Alcest's "Écailles de lune, Pt. 1" and Brooklyn's Black Metal Summer
Drumming Upstream 16
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I am learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each of them as I go. Once I’m finished I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. After today’s entry I only have 464 songs left to learn. That’s a lot of songs!
Today’s entry is a genre-changing landmark from the French band Alcest called “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)”. That means “scales of the moon” or “moonscales” depending how you want to translate it. Scales like fish scales. The song is quite long, almost 10 minutes, and this letter is pretty hefty itself. If you want to read the whole thing, and I hope you do, I recommend you open it in a new tab or read it directly on my Substack page. I have a lot to say in this letter about black metal history and Alcest’s specific place in it. I hope I’ve done a good job making that history accessible even to the non-headbangers in the audience, but if you find yourself confused at any point don’t be afraid to ask for clarification either by email or in the letter’s comment section. I’m a friendly guy, I promise.
Now, onto the song.
Side A
"Écailles De Lune, Pt. 1"
By Alcest
Écailles De Lune
Released on March 29th, 2010
Liked on December 7th, 2015
“Now see the thing about Soulja Boy is…”
I’d heard of Alcest before. I read about them on the internet. I knew that they were French and that since 2007 they’d been a matter of heated debate on metal forums. On one side were rabid advocates who believed Alcest were breathing new life into black metal. Opposing them were traditionalists who refused to accept that Alcest were metal at all, let alone good. For three years I spectated these arguments from the sidelines. During those years I never once saw their debut full length Souvenirs d'un autre monde in a store or spoke to anyone about them out loud. And until the summer of 2010 when I walked past a man loudly talking about “Crank That” while crossing 8th avenue on 9th street in Park Slope, I had never seen anyone wear an Alcest shirt.
To me there was nothing incongruous about this combination of clothing and topic of conversation. Alcest were and are a band for people who don’t just like music but like having opinions about music. As an aspiring opinion haver myself in 2010 I had already bought Écailles De Lune, Alcest’s second record and first with Jean “Winterhalter” Deflandre on drums, from the Reckless Records blocks away from my dorm in downtown Chicago that spring. But my opinions about Alcest, including where I sat on the question of their genre, didn’t congeal until I came home to Brooklyn.
I was not the only young man in Brooklyn, NY forming thoughts and feelings about black metal in 2010. Each time I’d flown back to visit between semesters I found more evidence of a trend underway. Gutter punks and private school math rockers alike were starting to experiment with the genre in local bands. Websites like Pitchfork and Stereogum had their own metal columns and frequently covered black metal in particular. Until The Light Takes Us, a documentary about the Norwegian scene that put black metal on the map in the 1990s, lit a bonfire big enough to burn down the Brooklyn Tabernacle in the minds of New York’s musical intelligentsia when it premiered in December of 2009. There was no denying it, the borough of churches was catching a case of corpse paint fever. It isn’t hard to see why hipsters picked black metal out of heavy metal’s bouquet of subgenres. Black metal’s predilection for low budget production and its practitioners’ habit of home recording make it an obvious spiritual cousin to the purported ‘Do It Yourself’ ethos of punk and indie rock. The genre’s sordid origins and real life body count make it even more enticing to those looking to sharpen the edges of their conspicuous interests. That black metal also sports metal’s most over-the-top and easily replicable visual aesthetic is the frostbitten icing on the grimmest of cakes.
I don’t need to tell you that metal fans did not take kindly to this sudden interest. When Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix of Liturgy talked openly of writing a manifesto about "transcendental black metal" while wearing a flannel shirt during a video interview at Scion Rock Fest in 2010, metalheads rained down the kind of digital vitriol usually reserved for women who dare to talk about video games on YouTube.1 “Hipster black metal” became an all purpose epithet for any band perceived to be made up of interlopers. There was a palpable fear that hipsters were going to ruin the genre by watering it down, making it softer and more palatable to the average music fan. The frothing did not stop what was coming down the bend. It turned out the gatekeepers were doomed from the start. The call was already coming from inside the house.
Until Winterhalter joined Alcest, the band did not strictly qualify as a band. All of the music on Souvenirs and the 2005 EP Le Secret was written and performed by a single musician, Stéphane Paut, who credited himself as Neige.2 Neige had gotten a foothold in the French black metal scene as a teenager playing drums and guitar for bands that he has since expressed a great of deal of regret for working with. When the time came for Neige to write his own music, he immediately swung to the opposite end of the emotional spectrum.
