Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I, Nicola Masciandaro, ed., CreateSpace, 2010."Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised."
"Pretty much every truely obsessive black metal fan is gonna want this, whether they actually read it or not... An essential, and maybe controversial [addition] to your metal music library" - Aquarius Records
"The essays are all exercises in passionate engagement, intellectual without being dryly academic... an exhilarating example of how to write about music as if it matters." - Wire Magazine
"Enjoyable reading for anyone interested in the more extreme forms of metal and contemporary theory." - Culture Magazine
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." - H.P. Lovecraft
"Poison yourself... with thought" - Arizmenda
CONTENTS: Steven Shakespeare, "The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils Itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling's Underground." Erik Butler, "The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances." Scott Wilson, "BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum." Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, "Transcendental Black Metal." Nicola Masciandaro, "Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya." Joseph Russo, "Perpetue Putesco - Perpetually I Putrefy." Benjamin Noys, "'Remain True to the Earth!': Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal." Evan Calder Williams, "The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Brandon Stosuy, "Meaningful Leaning Mess." Aspasia Stephanou, "Playing Wolves and Red Riding Hoods in Black Metal." Anthony Sciscione, "'Goatsteps Behind My Steps . . .': Black Metal and Ritual Renewal." Eugene Thacker, "Three Questions on Demonology." Niall Scott, "Black Confessions and Absu-lution."
DOCUMENTS: Lionel Maunz, Pineal Eye; Oyku Tekten, Symposium Photographs; Scott Wilson, "Pop Journalism and the Passion for Ignorance"; Karlynn Holland, Sin Eater I-V; Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani, Black Metal Commentary; Black Metal Theory Blog Comments; Letter from Andrew White; E.S.S.E, Murder Devour I.
“What sucks is when metal is co-opted by wannabe academic nerds,” grumbled the Black Metal blog Chronic Youth in anticipation of the Brooklyn symposium on which this book is based. Scott Wilson’s “Pop Journalism And The Passion For Ignorance” uses the Chronic Youth complaint as its epigraph, treating it as part a “hostility to academic commentary on popular culture that unites conservatives with pop journalists and bloggers everywhere”. If there’s one attitude likely to be shared by certain Black Metal fanatics and the middlebrow compilers of Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner, it is this hostility to the ‘intellectualising’ of popular culture. Chronic Youth was by no means the only dissenting voice about the symposium: comments from the Black Metal Theory blog, included as an appendix here, and some remarks quoted in editor Nicola Masciandaro’s essay “Anti-Cosmosis”, attest to a deep suspicion about the project.
Yet Black Metal as a genre is saturated in metaphysics. If some BM performers resist commentary, they are nevertheless unlikely to trot out the boring musician cliché that ‘they just play’. The reticence comes from a reverence, a sense that what the music evokes is unspeakable. BM is a music of intense vision and commitment, a music that – whether it likes it or not – is deeply theoretical. As Evan Calder Williams argues, Black Metal “is smarter than it thinks”. It isn’t exactly a stretch to connect Xasthur, Burzum or Wolves in the Throne Room with the dark, inhuman philosophies of Bataille, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Schelling and younger theorists like the gnomic metaphysician of decay, Reza Negarestani.
The danger with these sorts of projects is that they assume a kind of anthropological distance from their object, performing their analyses with a studied air of neutrality and a neurotic concern that footnotes are properly referenced. There is no trace of that in Hideous Gnosis: whether they are disinterring the different meanings of the ‘Black’ of Black Metal, as in Eugene Thacker’s “Three Questions on Demonology”, or tracing the mythic roots of some BM tropes in myth and folklore as in Aspasia Stephanou’s “Playing Wolves And Red Riding Hoods In Black Metal”, the essays are all exercises in passionate engagement, intellectual without being dryly academic.
