Black Metal Theory

Black Metal 101: "A Vague Teaching"

2012-01-07T08:08:00.000-08:00

P.E.S.T. Streams

2011-11-17T06:13:00.000-08:00

See also:

Zachary Price, Destroy Your Life For Satan
Ben Woodard, Folding a Cadaverous Scream

Juliet Forshaw, "Metal in Three Modes of Enmity: Political, Musical, Cosmic.”

2011-11-16T14:51:00.001-08:00

Juliet Forshaw, “Metal in Three Modes of Enmity: Political,Musical, Cosmic.” Current Musicology 91(2011): 140-62.

Gerd Bayer ed. 2009. HeavyMetal Music in Britain. Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Steve Waksman. 2009. ThisAin’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk. Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Nicola Masciandaro ed. 2010. Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Charleston:CreateSpace.

Reviewed by Juliet Forshaw

Scholarshipon metal always seems a little bewildered or put on the defensive by thegenre’s profoundly adversarial nature. Metal certainly opposes something, andto a large extent is defined by this opposition rather than by any obviousmessage of its own, but what exactly does it oppose? Certain political values?Certain kinds of music? Certain belief systems? Or does it represent a vagueopposition to “things in general;” is it the music of rebellion without acause? The short answer, judging by the academic treatments under review hereas well as earlier attempts to censor it, is that it opposes whatever itsinterpreters want it to. Thus its critics cite accusations of racism, sexism,and homophobia, while supporters praise its supposed opposition to capitalism,strict gender roles, and even the concept of order itself. Many of these metalpartisans, especially those whose primary concern is the rehabilitation of anart form often perceived as ethically problematic, spend so much timeexplaining away its disturbing features that they ignore the possibility thatdisturbance is precisely the point. Even those who do recognize disturbance asa fundamental aim of metal and call attention to the specific forms that thatdisturbance takes, such as expressions of animosity toward certain groups ofpeople, often fail to explain why listeners are attracted to these sounds. Thatthe appeal doesn’t lie only in bigotry is clear from the growing number of fanswho come from the very groups that have been the most stigmatized inmetal—women, ethnic minorities, religiously observant people, and queer womenand men.

Thefollowing essay will not fully explain either the genre’s lust for enmity inall forms or the perverse attraction that this spirit of antagonism holds forfans, but it will at least review current scholarly thought on these subjectsand suggest some possible avenues for future exploration. I will provide abrief overview of the scholarship that first legitimized the study of metal andconsider three recent books that each turn the notion of metal’s enmity towardother things into an analytical methodology; that is, they attempt to define itby what it is not and by what it opposes. The books cast metal in opposition tocertain political values, kinds of music, and religious/philosophicalworldviews. Out of our discussion—imbued with the recognition that metal existsonly in opposition, enmity, and negativity toward something else—will emerge asense of the elusiveness of this art form as a subject of inquiry and thedifficulty of finding a methodological approach that fully captures itsstrangeness, darkness, and hostility toward analysis.

Metal’stransmission from the stage to the page began with lurid biographies andautobiographies of performers, which continue to be churned out by bothmainstream and, increasingly, vanity presses. Like other popular music genres,it entered the academy under the aegis of sociology rather than musicology,since the validation of a set of sounds as music worthy of study cannot occuruntil the people who create and consume them are taken seriously. The earlywork of sociologists Donna Gaines and Deena Weinstein in Teenage Wasteland:Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (1991) and Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (1991)thus painted a sympathetic portrait of the typical disaffected, middle-to-lowerclass, white teenage male fan who had so alarmed adult elites that in 1985 abipartisan committee founded the infamous Parents Music Resource Center in anattempt to censor metal (as well as hip hop and some pop) for their supposedlydamaging effect on the morals of American youth. These works represent thebeginning of a sustained sociological and ethnographic interest in metal, aninterest that so far has outstripped that of musicologists.

Thefirst and still definitive musicological treatment, Robert Walser’s RunningWith the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (1993),walked the line between justification and critique as gracefully as waspossible in the charged rhetorical climate that surrounded metal in the earlynineties. Walser accomplished this by analyzing metal with the then-fashionableand still effective “new musicology” approach, which postulates that ideologyis encoded in the very structure of the music. Although Walser at times makesoverly definitive pronouncements about the “meaning” of tiny musical gestures,his basic claims remain compelling: high volume and distortion reflect ageneral preoccupation with power and intensity; the virtuosic guitar solos thatexplode out of conventional verse-chorus structure reflect general values ofassertiveness and rebellion; the reliance on the Aeolian and Phrygian modesreflect a focus on negative emotion. The book also raised the crucial issue ofmetal performers’ and fans’ masculinity, calling attention to the genre’scurious combination of macho swagger and effeminate visuals. Eighties glammetal, he argues, engaged in a subversion of traditional gender roles wherebymale musicians adopted traits of sexually provocative women’s dress andperformance (such as long teased hair, elaborate makeup, and sinuous dancemoves) in order to question conventional masculine norms.

Yetthough his argument has merit, I would contend that this aesthetic wasn’t asandrogynous and benign as Walser makes it sound. In some ways, it deconstructedmasculinity only to reconstruct it more solidly than ever: it was not awholesale rejection of masculine values or an espousal of feminine ones, but anadoption of the superficial trappings of sexualized femininity as a means ofdramatizing a preference for a certain kind of objectified woman (the stripperor groupie, endlessly celebrated by Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, and others).Though Walser is sensitive to the ways in which metal musicians recapitulatebroader sexist discourses, the book’s gender-deconstruction argument riskscasting metal in a “progressive” light, as a force that was on what academicstend to consider the good side of the culture wars. Walser generally reined inthe impulse to whitewash, but his successors have not always been so nuanced.

Whateverclaims to progressiveness attributed to metal during its glam phase werenegated with the rise of extreme metal (an umbrella term that includes abrasivesubgenres such as thrash metal, death metal, and black metal). When death metalbands such as Cannibal Corpse began singing about the pleasures of torture andthe early 1990s Norwegian black metal scene exploded in real-life murderousviolence, it seemed that Walser’s book had come along at exactly the wrongtime: just when he, along with Gaines and Weinstein, had validated metal withinthe academy, the genre found new ways to appall. As earlier heavy metal becameassimilated into the musical and intellectual mainstream, extreme metal aroseas a defiant response to such co-option and began its perpetual quest for whatGeorges Bataille called the “extreme limit,” a state of such intensity,irrationality, and unacceptability that no conventional discourse could everhope to pin it down.

Perhapsbecause extreme metal still bears this aura of incomprehensibility and badtaste, the majority of recent scholarship has continued to focus on music fromthe ’70s and ’80s, which has lost much of its shock value and can readily beassimilated through conventional approaches. The first book under review, GerdBayer’s edited collection of essays Heavy Metal Music in Britain,focuses on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), which arose in thewake of Black Sabbath and included bands such as Judas Priest, Iron Maiden,Motörhead, Def Leppard, and Venom. The tremendous problem facing anyone whowants to write a book about the NWOBHM is that the genre encompassed too manydifferent musical styles and lyrical preoccupations to allow for many valid generalizationsabout it on the whole (though some of these writers go ahead and generalizeanyway). The bands that are grouped under the NWOBHM umbrella today sharelittle more than their emergence in the late 1970s, their British working-classbackground, and their visual aesthetic of long hair and a denim and leatherwardrobe. Otherwise, they range from the Satanist proto-black metal of Venom tothe glam party-rock of Def Leppard. Given the diffuse nature of the movement’smusic and lyrical concerns, almost the only thing that can be generalized aboutis its politics—and indeed, many of the contributors focus on that topic,trying their best to position metal as politically progressive by placing it inopposition to misogyny and working-class oppression. These essays portray metalin what might be called the “political” mode of enmity, and illustrate thefirst of the three methodological approaches reviewed here.

Onevaluable as well as problematic essay that exemplifies the book’s strong desireto rehabilitate metal comes from Deena Weinstein, who in “The EmpoweringMasculinity of British Heavy Metal” pursues the theme of constructedmasculinity, arguing that the NWOBHM (narrowly represented by Iron Maiden andJudas Priest) was no more misogynistic than mainstream rock, despite metal’sunsavory reputation. As a backdrop to her argument, I would point out thatBritish metal does share certain masculinist attitudes that inform much rockmusic production, such as the belief that rock expresses a male sensibility andshould be confrontational in a specifically masculine way. “Rock music shouldbe gross: that’s the fun of it and its attraction,” says Bruce Dickinson ofIron Maiden. “It gets up and drops its trousers. Not everybody wants to beSinéad O’Connor all the time” (in Jeffries 1991). In keeping with thestereotype of confrontation as a male behavioral strategy and conciliation as afemale one, those who adhere to rock’s code of authenticity shun theeuphonious, soothing sounds associated with pop music written by or at leastfor women and instead cultivate a harsh, raucous style. Insofar as Britishmetal musicians embrace Dickinson’s belligerent definition of rock, theysupport the dominant narrative of popular music, which champions rock and itssubgenres as a male discursive space.

But,with this aside, the most striking thing about the NWOBHM’s attempts toconstruct masculinity, as Weinstein points out, is how little its conception ofmasculinity is predicated on the overt sexism of denigrating or objectifyingwomen, in contrast to many American bands from the same period such as MötleyCrüe and Guns N’ Roses. Rather, it more or less ignores women and attemptsinstead to depict and impart a type of power that valorizes certaincharacteristics that happen to be widely perceived as masculine, such asstrength, boldness, and energy. Weinstein doesn’t sufficiently consider thenegative implications of this erasure of women from metal discourse, and herargument would have been more complete if she had explored the few but salientinstances of disparagement of women in these bands’ back catalogs. Herapproving mention of Nietzsche as the philosophical precursor of British heavymetal is particularly troubling, since his entire edifice was explicitlypredicated on contempt for women (much more so than British metal, in fact).Nevertheless, the essay is groundbreaking because it advances the overduethesis that the NWOBHM’s preoccupation with a masculine-derived ideal ofathletic physical power is not in and of itself pernicious to women; indeed,female fans may even experience it as empowering. After all, many women sharethe common male desire to feel powerful in the culturally masculine sense ofhaving athletic prowess. Although heavy metal’s celebration of adrenaline-infusedpower is derived from an ideal of masculine physicality, this power, oncetranslated into music, can be appropriated by female as well as male fans.

