The Beauty of Sorrow & Death

Jun Konagaya - Contact

I’ll start this off with a caveat:

Jun Konagaya may make the most unsettling music I’ve ever encountered and very few of you will like it.

Of all the genres of music spewed out over the past fifty years, the awkwardly monikered death industrial is the most disturbing to me, although you may have to pan for gold to get to any of it that’s really worth paying any attention to, just like with harsh noise or power electronics (genre classifications really are the silliest but I have no idea how you would classify any of this in three words or less). Most of it is unlistenable, or to be more forgiving: forgettable. These are genres I have a hard time recommending, outside the legendary Throbbing Gristle, because for the most part it’s all really antisocial music often made by antisocial people (see Peter Sotos for an idea)*.

I wouldn’t really categorize Jun Konagaya as any single of the aforementioned genres though. His work in White Hospital and some of the stuff released as GRIM fits the death industrial moniker (again with the names, groan) but he’s way too diverse for it, and the schizophrenic way he can shift from grating primal noise to melancholic pop is frightening-mainly because there is an ever present sense of unease that is standing breathing over your shoulder you as you listen, which then snakes itself around to fully reveal its sinister self to you before drifting back. And it works to crawl under your skin because it maintains a unique balance between being beautiful and being ugly, or maybe just off-kilter.

It feels very Japanese. It feels quite comfortable next to the ero guro artist Shintaro Kago, whose manga is dripping with grotesqueries such as schoolgirls in ecstatic states of self-immolation. I think the ero guro genre (style?) as a whole is the visual companion I need to try to make sense of Jun Konagaya’s whole library of output or else I might not understand that there’s a lineage of the type of work that normalizes this beauty of madness, that suggests we accept the weirdness of our corporeal existence, while entertaining the lunacy of possibility our cerebral self tries to regulate with our primal self.

I’m probably not making sense and am trying to perform way too much analysis for such a short post.

The song below, Contact, is taken from the album Travel, which is the second part of a two album concept telling the story of a young girl and a monster. On this album, the girl, Magnolia, tells the monster Gamahead about her travels, which may be real, may be imaginary. Contact is a great fusion of what makes his work different, in that he combines the beautiful sorrow of his more unsettling poppier work with the abrasion of his earlier sound in a psychedelic, layering ambient piece that would fit well on a mixtape with Jesu or Main.

So, to continue with the Halloween theme of truly frightening music, here you go.

*regarding this, I’d like to say it’s not all so negative. I’ve put on an event with noise artist The Rita as a guest performer, as well as deejayed on the same bill as him, and he’s a very nice and interesting person, and his approach to his music is fascinating.

Like what I’m doing here? Let me know by suggesting it to someone else that may like it. Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have too much to do to waste time on bad music