It is quickly clear that BM’s real enemy is not religion as such – which, after all, is ripe for infestation and inversion – but the desacralised arcades of postmodern populism, with their ontological and cultural pluralism and their smirking personability. Joseph Russo’s essay “Perpetue Putesco – Perpetually I Putrefy” notes with disgust that religion itself has succumbed to this quotidian cheeriness: many “masses often take place in fluorescent-lit recreation centres” and “priests often wear swimsuits”. Much of Black Metal’s appeal consists in the way it constructs a (sepulchral, subterranean) alternative to these overlit zones. One of the most interesting and difficult problems, however, is BM’s tendency – by no means ubiquitous, but widespread enough – to characterise its alternative in terms of extreme right-wing politics. Benjamin Noys’s “’Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal” and Evan Calder Williams’s “The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse” are about the political implications of BM given that, in Williams’s words, it is not possible to “separate the musical wheat from the crypto-fascist chaff”. For Williams, BM becomes a symptom of the very world that it abominates but fails properly to negate: “If the antistatic condition on which Black Metal is staked is ... that of militancy, its impossible solution is collective militancy.” One of the many provocative claims in a book that is an exhilarating example of how to write about music as if it matters." - Mark Fisher
"This one almost doesn't require a review, pretty much every truely obsessive black metal fan is gonna want this, whether they actually read it or not. And having only dabbled, it's hard to say how many folks, metalheads in particular, are actually gonna want to delve into this, a collection (often in expanded and revised form) of essays and documents that were presented late last year at "Hideous Gnosis", a symposium on black metal theory (yes, a symposium on black metal theory), which took place in Brooklyn in December of 2009. That said, we also can't imagine a metalhead who wouldn't feel like they had to have copy of this on their bookshelf, if they have any intellectual pretensions whatsoever (which this sure does), or sense of humor (which perhaps this does as well).
The real question regarding Hideous Gnosis is whether black metal does indeed have some sort of lofty academic underpinnings, or is this academic study of the genre simply another example of hipsters trying to legitimize something that appears to be, at its core, raw and underground and visceral and personal and pretty much diametrically opposed to any idea of scholarly study or academic examination? Which thankfully is discussed quite a bit in this book, in the form of several essays, but via the inclusion of comments from the symposium's website, both positive and negative, plenty of them mean, some of them funny, and a few measured and thought out. But it's good to know that the very fact that there exists an academic black metal symposium is in itself worthy of debate, keeps Hideous Gnosis somewhat grounded.
There are definitely some interesting essays here, one in particular that focuses on black metal's reliance on climate, as in grim and frosty and cold, etc. The most interesting to us, are also the ones that are easiest to read, the ones NOT mired down in academic grad school doublespeak, there are plenty of examples of essays that seem interesting, but require digging though a malfunctioning thesaurus to get to the root of what's really being said. There is an excerpt of Brandon Stosuy's in progress oral history of American black metal (featuring our very own Andee) which was also printed in a different form in a past issue of The Believer, which is definitely cool, there's Hunter Hunt Hendrix of Liturgy's confusional analysis and dissection of "Transcendental Black Metal", and so it goes, the collection slipping back and forth, striking a pretty good balance, between people who love black metal who just want to dig deeper, and explore a music they love and discuss it with other like minded metalheads, and the flipside, dry, academic treatises on various elements and aspects of black metal, a bit too removed from the actual sound, and the fucked up ferocious intensity that is what makes the music truly appealing for us. But again, that doesn't mean those pieces aren't a blast to read, some might win you over, others actually do offer up some keen insights, and some seem to exist simply as fodder for merciless mockery. But really, in some weird way that does essentially reflect the genre as a whole, there are dabblers, there are folks who take it WAY too seriously, people who love it and live it, others who are merely fascinated or curious or even repulsed. It ultimately doesn't matter, like the spate of recent black metal docs, online blogs, if you're into black metal, for whatever reason, you're probably gonna want to read this, even if it pisses you off. ESPECIALLY if it pisses you off. An essential, and maybe controversial [addition] to your metal music library." - Nicola Masciandaro
"... black metal could be described as a negative form of environmental writing; the least Apollonian of genres, it is terrestrial – indeed subterranean and infernal – inhabiting a dead forest that is at once both mythic and real unfolding along an atheological horizon that marks the limit of absolute evil where there are no goods or resources to distribute and therefore no means of power and domination, a mastery of nothing." - Niall Scott & Scott Wilson
I'm finally getting around to reading Hideous Gnosis which was originally a symposium organized by Nicola Masciandaro and sponsored by Glossator and Show No Mercy. Brandon Stosuy gives us - for those unfamiliar with the Black Metal movement - an informal history of the movement in the US in his article for The Believer magazine A Blaze in the North American Sky. He recounts the gruesome murder of Norwegian born Aarseth at the hands Vikernes (a.k.a. Count Grishnackh) which gained the movement its most notorious publicity.
