Et Moriemur – Tamashii no Yama (2022, Czechia)

As randomly chosen by survey[1] on Mastodon, our next spotlight is on number 499 on The List, submitted by HailsandAles.

It’s been a bit since we had one for the metalheads! Often it’s possible to tell from a metal album cover what you’re in for, but not so with this one. And, as might be gathered simply from the title of this post, there’s some stuff to unpack here. I, uh, may have gone on a bit of journey to figure out my thoughts on this album and what the take-off and destination points should be for this spotlight. So, if you’re just here for the music, click here and, happy listening (it is a good listen). But, if you want to join me in recounting said journey, well, I hope you have some snacks…

Band name: Latin for “and we will die”, is a quote from Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present by French historian Philippe Ariès. All of the band’s albums except for this one in fact feature song titles and/or lyrics in Latin.

Genre: Atmospheric/melodic funeral/existential doom metal, with a smattering of…goth/baroque stuff? I mean, the opener is primarily piano, with some harpsichord weaving in and out all over the place.

Album name, song titles, some lyrics, album art: In Japanese/Japanese-inspired. Okay, so. Tbh, my first thought when taking a look at Tamashii no Yama – the album/song titles, the art, and the statement that the album is “exploring Japanese themes” – made me go, ‘uhh, why’. Translation: ‘is this cultural appropriation’. Upon first listen, if it weren’t for the album/song titles and art, I’m not sure I would’ve grasped that it was inspired by anything Japanese (and it wasn’t until my third listen that I realized some lyrics are sung in Japanese). Sure there’s one traditional Japanese instrument listed as being on the album, the shakuhachi, but that plus the Japanese titles and Japanese-inspired art aren’t exactly a “theme”, anymore than having Eddie dressed as a samurai and having the title written in Japanese characters makes Iron Maiden’s Senjutsu album Japanese-themed. And so, worried that this album was perhaps another example of cringe-inducing orientalism, I bristled a bit about this one, hummed and hawed about what to do with the spotlight, and asked the Fediverse if a country/existing culture could be tastefully and respectfully used as a “theme” by someone not from that country/culture. The comments were interesting, appreciated, and, as I expected, varied widely. I continued to hum and haw. And then, I dug some more.

First up, I thought it was odd that there was so little info on the Bandcamp or label (Transcending Obscurity) page, and no lyrics on any of the various lyrics websites that exist. So, I went to the Discogs to see if someone had uploaded images of liner notes. No liner notes photos, but someone had uploaded images of the inside of the gatefold LP, which is how I found out that some of the lyrics come from Japanese poets – Ono no Komachi, Matsuo Bashō, Kobayashi Issa, Masaoka Shiki, Takahoma Kyoshi, Ozaki Hōsai, and Masajo Suzuki. With no other info provided or personal knowledge of these poets, I looked them all up and found them to be from widely different periods, from the 9th century up to the 21st. Okay, hmm, so are the “Japanese themes” not musical in nature but rather a literary tour of Japanese poetry through a wide time span? And perhaps the song names, all seemingly real Japanese locations except possibly the last one (being either the mythical Takamagahara or the real Mount Takamagahara), are places somehow tied to those poets?

I took a step back, and looked at Et Moriemur’s other albums. All of their previous three LPs have a bunch of lyrics pulled from poetry or other works from various writers (e.g., Rilke, Goethe), in various languages. So the band definitely has a bit of a literary thing going on, meaning my Japanese poetry tour idea could hold… Have they done other “concept” albums? Indeed yes, the album before Tamashii, Epigrammata, tackles a central theme, in terms of topic (death/grief) and/or another location/concept as the main inspiration (the so-called ancient world, specifically Greece and Rome), and through a more or less literary lens at that. For that album, all song titles are in Latin, much of the lyrics are either in ancient/later Greek (taken from the Palatine Anthology and other poetry) or in ecclesiastical Latin (i.e., not classical Latin, but taken from the Catholic Mass for the dead) performed by a Greek choir in Gregorian chant style, and the album art is taken from ancient Greek black figure pottery. There’s also a quote thrown in from the Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, stemming from the singer’s (Zdeněk Nevělík) interest in Zen Buddhism. In other words, though at first glance Epigrammata may look like a tidy concept album, it still pulls from a number of widely different eras/peoples/sources, with the written word at its core. So, perhaps that’s another vote in favour of a multi-century Japanese poetry tour concept for Tamashii.