Butwhy, one might ask, is heavy metal obsessed with feeling powerful in the firstplace? Many of the essays in this book argue that the feeling of potency issought as a tool with which to overcome the economic oppression that lurksaround the corner in this music, created as it was by men who identifiedstrongly with the working class. The authors do not, however, anticipate thedark side of this quest for power, which would only become obvious with therise of extreme metal: power can also be used to assert mastery over others andengage in oppression oneself. The NWOBHM gives us a foretaste of this trend insongs like Judas Priest’s “Electric Eye,” in which the narrator takes on theidentity of an omnipotent governmental entity that is watching its victims’every move. Depiction of, and perhaps identification with, the imagination ofthe oppressor would henceforth become one of metal’s most common tropes.

Thetheme of oppression gets more sustained treatment in Ryan H. Moore’s excellentessay “The Unmaking of the English Working Class: Deindustrialization,Reification and the Origins of Heavy Metal,” a downbeat look at the ways inwhich British metal’s fantastic and supposedly escapist lyrics expressworking-class frustration—but failed to mobilize its fans to political action.Drawing on Lukács’ development of Marx’s concept of reification, he argues thatthe decline of the British manufacturing sector in the 1970s and ’80s left theworking class with a sense that they were at the mercy of impersonal socialforces beyond their comprehension or control: “They knew they were screwed, butit was hard to articulate why” (156). Heavy metal reifies these forces intomysterious, supernatural beings that perpetrate violence and cannot be resistedthrough conventional (i.e. political) means. Instead, metal seeks to empowerits fans through the ritual evocation of magical energies that can be used toresist these “superhuman” oppressors. The indirectness (and, for Moore,ineffectiveness) of this strategy “expresses a mystification of powerrelations, a general sense of confusion about how social power subjugates youngpeople and the working-class and how exploited peoples can take power andresist their exploiters” (148).

Othercontributors to this volume, including Magnus Nilsson and Laura Wiebe Taylor,see more potential for real resistance, but given that the major NWOBHM bandshave all spread far beyond their initial working-class fanbase and are near theend of their careers with no successors who particularly identify with theworking class, it seems unlikely that this musical culture will play a majorrole in any revitalization of the labor movement. If anything, the worldwidesuccess of bands such as Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, which cuts across allclass boundaries, suggests that their visions of dystopia and magicalresistance are appealing primarily for other reasons besides that of class-consciousness.Instead of trying to mobilize the music of thirty-year-old bands for currentpolitical causes, it might be worthwhile to explore why else fans are drawn tooccult imagery and representations of violence.

Onething that fans might be getting out of this sinister music is the rareopportunity to fantasize about an unacceptable scenario and find a perversedelight in it. (See Iron Maiden’s “The Number Of The Beast,” in which thenarrator dreads being possessed by the devil but gradually succumbs, againsthis will, to the attractiveness of the idea and ends by singing as the devil.)None of the contributors to this book explore such dark psychological terrain,though at least the topic of dystopian fantasy gets treated in Taylor’s “Imagesof Human-Wrought Despair and Destruction: social critique in Britishapocalyptic and dystopian metal,” which links the genre with the culture ofsci-fi dystopian literature and movies. Bands such as Black Sabbath and JudasPriest critique various aspects of modern society, including surveillance,war, mechanization, social conformity, and totalitarianism: they create visionsof despair and destruction, pointing out problems but rarely offeringsolutions. This has frequently led to the charge that their music isnihilistic; however, the depiction of dystopia is useful in that it maymotivate people to change what they don’t like about the world. Furthermore,within the overall narrative of nihilism, there are counter-messages of“defiance and hope” (93) such as the guitar solos that Walser analyzed as arebellion against the claustrophobic confines and depressing lyrics of theverses and refrains. Again, working-class frustration is an unspoken motivatorfor these dystopian fantasies, but for this reviewer the essay still tries toohard to cast metal as a progressive force, as a genre that critiques violenceand oppression rather than reveling in them as sources of intense sensation. Ican’t help thinking, for example, that the infectious refrain of “Electric Eye”and Rob Halford’s masterful performance of it, which sets him up as a rockstar/government surveillance agent observing and manipulating an adoring crowd,expresses as much a gleeful fascination with totalitarian power as disapprovalof it.

Becausenone of the contributors to Heavy Metal are music scholars, theygenerally locate a given song’s ideas or “message” in the lyrics and avoidengaging with the actual sound of the music as a locus of meaning. This book issymptomatic of the reality that metal has drawn much more attention from fieldsoutside of music scholarship. Scholars from a variety of disciplines areinterested in metal culture, lyrical tropes, political content, andphilosophical ideas, but few musicologists have taken it upon themselves tocontribute their expertise to these discussions. That is what makes SteveWaksman’s This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in HeavyMetal and Punk so refreshing, as it is full of lucid and lively descriptionsof musical sound and structure. Although Walser and other formally trainedmusicologists such as Esa Lilja have discussed metal’s harmony, melody, andform, and Glenn Pillsbury has tackled its rhythm, the field has only begun toexplore metal’s most striking feature—timbre. Waksman has already exploredtimbre in the more general context of rock in Instruments of Desire: TheElectric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (1999), a criticalorganology of the electric guitar that deals with technology, industrialpractice, marketing, and musicians as part of the evolution of the instrument.In This Ain’t the Summer of Love, his concise and not excessivelytechnical analysis sheds light on particular types and degrees of sonicdistortion. For example, on doom metal band Trouble’s “Psychotic Reaction” hewrites, “The opening riff is a rather stock pentatonic figure in F-sharp,played in the lower midrange of the guitar, that derives its propulsion from thesharp, treble-laden quality of the fuzz” (61). This timbre-centric approachholds exciting possibilities for the study of all metal, especially extrememetal (though Waksman’s book doesn’t go deep into that territory, ending as itdoes with Metallica, Venom and the alt-rock revolution), because as guitarsbecame increasingly downtuned and/or lo-fi in the 1990s, melody and harmony andpitch itself became increasingly difficult to detect through the registralextremes and sheer timbral complexity of the music. Traditional melodic andharmonic analysis of this more distorted music would probably be less usefulthan an analysis that emphasized timbre.

ThisAin’t The Summer of Love is also innovative in its approach tothe idea of metal as a genre. Rather than seeing it as simply an outgrowth ofhard rock with a sprinkling of Baroque sequences and Romantic virtuosity (theWalser narrative, which is true as far as it goes), Waksman portrays it asbeing defined at almost every stage of its development through its conflictwith punk (and vice versa). The book captures metal in what might be called the“musical” mode of enmity and provides a more balanced and historically awareapproach than the strained efforts of Bayer et al. to reclaim metal for thecurrent political left. Entire books remain to be written about metal’santagonistic relationship with other musical genres, such as pop and especiallyAfrican American-derived musics. The violence of the metal-punk conflict isbrilliantly captured in the opening of the This Ain’t the Summer of Love,which details an exchange between fans of each genre that was published in theLetters to the Editor section of several issues of Creem magazine in1980, in which each side repeatedly hurled homophobic slurs at the other. Waksmanis sensitive to the ways in which this conflict of genres intersected with acontest over “authentic” masculinity: at stake was not simply musical style,but male fans’ sense of how their musical preferences reflected andestablished their own masculine identity. The heavy investment of both of thesegenres in the performance of masculinity has tended to result in themarginalization of female performers—a marginalization replicated in genrehistories. Given the lack of scholarship on these performers, the extensivediscussion of the all-female band the Runaways in chapter three is particularlywelcome. Like much of metal, theirs is a story of disintegration andirreconcilable opposing forces: caught between Joan Jett’s stripped-down,punk-style rhythm guitar and Lita Ford’s virtuosic metal lead guitar, betweenthe demand to embody a heretofore masculine brand of rebellious self-assertionand the opposing demand to embody feminine sexual tractability, the Runaways’career demonstrates the pitfalls of blurring genre and gender roles. Neitherfish nor fowl, they fizzled.

Ifother bands more successfully navigated the no-man’s-land (and certainlyno-woman’s-land) between punk and metal, many of them have nevertheless largelybeen excluded from scholarly treatments of either genre because they don’tquite fit either one. This book sets out to reclaim them. What emerges is analternate history of an altogether new genre, punk-metal crossover, which hasits own canon: Grand Funk Railroad instead of Led Zeppelin, the Dictators andthe Runaways instead of the Sex Pistols, Mötorhead and Venom instead of JudasPriest. This approach also forces the reader to rethink assumptions about bandsthat are widely thought of today as more or less definitively metal or punk (orsomething else): the Stooges, Iron Maiden, Black Flag, Metallica, and Nirvanaare here re-conceptualized as punk-metal crossovers—as indeed they wereperceived at certain points in their careers, according to the numerous rockjournalism primary sources that Waksman cites. The book superbly illustratesthe limitations of conventional genre histories and the opportunities thatarise when one deconstructs them. The fact that new paradigms and genredesignations emerge from this process should be no deterrent.

Ifthese bands initially occupied a middle ground between punk and metal, whodecided to classify them definitively as one or the other? Not the artiststhemselves. As many writers have observed, generic designations are more usefulto the music industry than to performers. In this case, the distinction betweenmetal and punk was largely created by music critics and marketing byindependent record labels such as SST, Metal Blade, and Sub Pop. All of theselabels produced music that could be heard as either metal or punk but wouldcome to be characterized by the press and listening publics as completelydifferent genres. SST was associated with early hardcore acts such as BlackFlag; Metal Blade supplied hardcore-influenced thrash and speed metal such asMetallica and Slayer; Sub Pop purveyed the “Seattle sound” of bands such asSoundgarden. Though these independent labels were more dependent on themainstream music industry than their founders would likely admit, they played acrucial role in marketing regional “sounds” that were initially ignored by thelarger industry, and would later crystallize into widely popular genres: forexample, the “Seattle sound,” which became grunge. This kind of attention torecord labels and their role as tastemakers is long overdue in musicology,which has tended to focus on metal musicians and fans but not on the industrythat mediates between them.

