Music / Jute Gyte

Jute Gyte is a band from Springfield, Missouri, consisting of sole member Adam Kalmbach. The project's musical style has varied massively over the course of (as of May 2021) thirty-two full-length albums and around a dozen EPs, splits, collaborations, or compilations, but the majority of it is rooted in some combination of Black Metal, Avant-Garde Music, Ambient, Harsh Noise, and Industrial Metal. Other influences at times include Technical Death Metal, twentieth-century Classical Music, Progressive Metal, Doom Metal, drone, Electronic Music, and IDM, and at times his music falls into some (or all) of these genres. Kalmbach, who has a degree in music theory, takes an unusually academic approach to composition by metal standards; however, his music is also extremely heavy and, frankly, often frightening. Kalmbach has added new weapons to his compositional arsenal by basing all of his music since Jute Gyte's twenty-first album, 2013's Discontinuities, on a twenty-four-note scale - thus giving him twice as many notes to work with as are found in the twelve-note scale that underpins virtually all Western popular music. This has resulted in quite possibly the most dissonant musical catalogue in all of Black Metal, a genre that already has a reputation for dissonance.

Kalmbach is quite reclusive; he does not maintain a social media profile and only occasionally gives interviews, although he is fairly forthcoming about himself in them. He also often includes lengthy liner notes with his releases explaining his composition process and literary influences in great detail. He makes nearly all of his work available as pay-what-you-want releases on his Bandcamp. He also has little interest in self-promotion, but despite this, his music has attracted a fair amount of acclaim (and notoriety) in the metal underground. Love it or hate it, it's difficult to deny that there is little else like it in the history of recorded music.

Albums

Release dates as yyyy-mm-dd

• 2006-06-06 - Apidya
• 2007-07-07 - Arakan
• 2008-01 - Thanatron
• 2008-08-08 - Old Ways
• 2009-12-12 - Subcon
• 2010-01-01 - Ghost Sickness
• 2010-06-06 - Young Eagle
• 2010-09-09 - Ritenour's Earth
• 2010-12-29 - Communicants
• 2011-05-07 - Verstiegenheit
• 2011-07-18 - Wounded Snake: Early Noise Works
• 2011-09-10 - Faunscan
• 2011-11-14 - Impermanence
• 2012-01-31 - Andreyev's "Lazarus"
• 2012-03-10 - Volplane
• 2012-05-01 - Isolation
• 2012-07-14 - Witzelsucht
• 2012-10-01 - Senescence
• 2013-01-01 - Noctis Labyrinthus
• 2013-02-01 - Metonym
• 2013-03-04 - Discontinuities
• 2014-02-03 - Vast Chains
• 2014-09-01 - Ressentiment
• 2015-03-02 - Dialectics
• 2015-06-01 - Ship of Theseus
• 2016-06-06 - Perdurance
• 2017-07-10 - Oviri
• 2018-05-01 - Penetralia
• 2019-07-01 - Birefringence
• 2020-03-30 - Respice Finem
• 2021-01-02 - Diapason
• 2021-05-07 - Mitrealität
• 2023-05-05 - Eclose
• 2023-06-01 - Krun Macula
• 2023-09-05 - Unus Mundus Patet

