning with the languorous “soft hum/golden mutiny” and concluding with “praise, join and sunder,” in which the roaring gales of earlier tracks take on a hopeful hue, culminating in an elegiac crescendo that uplifts the listener to the thrilling emotional heights of righteous rebellion. To the title of this brave and remarkable recording I simply reply, “Amen.”
Music
Flask Lounge
“Monday of the Minds” CommUNITY Hip Hop Showcase
8 p.m., no cover (21+)
Merrill Auditorium
“Christmas With Kennerley” (Kotzschmar Organ concert)
7 p.m., $28-$58
Three Dollar Deweys
After Dark
6 p.m., no cover (all ages)
club guide
Performing Arts
Portland Stage Co.’s production of the winter fairy tale The Snow Queen at Portland Stage (25 Forest Ave.) at 7 p.m. Tix: $35-$65. 774-0465. portlandstage.org.