Thebook unfolds chronologically as a series of focused case studies of bands andlabels ranging from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. (One can only hope thatWaksman will write a follow up book about the 1990s and 2000s flourishing ofpunk-metal crossover genres such as grindcore and metalcore). Each case studydiscusses not only musical style, but also reception by critics and theexperience of live concerts. The focus on live concerts is particularlygratifying insofar as metal and punk foreground the live show as the mostimmediate way of experiencing the music and the community associated with it.Several of the bands featured here fundamentally changed the dynamics ofperformance and interaction with the audience, as well as audience expectationsabout performers’ images. Thus we read about how Grand Funk Railroad rejectedthe highbrow, virtuosic tendencies of ’70s rock and created their own brand oflowest-common-denominator arena rock, in which the performers are seen less as“shamans” and more as “pals” (46), how Alice Cooper and especially the Stoogesreacted against GFR’s feel-good ethos with their antagonistic stage personas,how the Runaways tapped into nostalgia for a more youth-centered rock cultureand in doing so created a new rocker image of the teenage girl gone bad, howMetallica’s faster and more percussive style led to the culture ofhead-banging, and how peripheral exposure to metal and punk shaped consumertastes so as to facilitate the commercial explosion of grunge, which “was atonce inviting and exclusive; it generated a sense of mass belonging that hingedon its capacity for highlighting the expressive force of anger andintrospection” (301).

Thesediscussions reveal the tension in both genres between the desire forindividuality, as expressed through virtuosity and flamboyant stage personas,and the desire for loss of self within the collective, as expressed through thecommunal nature of live performance, the stripping away of virtuosity, and thephenomenon of noise itself. Waksman rather philosophically describes it as a“simultaneous drive toward differentiation and unity . . . The desire forbelonging in rock has continually been set against the longing to be set apart”(307). The conflict between these desires would only sharpen with extrememetal; it is one of the main themes of the final book reviewed here, NicolaMasciandaro’s volume of edited essays, Hideous Gnosis, the product of awhimsical conference/ritual that took place—with me in attendance—in Brooklyn’sfrosty, dark bar, Public Assembly, in November 2009.

Itwas a small gathering of black-clad academics, many of them from the UK, whoknew each other already from the English department circuit and previous metalconferences. They had a bashful and eager air, as though they felt the wholebusiness was a little harebrained but nevertheless happy occasion, a meeting ofminds. I made the acquaintance of one of the few non-academics there, a fictionwriter who had seen a flyer and thought that something called “Hideous Gnosis”might provide good material for a story.

Thehistory of black metal is stranger than fiction. An obscure subgenre of extrememetal that began mostly in Scandinavia in the late 1980s, it was launched intothe wider metal community and briefly into public consciousness in the early1990s after a spate of suicides, church burnings, and murders within the scene.The most notorious of these musicians is Varg Vikernes, of the one-man bandBurzum, who was convicted of arson and murder and became something of a martyrfigure, which in turn inspired many others to take up his brand of lo-fi,despairing, misanthropic music. His racist statements made from within prisonhave aroused even more ire than his crimes, but in the end they too are part ofhis appeal for some fans, and the genre that arose in his wake has continued totraffic in themes of nationalism, fascism, and racism. Black metal is thusforbidding even by the standards of extreme metal, and those who expect to walkaway from reading Hideous Gnosis with a tidy summary of the genre’sgreat issues will likely be disappointed. The goal (and effect) of the essaysis not so much to shed light on their subject as to plunge it into even greaterdarkness; that is, to suggest that black metal is far more complex, conflicted,and philosophically rich than many of its detractors—and, more importantly, itsfans and creators—realize. The purpose is not to “‘address’ or ‘solve’ [thesepuzzles], but to intensify and exacerbate [them] . . . to bask in thespeculative glory of the problematic” (267). One result of this desire toproblematize rather than solve is that the essays themselves read more likelyrical perorations or choleric manifestos than typical examples ofcontemporary scholarship. Yet somehow, more than most other academic treatmentsof metal, this artfully messy volume finds a discourse that productivelyengages with a genre that resists discourse.

Perhapseven more than other metal subgenres, black metal is predicated on anopposition to whatever its practitioners see as the prevailing order orworldview of the day as articulated by public institutions such as governmentsand churches. But because opposition works through inversion and reversal, thismeans that black metal remains formally dependent on that which it is opposing,much as a Satanist Black Mass of the nineteenth century inversely replicatedthe Catholic mass in all particulars. The prevailing order that black metalmost famously combated in its early stages was that of Christianity, butalthough the genre earned a reputation for being satanic, in many ways itremained dependent on Christian thought, ritual, aesthetics, and strategies.Thus Erik Butler’s “The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: SpiritualSubstances” calls attention to various morphological similarities between blackmetal and Reformation-era Roman Catholicism, including the genre’s revival of whatits practitioners saw as the purity, rigor, asceticism, and orthodoxy of earlymetal in the face of the perceived heresy of commodified, mainstream ’80smetal.

Butlerraises many points that would benefit from further exploration. For instance,how and why did this morphologically Catholic art form arise in Scandinavia,which is overwhelmingly secular/Protestant? The appeal of Catholicism for blackmetal musicians certainly doesn’t lie in its doctrines. Might it lie in theCatholic Church’s “irrational” taste for mysticism and elaborate, grislyrituals of sacrifice, which contrast sharply with both institutionalizedProtestantism and the post-Enlightenment rational worldview that togetherundergird modern European society? A metal concert is nothing if not a goryritual, and it may be that black metal musicians find the Church—one of themost uncompromisingly old-fashioned institutions of our time—a treasure troveof aesthetic strategies for their own revolt against modern society. Even whiledecrying its beliefs and praising the devil, they have embraced its trappings,positioning themselves in opposition to rational, secular modernity through aritual, Satanist appropriation of Catholicism. In this connection, can otheraspects of black metal be related to Catholic praxis? For example, can blackmetal’s aestheticization of pain as a means of giving the listener a sense ofcommunion with cosmic forces be linked to the Catholic tradition of meditationon intense pain as a means of communing with God? Finally, to what extent isblack metal still dependent on Catholic or broader Christian modes of thought?Many of the essays, including Aspasia Stephanou’s “Playing Wolves and RedRiding Hoods in Black Metal” and Niall Scott’s “Black Confessions and Absu-lution,”suggest that Christianity is still a primary force that the genre opposes andrelies on, while others, such as Joseph Russo’s “Perpetue Putesco—Perpetually IPutrefy” argue that some black metal has outgrown both its opposition to andaesthetic dependence on Christianity.

IfChristianity represents (or represented) a prevailing order that must becombated and exploited, another prevailing order that black metal often opposesyet benefits from is political: the modern democratic nation-state. This book’sdiscussion of what, for many, is the hot-button issue of black metal—itsfixation on fascism—raises more questions than it answers. No one has everexplained to the satisfaction of outsiders exactly why black metallers are sodrawn to fascism and, in some cases, racism, and why the genre rose toprominence in Norway, a country whose socialist trappings, in the form ofgenerous unemployment benefits, are precisely what gave these musicians theleisure to create their music in the first place. In this sense, NationalSocialist black metal is often also an unacknowledged Social Democratic blackmetal, as sociologist Asbjørn Dyrendal has quipped (in Kahn-Harris 2007:2).Certainly many Norwegians (and not just black metallers) are angered at thegrowing number of ethnically diverse immigrants, but fascism would seem a poorsolution for these musicians, if only because a fascist regime would likelyhave less tolerance than the current democratic one for their unpopular artform.

Scholarlydiscussion of this puzzlingly self-destructive fascist impulse, when it appearsat all, often merely describes the far-right rhetoric of individual musicianswithout exploring its connection to their music, its relevance to the scene asa whole, or its links to larger social forces. The first trade book on blackmetal, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (1998),features several interviews on the subject but provides little in the way ofcritical perspective or explanation. Early scholarship might be forgiven fornot addressing every factor in black metal’s emergence and every facet of itsideological underpinnings, but the inability or reluctance to engage with thegenre’s politics continues to this day. See, for example, Until the LightTakes Us (2009), a documentary which features numerous interviews withblack metal’s founding fathers, including Varg Vikernes. The film pointedlyavoids difficult questions, instead allowing Vikernes to hold forth on lessincendiary subjects such as the evils of globalism and his interest in Nordicpaganism.

HideousGnosis makes a more sustained attempt to explain the appeal offascism. Most of the contributions touch on the ways in which black metalrepresents a rejection of modern life, including mass consumption and theapparent leveling of social hierarchies that together have resulted in whatblack metallers see as a culture of undifferentiated mass mediocrity. BenjaminNoys in “Remain True to the Earth: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal”relates black metal’s fascist tendencies to Nietzsche’s grand politics, whichsome have interpreted as championing dominance by an aristocracy of supermen,and Carl Schmitt’s theory of the partisan or insurgent, which champions a typeof fighter who fights not for one abstract ideology against another abstractideology, but for his land against those who would take his land (in Nietzsche1968 and Schmitt 2007). This type of fighter remains “grounded”; he knowsexactly what he stands for and what his enemy stands for. Black metallers,according to Noys, are drawn to the romantic nationalism of the warriorfighting for his land because this imagery gives them a way to define theirnebulous enemy, which, for Noys, is mainly advanced capitalism (but dependingon the band one might also suggest the modern liberal-democratic state,Christianity, multiculturalism, and cosmic order) as clear-cut opponents—asOthers; in turn, defining their enemies gives them a clearer sense of their ownselves.

Thefascination with such an anachronistic theme and the idealization of theancient past at the expense of the (disappointing) present suggests that blackmetal is a form of reactionary cultural expression akin to many strains ofpolitical conservatism which, dismissive of the liberal attitudes towardeconomics and social questions that gained traction in the late twentiethcentury, seek inspiration for future policies in a distant, idealized past. Inthis regard, I would add that black metal is only an extreme instance of a moregeneral turn to a mythologized past in metal. Most subgenres of metal containsignificant conservative proclivities despite their origins in the workingclass. This would explain why British heavy metal didn’t inspire its fans toprogressive political action, to the dismay of the contributors to HeavyMetal Music in Britain. It is no coincidence that metal arose in the era ofdeindustrialization and affirmative action, when many working-class white men,who along with other white men had been relatively dominant in their professions,began to feel increasingly imperiled by the need to compete with morecontenders from other demographics for fewer and fewer jobs. The heroicrepresentative of a dying tradition who fights various Others could seem anappealing if misguided metaphor for people in this position.

