Tropical gothic
April 23, 2004 | 12:00am
Things tend to get a bit strange here."
It’s a line more accustomed to tales told in colder climes, with the sound of either howling winds on wild Yorkshire moors or the whispers in a tomb, and the architecture of houses on the borderland and abbeys of depraved monks. It’s from a tradition that goes far back in literature as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and has luminaries like Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley. However, the phrase and accompanying genre has been likewise adopted by the natives of this tropical island of sun tan oil slick waters and beaches downtrodden by tourists’ feet.
As frontman for the country’s longest running freak-show Dominion, Mike Strange is no stranger to scaring the wits out of his audience whether it be by performing novellas of disquieting beauty in the manner of eight-minute songs or his peculiar fashion sense. Much to his credit, he has also made it a career of being out of step with everything else, an outcast with murder on his mind and the patience of a priest. With his debut solo outing "Sacred Silence," he indulges his taste for the odd once more with a batch of compositions that manifest his fascination for The Cure’s "Pornography" and distaste for the revelries erupting without meaning around him, excluding him.
Never one for a bit of reggae, Strange has crafted an album that allows one entry into a crepuscular world that lurks within the shadows of the dense foliage. Despite the sweltering heat, love – in the form of a brown-skinned nymph – guides you with a chilly hand across into the forest. No syncopation or weed needed here: just the slow constant metronome of your heart beating as your feet glide deeper into the darkening wood.
The song titles betray Strange’s intentions: The Endless Fear, And Before I Die and Tragedy Of Lovers. Whatever waits at the heart of this jungle it certainly won’t be quite what you expect, the beast and the belle nonchalantly exchanging frocks and masks. It wouldn’t be saying too much to charge these opium-reveries of Strange as being the product of a diseased imagination, to pass him off as being barking mad. But that doesn’t explain why he makes songs that are so engaging, so compellingly made that one finds it difficult not to succumb to (dare we say it?) charms.
Strange not so much transposes the European grain of his influences to a third-world setting but more accurately chisels them from the edifice he himself erected to protect him from the effects of getting too much heat. Making the music for him is exposing his skin to harsh the glare of others for the sake of creating a personal statement of beauty. (It is rather akin to viewing a Jose Legaspi painting wherein the subject matter is never pleasant but, like illegal pornography or snuff films, one can’t help but look.) He sings in English but that doesn’t negate him being a Filipino nor single him out as a colonialist — if that were the case we should brand writers like Nick Joaquin, Gregorio C. Brillantes and Butch Dalisay as being unpatriotic. Or National Artists like Gerry de Leon for making foreign language films as well. While it would be saying too much to put Strange in their league, there is no denying that he has something special to offer.
Directors like Peque Gallaga have often said that to test if a film is effective it should be able to tell its story even without the use of sound. If we were to apply this to Sacred Silence by subtracting the lyrics from the music, it would be clear that Strange’s talents leap-frog over all issues about language, able to convey landscapes that are vividly drawn and recognizable. The title-track itself conveys the anomie of watching the gray, concrete of EDSA from your car, its pockmarks moving past like the spokes of a musical box and emitting a melancholy air.
Empire of the Moon is a megalomaniac’s hymn to himself as he surveys the smog that hangs over the Makati skyline, each high-rise that risks his displeasure cut down into rubble with a motion of his hand and the blink of his eye.
The more dominant theme though is one of damnation. Strange often sings with the voice of the accused – unsure of whether he should change his plea. Fittingly, the drum loops resound with the impact of a judge’s gavel while the guitars sway into the mix like a hangman’s nooses. If the Inquisition had any mood music, this would certainly be it.
In his 1756 essay The Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke calls the sublime as something that inspires awe and terror and gives as example "delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and the truest test of the sublime." As Brian Aldiss has explained in his seminal Trillion Year Spree, it forms "with pain as its basis" and "disturbs the emotions."
Strange is guilty on all counts.
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