Enceladus

Enceladus Book Sample - Chapter One

The Enceladus Enigma

By Toby Emmanuel. Editor. Music Mastery. August 2020

When Enceladus burst onto the music scene a five months ago, everyone wanted a piece of them. Their first hit, Black Antarctic, garnered twenty million listens on Spotify in its first week. That now seems long ago. Their second hit, The AntiLight in the Halo, Number Two, now known to fans simply as AntiLight, had twenty million listens on its first day. Those numbers seem insignificant given their reach now. And they reportedly just cut a deal with Spotify to release their second album, Reliquary, on terms that put them in the same league as Taylor Swift.

    Their first album, unnamed and released only on vinyl with a matte black cover, but now universally known as Black, sent record stores into meltdown. Released by little known record label Vantage, out of Tokyo of all places, this somewhere-based band defies everything that we can imagine about the music industry.

    Old-school turntables disappeared off the shelves of every available retail venue. The decision by the band not to release on the internet, nor on Spotify, defied every logical move. They seemed to care little, and gave no explanation as to why, but this week’s Spotify deal proved it a masterstroke.

    And the album cover is as mysterious as the band itself. The names of the songs are printed in gloss on the cover’s back. Tiny words that required this writer to hunt for a magnifying glass.

The names of the songs: Black Antarctic, The AntiLight in the Halo: Number Two, Clockwork Cello, Tessellated, Seven Eight Eleven Sixteen and Thirteen, 6, 7, Angels Sometimes Kiss and Sometimes Bite, M1-11, Cadence and Ice Shards, The 1000 Things We Didn’t Feel, Apology, Auroral Static, and Gigantor. Nothing ties those names together.

    Their first gig was played at the Ruby Room in Shimokitazawa in Tokyo. That much we (kind of) know. Ruby Room is a popular band venue in the indie-cool suburb close to Tokyo’s heart, and it was announced on the band’s Instagram page – which informs us of frustratingly little – half an hour before they went on. According to those who attended, they played to a packed-out club (which holds only a hundred and fifty) for half an hour before the hordes of people arrived. The door to the venue was closed and locked because the lucky patrons had already been admitted. A line formed around the block. The owner, Sato, opened the door for a second, and third set. So four-hundred-and-fifty people saw them for the first time. Some of those people are now minor internet celebrities.

Every fan has seen the phone footage that’s been uploaded to YouTube from that gig, and the songs from it you’ll find on Black.

    Over the next two weeks, the band played four more times, twice at Zepp Shinjuku and twice at Line Cube in Shibuya. Both hold thousands, but it wasn’t enough. Stories of scalpers selling tickets to the Line Cube gigs for $5000 have become a thing of Enceladus folklore, and fans flew in from as far away as New York – with only twenty-four hours’ notice. Rumour has it that the gig was almost moved to the Tokyo Dome, with a capacity of fifty thousand. Remember people, this was the band’s fifth gig – ever.

    On first listen, the album is a revelation. And I don’t write that lightly. Clearly a concept album, in the biggest sense of the word. I could never have imagined it, given the wide differential between the musical style of Black Antarctic and AntiLight, but here I am. A concept album it is. And after the first listen, I had to sit down.

    It’s hard to describe. The moment it had finished, all I wanted to do was listen to it again. And again, and again.

I’ve written about music for twenty-five years. I’ve seen bands explode out of the blocks only to die on their second album. Think MGMT with Oracular Spectacular. So I’m careful in my praise. These articles come back to haunt music journalists, years later, when they’ve lauded some band as the Next Big Thing burning bright, only to see the band reduced to charcoal after their second album, the gushy prognostications brutally premature.

    But Black is momentous. Momentous. And after that first listen, I know it will win a Grammy this year. High praise? Go out and buy a copy – and a turntable – if you can get your hands on either. Nobody knows the size of the first print. It was estimated at half a million. They’re gone, and the shelves of turntables that can play it are gone too. The band hasn’t said – it never says anything – when another print will come out, but record stores are biting their nails in anticipation. Back orders run into the millions.

    I wanted to put down my thoughts before I listened to it a second time. I’ve now listened to it on constant rotation for the last two days, and the following initial thoughts have crystalised, with some additions.

    On first listen I wondered if someone had the same reaction sitting with Ludwig von in 1804 during the first performance of the Fifth. Mozart was the genius inside the symphonic form, but Beethoven took a hatchet to the rules. Enceladus have done the same thing. It’s music – my God is it music! – but what type?