But,Noys argues, black metal doesn’t just define and attempt to vanquish its enemy;it also attempts, through combat with the enemy, an ambitious redefinition ortransformation of the self. (After all, one can’t become a glorioussuperman-warrior without an opponent.) This strategy is ultimatelyself-defeating, since the genre’s enemies are ideological and thus alwayschanging. Constantly evolving past tidy definitions, these elusively abstractopponents refuse to give black metallers the sure sense of self that theycrave. Yet the musicians (or rather their fictional avatars in their songs)fight on, with no sign of victory, as their enemies will not disappear any timesoon. It is as though the most important thing for them were the struggleitself, not victory as such. In fact, they know they are doomed; albumsfrequently end with the implied death or subjection of the narrator at thehands of undefined cosmic forces. For Noys, the futility of this struggle doesnot detract from the aesthetic power of black metal, but rather enhances it bydramatizing its core principles of opposition for its own sake and willingnessto put the self as well as others at risk. The extent to which black metalviolence is directed against the self has not been so remarked upon in thepress, which has focused on musicians’ crimes against other people, but Ishould note that the movement has been associated as much with its practitioners’self-mutilation and suicide as with assaults on others (Moynihan and Søderlind,45–62).

Asimilar logic of aesthetically enriching failure emerges from AspasiaStephanou’s “Playing Wolves and Red Riding Hoods in Black Metal,” whichconsiders the efforts of female black metal musicians to carve out a space forthemselves in the genre and concludes that in their opposition they succumb,willy-nilly, to the dictates of masculine discourse: they must adopt their malecounterparts’ masculine behavior (which for Stephanou is a capitulation, not avictorious annexation of masculinity à la Judith Halberstam in FemaleMasculinity), over-sexualize themselves, or retreat behind masks into inaccessibility.Yet these tactics do not lessen their artistic achievement. Rather, as withblack metal created by men, it is precisely the distortion or loss of the selfin the face of overwhelming forces that is the source of the genre’s appeal.Stephanou’s essay can usefully be compared with Waksman’s discussion of theRunaways; both imply that women’s sense of self is constantly undermined by theconflict between the demand to compete with men on male terms and the demand tobe feminine, where femininity, too, is defined by men. What is peculiarlyfascinating about black metal is that its male performers willingly submit to asimilar disintegration of the self.

EvanCalder Williams also considers the implications of dismantling the self in “TheHeadless Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” but his reading emphasizes less the lossimplicit in this sacrifice than the possibility of reincarnation in new,different, more interesting forms. Contra Noys, who views black metal asbasically an egocentric enterprise, Calder Williams explores the equally strongcollectivist strain in black metal, which continually evokes hordes, armies,and packs of wolves but rarely a leader. Insofar as there are leaders, theyseem to be mysterious, collective beings drawn from the essences of manydifferent individuals, as in the title of Emperor’s song “I Am The BlackWizards.” Though Williams avoids drawing any definite political conclusionsfrom this, he clearly sees black metal as embodying a desire for intense,continuous transformation of the self and the community, too unstable toendorse a leader or harden into a well-defined fascism or indeed any politicalprogram. This notion is borne out, or at least superficially supported, byleading black metal figures’ frequent claims that they don’t care aboutpolitics and their tendency to undercut their own pro-fascist rhetoric, as whenVikernes said years later of his bigoted prison manifesto that it “was writtenin anger, while I was young and on isolation [sic]” (Vikernes 2004).

However,the fact that black metal doesn’t endorse a specific political program shouldnot lull fans into dismissing this coy, self-subverting, fascist-leaningpolitical apathy as innocuous. Claims of political detachment on the part ofcultural elites are misleading insofar as they function as part of theperformance of power: it’s easy to declare your indifference to politics if thestatus quo benefits you. Because certain dominant groups, such as white men,are better served by the status quo than other groups, they have the privilegeof not caring (or seeming not to care) about politics. And even if black metalmusicians are as politically apathetic or amorphous as they claim, not all oftheir fans are and promoters are: for example, the American label ResistanceRecords, owned by the white separatist National Alliance, produces and sellsblack metal along with more overtly neo-Nazi music. Williams’ argument isreminiscent of other attempts to reclaim metal for the left—not for labor as inthe case of Heavy Metal Music in Britain, but perhaps for anarchism. Itis not altogether compelling as a frame for thinking about Scandinavian blackmetal, but, as we will see below, it may be more accurate if applied to blackmetal in America.

Whatremains unaddressed in the collection is racism, and this is symptomatic ofmetal studies as a whole. Scholars’ avoidance of the topic of racism is aparticularly grave oversight in the case of black metal, considering such clearindicators as Vikernes’ vocal support of eugenics and racial separatism and theinflammatory statement on the cover of the foundational band Darkthrone’s albumTransilvanian Hunger, which translates as “Norwegian Aryan Black Metal.”Given current xenophobic tendencies in many black metal scenes around the world(perhaps most openly on display in the jingoist lyrics of French band PesteNoire’s album Ballade cuntre lo Anemi Francor), which indicate that theproblem is not limited to a small cabal of Norwegian musicians, it is importantthat future scholarship in this nascent field address the issue. Questions thatneed to be answered include: To what extent do the genre’s notoriously abstruselyrics camouflage racist sentiments, and can the average fan hear them throughthe screaming and language barriers? Why do many fans shrug at the imputationsof racism and brush them off as irrelevant to their experience of the music?How do black metal’s non-white fans relate to and contextualize this music?Where are, and how powerful are, the voices within the scene that opposeracism? To what extent is racist posturing a marketing ploy designed tocapitalize on shock value, and has it aided or hindered the commercial successof this music among its target audience? Given that black metal musiciansfrequently dismiss all of humanity (including their own countrymen andsometimes even their own fans) as worthless, to what extent are their raciststatements part of a bigger misanthropic puzzle? Vikernes recently impliedsomething of the sort:

I am a narrow-minded ultra-conservative anti-religiousmisanthropic and arrogant bigot, alright, and I have a problem with just abouteverything and everyone in this world, but I am not demented, and if those whoare not like me are able to enjoy my music that is all fine by me. Be aChristian-born black gay feminist converted to Judaism for all I care, orworse; a Muslim. Just stay off my lawn. Oh, and I may add that I have a problemwith most Nordic heterosexuals with a Pagan ideology as well. (Stosuy 2010)

As a caveat to Vikernes’ statement, it is necessary topoint out that even misanthropes usually hate some people more than othersrather than subscribing to equal-opportunity misanthropy. There are norecorded instances of racially motivated crimes—although this may merely be amatter of lack of opportunity—by black metal musicians, as far as I am aware,but a plethora of crimes against churches, fellow musicians, gay men, and theperpetrators themselves (Moynihan and Søderlind, 45-62, 81–144). This raisesthe question: what group, if any, is the main target of black metal hatred?

Perhapsbecause such questions are so difficult to answer, and perhaps because thecontributors to Hideous Gnosis are more interested in the genre’sesoterically mystical possibilities for the lone individual than its observablesocial manifestations, most of the essays avoid political discussions and focusinstead on the intensely introverted and private experiences that some blackmetal conjures up. One experience that is commonly evoked in songs is the senseof dismantlement and transformation of the individual self by natural orsupernatural forces such as decay and demonic possession. The lyrics oftendescribe experiences of extreme cold, heat, or pain which the human self cannotendure. Anthony Sciscione in the Victor Turner-inflected “Goatsteps BehindMy Steps . . .Black Metal and Ritual Renewal” suggests that black metal’sinterest in unbearable physical experiences and in the consequent breakdown ofthe self is:

motivated by a dissatisfaction with medial states and amanifest lust for the intensity of transitions, of ceding . . . to a radicalalterity that reconfigures identity by destroying and overtaking . . . [Theblack metaller] undergoes a sacrificial demise in order to open himself up as ahabitat for and an expression of the power of the demon. (176)

The theme of demonic possession gets further treatment inEugene Thacker’s “Three Questions on Demonology,” which argues that the demonin black metal, while sometimes a stand-in for Satan or pagan deities, isprimarily a symbol of impersonal cosmic forces which act on humans but cannever really be understood by them. Songs about demonic possession, then, allowus to imagine a state of being at the limits of rational knowledge, or evenbeing overtaken by a non-human point of view. This is the most fundamentaltheme of the book: black metal is concerned with the extreme limits of humanexperience and thought; it attempts a topography of the unknowable, an anatomyof the non-human.

If black metal is all about destruction—of traditionalreligion, of modern civilization, of rational thought, of the human, of theself—then where do you go after you have destroyed everything? One answer isoffered in “Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism” byHunter Hunt-Hendrix, frontman of the New York-based band Liturgy and graduateof Columbia University. Hendrix believes that Scandinavian black metal was onlythe first, primitive phase of the genre, and he wishes to inaugurate the secondphase, American black metal, which he also terms “transcendental” in a nod toEmerson and Thoreau. In contrast to the nihilistic, nocturnal, hermetic,depraved, and misanthropic Scandinavian black metal, the new black metal is tobe affirmative, solar, courageous, open, and loving (or at least non-hateful).Lest anyone mistake this for a hippie manifesto, Hendrix makes it clear thatthe optimism and joy he advocates are not simply there for the taking, butrather have to be earned through arduous struggle. His good cheer is the lightat the end of a very long tunnel: He writes, “Transcendental Black Metal is infact nihilism, however it is a double nihilism and a final nihilism, a once andfor all negation of the entire series of negations. With this final ‘No’ wearrive at a sort of vertiginous Affirmation, an affirmation that iswhite-knuckled, terrified, unsentimental, and courageous” (61).

