Girls Against God

Christian about the vibrato; there has to be, since they do it so much. In their boring gospel songs, the vibrato trills between God and the world, reflecting norms and rules. The most beautiful trill, if sung appropriately and in the most conventional way, is closest to God.
When I sing in my band, there’s no vibrato, no sincerity, or depth. There’s also no growl, HHHHHHH, I don’t understand why that’s the direction you’re supposed to go, either. But deep down I’m actually tired of the metal conventions. Everyone in my circle missed the beginnings of black metal; it’s been five years since all the action went down, and now everyone plays doom, a slower version with a more romantic outlook. In that genre, the bands shroud everything in a beautiful veil of dictionary English. None of us understands all the words, but on paper they look complex and ornamental. The clothes I should be buying are Victorian dresses and corsets, props from a time even more conservative than the dress code at the parish centres. No one actually questions anything. No one’s really trying to rouse anything. Nor am I, except when I’m alone in the witch’s dorm, and then I’m under the covers with my clit in my throat, cursing all the villages around me – Fevik and Rykene and Songe, and especially Saron’s Valley – and all the radical evangelists. If it’s really true that singing and writing can transgress the borders between the real world and someplace else, then there’s no point in wrapping it all up in convention and corsets. Why should you not question, not doubt or go forth in chaos, not scream or bark or howl? You have to open up to the strange. You have to say something new.
I stay and listen to the parish choir at the top of the hill while I take off my jacket and jumper. I’ve been taught that song is a sacrament; it makes the holy words and the holy being real through the body. The same thing happens at band practice and when I curse, too, I take the words I and the others have written, preferably about denying god, about grief and hopelessness, and make them real. Composing a beautiful melody for the words I hate God excites me, but I don’t dare sing it in front of the boys in the band: it sounds too primitive, too ecstatic. It’s still better to let them find the lyrics, deep in their dictionaries.
The old women at the top of the hill lend their frail existence to the words that they find holy. The purity of the words and the physical entities of the voices melt together. It’s a deeply Christian, almost Catholic moment, where faith is reified through its own complex, deeply sexual, religious melding. But it’s the words, not Christ’s blood and body, that manifest as they pass through the larynx, vocal cords and mouth. It’s the faith, the story, that’s reified. The trees, wind and the whole landscape curves around them. Below them, in the churchyard where we’ll shoot our band photos later that same year, where I pretend to be crucified, is the underground, mile after mile of blood.
Perhaps art and magic are synonymous. Ever since someone worked out that a sound could be a word, or that you could draw an object. When signs, or words, emerged, you could describe the surrounding world, signless until then. And from there, figuring out that this language could also describe things that don’t exist in the world was no great leap. It’s possible to just make stuff up, take ourselves places we didn’t know existed and that perhaps don’t exist, that emerge only in the moment the voice, and later the reader or writer, is connected to language.
When this spell, language, is used to create gods and mythology, the fiction becomes so complex and self-referential that in fact it seems real, perhaps even self-aware. That might actually be what the singers in the old parish choir dream of: making God real through song, through their own real bodies, although they themselves of course would say that God is already real, that he exists. (And when they say that, he appears to them, in words.)
In ancient scriptures, and in everything written ever since, witches and magic have been a philosophical problem that stares God right in the eye. The witch’s artistic expression is of course witchcraft, but just like the priests and the establishment, she uses both the body and words to give the craft life. The threat becomes real because these processes are similar, or perhaps, when all is said and done, magic is just a better word for God, faith, words and the existence of God. Perhaps it’s this fear that makes my college class cross themselves when I exclaim fucking hell while our class photo is being taken, or maybe it’s this fear that drove the writer of Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches, to include such an infinite number of pages with extrapolations of witch characteristics. Page after page filled with descriptions of how a witch uses words, body, and ritual, systematically eradicate her human and womanly qualities: her genitals are a dry desert that cannot reproduce; her throat is a broken connection between voice and body. Her body can be dressed in tempting animal- or humanlike disguises, and her voice is an artificial, sickly-sweet additive that tempts us to drink from the poisoned cup. The heavens open and God’s holy presence is realised in the bodies of God-fearing people through their songs and sacraments, but the body of the witch, through her magical rituals, opens a parallel forbidden reality, underground, that doesn’t belong in reality and shouldn’t exist.
Language is transgressive, in both magic and religion. But in my world, when I say fucking hell in 1998, magic is the more appropriate word. The phrase is like a microscopic portal in a network between two worlds, and when I raise my voice