Tropes

• All There in the Manual: His liner notes are almost always detailed and extensive, although for some of his older releases he admits he doesn't remember much about his thought processes when he was recording them.
• Breather Episode:
  • The majority of his metal albums have song-length breather episodes. Examples include "Interlude" on Old Ways, "What a Bird Bore Away Over the Deep Ocean" and "The Flower and the Chain" on Young Eagle, "Discontinuities" on Discontinuities, etc. Note that these are only breather episodes by Jute Gyte standards, and they remain somewhat unsettling in the contexts of their respective albums; in the context of a normal band's discography, they would probably qualify as weapons-grade nightmare fuel.
  • The metal tracks often have breather episodes as well; "Yarinareth, Yarinareth, Yarinareth" has a good example about midway through the song.
• Brown Note: Often approaches a Real Life version of this. Due to the 24-note scale, even when the songs aren't all that dissonant, the melodies feel slightly off in a very unsettling way. When the songs are dissonant, the effect is even more unsettling.
• Careful with That Axe: Even by the standards of Black Metal, a genre known for taking this trope to extremes, Kalmbach's vocals can be unusually tortured. This is particularly evident in tracks like "Apparition in the Woodlands at Dusk", which would be fairly mellow (...in parts...by Jute Gyte standards) if not for the vocals.
• Deconstructive Parody: Old Ways, per the liner notes, was "meant as a sort of satire on the black metal trope of warlust, one way to utter the useless Nietzschean 'yes' to life," and its title (which it shares with a Neil Young album) "is meant to refer to another black metal trope–the yearning for a fictive past."
• Epic Rocking: Almost every song. A typical Jute Gyte release (insofar as there is such a thing) has about six or seven songs and runs for about an hour. Most songs tend to be in the 7-16 minute range. A few are way longer; the longest is probably Diapason, which consists of a single song and runs for two hours and twenty-three minutes. Also of note is Respice Finem, which likewise consists of a single song and runs for more than eighty-seven minutes. (Both of these, we should note, are ambient works that have little to do with rocking per se.) Some albums are also quite long; Penetralia, which is nearly four hours long, probably takes the cake, though.
• Foreign Language Title: Frequently. A few examples:
  • French: Ressentiment can be translated merely as resentment, but is more strictly used in English to mean "a sense of resentment arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred, often leading to a frustrated sense of inferiority, with various social repercussions." Kalmbach most likely got it from Nietzsche's writings, in which it appears because German has no close equivalent; hence, Nietzsche used it with a very specific meaning in works such as Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality; other philosophers and psychologists have since developed the idea further.
  • German: Verstiegenheit means "wandering beyond limits"; Kalmbach apparently got it from Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence by way of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Witzelsucht literally means "joke addiction", and translates less literally as "a tendency to tell inappropriate or pointless stories and poor jokes; excessive facetiousness, especially when due to some medical condition."
  • Greek: Diapason comes from διαπασῶν, meaning the musical octave. "Οφιούχος" ("Ophioukhos", most often seen in its Latinised form "Ophiuchus", literally meaning "serpent-handler" or "serpent-bearer") comes from a constellation on the celestial equator.
  • Latin: Respice finem means "Look to the end" or "Consider the final outcome." "Angelus novus" means "New Angel". Noctis Labyrinthus means "Labyrinth of the Night" and refers to a region of Mars in the Phoenicis Lacus quadrangle (the album was inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy).
• Genre Roulette: Even by the standards of avant-garde black metal, this project is particularly difficult to classify, particularly since Kalmbach releases most of his music as Jute Gyte, regardless of genre. As a result, a blistering metal album may follow a serene ambient album in the band's chronological discography, and thus it's impossible to have any idea what you're in for without listening (or at least reading reviews).
• Hell Is That Noise: Kalmbach is seemingly in love with this trope, and seems determined to find ways for both composition and instrumentation to invoke it.