Black metal has long had a bit of a green thumb. The genre's back-to-basics recording philosophy pairs well with back-to-the-land imagery. It was not just fear of ridicule that led Immortal to don corpse paint and chase each other through the woods instead of the streets of Oslo. In their own goofy and, let’s not mince words, often reactionary way, these bands were trying to evoke something in their music that could stand in for the beautifully inhospitable landscape of their home country. With Alcest, Neige wanted to carry on the legacy of using black metal to describe a place. But unlike his Norwegian predecessors, Neige had no interest in taking you to the fjords of the Arctic Circle. Instead Neige wanted to take you somewhere warm and peaceful. A place where maybe only he had ever been.
This is how he described it to Your Last Rites in 2010:
“In my early years I used to have sudden visions, memories of a place that is not the one we know. The things that came to my mind came with the precision and the evidence of any real memory. These were images of an indescribably beautiful haven where everything, trees, glades, and streams produce a pearly light and where a faraway and celestial music floats in the air like a perfume. In such a place the spirit wanders without its mortal coil, deprived of the five senses pertaining to the body. The spirit perceives what surrounds it in a completely different way. There, one no longer feels moral and physical suffering, the weight of time, diseases, the anguish of death, only a feeling of peace and indescribable ecstasy. This heavenly place is inhabited by beings of light who are infinitely benevolent, protective, and who communicate by talking directly to the soul, in a language beyond words.”
Whether these visions were legitimate glimpses of another world or the fanciful hallucinations of a sensitive child is not something I’m qualified to determine. What matters is that Neige wanted to play music that made his audience feel the way he once felt looking into this idyllic setting. To do so, Neige tore up much of the black metal playbook. Instead of the genre’s “all minor chords all the time” harmonic sensibility, Neige filled his songs with the kind of lush chords you’d expect from a French composer a century older. Alcest’s early songs were bright and summery, and Neige sang over them with a wispy softness far more often than he shrieked in the genre’s typical style.
Who can say whether Neige succeeded in sharing the feeling of his vision with the world? What I can say with certainty instead is that Alcest were a metal band that sounded like no other before them, and that by 2010 there were still no other bands on my radar that sounded like them. That should at least count for some milage on the path ferrying metalheads to “a place that is not the one we know”.
Well, some people along for the ride did recognized the scenery. Without meaning to, Neige had wandered into the well-kept garden in shoegaze’s backyard. Though he initially balked at the comparison, telling Your Last Rites in 2010 “I don’t see any similarities between Alcest and shoegaze bands… shoegaze is a noisier version of pop with distant vocals. It’s teenage music.” clarifying only sentences later that after reading about the genre for the first time in a review of his music that “shoegaze has become one of my favorite musical styles. I listen to it a lot!”
I bring up this possibly embarrassing combination of self-aggrandizing prickliness and earnest enthusiasm because it’s important to remember that Neige was only barely not a teenage himself when Alcest started. When he released Le Secret he was only 20 years old, the same age I was when I first listened to Écailles De Lune. I mean it as a compliment when I say that you can tell that a young man made this music. Your early twenties are the first time enough distance has passed from your childhood for it to be an object of genuine nostalgia. And yet at the same time you’re young enough to not know how to handle these feelings in proportion. That is a recipe for powerful emotions.
Summer 2010 was the first summer that I spent thinking as much time thinking about past summers as I did the present one. I had plenty road maps for that walk down memory lane. This was a summer framed by the release of Toy Story 3 in June and Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs in August3, both of which urged me to think about how things used to be simpler in years past. When I say that it’s obvious that Neige was young and that this is a good thing, what I mean is that when I’d listen to “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” while walking through Prospect Park on a sunny day I recognized a kindred spirit. Hearing the way Neige and Winterhalter lingered on their most bittersweet melodies for minutes at a time, as if they would never be able to hear them again if they stopped playing, I saw something of myself retracing the wooded paths and tranquil meadows of my own childhood. I don’t doubt that I thought of those summer days of old again when I Liked “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” on a Brown Line Train heading toward the Loop while the sun dipped over the horizon on a frigid December day in Chicago.
I assumed then and continued to assume until researching for this letter that “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” was about the heavenly world of Neige’s visions. Not so. By age 25 Neige’s nostalgia had hardened from childlike wonder into the more literal “pain from an old wound” variety. “I was missing that place” a 35 year old Neige told Machine Music in an interview about Écailles De Lune ten years after its release. “I felt like an outsider and I felt alone”.
According to Neige the lyrics to Écailles are about a different place, one of “longing and melancholy" where “you are alone and missing something and wanting to be away from down-to-earth reality”. As a fan of French philosophy as well as French metal, I went looking for my own interpretation. Only one problem: I don’t speak a lick of French. Luckily I asked around and graciously received two translations of the lyrics to “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)”, one from a native speaker and another from a fluent but rusty American friend of mine. I figured that the two would cover each other’s potential gaps of knowledge and would allow for a multiplicity of readings. Having read both I’ll try to synthesize them in my summery of the song’s narrative.
