The architecture
of doom

>> NYC’s Khanate will have you shaking all over

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

The debut album by NYC’s Khanate (pronounced “con-eight”) is one of the most brutal, punishing, pummelling recordings you are likely to hear. These molten lead riffs play at sublevel, discordant harmonics, drums thunder way behind beats, bass drones at bowel emptying notes while a seriously disturbed individual screams over top with each song clocking in at an average length of 10 minutes. In other words, the doom metal genre at its finest, an aural assault that challenges and disturbs with teeth-clenching intensity. The Mirror talked with guitarist Stephen O’Malley to try to get the lowdown on this doom thing.

Mirror: Can you tell me what the roots of doom metal are?
Stephen O’Malley: Black Sabbath. In the ’70s, Black Sabbath created a beautiful child that was genetically perfect, and that sound evolved around a lot of low tunings and morbid themes. The architecture of doom was built on Sabbath’s Sabotage and Master of Reality records.

M: Since the Sabbath days though, we have seen it evolve. The sound has come to include dirges like Swans did, noise elements and just more brutality, experimentation and extremity.
SO: After 20 years, people are going to take things in a very extreme direction. Sabbath definitely started it but in the ’80s and ’90s, bands like Earth and the Melvins and more obscure bands from around the world kind of took those ideas and ran with them. They took the emotional impact of certain ideas and stretched it to the limit.

M: What are the lyrics about?
SO: I think Khanate lyrics are completely surreal and exist as icing over structural patterns that we develop.

M: The Swans used to clear rooms in the ’80s with their sublevel dirges. Have you had any adverse reactions due to your excessive volume, low notes and slow tempo?
SO: As the guitarist and conceptualist of the group, what is important to me is to create a physical environment through the note pattern that will allow people to sort of exit out of reality. We are not after volume as so much wavelengths coming out of the amplifier. If people are into it and understand it then that is a huge compliment to me. If they have the patience to sit through 20 minutes of power drones on A-flat and actually have their bowels shaking, legs shaking and feet shaking, and get an almost a massage-like experience out of it, then that’s great. If people leave the room then that’s cool too. I’m not trying to influence people’s tastes or change people’s perceptions of the world. We have been lucky enough so far to have been able to congregate people at least in NYC who want to experience us on a physical level and a spiritual level. I think the biggest failure for a band is to have an expectation from their audience. People who come to witness a Khanate performance, I hope, can gain what I gain out of a performance, which is a separation of physicality. If they can reach that through the tempo and body of the music and alter time and space, then that is most magical thing I could give them. It’s very spiritual that way. :

With Warhorse, NostroDrama and Porno Coma at l’X on Sunday, July 7, 8pm, $12

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