Profiles in Brutality: Kaoteon
Beirut, 2003
AK-47s raised, the exceedingly pissed-off men easily parted the stunned crowd and stormed onto the stage. What had begun as an intimate metal show in a small club had descended into violent pandemonium. The band — known then as Chaotaeon — were stopped in the middle of playing, dragged out of the club and thrown into the back of a car. The gunmen were undercover police investigating allegations that the band were engaging in devil worship - a very serious crime in Beirut.
Kaoteon founder Anthony Assaker (who goes by “Anthony Kaoteon”), explains what happened next. “They held us for three days on suspicion of devil worshipping because they pronounced our band name as ‘Shaitan,’ which is Arabic for Satan. We were up on stage, screaming our lungs out and they thought we were doing a black mass.”
If the authorities had hoped that the abduction would intimidate the band, if not put an outright end to it, they were badly mistaken. “Two months later, we released our first demo,” he says. To avoid further confusion however, they did change their name, adopting Kaoteon as their new mantle.
Born in 1983 and raised in Lebanon during the final stretch of the Lebanese Civil War, death was an ever-present threat. Anthony recalls, “I spent like 7 years going between a bomb shelter and the house. I have pictures wearing bulletproof jackets and behind me there were cars burned to ashes and buildings that were trashed. That was my day-to-day commute between the bomb shelter and home. Whenever the alarm would go off, you’d go down into the shelter and when it would stop, you’d come out. For a couple of weeks we’d go to school and then shit would hit the fan again and we’d go back to the bomb shelter for a couple of months.”
Now living in the Netherlands, Anthony is physically far-removed from those dangers but as he relives the memories today, he pauses for a good long bit and then says, “When you’re living there, you don’t realise what you’re experiencing; especially if you’re born there. The longer I think of it and the more I learn about the world, the more I see how fucked-up it was.”
The bomb shelter where he spent so much of his youth was actually a sprawling underground carpentry shop where one hundred families sheltered at a time. With his parents on one mattress and he and his sister sharing another, they slept and lived in close quarters with the other families under the light of portable, battery-powered lamps. Eventually the families figured out how to use the batteries to power a television. “We had one of those small TVs,” he says. “They’d put TV shows for kids on, but it didn’t matter if it was good cartoons or not, everybody would watch it. We had two or three TVs for a hundred families.” And yet, under these pressure-cooker conditions, there was a good bit of normalcy. “Funny enough,” he says, “it was fun. All hundred families’ children played together. Of course there was no gaming; we played with balls, wickets, cards and all of those kinds of things. This is why I said that when you’re living it, you don’t realise what’s happening. You hear the bombs but eventually you get used to it, even though there’s destruction everywhere. As I grew up, I realised how lucky I was to survive.”
Anthony was not yet ten years old when he began learning guitar. “I started playing guitar in ‘92,” he says. “I was super young and I wasn’t playing metal. I stopped playing for a few years because it wasn’t so cool back then. Ha ha.” Shortly thereafter, his uncle turned him on to the classics. “ Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Doors,” Anthony explains. “Then he gave me grunge music and eventually bands like Unleashed, Napalm Death and Carcass.” And a metalhead was born.
Though the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990, dire economic conditions persisted there and the country was quick to adopt the Internet as a means of learning what was happening in the outside world. And of course, it became the main outlet for finding new music. “We started downloading shitloads of music,” he says. “First it was tapes. You’d pass around the tape and make copies. When an album reached the metal community, everyone would make a copy of it. Then you had a radio station that would put some gothic and doom and everybody would, of course, record those songs. But mIRC (a popular Internet chat protocol for Windows, invented in 1995) was where I discovered all of the music that I really liked. Going from one band to another, I discovered thrash metal, black metal and death metal and eventually I built my own identity in the metal genre.”
By 1997, Anthony had acquired his first electric guitar and, undeterred by the lack of extreme metal musicians in his circle, he began playing as a one-man metal band. “Even if it’s something you shouldn’t really say now, Burzum, the one-man band, gave me the idea.” He’s quick to clarify that it was neither the band’s lyrics nor philosophy that inspired him — it was something entirely practical. “It encouraged me to do a band as just one man - one man can do a fucking band! And with this music, you don’t need to record great stuff and then tour. I discovered Darkthrone, who don’t play fucking live! And they made it. So I realised that I could do this shit, too. I started playing around and writing stuff and eventually finding people to play with.”