The narrator sits at the edge of the shoreline at the end of a day in July and lets their mind wander with the setting of the sun. The narrator indulges themselves in the warm breeze and the soft roar of the waves. While they watch the horizon they feel haunted by happier times that have since faded away like a dream. Both translations then end with the same phrase: “My thoughts drown in the horizon”.
Drown. Noient.
The word jumped out at me both times that I read it. That one verb sent tidal waves of understanding through my mind. Suddenly everything that had perplexed me about “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” shone crystal clear. This moment of clarity did not have the results that I expected. To explain why, you’ll have to join me on Side B where we’ll look at the nuts and bolts of Alcest’s music and what I learned by playing it on drums.
Side B
"Écailles De Lune, Pt. 1"
Performed by Jean “Winterhalter” Deflandre
128 BPM (mostly)
Before I get into it, I love that Deflandre went with the stage name “Winterhalter”. A lot of black metal musicians take on intimidating or evil stage names. Hellhammer, Frost, Demonaz, that kind of thing. But this guy took a name that says “my blast beats keep the weather 60 degrees at all times :)”. Very charming.
“Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” is quite long. I knew that to learn how to play it on drums I would need to break it into smaller pieces. Luckily for me Alcest gave me some natural points of demarcation. There are exactly three points in the song where the drums drop out. If we treat each of those as the beginning of a new section “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” slots neatly into a three act structure.
Act 1 (0:00 - 3:00)
Act 2 (3:00 - 6:09)
Act 3 (6:09 - 9:52)
Wow, look at that! If you take out the long fade at the end of Act 3 each of these three acts are almost identical in length. Instead of learning one ten minute long song, I could think of it as learning three 3 minute long songs.
Thinking of the song as three distinct chunks doesn’t just make it easier to learn. It also explains why the song is arranged the way that it is. “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” doesn’t have any sections of music that recur. Alcest repeat riffs, often for quite a while, but once they’ve moved on to the next section those riffs never come back. Therefore there are no real verses or choruses. Act 1 sounds like two verses followed by a chorus, but once they’re gone, they’re gone.
This linear structure is as telling a sign that Alcest are a metal band as their stage names and long hair. Metal bands since the dawn of the genre have never been satisfied with the tried and true verse/chorus way of writing songs. Some bloat out the standard form with extended guitar solos. Others start conventionally and then wander off somewhere else once they get to the bridge. Starting in the 1990s bands playing more extreme styles went buckwild for linearity. Hell, this is only the second metal song I’ve learned for this project and both of them are essentially linear (we’ll discuss their other similarities once we get to the Leaderboard).
What makes “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” better than most linear metal songs is that its twists and turns are motivated, at least in part, by Neige’s lyrics. Crucially, the lyrics only appear in the song’s first act. After that Neige gradually fades from view, first singing wordlessly over the climax of Act 2 and then disappearing entirely during Act 3. How can the lyrics motivate pieces of music that they don’t interact with? Think of it like this: Acts 2 & 3 retell the lyrics of Act 1 in musical form.
Act 2 is the mirage of happy memories, hence the bubbly double time groove that starts it off and the melancholy slower section that closes it. We get both the pleasure of the memory and the pain of its distance. Even the drum part during this chunk helps sell the mirage element of the lyrics. For a solid two minutes Winterhalter never plays the same measure twice. This made the part an enormous pain to learn, but it gives the whole section a slippery, ephemeral quality. Even as the melody repeats it never settles down into tangible reality.
This can only mean one thing about Act 3. This is where thoughts drown. After the longest break in drumming action in the song, Winterhalter returns with a fury, unleashing that most signature of black metal grooves: the blast beat. It is worth noting that “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” is the first track on its namesake record. Holding off on blast beats for seven minutes and then unleashing them in a torrential downpour in the last two minutes of the opening track is a masterful case of delayed gratification. I have more to say about this closing act, but maybe for now it would be helpful for you to watch me play the song.
First off, a note on my appearance in this video. I decided to role play this cover as the dreaded “Black Metal Hipster” of the gatekeepers’ nightmares. I busted out an old flannel that I used to wear in the early 2010s. I brought a smoothie to sip during the breaks in the drum part (the smoothie sadly ran out by this take, but you can still see it in the cupholder on the hi-hat stand). I also brought a copy of Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea4 to conspicuously read during the longest pause. I figured this would be the kind of edgy and pretentious prop that would have driven traditionalists up the wall. And hey, the sea’s a central theme here, right?
