NON
Might!

LA RECENSIONE

"Christs may come, and christs may go...

but Caesar lives forever”

This would mean: Christs come and go, but Caesar is always Caesar.

With this brief epithet, Boyd Rice summarizes the entire essence of “Might!”, and probably the entire essence of his thought, thus outlining his view of the world, man, and history: a relentless struggle that sees the dominance of the strong over the weak. From here, the disdain, the mockery for pity, for progressive doctrines, for all those who fight turning the other cheek, hypocrites, at best deluded, doomed to perish under the blows of those who do not hesitate to use force and cunning for their self-preservation.

Steeped in a cynical form of late 19th-century social Darwinism, “Might!” is based on the dictates laid out in “Might is Right,” a book written by someone who called themselves Ragnar Redbeard, a work remembered as the definitive exposition of Darwinian thought applied to the dynamics concerning man and society. More than a celebration of brute force, the text describes its inevitability in social dynamics: the blind law of the strongest in opposition to the annihilation of the weakest, condemned to succumb and disappear. According to Rice, there is no moral or ethical connotation in the ruthless laws that prevail in Nature, and consequently in human society.

How could such a thought be translated into music? Obviously in the most brutal way possible. It's 1995, but Rice's art and language seem unwilling to depart from the sonic territories where he loves to tread, since the days of that “Blood & Flame” which defined the Non-sound in the years to come: harsh noise of the worst kind, electronic cut with a hatchet, tapes violently abused. The incredible sound flow set up by the American terrorist is traversed by a dark monologue that reviews the salient moments of Redbeard's treatise. In a sense, Rice adapts his declamatory passion, already sagaciously experimented with in the dreamy and smoky atmospheres of the Boyd Rice and Friends project, to the lethal wall of sound erected with his NoN.

The opener “No Nirvana (prelude)” is its manifesto: far from peace and harmony, Rice's word drags us into sonic waterfalls that plunge into the abyss of a bloodthirsty arena where only the most skilled, cunning, and unscrupulous will survive: tapes shot at full speed, hobbling rhythms, the screams of demons falling into Hell intermix and lay a carpet of bones and blood under Rice's sly recitation, the voice of the apocalypse in the midst of the apocalypse.

If winning solutions will not be lacking (the overwhelming belligerent charge of “Credo”, armed with a tectonic and pressing bass; the flat and stratospheric violence of “Force”, probably the most extreme piece in the history of “music,” so extreme as to appear monotonous in its unsurpassed tension; the wonky acoustic dances of the guitars in “The Immolation of Man”, a drunken dance called to lull the ravaged ears), in the end, one cannot but come out with broken bones. Defeated. Defeated because at the end of the day, it must be said, there remains that sense of incompletion and that general feeling of dissatisfaction that one often experiences listening to a NoN album, a collection of abortions and mutilated limbs severed with cruel and blind violence in Rice's sonic slaughterhouse: a mirror dimension to that terrible arena which is the world.

And as for brutality and lack of scruples, Rice wins a sure victory over our (poor, weak) ears...