Lebanese noise artist Maltash has a new take for you in 2021. Instead of making a resolution. Instead of attempting to optimize your body and mind to make them more attractive to our corporate masters. Instead of eating better or drinking more water, why not try something new? Why not sabotage yourself? Why not let it all fall away? Stop answering calls. Stop replying to emails. Stop watching documentaries on Netflix. Just say no, to all of it. See what happens. See how the walls dissolve around you and the spaces that seemed closed to you suddenly open. Move through these openings like a mist between dead trees. Doesn't that feel good? Doesn't the thought of melting out of sight just sound like a relief? Such a nihilistic fantasy may be about as close to real liberation that you are likely to know this side of the new decade.
Obviously, you can't give up on everything in your life, and some of those cliched resolutions might actually be good for you (drinking more water for instance). But the reality is that most of the things that we think of as ways of "improving" ourselves are actually just ways of tightening the chains that already lace themselves around our limbs and neck. It's the organizing principle of the West (and increasingly the rest of the world). We each are our own and our neighbor's jailer. And as long as you don't leave your cell, or can keep someone else in their's, you'll be ok... for the time being. Until the warden needs to make an example of someone that is, and he always does...
On his Bandcamp, Maltash explains his debut album Sabotage Yourself as operating on a simple philosophy "Break Every Boundary, Empower the Disheartened." For his work, he draws from the tumultuous modern history of his home country, but the sentiments are universal as I've already explained. Whether its the explosive cacophony of opener "Dystopian Dream" or the bleak, blackened electro-doom of "Infatuation Queen" with its unsettling vocal expressions, taking the form of a hog-like, slit-throated gargle at first, and transitioning into a red-eyed, exasperated holler after the bridge, sounding like a man trapped in a well during the rain, as the water levels slowly rise around him. "Kid on the Left" sounds like a version of Street Sect that's literally been run over by a street cleaner and had all of its skin frayed into a chew, blood-sopped felt. But the most devastating elements of Maltash's sound are saved for the profane sacrifice of the title track, beginning with Nine Inch Nails reminiscent, gas-exchanging, compressed filament of beats and a pitiful, weeping vocal bawl, it continues with this wailing and woeful thesis as the song's tempo increases and the melody (if you can call it that) is beset by wolf-like growls and foundation wrecking bass-lines that wipe and lash like cut electrical lines in a storm.
On Sabotage Yourself asks a simple question. What parts of yourself are worth saving? What parts of you should be left to die? Answering this question may be the only thing that saves your sanity in the coming year.
