Sartre’s famous line that “hell is other people” is not actually about the potential suffering and frustration of putting up with our fellow human beings and their (real or perceived) inadequacies and cruelties. Instead he’s speaking to the way that we inescapably live conscious of the fact that we are under the apprehension of others, whether it’s specific people or just the generalized Other as instantiated by society and/or the various strictures we feel in our own heads. If anything, New Brunswick’s DenMother suggests, he might have been letting us off too easy. Sartre does acknowledge the way we often internalize the gaze of others even in the absence of their literal gaze (what else would you call socialization?), but on FRANTIC RAM DenMother takes us on something of a Dante’s Inferno of the self, progressing through and witnessing various personal spheres of challenge and torment in ways that reveal that the gaze of the Self can be just as painful and necessary as that of the Other.
DenMother’s Sabarah Pilon has been putting out albums for a decade now, and while 2011’s self-titled debut was already a strong debut of incantatory beats and layers of synths, capping her first decade of work with the vivid, head-spinning atmospheres of FRANTIC RAM feels like a real triumph. Here there are rites and prayers, dances and feasts, the aforementioned Dante, Jungian archetypes and the occult and personal reckoning and the claustrophobia of a global pandemic. It’s the kind of work you can only get when the artist has been mastering these tools and sounds and themes over the course of years and multiple works, and where pointing towards various stylistic roots (synthpop, industrial, the darkest of doomfolk) doesn’t really go far towards describing the singular effect of these songs. Looking for another record that shares some of FRANTIC RAM’s atmosphere you might pull in something like Holden’s The Inheritors, which also bends machines towards making something that feels primal, ritualistic, somehow pre-historic and pre-social.
On these nine songs Pilon evokes furies and seances, nudes and gluttons, women who run with the wolves and birds of a feather covered in tar, self-abnegation (or even -destruction) and fearsome expressions of power. Several of the tracks built to moments of brutal reckoning, with her left gasping “we are imposters” or “I’m nothing else” (in a way that, as its repeated, begins to sound more like “I’m nothingness”). Whether it’s the harsh castigations of “BIRDS (Feast of the Gluttons)” or the imperial, nocturnal sweep of “KING (Idol Worship)”, these songs can feel simultaneously like one is witnessing an intensely intimate working and yet as if they are invoking the same kind of deep inner confrontation in the listener. Ultimately this is something one can only do for themself; as “REDEEMLESS (Dance of the Wretched)” puts it, “and who am I forgiving / if not myself? / and I am the bearer of all my guilt / and nothing else.”
By the time of “FRANTIC RAM (Closing Prayer)” and the end of the album, both artist and listener may have attained a kind of fragile, uneasy peace with those elements of the self that just living in the world can cause to go astray or haywire, a detente that neither strays into denying our own power and agency nor allows us to run roughshod over ourselves or others. The descent through these various circles ultimately does not involve either rejecting these parts of one’s self nor just acting on pure instinct, without consideration, but instead an attempt to tame one’s self instead of either rampaging or allowing the sometimes painful distortions of some Other constraining you. The Inferno is revealed not truly as other people but the place we all live and struggle within, ourselves revealed not as the demons we feared, but merely human beings. However one wishes to follow Dante (strictly, loosely, or not at all), FRANTIC RAM demonstrates at least one part of his larger narrative still holds true; to attain any kind of neutral ground or even paradise, we must plumb this inferno first.