The thing is, all of Et Moriemur’s previous albums have liner notes complete with lyrics in their original language plus indication of the author when it’s a quote from someone else. Given that Nevělík is a journalist – who writes on East and South East Asia for a Czech newspaper, no less![2] – this sort of attention to detail is no surprise. So at first I thought that it was weird that Tamashii would be treated differently. But then, I realized, it’s not. The disconnect is in the band’s/label’s approach to digital vs. physical media. For the previous albums, Bandcamp also doesn’t have any lyrics, citations, or extra info that are in the physical liner notes (which I can only see via Discogs images). And, if you look very closely at the tiny photos on Bandcamp, it appears that the CD version of Tamashii (but possibly not the LP?) does indeed have liner notes. So, not having access to those liner notes – which are presumably complete with citations – is here a case that the Discogs users who created the entries for the physical versions couldn’t be bothered to take photos of the liner notes, unlike with the previous Et Moriemur albums.

But it’s still weird that the names of the Japanese poets quoted in the lyrics aren’t in the Bandcamp description, isn’t it? And none of the reviews of the album that I’ve read mention them at all, so I feel like that piece of info didn’t get passed on. Indeed, all of the reviews I’ve read seem to scratch their heads at how Tamashii could be considered a “Japanese themed” record, assuming that would mean musically themed and pretty much all saying that they couldn’t hear it. What gives?

Then, after sifting through 2 1/2 years of Transcending Obscurity’s IG posts, I found this, in an interview between No Clean Singing and Nevělík:[3]

NCS: The new Et Moriemur songs are named after Japanese cities, mountains, and… and I don’t know. I didn’t find much. Let’s make it easier: What are your songs about? Are they connected with one general line?

ZN: Tamashii is inspired by the crash of the Japan Air Lines Flight 123 in August 1985 and the stories of the people aboard. The names of the songs point to the route of that flight, from the Tokyo Haneda airport to the mount Takamagahara where the plane crashed. So it’s a concept album and the songs are meant to be listened to in a row, though I think they work individually as well…

NCS: The band sounds quite traditional, quite western still, so didn’t you think to channel these Japanese themes we see in the album’s artwork and song titles using some eastern vibe, Japanese lyrics maybe? You have a bit of it in ‘Izu’ but it’s not too much.

ZN: Yes, the lyrics on the album are partly in Japanese, taken from traditional haiku poems. And we tried to put some Eastern melodical progressions on it, plus we used the Japanese traditional shakuhachi bamboo flute as well. So in my opinion the record sounds rather different from the previous Gregorian chant-based and in Ancient Greek-sung Epigrammata. But it’s still Western metal basically, I am not denying that.

It wasn’t until my third listen that I realized the odd recording in the background of the final track is meant to be voices of those on the Japan Air Lines Flight 123 as it’s going down, if not the actual recording (which appears on a Rammstein album also inspired by the same crash). I then thought to take a look at the Japanese characters on the cover, 魂の山, the translation of which I couldn’t recall seeing in any of the reviews/interviews, and definitely not in the album materials. According to the Internets, it translates as: “Mountain of Souls”. I.e., Mt. Takamagahara, where the plane crashed and 520 passengers died.

So, friends, what we have here is a concept album. And, thankfully, it does not seem to have been intended as a potentially cringe-y ‘this is what I think Japan sounds like’ concept, but is instead a look at a historical event that happened in Japan, told with the help of some poetry by historical Japanese poets. Tbh, I’m still not sure how I feel about the art (by Samantha Dibattista), as it’s not Japanese and doesn’t obviously fit the concept (perhaps there’s an explanation in those dang liner notes?). My main question though: why on Earth was the concept behind this concept album essentially buried?! All the effort that went into realizing that concept is completely lost on listeners if they have to dig to find an interview that actually explains it. Also, for the love of metal, can someone please upload these liner notes to Discogs?!!!

Anyway, for those who have stuck around to the end of this post, many thanks (and my apologies).

• Bandcamp: Et Moriemur – Tamashii no Yama
• Discogs: Et Moriemur – Tamashii no Yama
• Encyclopaedia Metallum: Et Moriemur

1. The survey choices that initially led to this spotlight were “I’m not your lover, I’m not your friend”, “I am something that you’ll never comprehend”, “No need to worry, no need to cry”, and “I’m your messiah and you’re the reason why”, following surveys that had “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man”/“I am something that you’ll never understand”/“I’ll never beat you, I never lie”/“And if you’re evil I’ll forgive you by and by cuz” and “You, I would die 4 U, yeah”/”Darling, if you want me to”/”You, I would die 4 U”. There was a 3-way tie between the last three options, so there will be a spotlight resulting from each of those options. For the third option and this spotlight, the survey result was translated as picking the third album in The List that contained a word in the phrase – in this case, “no”. ↩︎
2. https://www.metal-rules.com/2022/03/09/interview-with-et-moriemur/ ↩︎
3. https://www.nocleansinging.com/2022/04/14/an-ncs-interview-et-moriemur-2/ ↩︎