Beyond this dance of death the original inspiration for Black Metal came from the group Venom and its Thrash Metal sounds in which "the main early defining differences between it and its father-genre being tremelo picking and 'blast-beats'; drum beats played about twice the speed as the traditional trash metal base beats (32nds as opposed to 16ths). Taking major influence from Bathory and Venom, the ganre became largely associated with Norway through the work of Mayhem, Burzum and Dark Throne, many of the later bands categorised into the black metal genre being influenced by these three bands, and many of these bands being from Norway themselves.
Characteristics of black metal include typically high-pitched screaming vocals, tremolo picked guitars lacking bass and emphasising treble, and blastbeats (quadruple time drum beats). Unlike its sibling, the more thrash-based death metal, black metal concentrates more on mood and melodies (primal as they may be) instead of riffs and heaviness.
So why would a group of cultural theorists and philosophers want to discuss the dark contours of such a nihilistic subgenre of the Heavy Metal scene as Black Metal? Aspasia Stephanou asks us "Who is the lonely being that utters discordant, pre-linguistic cries amidst a chaotic symphony of sounds?"[1] Varg Vikernes, that most notorious scion of the Black Metal world tells us that early on he was involved in the RPG games of Dungeon and Dragons, but that it was Tolkien's world of Hobbits, Dwarves, and Elves that struck the deepest cord:
"I felt a natural attraction to Sauron, who was the person who gave the world adventure, adversity and challenges in the first place. His One Eye, the One Ring and the tower of Barad-Dur are all attributes similar to those of Óðinn. The One Eye was like Óðinn's eye, the One Ring was like Óðinn's ring, Draupnir ("Dripper"), and Barad-Dur was like the tower or throne of Óðinn, called Hliðskjálf ("Secret Ritual-Site"). His Uruk-Hai and Olog-Hai ("Troll-Race") were like Viking berserkers, the Warges were like Óðinnic werewolves, and so forth. I could easily identify with the fury of the "dark forces", and enjoyed their existence very much because they were making a boring and peaceful world dangerous and exciting."[2]
He has been associated with all forms of the modern pagan movement in its extreme modes of post-nazi philosophical and religious foundations. In the late 90s, "to avoid confusion" and "to find a term more suitable and accurate", Vikernes coined the term "odalism". "In it lies Paganism, traditional nationalism, racialism and environmentalism." Vikernes contrasts it with "modern 'civilization'" which he equates with "capitalism, materialism, Judeo-Christianity, pollution, urbanization, race mixing, Americanization, socialism, globalization, et cetera". He places importance on the fact that Odalism "is not a term tainted by history"; in contrast with Nazism:
The 'nazi ghost' has scared millions of Europeans from caring about their blood and homeland for sixty years now, and it is about time we banish this ghost and again start to think and care about the things that (whether we like it or not) are important to us.[3]