Thismanifesto has provoked a furor in the blogosphere, where it has been ridiculedin the online forum Nuclear War Now! Productions as, “a weird and obnoxioushybrid of verbal diarrhea and empowered hipster ignorance” (Blackmagoon 2011).More thoughtful and substantive than these taunts, which merely object to thejargon and do not engage with the subject matter, is Andrew White’s critique ofHendrix in the postscript to Hideous Gnosis: “[Black metal] isdark—bleak, angry, violent. This new form of black metal [Hendrix] proposessounds like something different altogether” (280). The whole point of blackmetal as traditionally practiced is its uncompromisingly negative andoppositional energy; for some, Hendrix’s worldview is simply too happy toqualify as black metal. The reception of his work underscores the fact thatblack metal isn’t just a sound, but a discourse, and anyone who dares tocritique that discourse is ostracized. His unusual background as a Columbiaphilosophy major attracts resentment as well, since it fosters the image of anaffluent, pretentious outsider—though why such markers of elitism woulddisqualify him from the scene is unclear, given the much more blatant arroganceand social contempt that prevailed among the genre’s founding fathers, who werealso outsiders and rebels against the metal community of their time. It remainsto be seen whether Liturgy will ultimately be perceived as a black metal band,and whether the claims of this essay will hold up over time, since the genre iscontinuously redefined by musicians and audiences. So far, the young Americanscene does seem significantly less hostile and angry than the Scandinavianscene, and more interested in carrying on the legacy of ’60s counterculturalprojects like radical environmentalism and peaceful anarchism than in burningchurches, worshiping ancestors, and fantasizing about battles in the north.

Whetherone accepts Hendrix’s vision or not, he at least deserves credit for buckingthe narrow-minded hermeticism and misanthropy that gave the scene its impetusin the early 1990s but at this point risks leaving it to stagnate. Like themusic of female black metallers and others who do not fit the conventions ofthe scene, his ideas and music represent an opportunity for fruitfulcross-fertilization with other points of view. His position makes for astriking contrast with most of the other contributions: while they portray thegenre as a force of decay and destruction, as something inextricably bound upwith the decadent society it despises and doomed to go down with it, he thinksthe art form can go beyond that; through a dialectical process it can become atheurgic and salvific force. His philosophical stance is reflected in Liturgy’sperformance style: he and fellow bandmates Bernard Gann, Tyler Dusenbury, andGreg Fox eschew the menacing theatrics that usually accompany black metal performance,such as horror movie-inspired costumes, corpse paint, demonic stage names, andantagonistic shock-rock tactics in favor of unremarkable street clothing and amodest, genial stage demeanor that belies their blogosphere reputation aspompous elitists. Because of their indifference to the etiquette of black metalas well as their wide range of non-metal musical influences, they are notalways accepted as a black metal band and are sometimes derided as interloperswho casually appropriate black metal’s musical techniques without making acommitment to the scene. In New York, at least, they headline at rock events asoften as metal ones. But if the band’s appearance is casual and unassuming, theessay is not. High-flown and grandiloquent, it expresses a desire to change theworld—one DIY venue at a time.

WhileHendrix’s contribution represents black metal theoretical discourse in anextroverted mode, Nicola Masciandaro’s “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya”represents this discourse in a more introverted and mystical mode. He triesboth to find a theoretical language to talk about black metal and to use thefundamental negativity of black metal itself as a way to enrich (or undercut)the way scholarship is practiced today. In other words, his meditative essayattempts both to theorize black metal and to make theoretical discourse moreindeterminate with an admixture of black metal esotericism. The ensuingevasiveness is reminiscent of mid-twentieth-century critical theorists’ effortsto deconstruct existing academic theory in order to make room for a differentkind of scholarship, but it also draws on older and richer traditions of“unsaying” discourses, especially negative theology, which approaches theultimate truth by saying what it is not rather than what it is. The result isindeed a different kind of scholarship from that which dominates academiatoday; this essay and the book as a whole are as much works of art as oferudition, full of fanciful illustrations and evocative, apparently candidphotographs from the symposium. The essays, which at first glance read likeimpenetrable amalgams of creative writing and post-structuralist philosophy,indulge in a level of obscurantism that is only possible among members of atiny occult sect who are unconcerned with courting a broader audience—in thiscase, a broader academic or scene audience. If this approach has elicited someunfortunate reactions from both the black metal scene (in the form of jeering,bigoted comments posted in the blog associated with the project that were thenprinted in the volume) and the academic press that refused to publish the book,well, that’s inevitable, and probably in keeping with black metal’sinscrutability.

Themystical/cosmological approach of the book inevitably results in a certainromanticization of black metal, albeit a more creative kind than that of mostmetal scholarship, which tends to read politically progressive attitudes intovarious metal subgenres. This volume romanticizes black metal not as apolitical force, but rather as a force for expanding the possibilities of humanexperience beyond the options afforded to us in everyday life. Using the commontactic of asserting the superiority of one’s own aesthetic and lifestylepreferences to those of the supposedly inane mainstream, Russo’s “PerpetuePutesco,” for example, hints that the genre may be an antidote to the casualconsumerism of modern life (and, one assumes, to the Top 40 radio played incommercial centers). He even suggests that it might be a gateway to a moreauthentic, more obscene, and more sacred experience of reality. Rather thantaking the usual academic approach of describing a musical genre as it hasexisted in the past and present, he and the other contributors primarily looktoward the future: by selectively bringing out certain of black metal’s latentphilosophical tendencies, they attempt to reclaim the music for somestill-to-be-defined, or never-to-be-defined, good.

Thisbook, one of the most intriguingly ambivalent attempts to redeem metal of itssins, illustrates the fact that all metal scholarship is inevitably the productof a fandom, and a very specific and limited one at that—a community ofscholars who want to burnish the intellectual credentials of this widelydenigrated and often anti-intellectual genre. Hideous Gnosis gives arich and layered account of what black metal represents for scholarly fans, butthe field awaits more ethnography to uncover what it means for otherlisteners—not just the kindly left-leaning professor, but the frustratedskinhead; not just the person who listens to the “kvlt” or “authentic” bandsthat are the primary subject matter of this book (with the exception of theheterodox Liturgy), but also the person who listens to the more commerciallysuccessful bands that temper black metal with the despised conventions of pop.

Themost urgent task of metal scholarship in the immediate future indeed lies inethnography, because metal’s audience has changed dramatically over the pasttwenty years. Gone are the days of the homogeneous audience described in earlysociologies. Today, metal’s fanbase includes people of many ethnicities andnationalities, classes, education levels, religious beliefs, and politicalviews, and multiple genders and sexual orientations. These fans have beenlittle studied, and attention to their experiences would shed light not only onthem but also on metal culture in general, since scenes are defined largely bytheir margins (and many of these fans do remain marginal). This process has recentlybegun with great promise in Keith Kahn-Harris’ Extreme Metal: Music andCulture on the Edge (2007), which gives considerable attention to theIsraeli scene, and Laina Dawes’ forthcoming What Are You Doing Here?: BlackWomen in Metal, Hardcore and Punk (2012). Metal also needs more attentionfrom musicologists, of whom few other than Waksman currently have the expertiseto analyze a form of music so minimally notated and so reliant onunder-theorized musical techniques such as distortion. Finally, metal is quiteamenable to studies from other disciplines, even (or especially) those thatinhabit the fringes of academia: the speculative, philosophical approach ofMasciandaro and his fellow maverick English scholars is a novel way of thinkingabout metal that opens up murky, alluring vistas of scholarship combined withcreative enterprises. Whatever the approach—sociological, musicological, orphilosophical—scholars need to suppress, or at least admit and temper, theirimpulse to justify the music. This whitewashing strategy was arguablydefensible in the past when metal lacked sufficient prestige to be consideredworthy of academic study, but that is not the case anymore. Scholars today needto acknowledge the fact that metal appeals because of its perversity, not inspite of it. The time has come to give metal’s fascinating depravity its due.

References

Aites, Aaronand Audrey Ewell. 2009. Until the Light Takes Us. Film. Variance Films.

Bataille,Georges. 1988. Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.

Blackmagoon.2011. Comment in the thread “None So Gay (Liturgy interview).” Nuclear War Now!Productions webboard. March 8. Retrieved from

http://www.nwnprod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20928&sid=2ff71be36867617c50d73e1ddbcecf12

Dawes, Laina.2012. What Are You Doing Here?: Black Women in Metal, Hardcore and Punk. NewYork: Bazillion Points.

Gaines, Donna.1991. Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids. New York: Pantheon.

Halberstam,Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Kahn-Harris,Keith. 2007. Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford andNew York: Berg.

_____. 2008.Review of True Norwegian Black Metal, by Peter Beste. The NewHumanist,

vol. 123, issue4. July/August 2008, Retrieved fromhttp://newhumanist.org.uk/1829/true-norwegian-black-metal-by-peter-beste

Lukács, Georg.1971. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History andClass Consciousness: Studies inMarxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Lilja, Esa.2009. Theory and Analysis of Classic Heavy Metal Harmony. Helsinki:IAML.

Nietzsche,Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale, ed. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.

Pillsbury,Glenn T. 2006. Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of MusicalIdentity. New York: Routledge.

Schmitt, Carl.2007. Theory of the Partisan. Trans. G. L. Ulman. New York: TelosPublishing.

Stosuy,Brandon. 2010. “Haunting the Chapel No. 8: Interview with Varg Vikernes.”Stereogum.com, October 3. Retrieved fromhttp://stereogum.com/295222/haunting-the-chapel-no-8/franchises/haunting-the-chapel/

Vikernes, Varg.2004. “A Comment To “Vargsmål” And Other Books By Varg Vikernes.” December 15.Retrieved from

http://www.burzum.org/eng/library/a_comment_to_vargsmal_and_other_books_by_varg_vikernes.shtml

Waksman, Steve.1999. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of MusicalExperience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Walser, Robert.1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy MetalMusic. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UniversityPress.

Weinstein,Deena. 1991. Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology. New York: LexingtonBooks.

P.E.S.T. Schedule & Abstracts

2011-10-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

P.E.S.T.

