Portal and H.P. Lovecraft

"What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs." 

-from "The Music of Erich Zann", by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

The massive influence of H.P. Lovecraft on heavy metal as a whole is undeniable. To enumerate the number of metal groups that have hearkened to his mastery of cosmic horror as a source of inspiration is an exercise in futility, for there exist hundreds (if not thousands) of such examples. However, while the vast majority of these aforementioned examples utilize Lovecraft's poetry and prose as a mere grab-bag for interesting lyrical fodder or surface aesthetic considerations, no band has fully embodied his work like Portal has with their own inexplicable synthesis of death metal's virility and black metal's immersive aural textures. The totality of this thesis may be adequately summarized by two main points, which are as follows:

i.) One hallmark of Lovecraft's work is the utterly visceral nature of the text that the reader quite literally feels when reading Lovecraft at his finest (At the Mountains of Madness, "The Colour Out of Space", "The Music of Erich Zann", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", etc.), which is largely due to his surgical control of descriptive language; Portal does precisely the same thing with their convoluted albeit effective diction.

ii.) Much like music, the essence of fine literature almost exclusively hinges on the quality of the structural framework of the piece at hand. The psychology imposed on readers entrenched in a volume of Lovecraftian lore is often a slow-burn of exponentially rising delirium. In examining the skeletal outlines of Portal's work, one finds an uncanny resemblance to the way in which Lovecraft shaped his stories.

It seems appropriate to begin this short treatment with a personal anecdote concerning the path I took that eventually ends in my fervent praise of Portal's music. My interest was piqued around the release of their 2007 album, Outré, and I chose to engage in a few cursory listens of tracks at random. Almost immediately, I rejected them on the grounds that they were the ultimate example of the pseudo-"avant garde" plague of 21st century metal wherein groups operate on the principle of "style over substance"; in the case of Portal I was mistakenly convinced that the band simply relied on a gimmick of costumed live performances and music that seemed discordant and interestingly unorthodox on the surface but utterly banal when viewed through a more critical lens. This proved to be a fatal error on my part, for Portal's music is just like Lovecraft's fiction in that one must view their work from a certain holistic perspective if one is to have the slightest inkling of what they're seeking to accomplish with their work.

In the same fashion as their other full-lengths, the aforementioned Outré bears a single-word title in the form of an adjective that speaks volumes about the work itself. The band's debut, Seepia (a word that crops up in later songs like"Black Houses" as an apparently sentient force of some other-dimensional sort; this will be talked about briefly later) captures the visual component of the band's antiquarian tendencies, whereas 2009's Swarth fully harnesses the band's opaque sonic miasma that fully envelops the listener by means of aberrant fretboard gymnastics and unnerving, non-standard drum patterns. However, it is the title of "Outré" that drives home the crux of the central claim of i.). "Outré" is the past participle of the French verb "outrer", which, in the present tense, is best understood as meaning "to go beyond". The word itself operates in an almost idiomatic manner, as if there is some implicit physical baggage attached to the purely linguistic entity that surges in the listener/reader upon its utterance/appearance of the terminated action of having already "gone beyond". In the case of Portal, the word takes on a meaning that is eerily analogous to Lovecraft's own conception of the operative role of the term "weird" in "weird fiction":

"The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen. If any unexpected advance of physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related by the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. It would no longer represent imaginative liberation, because it would no longer indicate a suspension or violation of the natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel."

Portal's employment of the term "outré", ostensibly to describe the essence of their music, is akin to what Lovecraft describes as "weird" in the above quote. The band uses this term in a rather sardonic manner by appealing to the futility found in the self-referential nature of language itself: a feeble attempt by humans to linguistically shackle a truly otherworldly phenomenon that our naive senses cannot fully grasp. Indeed, a great deal of Portal's implicit effect on the listener is entirely linguistic in nature. The band frequently opts for alternate spellings of already physically powerful words, thus multiplying the "other"-ness of the music ("Abysmill", "The Sweyy/Swayy", "Werships", "Marityme", "Seepia", etc.). While effective, the truly curious linguistic experiment that Portal uses to further distance themselves from the Euclidean, spatiotemporal realm is the aforementioned use of descriptive words like "swarth", "outré", and "seepia". These three words crop up a number of times throughout Portal's oeuvre, and the band's unorthodox use of them suggests something more than coincidentally similar to the construction of a mythos that Lovecraft sprinkled throughout his fiction. I could author an entire article on the role of these terms in Portal's discography, so a short examination of the term "swarth" will be the sole item of scrutiny for the sake of brevity, as it underscores the point I'm trying to make on its own.

"Souse in ichor, the clique transfuse
Volute the swarth, trawl betwixt phonotic
Scoff the festune"

-excerpt of"Abysmill", from 2007's Outré

"Ubiquitaint Of The Bellows...