Now the question is: Why have so many people been influenced by such a strange amalgam of religious bigotry and nihilistic ramblings? Or, is it that most Black Metal practitioners have formed another philosophy less racist? In the essay by Benjamin Noys, ‘REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH!’: REMARKS ON THE POLITICS OF BLACK METAL, tells us:
"If we were to define a degree zero of Black Metal politics then it would be an unstable amalgam of Stirnerite egoism and Nietzschean aristocratism: a radical anti-humanist individualism implacably hostile to all the ideological ‘spooks’ of the present social order, committed to creating an ‘aristocracy of the future’ (Nietzsche 464), and auto-engendering a ‘creative nothing’ (Stirner 6)."[ibid. Hideous Gnosis: p. 105]
Noys sees this music as underpinning a return to the 'grand politics' of a Nietzschean "racial-national metaphysics".[ibid. p. 106] Sale Famine of the French Black Metal group Peste Noire becomes the spokesman, or 'organic intellectual' "refuses any notion of the contingency of the link between Black Metal and the extreme right, instead insisting on the necessity of such a link."[ibid. p. 108] He goes on to say, quoting Famine, that Black Metal is, in essence, of the extreme right:
"To my mind, without being necessarily N[ational] S[ocialist], real Black Metal is always extreme right-wing music — be it from Asia or Latin America as extremeright politics are not the appanage of the white race — and it is always Satanic. (Famine, Zero Tolerance)" (ibid. p. 108)
I have to admit, my own left-wing heritage, makes me wonder just what all these cultural theorists and philosophers are up too by forming such a symposium, one that helps promote this music so devoted to the right-wing fascistic ideals of Nazism and Paganistic returns to, what Varg Vigernes, in his own form of it terms 'Odalism' ( sort of amalgam of ancient Norse Odanism and modern fascist ideals)? Noys tells us it seems to be a return to the Chtonian and telluric world view to establish its aesthetic identity:
"Black Metal is the musical memory of our bloodthirsty ancestors of blood, it is the marriage of Tradition, of old racial patrimony with fanaticism, with the rage and the rashness of a youth now lost. It is a CHTONIAN religion: a cult of the EARTH and a return to it, therefore a nationalism; a cult of what is BELOW the earth: Hell — the adjective “chthonian” applies to the Infernal gods as well. Black Metal is a fundamentalism, a music with integrity (from Latin integer, complete) which helps me to remain complete in a dying world, amidst a people in decay, unworthy of its blood. It is the apology of the dark European past. It is a psychosis which helps us to flee a reality we cannot tolerate anymore. (Famine, Zero Tolerance)" (ibid. p. 110-111)
Is this a return to the pre-weimer Germany, of an age of anarchy when the brown shirts ran amok among the population killing and luting, of a world of death portending some grand Götterdämmerung or apocalyptic Ragnarök. Is this the music of the Voluspa,
Old Norse:
Fylliz fiǫrvi
feigra manna,
rýðr ragna siǫt
rauðom dreyra.
Svǫrt verða sólskin
of sumor eptir,
veðr ǫll válynd
Vitoð ér enn, eða hvat?
English:
It sates itself on the life-blood of fated men,
paints red the powers' homes
with crimson gore.
Black become the sun's beams
in the summers that follow,
weathers all treacherous.
Do you still seek to know? And what?