    Think Dark Side of The Moon but add in the first and last songs from Meddle. Add instrumentation that’s…a dark metal Four Seasons by Vivaldi. Did I just write that? Ladle in The Origin of Symmetry by Muse for the haunting lyrics of lead female singer Seven. What she does with her voice defies belief. Down deep, she’s Janice Joplin. Up high she’s Jonie Mitchell. In fact at times I wondered if the band hadn’t somehow shifted her voice, midstream, with lead male vocalist Eleven. And then Eight and Sixteen come in behind her and wipe the decks.

    Then think Daft Punk. An obvious comparison given the bands aversion to disclosure, with their futuristic masks concealing their identities, but the Daft Punkian riffs are there. I was at the Alive concert in 2007 in Paris, and my mind was blown. This album did something similar, but I was sitting in my lounge room, staring stupidly and the revolving black disk that was sending out these songs. Mind-fucking-blown.

    Eleven on lead guitar is stunning. Eight on rhythm is a revelation. Thirteen on drums is a master. They all are. All of them. But who the hell are they? An enigmatic troupe who have taken numbers for names – and why those numbers?

We don’t know – but we know something is happening. After that first listen I went for a walk to try to process what I’d just heard, and a young girl, perhaps twenty, was wearing a tight white tee shirt with their names – sorry, numbers – on it. Ala John, Paul, Ringo, and George. And everyone knew who they were. But no one knows who they are.

    The first song, Black Antarctic, was a total shock. Seven, their anonymous base player and vocalist, kicked it off, with a passacaglia that ran the length of the song. I wondered if I was about to hear Dido’s Lament by Henry Purcell. I wasn’t. Thirteen, the drummer, came in. If you’ve listened to The Who, and Keith Moon at it, well, you’ll hear Moon resurrected. But add some of Neil Peart’s touch. Rush – eat your heart out. How he hits so hard, so clean, and with such sensitivity to what’s going on with the rest of the band…I don’t know.

    The five of them. Sweet Jesus. Those shaky clips of that Ruby Room gig on YouTube showed genius. Seven, Eight, Eleven, Thirteen and Sixteen. The bizarre names we all know now. Who needed more? Who’d want more? It would spoil it. Then it didn’t. Adding a DJ at the start of their shows, named Twenty-One, was an inspiration. Eleven is Jeff Beck. I’d say reincarnated, only Beck is still with us. He’s the guitarist’s guitarist. I’m not the only one saying it. And Eight’s mastery is eclipsed only because he’s next to Eleven’s stupendous talent. Sixteen on keyboard? Incredible, and when Seven takes over from Eleven (oh my God, I feel like I’m talking about a convenience store) on vocal duties, my longing just gets ratcheted up a notch.

    I heard everything in this album. Alongside the artists mentioned above: My Chemical Romance, Giorgio Moroder, lathers of Metallica. Audioslave. Grandaddy. When Seven takes to the mike I get Regina Spektor with more range – then she turns around and sings like Annie Lennox. Eight sounds like Jeff Buckley as if his guitar skills were insufficient. Fuck me. They’re not. Surely Buckley’s ghost has been rattled from the grave on this one.

    Sonic Youth is in there. Labyrinth must have been collaborating with them too, circa Euphoria – but he wasn’t. I’ve reached out to his record label. Thank God they communicate back. Even the Moody Blues is there.

It should be a mess. It’s a masterpiece. I can’t explain it. Twenty-five years writing about music isn’t enough. I don’t have the words. Find out someone who’s got it. Get a bootleg copy. I don’t know. Just listen to it. Again and again and again.

    Enceladus is the rebirth of heavy rock, and prog rock, and soul blues rock. Ah-ah-ah! It doesn’t stop there. It’s the rebirth of dance music too, and electronic grime soul pop rock funk. But then it isn’t. It’s its own thing. There’s nothing to compare it to.

    Can someone unearth who these people are? And whether they’re actually human. They look young – from what we can see. I’ve zoomed in on Seven’s hands. She’s a teenager. But that’s impossible. No one that young can have a voice like that. Four octave range? Where are they from? They’re not Japanese. Where did they all pick up their skills? And where have they jammed together to make them so tight? Someone’s fucking heard them rehearsing somewhere. Fess up.

    Oh, and by the way. They write all their own music. Twelve songs. Sonic Architecture.

    Someone, please find out. I’m speechless.