• Last Note Nightmare: "What a Bird Bore Away Over the Deep Ocean" starts out as an acoustic piece, but contains increasingly more noise as it progresses. It's still much lighter than the rest of the album it appears on (Young Eagle), with the possible exception of the final track, "The Flower and the Chain", which qualifies as this trope in its own way - it begins as a serene ambient piece based around piano, synthesizer, and birdsong, but both channels contains noise elements that get progressively louder throughout the piece, and it contains increasingly more dissonant notes as it progresses as well.
• Loudness War: Although his music is far from the worst offender out there, his metal work does tend to be somewhat clipped and usually comes out in the DR6-DR7 range. Some tracks have better dynamic range than others, however. The big outlier among his metal albums is Old Ways, which scores DR2 with most individual tracks scoring DR1 ("Interlude" is DR4 and "Snail" is DR2). At DR5, his second metal album Young Eagle is louder than any of the albums that followed, with metal tracks ranging from DR3 to DR5 and then two ambient tracks at DR8 and DR9. After this point, virtually none of his tracks have dynamic ranges below DR5 ("Griefdrone" from Senescence, at DR4, is one noteworthy exception). By contrast, his ambient works, as one might expect, have much better dynamic range; for example, Diapason is DR9 and Respice Finem is DR10.
• Mood Whiplash: Although Jute Gyte's metal albums commonly sound like impenetrable walls of noise on first listen, there are moments that ultimately reveal themselves as almost... playful, for lack of a better adjective. However, these can transition into blasting walls of noise at a moment's notice. Part of the charm of listening to a Jute Gyte album is developing the musical vocabulary to understand the emotions being expressed, which cover a wider range than listeners might expect on first listen.
• New Sound Album: He's arguably had several, but it's difficult to classify any specific album as a "new sound album" because his style is so difficult to classify. However, Discontinuities is particularly noteworthy for being the first album purely based on a 24-note scale, although he had used microtones before then (e.g., the detuned mandolin of "Snail" on Old Ways, the lap steel guitar he used on Impermanence), and when his metal albums are listened to in succession, Discontinuities feels like a natural progression from his earlier work.
• Nothing Is Scarier: "The Flower and the Chain" from Young Eagle has this effect overall, for reasons described above under Last Note Nightmare.
• Precision F-Strike: He doesn't use profanity all that often, so when it does show up, it's particularly powerful.
• Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Like most Black Metal, he is influenced by Romanticism, but he has drifted away from it in recent years; his song title "Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal" might give a hint as to what he thinks about Romanticism overall. At the same time, he also echoes Oxford music historian Richard Taruskin's view that our culture has never entirely left Romanticism behind and that, in Kalmbach's words, "right now we're in very late Romanticism".
• Rule of Three: Kalmbach has grouped Jute Gyte's black metal albums into trilogies based on what he feels to be similar stylistic tendencies. They are distinguished by similar cover designs:
  • Old Ways, Young Eagle, and Verstiegenheit
  • Impermanence, Isolation, and Senescence
  • Discontinuities, Vast Chains, and Ressentiment
  • Ship of Theseus, Perdurance, and Oviri
  • Birefringence and Mitrealität are the first two instalments of the current trilogy.
  • The compilations The Rib, Laocoön, and Helian also make a group of three.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: His lyrics frequently read more like philosophical essays than Black Metal lyrics. His song and album titles also often include little-known words like Birefringence, meaning "The splitting of a ray of light into two parallel rays of perpendicular polarization by passage through an optically anisotropic medium; the property of a material that light passing through it is so split"; Senescence, meaning the process of ageing; or Perdurance, meaning permanence or persistence.
• Shout-Out: Copious, and frequently lampshaded in his liner notes. Particularly common recipients of them include David Foster Wallace and Friedrich Nietzsche, but others have included Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Judith Butler, Thomas Pynchon, H. P. Lovecraft, Kim Stanley Robinson, Voltaire, Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Ligotti, Saint Augustine, and Anaïs Nin. There are countless others.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Even by Black Metal standards, his work tends to be quite pessimistic and cynical. He has argued for ethics from a negative utilitarian, anti-natalist perspective (i.e., the ethical imperative is to reduce suffering, and the logical conclusion of this is that humans should stop reproducing), citing Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race as being particularly influential on his thought.
