r/Neopsychedelia • u/Kittenbee_ • 9d ago
Dead Skeletons | 'Dead Mantra' 💀🎶
I deeply connect with the psychedelic, almost ritualistic quality of this song. Its relentless rhythm, layers of fuzz and repetition puts me into a bit of a trance-like state every time I listen to it 😵💫
'Dead Mantra' actually predates Dead Skeletons as a conventional band. It was originally created in Iceland in 2008 by Jón Sæmundur Auðarson (a.k.a. Nonni Dead), Singapore Sling frontman Henrik Björnsson, Ryan Carlson Van Kriedt (formerly of BJM) and Aislinn Van Kriedt for one of Nonni’s installations at the Reykjavík Art Museum. It later became their first release, including a unique 10-inch pressing with the ten-minute version on one side and an engraving on the other.
Musically, I appreciate how it begins relatively sparsely and then grows into a huge, driving wall of sound. The bass has a dark two-step pulse underneath layers of tremulous, fuzzed-out guitar, distorted organ and distant percussion. There are higher, almost shimmering layers cutting through all that weight as well, making the song feel both menacing and strangely uplifting.
It is intensely repetitive, but deliberately so. Rather than feeling static, the repetition becomes meditative, almost like being pulled further and further into some kind of ritual.
There is the mantra itself: "He who fears death cannot enjoy life."
Repeated in Icelandic, German and English throughout the song, they genuinely feel like words to live by.
Nonni described 'Dead Mantra' as a "spiritual battle song". The wider DEAD concept grew partly from his experience of living with HIV and his attempts to confront his own fear of death through art. He described the song as something he could use almost like meditation, a way of fighting that fear rather than being controlled by it.
That context makes the song even more powerful to me because, despite sounding so dark, its actual philosophy is profoundly optimistic. It is essentially saying that death is inevitable, so allowing the fear of it to control you only prevents you from properly experiencing being alive. It reminds me of my own personal mantra, Oscar Wilde’s quote "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
The track later opened their 2011 album Dead Magick, which expanded that same idea into a delightfully strange mixture of psychedelic rock, drones, fuzz, repetitive mantras and crashing percussion.
There is something simultaneously ominous and life affirming about this song that I love. It makes me want to go perform some kind of ritual or stare at the moon for an unreasonable amount of time 🌕😂
For all its darkness, it ultimately leaves me feeling more alive 🌌