Swarth

Hemorosphere Smothre The Othre
PlumeSurfeits
The Candent Recoil

Oust The Candent ...
Oust The Candent ...
Oust The Candent ..."

-excerpt of "Swarth", from 2009's Swarth

 

"Venous Stasis Fey Terminus
Lugubrious EverPuce Perforate/Disseminate
Polymouth Clotting Foul Exsanguinate
Psyphonetaneous Secrete

Caulk of Swarth... Scry"
-excerpt of "Writhen", from 2009's Swarth

The assumed use of "swarth", if it was to be used in everyday language, would effectively function as the archaic noun counterpart of the more common term, "swarthy" (note the subtle antiquarianism that the band, like Lovecraft, revels in). However, the listener is given an entirely different impression with the lyrics in conjunction with the compositions, as "swarth" in these contexts plays a multi-faceted role that suggests it is not so much an adjectival term as much as it is an abstract entity useful to invoke for the sake of incantations and other ritualistic endeavors. In "Abysmill", the visual (and physical) effect is something of an otherworldly cauldron typified by dreadfully ambiguous, indescribable scents emanating from a concoction being brewed for nefarious purposes, with "swarth" being a non-spatiotemporal ingredient for the "mereworking antibody" that the song describes. In the title track of Swarth, the word evolves to an internally consistent force unto itself; an immensely powerful abstract (perhaps sentient) source that one calls upon in order to "oust the candent" (that is, banish light in favor of darkness). Its role in "Writhen" is similar, as the song describes some sort of convulsive process of exsanguination for the sake of shedding the standard Euclidean mortal coil in order to use the corporeal, sanguine offerings (the "caulk of swarth") to perform a truly outré offering (perhaps one similar to those performed by devotees of the Cthulhu Cult or Esoteric Order of Dagon) inexplicable by the language of science.

An obvious criticism of Portal's lyrical madness is the seemingly unwieldy, sometimes incomprehensible organization of verbosity imbued within the text itself (a view I once held); but it is precisely this misguided criticism that highlights the brilliance of the band's lyrical deliberations. With each track, there is a clear sense of direction and meaning with regards to the linear direction that shines through on both the more straightforward, narrative tracks (usually songs on Outré explicitly dealing with actual Lovecraftian deities, such as "Omnipotent Crawling Chaos" and "13 Globes"), or the songs whose ebb and flow is achieved by means of groups of progressively descriptive stanzas that always move the song forward. This direction provides the general setting that houses the viscerally effective diction that usually defies all sense of organizational conventions we're familiar with, which is precisely the philosophical maxim upon which Portal's (and, to some extent, Lovecraft's) work rests.

This direction I speak of is the fundamental compositional convention that underscores the second point of my thesis. Lovecraft's fiction is so successful in physically entrancing the reader largely because of the man's prodigious command over the organic progression of the psychological state/s one would expect to find one's self in if confronted with the inexorable cosmic monstrosities that drive tales like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", At the Mountains of Madness, or "The Music of Erich Zann". In each tale, there is a non-linear cosmic impetus that reveals omnipresent, otherworldly madness at a cripplingly slow rate. In the case of the first tale, aside from an early up-close encounter with an acolyte of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the narrator obtains all of his knowledge of the "Innsmouth look" and other mythical notions about the decaying town from three main anecdotes, each of which top the previous in the physical proximity of dread expressed in their tales (the ticket man in Newburyport, the grocery youth from Arkham, and Zadok Allen, respectively). Each character in the progression of story exudes an increasingly unsettled disposition that culminates in Zadok Allen's hysterical cries that precede his disappearance, ostensibly at the hands of the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

From here, the singular sense of dread that permeates the entire story has graduated from the realm of local mythology to a physically pertinent matter. Still, however, as the narrator returns to his precarious hotel room to be disturbed to the point of being forced to flee, neither the narrator nor the reader actually witness the agents attempting to infiltrate the narrator's room. The strangeness is multiplied, however, once he finally manages to escape his hotel room and attempt to flee the town. Short, ambiguous descriptions of a legion of swimming creatures approach from the sea, once again promoting the dread from the physically explicable to a vague semblance of supernatural horror. At the climax of the events in Innsmouth, the narrator is actually confronted with the fish-like creatures that eternally reside in the sea following a short tenure of living as a "human" bearing the blight of the "Innsmouth look". The pinnacle of the physical horror evoked in the mind of the reader, however, comes at the very end of the story when the narrator describes the following years wherein he seeks genealogical information that eventually links him to Obed Marsh, the man thought to be responsible for the ritualistic practices that consigned Innsmouth to a fate of otherworldly strangeness. His stance on the matter gradually transforms from repulsion to immense curiosity, and finally, in the last two paragraphs of the story, a bone-chilling acceptance of his hereditary fate; he has literally been consumed by the dread that has been the subject of the story:

"So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself!
 

