Even from the outset, the work of Mekigah has had a cinematic quality; the shift has been in the imagery that his music evokes. Founded by sole member Vis Ortis as an orthodox-ish gothic doom act in 2008, it wasn’t long before he started taking the project into darker, more abstract realms that seemed to culminate with 2017’s Autoexousious, a work that bore only the faintest resemblance to traditional doom tropes. Instead, it felt like the soundtrack to some surreal VHS found in a derelict hospital, one that might kill anyone unfortunate enough to have watched the full thing. Seven years on, Ortis has progressed his sound further by essentially scrapping what came before and rebuilding from the ground up, crafting a collage of haunting beauty, horror and stream-of-consciousness utterings that makes little sense yet remains utterly gripping.
At 14 minutes in length and lacking anything approaching conventionality, ‘Collapsing Under’ is as close to an ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here’ moment as an opener can get. Starting as a jarring collision of fractured snippets of piano, cascading drums and the unsettling buzz of a chainsaw (yes, really) it swells in fits and starts, layering woozy synths, howls and moans, and guitars that barely even sound like guitars. At one minute it’s an eerie slice of chamber atmospherics, the next a disorienting fairground reel that perpetually shifts the ground under the listener’s feet…. and then there’s the explosion of free-jazz weirdness; then there’s the searing white noise and drone! It would be overwhelming but even within this first composition, an agenda is being laid out, one that asks the listener to surrender preconceptions and simply accept Ortis’ vision for what it is.
Even if later tracks do seem more straightforward in comparison, they have an unsettling ability to shift a listener’s perspective depending on environment, mental state or even just how they are focusing at that particular moment. Is ‘Broken Rhythm Pressure’ a clattering paean to mid-period Godflesh, a blur of murky trip-hop beats and ragged industrial, or is it some slam poetry jam from the bowels of hell? Does ‘Away Drifting From’ sound like a gonzo rescore of Fulci’s The Beyond, or is it an exercise in carnival-esque doom that strives to overwhelm the listener with as many distressing sounds as it can in as brief a period as possible. Somehow this album does the lot of it simultaneously.
Part of this might come down to Ortis’ sense of proportion in respect to his compositions, where collisions of multiple atmospheres and melodies can abruptly shift into relative simplicity and cohesion, and vice versa. Another culprit might be the deliberately murky production that leaves voices as disembodied, abstract forces of malevolent nature and drums as cold, cavernous rattles, and then occasionally forces them into close proximity with tangles of white noise and synth, eliciting a very real sense of claustrophobia and disquiet. It doesn’t feel accidental that ‘It Hisses So’ is somehow both the album’s most traditionally melodic offering but also its most cinematic and abstract one.
Honestly, there are times when To Hold Onto A Heartless Heart feels like a weapon of psychological warfare, a twisting labyrinth of noise and tortured melody that leaves the listener perpetually disoriented and quietly dreading what will pop out next, but then it throws in a moment of rare beauty and tranquillity and any attempt to lazily pigeonhole it goes out the window. It really is better just to experience the album over and over, piecing together the fragments and crafting your own perplexing, fascinating story.