Is this the music of our age, of a time when "greed will cause brothers to kill brothers, and fathers and sons will suffer from the collapse of kinship bonds. ... when the wolf will first swallow the sun, and then his brother the moon, and mankind will consider the occurrence as a great disaster resulting in much ruin. The stars will disappear. The earth and mountains will shake so violently that the trees will come loose from the soil, the mountains will topple, and all restraints will break, causing Fenrir to break free from his bonds."[4]
Noys comments: "The irony is that the aesthetic elements of Black Metal most likely to appeal to the left, or left-leaning, cultural critic – its use of ‘forms which are less conventional’, its evocation of terror or madness – are simply contingent elements that result from the mimetic parsing of the fallen world of modernity which Famine despises." (ibid. p. 113) He goes on to question the writings of Carl Schmitt and his idea of the 'enemy' - ‘The enemy is who defines me. That means in concreto: only my brother can challenge me and only my brother can be my enemy.’ In comment on this statement by Schmitt, Noys says, "the figure of the enemy also has a pacifying function: the construction politics around the friend-enemy distinction is to define ourselves and also to regard our enemy as an enemy, rather than as someone to be exterminated." (ibid. p. 117)
Noys sees this return to a pagan conception of life destructive and that in "the manner of the sorcerer’s apprentice Black Metal unleashes forces it cannot control and which return to destroy itself in an acephalic auto-consumption." (ibid. p. 119) He tells us instead that this cult of the black is a return to what Marx once called 'world-historical necromancy'. (ibid. p. 120) Noys affirms Walter Benjamin's critique of Nazism as ‘habitués of the chthonic forces of terror’ who peddle ‘sinister runic humbug’ ..., correlates with Black Metal’s similar fetishisation of war, radicalised nihilism, and an extreme rightwing politics that articulates itself in modes similar to that of the extreme left (pace Jünger’s ‘national Bolshevism’). (ibid. p. 124) In his summation Noys says,
"The aestheticisation and abstraction of social existence by capitalism in the time of real subsumption is what gives the aesthetic politics of Black Metal its mixture of pathos and bathos. The struggle to pose ‘form-giving power’ against the power of real abstractions creates particular forms of aesthetic politics that cannot simply
be identified with ‘classical’ fascism and Nazism, although, as I have noted, they have new malignant resonances in our global political and economic space that still falls back onto tellurian and nativist re-territorialisations. My point is not a falsely inflationary one, with Black Metal as the viral carrier of a ‘new Fascism’, but neither is it one that stresses dismissive complacency or the ease of extracting from Black Metal a new ‘purified’ and acceptable aesthetic radicalism. Instead, it is to stress the functional coherent incoherence of Black Metal, its constitutive impurity, as its mechanism." (ibid. p. 125)
I decide to focus on the political aesthetics of Black Metal in this first essay to steer the wary reader into the basic foundations upon which this music seems to base its strange dissonance and abject terror. There is another aspect of this music, its mythologies which harp back to the dark forest of ancient Europe, with the tribal howls, screeches, and yells of the Berserkers, those warrior-wolves and assassins full of baying songs of bloodlust and murder. In Aspasia Stephanou's essay PLAYING WOLVES AND RED RIDING HOODS IN BLACK METAL he describes this, quoting Angela Carter, as the "congregation of nightmare", "gothic monsters multiplying and infecting with their contagious proliferations the dark of night." (ibid. p. 159) He goes on to say:
"Black metal glorifies the becoming-werewolf and werewolf nomadism characterised by aggression, speed and violence. The lycanthropic entities that are conjured up in black metal’s lyrics along with the becoming-animal of the voice, demand from the listener a certain kind of response. Between a state of orgasmic pleasure and jouissance emanating from the performative space of radical otherness, and the horrors of hollowing up the body and transgressing its boundaries through the speed of sound, black metal is a monstrous desiring machine. ... It enjoins a bestial annihilation of being and loss of humanity in order to expand the self into a creative multiplicity of wolves. Black metal is becoming wolf, embracing carnal desires, animal transformations and violent instincts." (ibid. p. 159 - 160)
Stephanou even quotes from the "Furturist Manifesto" of Marinetti where he once stated "Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” In this Black metal misogynistic world he questions the role of female Black metal bands, saying,
"If female black metal bands manipulate the qualities that patriarchy has endowed them with through the use of sexuality in their performances, the language of nihilism or the repetition of black metal’s masculine discourses, then the perpetuation of the similar will persist and their presence will forever be silenced. Black metal is a strange place to be. In a genre in which misanthropy is related to misogyny and in which male authority mostly ignores the feminine presence, black metal’s red riding hoods whether they choose, as the fairy tale says, the path of needles or the path of pins, they must still fight both the father and the wolves to survive in the woods." (ibid. p. 167)
Whatever we might say of Black metal with its proclivities toward a dark paganism and a right-wing aesthetic it seems to be filling some void within the sub world of this dark musical community, and as Scott tells us on the sin-eating mission of these troubadours of blackness, "The Black Metal event is a stranger returning from the void to collect and consume the misery of mankind." (ibid. p. 231) Let us hope that stranger god is not the dark sorcerer of a more terrible abyss of the unreal from which even our own blackest nightmares seem nothing more than the paradisaical glimpse onto a forlorn universe bereft of all things human." - Dark Chemistry
"The bald, beefy moderator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in darkness. “It is my revolting pleasure,” he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, “to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who will present his paper ‘The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.’ ”
And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”
You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not just because plenty of people like to make fun of academics discoursing on youth culture but because the subject was something like the music that dare not speak its name.