Philial Epidemic Strategy Tryst

Black Metal Theory Symposium

Date: Sunday 20 November 2011, 14.00-Close

Location: The Pint Bar, Eden Quay, Dublin, Ireland

2.00-2.15 Opening: Michael O’Rourke

2.15-3.15 PHILIAL

- 2.15-2.30 Zachary Price

- 2.30-2.45 Karin Sellberg

- 2.45-3.00 Nicola Masciandaro

- 3.00-3.15 Q & A

3.15-3.30 Drinking Break

3.30-4.15 EPIDEMIC

- 3.30-3.45 Aspasia Stephanou

- 3.45-4.00 Scott Wilson

- 4.00-4.15 Q & A

4.15-5.15 STRATEGY

- 4.15-4.30 Steven Shakespeare

- 4.30-4.45 Ben Woodard

- 4.45-5.00 Vincent Como

- 5.00-5.15 Q & A

5.15-5.45 Drinking Break

5.45-6.30 TRYST

- 5.45-6.00 Paul Ennis

- 6.00-6.15 Diarmuid Hester

- 6.15-6.30 Q & A

6.30-7.30 Refreshments

8.00-11.00 LIVE ACTS

Eternal Helcaraxe and Wound Upon Wound

ABSTRACTS

The Mutual Pestering of BlackMetal and Theory

Michael O’Rourke

If Black MetalTheory in all its incipience and not-yet-here-ness involves a mutualenblackening, then it also necessitates a mutual openness and pestering. Thatis to say that theory must open itself up to its parasitical outside (which is always already inside) and black metaltoo must open itself up to its own parasitical outside (which is always already inside). In order tofashion, however provisionally, a black metal theory, a moving-back-and-forthbetween black metal and theory, one needs what Deleuze called “intercessors”,forces which come from the outside attracted by incipient conditions for theircoming in and feeding on. The forces which this paper activates—from diversefields including ecology, literary theory, art, politics, and philosophy— are aseries of cuttings-in or inter-scissions which create trouble, a thickening cloudiness, a smudging which bridges bothblack metal and theory and their participations with a shared outside. These reverberations or resonances—openingsto, butcherings open by, the outside— are attuned to the temporality and politicality(and by extension the ethical stakes) of a Black Metal Theory which is alwaysto-come.

“Destroy Your Life For Satan”:A Buddhist Exploration of Black Metal Toward the Establishment of Necroyana

Zachary Price

The AmericanNihilist Underground Society (ANUS) once published a piece sketching theapparent affinity between death metal and Buddhism. The article recounts thestory of a man who, focusing all of his attention on death, learns the Buddha’sopen secret. “Only death is real.” Total awareness of death brings death metalinto a space where it may begin to realize the Buddhist path to enlightenment;it is, after all, what set young Siddhartha on his path to become the Buddha.Simply recognizing death is only the beginning, however. Without a liberatorypractice, death metal stalls and binds itself more deeply to illusion. Lookingis not enough. One must “taste and see.” Where its forbears have only gazed,black metal insists on going. It relies on active dissolution, as evidenced incommon lyrical themes, production values, and even on-stage mutilation. InTibetan Buddhism, as well, many practices—for instance, the phowa, ortransference of consciousness—involve enacting a dissolution of the body, agrinding down into is constituent elements, as well as a dissolution of themind. These overlapping methods demonstrate that black metal is a practice of death, just as Buddhismessentially consists of the practice of death in meditation. Thus, it is also ameditative practice. Practicing death, like all meditative practices, is aliberatory process. It frees its practitioners from the illusion of life—which isto say, it unearths and makes present the truth that we are always alreadydying and rotting away. Therefore, black metal is akin to the yanas of Buddhistpractice, a vehicle for the realization of enlightenment. It is necroyana, thevehicle of death itself, a body of practices against the body. A “massiveconspiracy against all life.” Not a diamond, but a femur pestle. A rope portal to the actualization of theempty essence of mind. [References: “Destroy Your Life For Satan,” Mütiilation,2001; Buddhism and Death Metal,” ; Psalm 34:8; “MassiveConspiracy Against All Life,” Leviathan, 2008]

DeadGifts

Karin Sellberg

“Take thou some new infection to thy eye / And the rank poison of theold will die” (Shakespeare, Romeo &Juliet, 1.2.49-50). The Norwegian/Swedish word ‘gift’ connotes both marriedbliss and poison. It also shares a common root with the English ‘gift’. The OEDtells us that a gift is something bestowed without the expectance of anythingin return. Giving, in its ideal form, is thus a pure expenditure or expression,but as George Bataille reminds us gift exchange often harbours more complexstructures. Whether passionate or poisonous, most gifts are imbued with a veinof sacrifice – and the lacerations following its sacral thrusts contract thegiver to his gift. Black Metal lore is full of sacrifices and ‘sacred’ gifts.The most infamous example is possibly the suicide of Mayhem’s vocalist Dead(Per Yngve Ohlin), after which the rest of the band members were said to havefeasted on his brains and made ‘special gifts’ out of fragments of his skull.The brain stew was later claimed to be a false rumour, but the band hasconfirmed the existence of skull amulets. Whether true or not, the myth of boththese omophagic philiations pose a number of interesting questions: is there aparticular allure to Dead’s discarded physical remains? What type of power arethe Dead Gifts invested with? Bataille and Reza Negarestani offer us a fewclues. Death is both contagious and cathartic. As several of the Mayhem membersattest to, Dead always saw himself as dead: “That is the reason he took thatname. He knew he would die” (Occultus), but in death Dead became something moreelevated and universal. He became the image of Death – its allegoricalcounterfeit. As his bones were shattered by the force of the gunshot, his bodygrew steadily more formless and molar. When Dead came to personify Death, Deathitself was split open. The Medieval saint Angela de Foligno recognises that theingestion of Death (in her case through a mouthful of leprous pus) opens herbody to Christ and infinity. Dead’s gifts of Death allow their recipients tocommune with transcendence.

On the Mystical Love of BlackMetal

Nicola Masciandaro

“Deep in theshadows wings take to flight through clouds of chaos where stars die” (Inquisition,“Across the Abyss Ancient Horns Bray,” OminousDoctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm). “That which neither createsnor is created . . . is classed among the impossibles, for its essence lies inthat it cannot be [cuius differentia estnon posse esse]” (John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon.The love of black metal twists toward absolute cosmic exteriority along amystical path of intensive inversion. Ordinate mysticism takes an inward and upward path to God as the source and goal of everything,withdrawing from the exterior phenomenal world in order to ascend beyond it tothe One in a movement that is anabatic, apophatic, and anagogic (Plotinus, Enneads, 4.8.1; Augustine, Confessions, 7.10,16; Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 1.1). The love ofblack metal, reversely and contrarily, leads downwards and outwardsinto a paradoxically disordered and multiple cosmos that is no less divine,pursuing a musical path that is catabatic, cataphatic, and apogogic (a path,however, that necessarily twists these terms according to its own essentialnegativity). Where music traditionally aims to mimetically ascend tohyper-central divine truth through the harmony of the celestial spheres, blackmetal’s noisy anti-modern sonic drive coordinately plunges into the depths onlyto release and radically fly upon the infinite centrifugal power or negativecosmic wind of sound itself. Crucially, this distinction, between the orderedmystical love of God and the disordered mysticism that love of black metalinescapably is, is not a pure opposition. Like the Petrine Cross that at oncemarks the temporally separate twin foundations of the terrestrial ecclesia andthe heavy acosmic kvlt, black metal love is a most intimate transposition ofits spiritual precursor, a dissemblance that exacerbates and intensifies thestill, unmoving point of identity with what it inverts. This point, the secretmoment or punctum around which blackmetal assemblies anarchically gather, is perversely legible in moments of blackmetal complicity with essential ‘disordering’ counter-movements within medievalmystical discourse, for instance, Richard of St. Victor’s representation of theGod-enflamed soul as spontaneously sinkinginto the divine will like liquefied black metal (On the Four Degrees of Violent Charity), Mechthild of Magdeburg’sexaltation of the soul’s descent into the night of separation: “O blissfuldistance from God, how lovingly am I connected with you!”, and Meister Eckhart’sprayer to be rid of God. Arguing that the modern love of black metal is,willy-nilly, a profound and fresh form of mysticism, a desperate contemplationof the divine manifesting the ‘desire to be everything’ (Bataille), thislecture will demonstrate, with special reference to the works of Inquisitionand John Scotus Eriugena, how black metal and mysticism are lovingly united inthe dark pestilential space of excessive and compound negativity, a new realmof the not not God.

Contagionand Solipsism

Aspasia Stephanou

This paper will examine the possibility of contagious proliferations inBlack Metal, as well as the vampire/monstrous self as an enclosed capsule atthe centre of the black metal universe. While black metal narratives open upthe self to horror and epidemic contagion, dissolving boundaries between theself and other, between the self as a good meal for the other, at the same timethe monstrous persona of black metal refuses to be eaten or eat with the other,sustaining thus the boundaries between a dominating self and a submissiveother. Such a relationship is always imagined in terms of a masculine voice andimaginary self who invites the female other, in order to deny her her own jouissance, retaining thus his integrityand wholeness. As Joan Copjec writes, the vampire represents our overproximityto the object of the breast, the objetpetit a, which the vampire now possesses but as a source of jouissance (36). For Copjec, vampiresare male and their victims are female. Similarly, the vampiric black metal selfdominates the female other, even when such contagious transactions occur,re-establishing thus limits and hierarchies. If the vampire messes up meal andits economies, as Negarestani argues, it also functions as a fictional prop toconjure up the horror of pestilence through the masculine prerogative toconsume without the possibility of exchange or openness towards death mess andnecrophilic contamination.