I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."

-Final lines of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

By the end of the story, the reader has been subjected to a tale in which the horror upon which the entire tale is based has not been explicitly revealed until the tail-end of the final act, with masterful rising action moving the story along at an exponential rate. To demonstrate the relevance of this structural convention to our current investigation, I will simply deconstruct two of Portal's finest examples of this in the forms of "Larvae" and "Werships", respectively.

The former track deals with the birth and subsequent domination of an alien-esque insect horde with cosmic implications. A jarringly dissonant phrase begins the song before the lyrics begin amid a fairly tonal section that alternates between a drum beat suited for the procession of an army and frantic blast beats, all while the subjects of the song are described in esoteric detail:

"Domus Lacunae
Meta Matriculant
Theta Genus
Fait Accompli

OcturKnell Unfurl
Husks of Hearths Litter
Inquilines Dither"

At this point, the song shifts to a short cyclical section in which the incantation "Pupa to pupils..." is recited over and over in order to indicate the physical manifestation of the creatures. From here, Portal utilizes the low register of 8-string guitars to play a creeping, writhing riff that slowly elevates as the scene is set for the inevitable exaltation of the members of this "olde guarde dipteran order":

"Olde Guarde Dipteran Order
Spheres Flous Prod To The Marrow
Fly Anointment Prey Eclipsed"

 

It is at this point that the aforementioned cyclical riff is reintroduced for a similar albeit fundamentally different incantation of "pupils to master...". The creatures have now conquered the Earthly inhabitants of whatever realm they may be occupying, and the song explodes with a palpitating energy that signals the monarchy of this race of beings as vocalist The Curator continually bellows the name of this group, perhaps in some sort of twisted reverence:

"Olde Guarde Dipterous
Olde Guarde Dipterous
Olde Guarde Dipterous"

The song speaks for itself, and the points I have outlined above have been sufficiently demonstrated within the analysis of the song's ebb and flow itself. We now move on to "Werships", a colossal song that functions as a clarion call for the adherents of the cult found in "The Call of Cthulhu". An eerie introductory riff in which tones shift in a distinctly continuous manner (as opposed to a discrete process of quickly changing from one of the 12 tones to another) is played alongside a ritualistic march that alternates between mid-paced double-bass and tom drums until the song's main theme in the form of a truly bizarre minor 2nd interval shape is played over and over again to set the stage for the impending invocation. From here, The Curator howls over a rung-out chord of considerable dissonance (I haven't bothered actually dissecting the individual intervals to diagnose a particular chord, but suffice to say, it's unsettling) before the first instance of descriptive lyrics appear right before the three minute mark:

"Fogging Stark Crepuscules
Awash With Squalid Aghast
Course In Septic Blight"

Here we are given a description of the twilight during which this ritual is to take place over alternations between a vertical, "continuous" blasting riff and the aforementioned chord of unspeakable dissonance. The same general pattern follows for the next stanza, but there is a marked difference in the guitars, which have now moved up an octave or so and have begun to play a strangely different pattern in accordance with the shift in subject matter: now the devotees of the cult themselves:

"Drones Of Inequity
Servile Of The Manors Steer
Knell Of Antiquate Tide"

\

The pattern is again repeated to describe the alternate weird Boston landscape that Lovecraft created as the setting at which these entranced acolytes begin the ritualistic proceedings:

"Sub-Ornament Creaking Carcasses
Stagger Blackest Harbours
Moored Frothing Profuse"

It is here that the main phrase that defined the initial rising action is reprised in an entirely different context. The first incarnation of the phrase served to anticipate the oncoming action and vaguely cauterize the listener's psychological state with a sense of ambiguous fear. At this point in the song, the horror has become explicit and undeniable, as song shifts to its final section in which The Curator recites a cryptic mantra to the tone of a phrase that alternates between fast tremolo picking and gradually descending (in a tonal sense), palm-muted chugs:

"Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces"

The song ends with a sample and sets the stage for the formidably sepulchral album-closer, "Marityme". Much like the investigation of "Larvae", any further word drawing parallels between Portal's mastery of psychological songwriting and Lovecraft's prose would be superfluous.

At this point I'm satisfied with the evidence presented in defending the claims I made at the outset of this post. I conclude by remarking that the grasp Lovecraft had on the spectral and "weird" has only been rivaled by a handful of other authors that have dared to broach a subject of imposing philosophical depth; and the same can be said of Portal within the paradigm of death/black metal.