Black metal, which has been a self-conscious genre since the early 1990s — with a prehistory in some ’80s metal bands — remains metal’s most underground subspecies. (Black refers to a bleak outlook on life.) Musically it’s all scoured howls, nonsyncopated blast-beat drums, and cold, trebly guitars. It sounds like it’s rotting, and that’s the point: black metal represents decay, radical individualism, misanthropy, negativity about all systems, and awe of the natural world. (Death metal, on the other hand, is more proactive, body-centered and psyched about gore.)
“The purest black-metal artist is one who’s unknown and inaccessible,” said Nicola Masciandaro, a professor of medieval literature at Brooklyn College who organized the six-hour event.
In a way, black metal runs on a very old cultural motor: loss of faith, and the hysterical fear and sadness that come with it. But it has become one of rock’s best modes of resistance, which is why it persists, why recent books and films about it have found an audience (like Peter Beste’s photo essay “True Norwegian Black Metal” and the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us”) and why it has inspired a new American wave of bands, including Nachtmystium, Krallice, Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy.
Even as the Americans bend black metal far away from tribalism, violence or antireligious malevolence (some Norwegian black-metal musicians became notorious for murder and church burnings) and toward something more Whitman-esque, it remains ingrown. Some of its practitioners — like the Americans Xasthur and Leviathan — make records but will not perform or, in Leviathan’s case, give interviews. Talking about black metal in certain quarters seems deeply lame.
One commenter on the online-forum page of the metal magazine Decibel summed up a certain kind of black-metal fan’s attitude toward the symposium. This music, the contributor wrote, “has nothing to do with being intellectual and everything to do with not wanting to try and break every little thing apart” for analysis.
“There’s lots of resentment toward a sensible discourse around black metal,” said Mr. Masciandaro in an interview. “There’s also lots of dissent and difference around what black metal is. Its center of gravity is an essential negativity, an idea of some remainder, something that cannot be reduced.” He was inspired to organize the symposium, he said, by the conference on heavy metal, held last year in Salzburg, Austria, organized by Mr. Scott. He was there and wanted to create a more specific event. He chose a club with a bar as the setting, rather than a university, figuring it would be more “ludic.”
Was the afternoon humorous, ridiculous or at least ludic? Not really. (It could have used a few more dozen spectators and a temperature boost of about 15 degrees.) To the contrary, it felt necessary. Despite what black-metal musicians might proclaim — Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the symposium’s lectures as saying, “my music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion” — their work is basically philosophy. It is theoretical, a grid for looking at life, with ancient roots. It could use a critical apparatus, and though the afternoon’s many citings of Continental philosophers like Lacan, Derrida and Bataille might have seemed ludicrously distant to the practice of black metal, such writings relate to the subgenre’s big subjects: death and time.
Mr. Masciandaro’s lecture, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” dealt with ideas of cosmic evolution and annihilation in black metal. In “Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration,” Joseph Russo talked about, um, rot, and the “liminal death-space” in the work of Xasthur. Brandon Stosuy, a Brooklyn music critic, read from his oral history in progress of American black metal: a welcome demystification, cast in normal-dude voices.
“Transcendental Black Metal,” a lecture by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the young singer and guitarist of the Brooklyn band Liturgy, gave the Nordic black-metal tradition a stern challenge, and amounted to an artistic manifesto for his own band. He discussed how America represents “dignity, freedom, renewal and hybridization,” and suggested that these qualities could be represented in a new form of black metal. He proposed a new rhythm to replace the blast beat: the “burst beat,” by which rhythm can contract and expand in time, as in free jazz. He cited Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Ornette Coleman’s “Skies of America” as philosophical models, with their “joyful experience of the continuity of existence.” He talked of “life and hypertrophy” replacing “death and atrophy,” and in his own way he was as nonnegotiable as Ovskum: “Our affirmation is a refusal to deny.”
