Schloss Tegal continues to explore the absolute outer regions of “human” experience, with every recording and live action they issue. I put human in quotation marks because, on The Myth of Meat, their latest release, they manage to forge the spiritual netherworlds of previous efforts in a visceral assertion of pure corporeality; we are all animals, we are constantly reminded, from the blunt photographs of a Czech meat factory adorning the cover, to the slashing sounds of manic butchery encapsulated within.

In the past, Schloss Tegal has dabbled with ufological sampling as well as electronic voice transmissions from the spirit world. Now, the collaboration of sound artists Richard Schneider and MW Burch has entered into a new era, one of “psychogenic music with extreme realism,” as the pair describes it.

“I don’t want to die.” This plaintive statement is repeated on a loop on the album’s third track, “Urban Funk Campaign (Feraliminal Lycanthropizer),” and it is backed by yet another gravel-sharp voice intoning the indecipherable, as doors slam and the hatchet stabs the metal dissecting table. Bloodlust satiates our membranes, and yet only the most powerful are able to satisfy these cravings. No less an abomination than the Hostel films express this subhuman norm, but in their inherent patheticity, we cannot seriously indulge the truths they purport to represent. The Myth of Meat, on the other hand, gives us a realness we are truly ill-prepared for. While the layering is dense, in true Tegal style, we can readily discern the sounds of a slaughterhouse, the mundane slayings that give rise to the evening meal – the “Cannibal Communion” that comprises our nightly ingestion of death before farting our way into nocturnal slumber.

There’s nothing to panic about, kids. Not unless you’re an imaginative type, drawn to infer that it is you yourself about to be hung on the meat rack, the valuable parts of yourself torn away to reveal your ultimate soullessness. It won’t be dramatic. You won’t scream. The part of you that enables that function will no longer be there.

Does this gruesome hoax, this filth of days, serve some so-called higher purpose? Can you imagine a radioactive farce being played out on the dissecting table as you try to call to mind the proper names of those entities, beings that have placed you there? Or will the sounds of the saws and the cleavers and the gadgets remind you the impenetrability of such happenings?

Wild occurrence: that’s the fantasy of an enlightened few. The anomaly here is “The Long Pig,” a track that seems to return Schloss Tegal to its sci-fi roots in its beeps and subliminal voice warblings.

The mix, as always, rends its way through your skull via invasive volume. Maximalization truly necessary in a time when most are afraid to assert anything. When crippled by language (against language), we may rely on raw sound as the true transmitter of certain ideas, truths. Sadly, the image may only rarely be trusted. Gertrude Stein said it most coherently, even presciently, in Lucy Church Amiably:

It is easier to listen than to look. To be as and can.

When the metaphorical is extricated to blend with and uphold the possible. That is where a new opening, a flesh wound, gives way to a certain light, a light of recognition that binds as it blinds.