In my letter about “Carry” I speculated that as I learned more metal songs I’d encounter more songs set to a click track. For 75% of its run time, “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” bears this out. The song was absolutely recorded to a click track, even if Winterhalter’s tempo falters here and there. Act 3 however, throws the metronome out of the window. You’ll notice that I reach over to my computer at one point. That’s so I can turn off the click. Over the last two minutes Winterhalter gradually slows his blasts down by about 10 bpm. This is why you can hear me slide out of sync for a few measures early on in the finale. There’s no way two humanly imperfect drummers can decelerate in perfect unison at that speed.5 Making matters even more complicated, Neige’s guitar playing doesn't exactly line up with the downbeats of each measure. Instead he glides over the bar line into each measure the way a violinist would. Taken in tandem this gives Act 3 the feeling of something powerful but amoebic, a vast force that you can’t hold in your hands. You know, like the ocean.
One of the central arguments of Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism is that the blast beat as performed by traditional black metal bands is a static, unchanging musical gesture. She proposes the “burst beat” instead, a version of the blast beat that “ebbs, flows, expands and contract”. Now on the other side of learning “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” I can say with authority that such an invention is fixing what isn’t broken. Don’t get me wrong, I love the way Greg Fox played blast beats on those early Liturgy records, but only a guitarist would listen to a “hyperborean” blast beat and walk away thinking it was rhythmically static. Any blast beat played by a human being ebbs and flows in time. Have you listened to an Emperor record? Those drums barely stay in time at all!
Hunt-Hendrix was right about one thing though. The blast beat section that ends “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” does represent a kind of death. This is the revelation that the word “Noient” brought me, that the narrator doesn’t just drown their thoughts at the end of the song, they drown altogether. Winterhalter’s blast beats are the sound of the waves carrying them ever downward toward the bottom of the sea. The tempo slows. The volume fades. The self is annihilated. Taken to its logical extreme this is what all escape from “down-to-earth reality” becomes: a rejection of life in the present for the soft death of living in one’s memory.
And no matter how soft, nothing is more metal than death.
With that part of the decade-plus debate solved, join me in the next section to determine the other half: Is this song good?
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
After all of this bloviating I’m still at a loss as to how to rank “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)”. Earlier I mentioned that in 2010 there were no metal bands that sounded quite like Alcest. By the time I Liked the song in 2015 A LOT of bands sounded like Alcest, including a number of bands that will soon show up in this series. My old stomping grounds Invisible Oranges even put together an oral history of bands inspired by Écailles De Lune for the album’s 10th anniversary. Alcest’s place in metal history is secure at this point, and this song played no small part in making that happen.
And yet I keep stumbling in my attempts to love it completely. Every individual part of the song is great, but even with its lyrical justification I find the linear structure kind of tacky. Alternating between loud and soft parts without tying any of those parts to each other makes the song sound like it was assembled after the fact out of unrelated ideas. It is a huge compliment to Neige’s vision and lyrical focus that he’s able to blend these disparate parts together into a cohesive narrative.
But I find it even harder to love that narrative. As accurately as this song captures the feeling of wanting to escape into the past, returning to that feeling over and over again as I learned this song made me feel sick to my stomach. A recording is already a memory. Replaying a memory of remembering an even older memory is a good way to get vertigo. I’ve spent enough time at the bottom of memory’s ocean. These days I want to live on the surface.
As far as songs about the the pleasures of self annihilation via large bodies of water go, “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” can’t match the psychosexual drama of Isis’s “Carry” but it far outclasses the pablum of Washed Out’s “Weightless”. Compared to the other French impressionist we’ve covered who saved his most exciting material for the piece’s final moments, I have to give the edge to Maurice Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé Suite No.2” simply on textural complexity alone. This leaves us with a song that is good and important, but not great and transcendent. That sounds like number 9 to me.
“Écailles De Lune (Part 1)” by Alcest
Drumming Upstream is going to stay in the European metal zone for the next entry, though thankfully the next song is shorter and easier to learn. I can’t promise however that the next letter will be a quicker read. I love the hell out of the next band and will find a lot to say about them whether I plan to or not. Thank you again for taking the time to read this project, and special thanks to Phoebe Temkin and Martin Izizin for their translation assistance. See you next time.
Hunt-Hendrix’s manifesto is worth a read, although as you’ll see later in this letter I think she made some pretty serious oversights in her research. I also felt at the time that she came off horribly in that interview. In the interest of fairness, I’d suggest you read both the manifesto and an open letter response from Chris Gregg of the band Woe, the best good faith critique I could find from the time period.
That so many black metal musicians have three names that all essentially refer to the same entity is one of several ways in which black metal is pretty Catholic.
Arcade Fire will eventually appear in Drumming Upstream.
Gotta say, it has been a long time since I’ve read a book that so openly and enthusiastically hates women the way this book does. Mishima was a fucked up guy, let me tell you.
Don’t get it twisted though, I can absolutely crush this part live.