• Shown Their Work: Jute Gyte's music, lyrics, and liner notes make it clear that Kalmbach is very well educated on a wide variety of subjects (particularly literature and philosophy), and his level of musical education is frequently reflected in his composition style.
• Sophisticated as Hell: His lyrics tend to be very erudite, but he's not above throwing in occasional vulgarity when it serves the song. He manages to make even this sophisticated, though: One of his songs might be titled "Your Blood and Soil Are Piss and Shit," but in the album liner notes, he quotes Voltaire (describing humanity as "insects devouring one another on a little atom of mud", a quote from Zadig) and (an apparently misattributed quote of) Saint Augustine (in Latin, no less: "inter urinas et faeces nascimur," meaning "we are born between urine and feces")^note Technically, [1] faex (faeces is its plural) means "dregs", "sediment", "salt of tartar", "brine used for pickling", "rouge as makeup", or "grout from brewing"; however, in this quotation it means "feces". Interestingly, urinas is the accusative plural of urina (inter takes the accusative); urinam would be the accusative singular. The first known citation of the quote is an 1867 anatomy textbook (in German) by Josef Hyrtl, who attributed it to "a church father"; it was subsequently popularised by Dr. Sigmund Freud, who apparently found it in Hyrtl's textbook. The quote apparently does not appear in Augustine's surviving writings. to back himself up.
• Stylistic Suck: Old Ways was intentionally given a raw, abrasive production with almost all of the dynamic range sucked out, and all of the vocals and instrumentation run through multiple distortion filters and other processing. Kalmbach himself noted, "This method of working was enjoyable but left little room to grow and I subsequently struggled to find a way forward," and "[T]he dense sound processing so greatly privileged timbre over pitch content that all attempts at complex polyphony were rendered indecipherable." His later metal albums all have more reasonable levels of dynamic range, and while they still have harsh, noisy production, the instruments are more clearly recognisable as instruments.
• Surprisingly Gentle Song: Let's put aside the albums that have essentially nothing to do with metal as irrelevant to this trope. Even on most of his metal albums, some tracks are a lot less heavy than the surrounding material, usually to provide a Breather Episode. Discontinuities the album is mostly Level 11+ experimental black metal, but "Discontinuities" the song is an avant-garde guitar piece based on an ascending pattern on the 24-note scale that doesn't qualify as metal at all; it sounds more like it was beamed to us from an alternate universe where King Crimson's Robert Fripp got into microtonality.^note Think "Fracture" or "Discipline", but slower and without the full band accompaniment. It's still plenty avant-garde, weird, and unsettling, owing to the microtonal scale.
• Take That!: His thoughts on nationalism are succinctly summarised in his song title "Your Blood and Soil Are Piss and Shit".
• Uncommon Time: Copious, and sometimes taken to extreme levels. He also has taken polyrhythms up to eleven by featuring multiple simultaneous tempi, sometimes to a degree that might make Meshuggah blush. According to the notes for Oviri:
  "Mice Eating Gold" and "Yarinareth..." have sections in which one guitar gradually increases in tempo while a second guitar gradually decreases in tempo in a manner similar to Conlon Nancarrow's Study No. 21. For instance, "Yarinareth..." opens with a left-panned guitar decelerating from 400 BPM to 100 BPM, while a right-panned guitar accelerates from 100 BPM to 400 BPM. At the midpoint of this process (0:36), the left and right-panned guitars momentarily converge at 200 BPM and a third, centered guitar enters at a stable 200 BPM. The guitars proceed through different configurations of these tempo gradients each time this section recurs in the track, always playing manipulations of the 24-note series 0, 3, 22, 21, 14, 17, 8, 7, 4 19, 18, 5 6, 15, 16, 23, 20, 1, 2 13, 10, 11, 12, 9.
  
  Most of the tracks have sections in multiple simultaneous tempos, like the prolation canon in a 4:5:6:7:8 ratio in ["The Norms That Author the Self Render the Self Substitutable"]. "Democritus Laughing" opens with a four-measure riff that accelerates by gaining an extra note each measure in a horizontal 4:5:6:7 ratio, for a total of 22 notes. The 22 pitches played by the opening guitar were generated aleatorically by rolling a 24-sided die; the three other guitars play serial transformations of that pitch material. When the drums enter, the tempo ratio becomes vertical and the four guitars trade tempos in that 4:5:6:7 ratio every time the opening theme recurs.

---