Weird music that you may or may not have hear part one. Devil Doll.

[EK WAFFLR]

Devil Doll is an Italian-Slovenian experimental rock band formed in 1987 by the mysterious "Mr. Doctor". The band has gained a cult following, taking influences from gothic rock, classical and slavonic folk music, and fronted by the sprechgesang of Mr. Doctor himself. The band is notable for very lengthy epics, none under 20 minutes.

(from Wikipedia)

Devil Doll has been one of my favorite bands for fifteen years. It's truly weird. But people have described it better than me, so here goes:

Reveal to me The Mind of Mr. Doctor

by Henry Leirvoll



I am a virgin, I have not yet penetrated Music. Like an ignorant child, I thought I had long ago; but it was proven to me that I was wrong.

I have since been allowed to touch the flesh of music and art, but still nothing more than a touch. Maybe a slight caress, but that is all.

I still catch myself trying to steal but a moment of it. To try and see through the veil that I now so clearly see covers my face.

Like a child loves his mother, I still remain ignorant.

I honestly thought, if nothing else, that I had at least a certain grip on music; what it means, and what it can do. I have always known that I am not a scholar as far as the subject is concerned, and that there are many aspects of music, and art, that I do not understand.

But I know what I feel, what I can feel.

When I first heard Devil Doll, I truly did feel like a child. I heard things I recognised, things that I definitely reacted to. I enjoyed what I heard, and as I investigated further I found that it impressed me only more and more. Yet, I did not understand: What was this work appearing before me?

I know there are still so many aspects that I do not comprehend, but I want to learn!

Mr. Doctor took my hand and told me that I had every reason to be afraid. He told me that I should be in awe, and that I must continue.

I usually donât like to be led anywhere, but I had to follow this.

A new dimension is much too small a world to describe it, but something new was appearing before me. I had a revelation, that is the only way I can even dare to try and describe it.

Barriers crumbled, and windows shattered. What I had only been able to shimmer before, now surrounds me, and cut my flesh! I can see beyond the walls that blackened me, and I am able to touch, and caress the being, the scary, yet so fragile and pitiable thing of which I have no word to describe.

I can cry when I touch it, or I can cower from fear, but I can never laugh. There exist no happy thoughts in here, as is the only love to be.

He is alone over there. As I look around, I see many a soul trying to comprehend, they all, as I, stare at this thing; this man. None of us can reach him but several try. Stretching out their hands, I find they do the very thing I did on my first trip to this place, and still do every time I am allowed to visit, they weep.

I fear, and I revere. I am in awe.

Today whenever I sit down to listen to Devil Doll, I find it very hard to stop. When I first have started an album, I feel guilty if I stop it and cursed if I skip a track or index. If I do, I surely know, in my mind, that I will most definitely miss the point.



Mr. (Hyde) Doctor (Jekyll)

[EK WAFFLR]

Mr. Doctor himself on first (second, really, but Mark of the Beast was pressed in a single copy) record,

The Girl Who Was...Death

"The Girl Who Was...Death was the first long-player to be distributed, because our debut album, The Mark Of The Beast, had been thought as a sort of "aural painting", hence it was pressed in one single copy, to which I made myself the hand-painted artwork. One of the most memorable parts from The Girl Who Was...Death (introduced by an arpeggio of guitar followed by the lines "Who Are You Looking For...What Are You Looking At..." and by a breathtaking violin solo) was in fact transposed from The Mark Of The Beast: the lyrics are different, but the music was basically the same, although instrumental and vocal parts were reversed, in the sense that the instrumental parts of The Girl Who Was...Death were sung on The Mark Of The Beast and vice-versa."

"Recorded first-take-live-in-the-studio, The Girl Who Was...Death is Rockier and more immediate than any other Devil Doll album. Patrick McGoohan's esoteric TV series The Prisoner was its loose inspiration. The Prisoner was McGoohan's personal obsession as Devil Doll was mine: ONE man was in full control of the whole project, creating the concept, being the main actor, the screenwriter of the chief episodes, the director of some of them, the executive producer, the one who had even whistled the theme music to the series (later arranged by Ron Grainer) and the only person who knew what the whole thing was about, as the series, which had started as a bizarre spy-story, progressively metamorphosed into the realm of a nightmarish allegory on Man, at the same time Prisoner and Captor of Himself."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYdcApobjTY

[EK WAFFLR]