The early-Noughties in Lebanon saw the expansion of a local metal community as well as the rise of moralists and politicians, eager to raise their profile by accusing metal bands of spreading harmful ideologies to the youth. It was very much like Tipper Gore’s morality campaigns against the music industry in the US in the 80s. In the wake of his 2003 detention, Anthony became a face — albeit anonymous — of the new metal movement. “I was on national television in Lebanon once because of devil worshipping. I was behind a curtain and they changed my voice. It’s on YouTube somewhere and it’s in Lebanese. The show was on one of the biggest TV stations in Lebanon. We discussed devil worship and music and all that stuff and basically, because we were stopped and thrown in jail (for the 2003 gig), they were saying, ‘You are the head of the snake,’ blah, blah, blah... haha I don’t care about the devil any more than I care about religion because I don’t believe in either. So it’s really funny to me when these things kick up.”
That said, while Anthony acknowledges that black metal has attracted more than its fair share of controversy over the years, he strongly opposes any blanket assessments. “I think that all metal genres and all music genres can be controversial,” he says. “It’s not about the genre. You have bad bands, just like you have bad CEOs and bad musicians and bad rappers and bad black metal musicians. It is a genre that’s dealing with extreme subjects, so you’re playing on the borderline. In any genre of any music, you have an influence on the people who hear what you put out. Now, the way that you use that influence depends on the artist. For me, metal is about being the voice of the voiceless. It’s about exposing what’s wrong about the world and not encouraging doing wrong in the world. So when you use your voice to add more controversy then yes, black metal can be controversial; but I feel that black metal is trying to release the shackles of this prison that religion is using to keep the world hostage. This is why I like the genre. I like its darkness and I like its obscurity because it deals with obscure subjects. Would I say the blanket criticism is justified? No. Would I say there are a lot of wrong things happening in metal? Then yes.”
While Kaoteon’s early years featured a number of different musicians, they recorded several demos before releasing their full length debut, Veni Vidi Vomui in 2011. Inspired by the raw, aggressive black metal of the early-90s, the album incorporated prominent death metal elements into the mix, along with Anthony’s razorwire riffing and utterly-corrosive production. Fronted by vocalist Walid Wolflust, the album revealed a band that had already begun to carve out their own distinct sound. Though it lacked the melodic strengths of later outings, Veni... was an aural manifesto of pure hatred.
Some observers, well-meaning or not, qualified their praise for the album by suggesting that it was surprisingly strong for a black metal album from Lebanon. “I hated when people would say, ‘It’s very good music for Lebanon.’ What the fuck is ‘for Lebanon?’ As if you’re saying, ‘He’s a good human for a Lebanese person.’ I didn’t want any part of that thinking. I put my mind to writing really good music, so I started looking for really talented musicians who could play the kind of music that I wanted. That’s how I connected with (drummer) Frederik (Widigs) who played with Marduk, on our second album, Damnatio Memoriae. I also connected with bassist Linus (Klausenitzer, also in Obscura) who first started with me on Deathtribe (one of Anthony’s side projects) but then I got him on the second Kaoteon album. And the rest is history.”
More accurately, the rest is in medias res because Damnatio Memorae propelled Kaoteon from black metal’s outer fringe into the middle of the fray. Powered by legitimately bludgeoning riffs and surging, sledgehammer tempos, the album clawed its way onto more than a few albums of the year list in 2018. Such was its impact that the UK’s Metal Hammer magazine awarded Kaoteon its Global Metal Award at the annual Golden Gods award ceremony that year in London. Considering that Kaoteon were up against literally every other metal band in the world outside of the UK, this was no small feat. “You don’t realise what you’re getting when it happens,” he says, “because it happens so fast. In 2017, we played a festival in the Netherlands and they flew us in from Dubai. I was like Fuck man, this is really happening to us. Then in 2018, we played a show in Lebanon again and saw that we had about a thousand people who knew the band. It felt super awesome. Then we got nominated for the Metal Hammer Global Metal award and then we won it! Ozzy Osbourne and Tool and other bands were on that same stage getting different awards and Meshuggah and Parkway Drive both played. I kept thinking, Is this really happening? I said to myself, OK, I really need to keep doing this. I need to put plenty of fuel in the tank! Ha ha So as you can see, I keep this award behind me here as a reminder to keep dreaming and to hold on to the passion because I don’t want to lose it. It’s burning inside me.”
