Deathconsciousness

Deathconsciousness is the most despairing record anyone has made and it was recorded by two men in basements in Connecticut on equipment that could not handle it.

That last part is not a criticism. The album's sound — enormous reverb, drum machines pushed into clipping, bass that smears, guitars that are mostly noise, vocals buried so far down that the lyrics are frequently inaudible — is the consequence of recording ambition on inadequate gear over several years, and it is the most important thing about it. Everything is too loud and nothing is clear, which produces the specific experience of listening to it: you are hearing something enormous from the wrong side of a wall.

Barrett and Macuga were not a band in any professional sense. They pressed a small number of copies, the record found its audience over a decade through word of mouth and listener-aggregation sites, and it has since become one of the few genuinely canonical internet-era albums — not because of a campaign, but because people kept handing it to each other.

The Antiochus essay

The album came with a long prose document about Antiochus, an eleventh-century heretic, and the Antiochians, the cult that followed him — his teachings, his death, the suppression of his movement. Antiochus did not exist. The essay is fiction presented as history, attributed to a scholar who is also fiction, and its function is to give an album about despair a frame that is about belief. It is the clearest precedent in this medium for what Danielewski does with apparatus in House of Leaves.

The record itself

"Bloodhail" and "The Big Gloom" are the openers that establish the method. "Telephony" and "There Is No Food" are the most oppressive things on it. "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000" is the one that most listeners cite, and it is almost unbearable — a slow build on a two-note figure that arrives somewhere genuinely frightening. And "Earthmover" is the closer and the reason the album has the reputation it does.

Where it is difficult

It is eighty-five minutes long and it does not vary its emotional register once. The production will read to many listeners as simply bad rather than as deliberate. And the lyrics, where they are audible, are the weakest element — the record works as sound and atmosphere far more than as writing.

For the same fictional apparatus wrapped around a work, House of Leaves; for the same voice-inside-a-mass effect, Black One; for the same unrelieved bleakness in another medium, Tender Is the Flesh.

The short answer: it ends with "Earthmover", which is about nine minutes long and is the only point on the record where the band let something resolve. The track builds on a slow, enormous, heavily distorted figure, with Barrett's vocal further down in the mix than anywhere else on the album, and then — in its last third — opens out. The distortion thins, the reverb widens, and the piece arrives at something that is recognisably a release rather than a collapse. It is not a happy ending and it is not a redemption; it is the sound of something stopping after eighty minutes of not stopping. Listeners routinely describe it as the only part of the album that feels like air, and placing it last is the single best structural decision Barrett and Macuga made.

Who is Antiochus?

Nobody. The essay packaged with the album presents Antiochus as an eleventh-century heretic whose followers, the Antiochians, held that the world was the creation of a malevolent power and that existence itself was the punishment — and it presents this as documented history, complete with scholarly framing and an attributed author. All of it is invented. The fiction is the point: the album is about despair, and the booklet gives that despair a theology and a persecuted church.

Who are Have a Nice Life?

Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, from Connecticut, who recorded this over several years in basements and self-released it in 2008 in a very small pressing. They are not a conventional band and have released sparingly since — The Unnatural World in 2014 and Sea of Worry in 2019. Barrett also runs the Enemies List label and records as Giles Corey, which is the closest relative to this album's sound.

What genre is Deathconsciousness?

No single one, which is part of why it spread. There is post-punk in the drum machines and bass lines, shoegaze in the guitar textures, industrial in the production, drone in the long passages and doom in the tempos, and the vocal delivery is closer to Joy Division than to anything heavier. It is usually filed as post-punk or shoegaze and neither description prepares anybody for it.

What is the album cover?

A detail from Antoine-Jean Gros's 1804 painting of Napoleon visiting plague victims at Jaffa — a canvas about a leader walking among the dying. Using a Napoleonic propaganda painting as the sleeve for a record about a fictional medieval heresy is exactly the kind of layered misdirection the whole package runs on.

Where should I start with Deathconsciousness?

"Bloodhail" for the sound, "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000" for the scale, and "Earthmover" for the reason people love it. But the album genuinely works best heard whole and in order, loud, once, without the booklet — and then a second time with it.

Is Deathconsciousness horror?

Not by genre and absolutely by effect. We score it 005 on tone, close to the floor of our scale, and 085 on the threat axis, because the record's subject is what people do to each other and to themselves rather than anything supernatural. The fictional heresy around it is the only metaphysics on offer and it is a bleak one.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 005 is near the floor of our scale — 98 works score higher. There is no consolation across eighty-five minutes except the last three, and the consolation is a cessation rather than a resolution.

The threat at 085 leans hard towards the human — 92 works score lower. Nothing on the record is supernatural; its subjects are suicide, violence, faith and failure.

Reality anchor 072 leans towards dream logic — 80 works score lower. The production buries everything, the lyrics are frequently unintelligible, and the album arrives wrapped in a fictional history presented as fact.

Viscera 025 is low — 25 works score lower. The record's violence is almost entirely conceptual; there is very little bodily imagery in what can be made out.

Era bias 074 leans modern — 66 works score lower. 2008, recorded digitally on inadequate equipment, and distributed in a way that only the internet made possible.

Pace 018 is very slow — only 18 works are slower. The tempos are doom tempos and the tracks are long.

On shocks: two or three, and all of them are the production breaking rather than anything written.