Muscaamusica and the sound of Satan’sascension

Scott Wilson

“Halo of Flies OverMy Head / I am decaying Satan’s Wrath / The one to walk planet earth / alone / Spreadingdisease, death and war” (Impaled Nazarene, ‘Halo of Flies’ All That You Fear [2004]). “Attractiveto the flies ... I am their mephitic trough ... a buzzing which engulfs all ...Through compound eyes / I envision eternity” (Lugubrum, ‘Attractive to Flies’, De Vette Cueken [2004]). Flies are afrequent trope in both black and death metal. For the latter, buzzing fliespullulating over a rotting corpse lyrically figures death metal’s pulverizinga-subjective affections of the body; for the former, flies are related to ametaphysical problem bound up not so much to the paradoxical notion of thedeath of God but the death and deification of Satan. The ultimate reference(perhaps since Iron Maiden and across numerous genres) is to Satan as ‘Lord ofthe Flies’, or as Malkuth put it, ‘Great Black Goat God (Lord of the Flies)’(1994). But as this reference to Golding’s famous novel suggests, Satan isalready, here, a rotting animal’s head: the sacrificial offering to the Beastmisperceived as the Beat itself. Or rather becomethe beast through the hideous teeming acephalic noise of the flies that swarmabout its decapitated head. The process of self-identification andself-transcendence that holds the God-Satan-Man triad together is transformedthrough parasitic consumption. Flies, not Man, maketh the Beast, but firstthrough turning the flesh into ‘a mephitic trough’, a Styx of digestive liquid’(Lugubrum) in which ‘Transformed man [is] dethroned’, Nominon, ‘Hordes of Flies’(2005). For Nominon, then, the process of complete post-parasiticaltransformation – ‘Innate insects part of me /Parasite inside eating me / Hostof flies born inside – sees the Satanic ‘Beast’ (the satanic multiple)resurrected from the swarming darkness of base matter where death has nodominion: ‘Absence of life I am the lordof flies’. Companion species, no doubt, since the migration of homo sapiensfrom Africa, musca domestica have lodged in the margins of humancivilization, incubating and pupating in its shit and garbage, feeding onwounds and rotting flesh, defecating and vomiting waste matter teeming indeadly bacteria and viruses: typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis. Inblack metal’s buzzing, its musca amusica,flies are both the locus of amusicalex-sistence and figure of Satan’s divine inexistence and ascension. ‘Throughcompound eyes / I envision eternity’.

Into theVomitarium: Diseased Sacraments

Steven Shakespeare

ThomasAquinas’ Summa Theologica has beenlikened to a ‘cathedral’ of thought. It is striking, then, that its finalarticle deals with sacramental dilemmas such as: what happens if theeucharistic host decays, or is eaten by mice? What happen if the priest goesinsane during mass, or throws up after receiving communion? An image isspawned: at the consummation of the cathedral’s mass, a priest lurches outsideto vomit the infected host. Satanic black metal pursues this corruption of theholy through scenes of violation, deliberately perverting sacramental imagery.This paper traces the ambiguous relationship it maintains with Christianeucharistic theology, focusing particularly on the work of Deathspell Omega. Intheir hands, black metal becomes a tool for pursuing the kenosis of God to itsultimate end in an identification with diseased flesh, a supplement whichungrounds the sanctity and wholeness of the divine. Whilst their earlier workis still encumbered with a normative misogyny which replicates the failure ofChristian orthodoxy to follow the logic of incarnation to its decaying end,from 2004, Deathspell Omega realise the strangely liberating corruption oftransubstantiation (the ‘of’ to be taken utterly ambiguously). Emblematic ofthis shift is the appropriation, on ‘Diabolicus Absconditus’, of Bataille’simage of the whore as God. The paperends by turning to the queer theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid to furthersubvert the unholy alliance of narratives of sanctity and rape. Althaus-Reidaffirms an unstable, scavenger God, constructed through the material, sexuallives of the excluded, celebrating “a Eucharist in which Christ’stransubstantiation depends on a discarded piece of rotten bread.” In thisencounter, orthodox Satanic mimesis of Christianity becomes, neither echo norreversal, but an intimate, putrefying communicatioidiomatum.

Folding a Cadaverous Scream: The Disharmonious Fleshof Recombinant Horror

Ben Woodard

This essay aims to harvest aphilosophical provenance for recombinant horror – a particular form of bodyhorror (or biohorror) that focuses on contagions that rearrange bodies bothinternally and externally with examples being Dead Space, ResidentEvil, Parasite Eve, and others. This form of horror I argue indexes thestrange mathesis of Leibniz (and Deleuze’s reading and Negarestani’s responseto that reading), Nick Land and Bataille’s discussion of the Labrynth, as wellthe tension between biological and architectural models of thought in Kant’sarchtectonic. Black Metal will be stitched through this form of horror throughthe odd complicity between music and architecture in Bataille’s pornographicrallying against the former, Land and Negarestani’s howling inorganics, and thesickly biological upsetting the prestablished structure of Kant’s thought. Bylooking at instances of biohorror in music I will attempt to discern howlyrical approaches coalesce or fail to demonstrate the nonstructural butstructure-dependent horror of recombinant horror. In the end the guidingquestion will be if the sickly noise of the inorganic can be sufficientlyabsorbed by the intentional sonic and how this informs the mediation betweenpattern in flow in the gross inevitability of a dark vitalism, in whichfecundity and negativity are inseparable, in which the body is twisted into alabyrinth, in which the inorganic screams with the pain of its self-inducedflailing.

Tune In, Turn On, Curse Out

Vincent Como

The artwork/imagerybeing used to promote this, the third Black Metal Theory Symposium, is from aseries of 23 works based on ancient Defixiones, or Curse Tablets, which applyan invocation—for good or ill—toward another party most often with whom you areeither besotted, or who has wronged you in some matter of business or personalrelation. In speaking about the worksin this Hexe series, we will summarize the traditional role of the cursetablet and how these particular works are constructed in order to achievesimilar results through a structural analysis and an exploration of theirmaterial properties in relation to Hermetic traditions. This will then allow usto move beyond the physical object of power and discuss intention and thepsychology of belief as an entity in its own right, which leads directly intothe overarching theme of PEST. One’s complicity with the complex andlayered structure that is belief is such that when encountering the intentionsof another, it ultimately challenges the insular domain of one’s very being;destroying the barrier of the self, and forcing an engagement with the realm ofan other. This, then, turns virtuallyall human interaction into a psychic attack being perpetrated by and uponeveryone at all times. Existence, as we will come to understand, is arelentless barrage of intentions, ideas and the surplus of decaying belief systemsbeing recycled from the beginning of time to the present. This perpetualassault goes predominantly unnoticed until it is tapped into and channeled byan object, person, or collective group, at which point the focused intentionmay cut through the omnipresent universal static to fulfill its purpose, tocause affect upon a receiver.

“The HopelessSoul Keeps Mating”: Notes on Black Metal and Contemporary Fiction

Diarmuid Hester

This contribution considers the recent interest in black metal amongstwriters of experimental American fiction. Utilising a conceptual frameworkderived from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, we will demonstrate that theconduction of black metal themes, cadences and intonation through fictionconforms to the Deleuzo-Spinozist outline of a disagreeable or poisonousrelation. Black metal’s encounter with writing does not bring forthamplification, accretion or combination to form a higher power but is, rather,corrupting and pestilential: decomposing and diminishing what we might callfiction’s subordinate –and therefore constituent– relations e.g. the range andaffective capacity of character, plot, syntax, etc. This reflection obliges usto reassess the merit of a Deleuzo-Spinozist ethology and to pursue thevitalist prejudice which circulates at the very heart of this system.

Bleak Theory

Paul J. Ennis

In this paper I set out to show how contemporary continental realisms,especially the more nihilistic strands of speculative realism, are not quiteblack, but bleak. I tease out this subtle difference from the launching pad ofEugene Thacker’s recent monograph In the Dust of This Planet whichincludes a sustained engagement with black metal theory. From there I intend toenter into a discussion of the theme of the impersonal and the unhuman as itmanifests throughout the post-Kantian tradition (with an emphasis on Kant,Hegel, Heidegger, and Meillassoux, etc.). In the end, my hope is to demonstratethat continental philosophy has always been if not black, then a little bitbleak, and so finds a natural ally in black metal theory.

Erik Davis on Hideous Gnosis

2011-09-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

Ghoulish, misanthropic, and often aggressively ugly-sounding black metal music—an important and well-established subgenre of heavy metal—has also become an unusually productive (if antinomian) site for the religious imagination within popular music. Both the music and subculture are marked by Satanism, neo-pagan nostalgia, apocalypticism, and an acosmic, sometimes mystical nihilism. Gathering together the proceedings of the first Black Metal Symposium, held in Brooklyn in December 2009, Hideous Gnosis both unpacks and traffics in these currents in ways that are simultaneously illuminating, provocative, and—like the music itself—intentionally disturbing. Edited and published by Masciandaro, a professor of medieval literature at Brooklyn College and the author of The Voice of the Hammer (2006), the volume's contributors track a number of themes—demonology, wolves, apophatic discourse, drum rhythms, and the specter of fascism—through the dark forests of the genre. “Emic” voices—a term the contributors would no doubt reject—are represented in a brief oral history of American black metal and a collection of often hostile exchanges between fans and the symposium organizers. That said, in comparison with the distance implied in most works of cultural studies, Hideous Gnosis attempts something at once more fannish and more intellectually aggressive. In Masciandaro's words, contributors were not involved in analyzing black metal so much as “thinking black metal.” This means dense weaves of theory, quasi-fictional rhapsodies, and the occasional deployment of Gothic fonts. Esoteric, intense, and occasionally disturbing, Hideous Gnosis is a vital resource on black metal (anti)discourse and an inspiring example of scholarly engagement with a complex cultural object that brings both sides of the operation into mutual contagion.

Erik Davis, "Hideous Gnosis," Religious Studies Review 37 (2011): 123.

P.E.S.T.

2011-08-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

PEST – Black Metal Theory Symposium

Organized by Nicola Masciandaro, Michael O’Rourke and Karin Sellberg, in collaboration with Invictus Productions and Into the Void Records

Date: Sunday 20 November 2011, 14.00-Close

Location: The Pint Bar, Eden Quay, Dublin, Ireland

P.E.S.T. (Philial Epidemic Strategy Tryst)

… affirmation (acting as companion) of a non-survival-supporting life whose tentacles crack death open merely as a collective perversion, a philia, which progressively disterminalizes as the end of all becomings or the terminus ad quem of becomings; and is transmuted to a collapsing expanse exhumed, deflowered and scavenged by life (non-survivalist life: unlife), its netting, mazing and bonding philia: a space of becomings, so contagious and epidemic, which as Nick Land puts it, is a “Pest”, a “meltdown plague ... Death as a terminal expanse of coldness and a part of desiring-machine is messed up through the pestilential and wasteful (exorbitant) bonds of epidemic life (philia) which frantically composes new strategies of 'openness to everything' – by means of its ungrounding strategies, bonds of philia and affirmation – not merely openness as the plane of being open but rather being lacerated, cracked, butchered and laid open ... then, sewing and scavenging what have been opened through the bonds of philia and the interphyletic labyrinths of life through which becoming runs as a vermiculating, mazing machine or an engineer of labyrinthine inter-dimensionalities.