Kaoteon performing at the 2017 Beirut Metal Festival
Kaoteon’s magnificent 2020 self-titled album would cement their status as one of metal’s rising forces — an uncompromising salvo of pure blackened brutality. It would be Walid’s final outing with Kaoteon, who are now fronted by Dutch vocalist Terry Stooker. On the strengths of these back-to-back releases, Metal Hammer has lifted them up alongside Rammstein and Slipknot in their 50 most-anticipated albums of 2022. Also featuring At the Gates drummer Adrian Erlandsson, the new album — called Neither God Nor Master — promises to expand the blackened death vision of its predecessors into something both distinctive and uncompromisingly brutal.
The first single, The Hunt For Life, has already dropped and from the skyscraping melodies and surging tempo changes, it signals a thrilling new direction. “It’s something you would not typically expect from Kaoteon but I wanted to put it out there because this is how I feel nowadays; these existential questions that we face today are what inspired that song. I felt like Kaoteon’s past two albums had achieved a certain sound. Damnatio Memoriae and the self-titled album sound different in their own ways. I really wanted to make the new album with a more mature approach and with more of a signature Kaoteon sound. Some people say, ‘You come from the Middle East, so why don’t you play more of an Oriental music or more Oriental metal like Nile?’ But I just don’t function that way. I like what I play and I feel that I’m moving in a direction that establishes the Kaoteon sound. I want people to hear us and right away say, ‘That’s Kaoteon.’ This is very hard to achieve but this was my vision.”
Thematically, Neither God Nor Master will examine the nature of existentialism from a variety of modern and ancient perspectives. “As someone who’s 38 years old, I realised there was so much I didn’t understand, so I went back to the books — all the religious books from the Jewish books to the Christian books to the Muslim books to try to understand what the fuck is happening? I just couldn’t relate but I got inspired by a lot of the lyrics coming out of these books. Not the first single I released, but the rest of the tracks are inspired by various topics and passages from these books.”
Though there’s no firm release date yet for the new album, the plan is to release a few more singles and then drop the whole album at the end of the summer. Meanwhile, scheduling live gigs remains a challenge, as countries, cities and venues continue to change regulations for public gatherings amid the ongoing pandemic. “I’m trying to put shows together but everything’s getting cancelled, especially here in the Netherlands. Most of the venues are already booked with shows that were postponed back in 2020. So I can’t promise any long tours yet but we’re trying to put together a few local shows at least after the album is released. From now until then, I’m going to release no less than four singles. Then I’ll put the album out, which is comprised of eleven tracks. And I’m going to be composing a full-out album with Deathtribe. I’m working with a very talented Swedish drummer and we already have four songs ready, with bass. Today we added the djembe on one of the tracks, which was really cool.”
No doubt about it, 2022 is shaping up to be an important year for Kaoteon and Anthony is ready for every minute of it. He will measure success not according to critics, fans or streaming numbers, however. “I made a promise to myself to make the music I want to make. I don’t write to impress anyone and I won’t do anything differently.” Reflecting more on the idea of success and what will continue to propel and inspire him, Anthony stops for a moment and then says, “In the back of my mind, I think about someone, somewhere out there in some challenged country or with a challenged nationality that cannot make ends meet is looking at Kaoteon — this band that was able to appear on the pages of Metal Hammer and on the pages of Vice and Revolver — and believe that maybe if they keep doing what they’re doing, they can get there, too. I might be wrong but I was like that when I was young, looking at bands from Brazil making it. Because it doesn't matter where you come from; it matters how much work you put in. So I need to keep doing this so I can keep inspiring these people.”
