Abbatyr ‘Music for Steakhouses vol. 2’

I only saw Abbatyr live once, in Henry’s Cellar Bar (Edinburgh) while it was mid-transformation from a nice, respectable jazz bar to something more underground and feral. Wires dangled from the ceiling awaiting light fittings. A literal pile of rubble blocked the fire exit. The floor was uneven with tiles half stripped and tumbled-down plastic picnic chairs. It was a perfect snatched moment of risk while a venue was born to experience a similarly raw gig.

You have surely heard reports of their live shows. Their instruments are meat and butchery, played with cleavers, mincers, and boning knives. Contact mics on flesh, tendon, bone, and steel are fed directly to the mixing desk. Despite the lack of any obvious source of processing the signal, they sound tortured beyond the tangibly obvious into an all-consuming primal maelstrom.

Once you get past the shock and literal gore, their performance is majestic. When the butchers, tapping the thin cleavers against each other to create a perfect pitch of ringing blades, howl in unison, a guttural chorus in tongues, you feel their ritual — however unknowable it might be — reverberate in your very soul.

Obviously, these live shows garner a loud opposition, despite the band’s staunch vegan aims and stance. They often talk about their rituals reconstructing and rescuing animals’ soul from packs cheap supermarket meat, sending them off in glorious adulation and bestial worship.

I did try to take photos of that night but they came out as an incomprehensible mess of flash smears and red eye blur.

In the vein of Zero Kama and Metgumbnerbone, whose instruments and performances centre on the use of bones (with the charges of grave robbing to prove it), this is music that seems so profound in its staging and act, that the notion of a recording seems pitiful.

So arrives ‘Music for Steakhouses vol. 2’. I don’t know what vol. 1 is.

Vol. 2 arrives as a cassette case filled with “magickally charged” meat, plump and bright red despite however long it spent moving through various postal services.

It smells slightly floral and metallic. If I listen closely, there is a faint, almost electrical, buzzing coming from inside that I am unable to pick up with my Zoom H5.

The press release (and follow up email from the distributer) insist that I try to play it.

I have an old Walkman that I can sacrifice for it.

As I go to push it in, thinking at least it might make a good photo, the strands of meat stetch out into place, coils of tendons wrap around the spools, as if returning to its rightful shell.

Spring asserts itself; the sun is bright and the air is full of pollen, although my nose is unbothered by it.

I feel strong.

I press play.

BUY ON BANDCAMP

EDIT: It appears that Abbatyr have taken down their Bandcamp page.