Second album

Eliogabalus

"Eliogabalus was almost entirely performed by the Italian section of Devil Doll and featured the title-track, plus Mr.Doctor, a composition which I had originally called The Black Holes Of The Mind and was inspired by the confession of an early Devil Doll fan, who told me she had been raped for many years by her older brother, a respectable "Doctor" who had eventually taken his own life jumping under a high-speed train. Among the crimes featured in the lyrics, the killing of "my brother" came from a dream I had, with "the unnameable who gave me the axe" being my mother. The rest of the story came from criminal cases found when I worked as a doctor in Law specialized in Criminology. The lyrics of Eliogabalus were about the most unknown of all Roman Emperors, Eliogabalus, who had been put to power when still a young boy because of his god-like beauty. He surpassed even the wildest borders of eccentricity and depravity and was soon killed. The Roman Senate ordered that no trace of his existence should ever left to posterity, hence his memory was obliterated by history until much later, when a brief profile was included in Aelius Lampridius' Storia Augusta. In the Devil Doll track, I wanted the mad Eliogabalus as the symbol of the diverse or deformed who's watching the world from behind the mirror. Where I always was. The Black Holes Of The Mind was played live many times before its recording (the only Devil Doll composition whose live performance pre-dates its studio recording) and the finale was taped late at night in a lousy bar just up the recording studio: you can still hear the cashier thanking the customers who buy cigarettes and pay. During the recordings of The Black Holes Of The Mind, I desired to also record Eliogabalus, a brand new track I had finished the day before entering the studio, so it had never been rehearsed. Furthermore, I had not thought of how to perform my vocal parts, but time was tight, so it was completely improvised."

Track one; Mr. Doctor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS8ALBNmEXE&feature=related

Track two; Eliogabalus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoCFeZdAGBU&feature=related

[EK WAFFLR]

Third album


Sacrilegium

"It is the most intense and claustrophobic of all the albums, and was recorded in dramatic circumstances during the cruel Yugoslavian war. Of the Italian half of the group, only drummer Rob Dani and pianist Francesco Carta dared to cross the Yugoslav border: the others quit the day before the beginning of the recordings, but Michele Fantini Jesurum joined at the last minute. He had been my school mate for eight years at secondary school and a master improvisator at the Pipe Organ, in the wake of his best friend and mentor, the old French organist (and a living legend of the instrument) Jean Guillou. Sacrilegium's story was set in a pre-2nd World War Europe, with its smell of decadence, doubt and impending death, which was not dissimilar from the street atmosphere of those days. The social setting was mirrored by the suicidal personal anguish I was experiencing those days. As a result, my vocal performance is filled a desperation and a "no-tomorrow" lack of mental oxygen, which is would be very hard to recapture.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP42yacM-XI&feature=related

[EK WAFFLR]

Fourth album

The Sacrilege of Fatal Arms

"As a companion to our sparse live performances, I wrote and filmed a silent movie entitled The Sacrilege Of Fatal Arms, a Dreyer-esque symphony of death whose soundtrack incorporated most of the music of Sacrilegium (although in a remixed form), plus thirty minutes of material specifically recorded to fit the images. The film and the soundtrack open with our rendition of the Drina March, a war song which had become the anthem of the cruellest faction during the recent Yugoslav war."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7PII2XREs

[EK WAFFLR]

Fifth album

Dies Irae

"After the release of The Sacrilege Of Fatal Arms, I started to record an album which was going to be entitled The Day Of Wrath. In the middle of the recordings the studio was completely destroyed by a fire, whose origin is still shrouded in the mist of post-war vendettas. I saved my skin but not the tapes, of which only an unmixed cassette survived. We were consequently forced to re-start the work in a different studio. Dies Irae resurfaced from the ruins of The Day Of Wrath and is the most complex and artistically rewarding of the five albums reissued by Belle Antique. The concept acts on two levels: a series of paradoxical philosophic questions connected with love, life and afterlife, culminating with the killing of the loved person in order to guarantee her eternal life . . Every passage is crystalline in its logic, though elliptically expressed in the flashes of poetic metaphors. The second level is personal. The lyrics, the artwork, the music feature over five hundred references, quotations, tiny clues which could reveal (to the most careful and prepared listener) all the influences which have fed my soul through the years. From a lyrical viewpoint I was particularly delighted by the way I managed to describe the killing ("and the virgin blade kisses, freeing, your white throat") and by the last monologue of the man in a strait-jacket followed by the orchestral grand finale. From the musical viewpoint I still have a preference for the frightening "Incubus" section. In fact, I had composed and recorded two of them, one should have been featured on the European version of the album, and the other on the American pressing which was cancelled at the last minute. The material we recorded for Dies Irae filled altogether over 700 minutes of master tapes: the tiny clips which are part of the "Incubus" were in fact long compositions of which only a few seconds have been randomly chosen, illogically, as it happen in the worst nightmare, which is uncontrollable by reason."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_xdvEUC9Y4&feature=related

[EK WAFFLR]

After Dies Irae, Devil Doll has continued to make and record music, but Mr. Doctor has lost interest in releasing it.

[Adjective Noun]

Thanks for pointing this band out, enjoyed everything so far. Interesting stuff!

[EK WAFFLR]

Thanks for pointing this band out, enjoyed everything so far. Interesting stuff!

He is one big enigma, that's for sure.
And the music is... well.. fantastically weird.

[Arim the Backwards One]

Have only listened to one song, and it already sounds great. Thanks for introducing me to them; i already feel a small fan growing inside me.

[EK WAFFLR]

I had a feeling it would appeal to some of you.


Also.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I had a feeling it would appeal to some of you.


Also.

I don't know who that is, but she's clearly AWESOME.

[EK WAFFLR]

That's Arim with a little fan growing inside of her.

[Arim the Backwards One]

 
I'm sick and lying in the bed at home, and this totally made my day.

[Lenin McCarthy]

Wow dude, this music is fantastically great.