During a Q. and A. period Mr. Hunt-Hendrix was challenged by Scott Wilson, a professor from Lancaster University, who, like Mr. Scott, had traveled from England to attend the conference. Mr. Wilson wondered, skeptically, if transcendentalist black metal just boiled down to “all you need is love.”
“I’m not so interested in defending anything I say,” Mr. Hunt-Hendrix replied. “I only like to be judged on whether it’s interesting or not.”
But perhaps the day’s most profound lecture came from Mr. Scott, who spoke in priestly cadences about black metal as part of the ritual of confession.
“The black metal event is a confession without need of absolution, without need of redemption,” he said. It is, he added, “a cleaning up of the mess of others.” He invoked the old English tradition of sin eating by means of burial cakes, in which a loaf of bread was put on a funeral bier or a corpse, and a paid member of the community would eat the bread, representing sin, to absolve and comfort the deceased.
“Black metal has become the sin eater,” he intoned. “It is engaged in transgressive behavior to be rid of it.” - Ben Ratliff
Review by Tammy L. Castelein & Bram Ieven
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MELANCOLOGY
‘Earthly thought embraces perishability (i.e. cosmic contingency) as its immanent core …. such perishability … grasps the openness of Earth towards the cosmic exteriority not in terms of concomitantly vitalistic / necrocratic correlations (as the Earth’s relationship with the Sun) but alternative ways of dying and loosening into the cosmic abyss … The only true terrestrial ecology is the one founded on the unilateral nature of cosmic contingency against which there is no chance of resistance – there are only opportunities for drawing schemes of complicity ... Hence, the Cartesian dilemma, “What course in life shall I follow?” should be bastardized as “Which way out shall I take?”’ - Reza Negarestani, ‘Solar Infernal and the earthbound Abyss’
Black metal irrupts from a place already divested of nature, a site of extinction, ‘a place empty of life / Only dead trees …’ (Mayhem, ‘Funeral Fog’, 1992); ‘Our skies are forever black / Here is no signs of life at all’ (Deathspell Omega, ‘From Unknown Lands of Desolation’, 2005). As such black metal could be described as a negative form of environmental writing; the least Apollonian of genres, it is terrestrial – indeed subterranean and infernal – inhabiting a dead forest that is at once both mythic and real unfolding along an atheological horizon that marks the limit of absolute evil where there are no goods or resources to distribute and therefore no means of power and domination, a mastery of nothing.
A new word is required that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. A new word implies a new concept and we know from Deleuze and Guattari that concepts have to fulfil three criteria. Accordingly, the plane of immanence of melancology is extinction and non-being. All things are destined for extinction; immanent to all being is the irreducible fact of its total negation without reserve or remainder. The development of the characteristics of melancology is to be addressed at the Symposium, of course, but there are already a number of apophasic determinations: it is not ecology, it is anorganic; it is not political economy, it is anti-instrumental; it is not love of nature, environmentalism, Gaia, geophilosophy … But it implies an ethos and a style that delineates the third aspect of the concept, its embodiment in a conceptual personae: the black metal kvltist whose ethos runs across the spectrum of melancholy from bile and rage to sorrow, depression and the delectation of evil all the better to affirm the desolation s/he contemplates in the sonorous audibility of black metal’s sovereign dissonance.
This environment of absolute evil is exactly the same as the absolute good of black metal itself: the expenditure of a sonic drive that propels a blackened self-consciousness, a melancological consciousness without object that is the necessary prior condition to any speculation on or intervention in the environment.
The Black Metal Theory Symposium thus invites speculation and interventions on the blackening of the earth, landscapes of extinction, starless aeon, sempiternal nightmares, black horizons, malign essences, Qliphothic forces from beyond … in a general re-conceptualization of black ecology.
Black Metal Theory
