Classic Album Review : APATOR - Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan (1992)
I remember the face my dad made when he first taught me listening to a Cannibal Corpse record. I was thirteen or fourteen years old. He became super melodramatic: "Not you. Oh God, not my son," he said. I don't what was it that he thought I was doing, but he clearly didn't see it for what it was : a kid listening to dorky, scraggly dudes singing about horror movies. My dad thought I was getting willingly corrupted by a malevolent artifact akin to APATOR’s Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan.
Dad, this one's for you.
Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan is not really metal. It isn’t really noise music neither. Hell, I wouldn't even call it antimusic. It's more like… not even music at all. To be fair, I'm almost 100% certain it is a joke record. But it's not uninteresting. Far from it. It consists in 27 minutes of a Dutchman named Robert Von Arnhem reciting song titles into a pitch shifted microphone and nothing else. It is both meant to ridicule the emerging wave of lo-fi black metal in Europe than and be extremely fucking creepy.
It would be easy to dismiss Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan as a pre-internet high effort shitpost and in a way it's exactly that. But it's also much more than that. It is the record your parents were afraid you'd be into. Something artless and subversive that sounds like it's hiding the bigger picture from you. Two years after Nevada court was trying to prove the existence of subliminal messages in Judas Priest songs, this recording sounded like a collection of subliminal messages ripped from various albums.
Crazy people like me who have listened to this record several times might've also noticed how efficient the use of rhythm and silence is in creating such a surreal at atmosphere. If John Cage's 4’33 used silence in order to celebrate the impossibility of silence and the music of the world, Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan uses silence in order to create anticipation for the next thing APATOR is going to croon in his low rent mic. You’re never sure if he's going to repeat the last sentence or elucidate the mystery.
But he never does.
Because it's supposed to be funny, remember? Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan is bold, (perhaps unintentionally) interesting from a music theory point of view, but it’s also a very elaborate way of making fun of black metal. Of the lo-fi production and compositional monotony. There are some great song titles also. My favourites are : Raptor Satan, Craving Satan's Violence and Rape the Bloodied Christ. They are all halfway between blasphemous and whimsical. They would be funny if this project wasn't so odd.
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I'm going to stop talking about Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan because there isn't much to say about it. But there's a reason why there are still people talking about this obscure and not-at-all serious project thirty years later. It's one of the purest manifestations of all the fears surrounding heavy metal. It looks and sounds like an occult secret, but there's nothing about it to be afraid about. It is also weirdly interesting from a noise/experimental music perspective, but I might be the only person in the world thinking that.
APATOR is apparently still active today. Only other music I could find is a grainy video of a performance from 2012 and it's as blissfully weird as expected. I take comfort in the fact that he's still out there, being old and freaking normies out.