– Reza Negarestani “Death as a Perversion: Openness and Germinal Death”

Christ on the cross appeared to me ... then summoned me to place my mouth to the wound in his side. It seemed to me that I saw and drank the blood, which was freshly flowing from his side … At times it seems to my soul that it enters into Christ’s side, and this is a source of great joy and delight. … [W]e washed the feet of the women and the hands of the men, and especially those of one of the lepers which were festering and in an advanced stage of decomposition. Then we drank the very water with which we had washed him. And the drink was so sweet that, all the way home, we tasted its sweetness and it was as if we had received Holy Communion.

– Angela of Foligno, Memorial

To be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).

– Georges Bataille, The Impossible

Pest: any deadly epidemic disease; plague (now rare); anything destructive; any insect, fungus, etc that destroys cultivated plants; a troublesome person or thing. Pestilent: deadly; producing pestilence; hurtful to health and life; pernicious; mischievous, vexatious [Fr peste and pestilence, from L pestis, pestilential, related to perdo, to destroy, ruin, lose; cf. perditus, lost, ruined by love].

Black Metal and Theory meet in a place of mutual pestering, a dark star-crossed extra-section of their individual para-sites, a rendezvous for conspiratorial communication; unnatural and extra-natural participation. The pestilential bonding of the equally sick pair exposes and releases to the air an epidemic of openness, “not merely openness as the plane of being open but rather being lacerated, cracked, butchered and laid open” (Negarestani). Black Metal and Theory have proven to be mutually antagonistic, vexatious, and their conjoining has occasioned much annoyance on both sides: from fans of Black Metal and from ivory tower theorists. Black Metal Theory is a pest and Black Metal theorists are mischievous pesterers. It is little wonder, then, that Black Metal theory is para-academic, simultaneously beside, outside and inside the academy: “Meeting, communicating or touching the true pestilential bonds of Empedocles' philia or the contagious plateau of interphylum or epidemic openness, the resistance, any isolationist struggle, uncommunicative reaction or opposition to, remains unchanged (unmutated) becomes impossible (but appreciated as a strategy intensifying the mess, the waste of the process and engineering the exorbitant). Through the expanse of philia, everything should participate and participation has no end, nor beginning, nor horizon, nor a certain objective of participation. Infested by the epidemic (contagious and wasteful) bonds of philia, openness is triggered on all levels of its communicative lines but more on the plane of ‘being opened’ than ‘being open’ or ‘being open to’” (Negarestani, “Death as a Perversion”). Black Metal Theory perverts, infests, and invents strategies for philial deviation, cross-breeding philosophy with the love of black metal, mating orcs and elves.

Pester: to infest (archaic); annoy persistently. [Apparently from Ofr empestrer (FR empêtrer), to entangle, from L in in, and LL pāstōrium a foot-shackle, from L pāstus, pa p of pāscere to feed]

The space or plane where Black Metal and Theory feed upon each other and are shackled together is one of mutual pestering, a cascade of parasitisms where it is impossible to tell which is guest and which is host, to discern what is living and what is dead, what is natural and what is not. A philial epidemic strategy for the two-fold event of infestation necessitates a “pact with putrefaction”, the “moment of nucleation with nigredo” (Negarestani). Nothing beats the supreme intimacy of inter-laceration and mutual rot. It is the only way of being anywhere: “Infinite universe as silent as death / In this coffin I lay to rest” (Inquisition, “Astral Path to Supreme Majesties,” Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm).

Pestle: an instrument for pounding or grinding.

To find strategies, or schizotrategies, which would allow for the contagious tryst between Black Metal and theory, one needs to pound reason, to grind out a pestilential rationalism. “Intelligibility is the epiphenomenon of a necrophilic intimacy ... reason reanimates the dead rather than bestowing life upon it ... intelligibility is the reanimation of the dead according to an external agency. Reason grounds the universe not only on a necrophilic intimacy but also in conformity with an undead machine imbued with the chemistry of putrefaction and nigredo” (Negarestani). One strategy for grounding the mathesis of decay is the Etruscan torture ritual where a living man or woman was tied to a rotting corpse, “shackled to their rotting double” and “left to decay.” What the Etruscan practice demonstrates is that the decay which is normally associated with the outside is always already internal to the body, to the flesh. The binding of the putrefying corpse and the living body is a strategy for necrophilic intimacy. This necroeroticism also reveals that the living are always already-dead and that the dead are always-already reanimatable. Black Metal, which is often “characterized among its followers and opponents by its ambivalent relationship with death and decay to such an extent that it is often said that the only protagonists in Black Metal are festering corpses” (Negarestani and Masciandaro “Black Metal Commentary”), is in an ambivalently necromantic relationship, a philial relationship between the living and the dead. The strategic philial tryst between the immoderate commentator, “the one who loves thinking” and “the loved one (black metal)” (Nicola Masciandaro, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya”) is necrological, an erotic rotting open of the object that exceeds the correlational parameters of exegesis and interpretation. “It is the ambivalent relationship of Black Metal with death that gives rise to the most criticized aspect of Black Metal, namely, necromanticism. As a part of vitalistic investment in death, necromanticism involves a liberalist or hedonistic openness toward death in the form of a simultaneously econonomical and libidinal synthesis between desire and death ... Black Metal can also be approached from a more twisted and colder intimacy with death, an impersonal realm where the already-dead finds its voice in the living” (Masciandaro and Negarestani). This twisted nest of relations is an inescapable yet reversible catena, a black chain of being or necrophilic link of perverse (non)relations: “Love (philia) in all its forms entangles openness with closure, and ultimately closure with the radical exteriority of the outside” (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials).

Parasite: an organism that lives in or on another living organism and derives subsistence from it without rendering it any service in return.

Black Metal and Theory are parasites and sites of para-kinesis: para-sites. For Michel Serres parasitism is a nest of relations in a chain of feeding on, a perpetual or persistent movement where the host and guest make a good meal for the other. Serres’ parasitic relation reverses the usual notion of semiconduction, a unidirectional arrow where one thing feeds on another and gives nothing in return. It is a multi-vorous, vociferous exchange: a reciprocal interference. Parasitism produces disharmony; it engineers noise in the system. Black Metal Theory as Philial Epidemic Strategy Tryst (P.E.S.T.) creates such a site for parasitic static, interference, black noise.

This Black Metal Theory Symposium invites speculations, commentaries, reflections, archivizations, reconceptualizations and interventions on pestilence, decay, plague, decomposition, putrefaction, rot, corpses, infestation, consumption, perversion, cannibalism, necrophilia, flesh, feeding, worms, insects, rats, rationalism, plants, ecology, swarms, maggots, fever, vampirism, waste ... among other things. “Let’s gather our contagious diseases and make love” (Negarestani, Cyclonopedia).

Live Acts:

Eternal Helcaraxe http://eternalhelcaraxe.net/

Wound Upon Wound http://www.myspace.com/wounduponwound08

Confirmed Participants:

Paul Ennis

Diarmuid Hester

Nicola Masciandaro

Michael O’ Rourke
Zachary Price
Karin Sellberg
Steven Shakespeare
Aspasia Stephanou

Scott Wilson
Ben Woodard

Confirmed Artists:

Vincent Como

[Image: Vincent Como, Hexe 001. Carbon paper, graphite, and invocation on paper, from a series of 23 works based on ancient defixiones, or curse tablets.]

Capsule presents the Home of Metal

2011-07-12T08:10:00.001-07:00

Helvete - Call For Art

2011-05-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

Incipit: Open Issue

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory (Vernal Equinox 2012)

Curated pages by Amelia Ishmael

helvetejournal.org

The curator of Helvete, a new journal of black metal theory, invites visual artists to submit works for the journal’s inaugural issue. Paralleling the thematic call for articles, the theme for this issue’s curated pages is open in two senses. Firstly, it is an open issue in that all submissions appropriate to the journal’s general theme will be considered. Secondly, the curator encourages contributors to consider the topic itself open just as the first issue of a periodical publication is its opening. Thus, submissions that interrogate the problematics of beginning and genesis—or of openings, apertures, holes, etc.—at the conjunction of black metal and visual art will be given priority. Helvete is an open access electronic and print journal dedicated to continuing the mutual blackening of metal and theory inaugurated by the Black Metal Theory Symposia. Not to be confused with a metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, black metal theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that “count” as black metal events—and, indeed, to see how black metal might count as thinking. Theory of black metal, and black metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Black metal as a language of contemporary art practices a transmodality between sound and vision, mutually blackening both art and metal, and thus pushing the limits of contemporary academic genres by definition.

Schedule
Entries will be accepted through August 1, 2011.
Artists will be notified of decisions in November 2011.
The project is scheduled for publication in March 2012.

To Submit
Proposals may be sent to the curator at helvetejournalart@gmail.com
Each artist may submit 3 original images. Each file should be in jpg format, 1 MB, 300dpi, and at least 1000 pixels across. Files must be titled with your last name, first initial, "underscore" and the correlating number to match the entry form. (Example: IshmaelA_Blackened1.jpg)

With Head Downwards - CFP

2011-04-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Helvete: Journal of Black Metal Theory

Winter 2013

(helvetejournal.org)

With Head Downwards: Inversion in Black Metal

Co-editors: Steven Shakespeare & Nicola Masciandaro

‘I beseech you the executioners, crucify me thus, with the head downward and not otherwise . . . Learn ye the mystery of all nature, and the beginning of all things, what it was. For the first man, whose race I bear in mine appearance (or, of the race of whom I bear the likeness), fell (was borne) head downwards, and showed forth a manner of birth such as was not heretofore: for it was dead, having no motion. He, then, being pulled down – who also cast his first state down upon the earth – established this whole disposition of all things, being hanged up an image of the creation (Gk. vocation) wherein he made the things of the right hand into left hand and the left hand into right hand, and changed about all the marks of their nature, so that he thought those things that were not fair to be fair, and those that were in truth evil, to be good. Concerning which the Lord saith in a mystery: Unless ye make the things of the right hand as those of the left, and those of the left as those of the right, and those that are above as those below, and those that are behind as those that are before, ye shall not have knowledge of the kingdom.’

The Acts of Peter

Mazdak’s followers were planted there head down, with their feet in the air, like trees. . . . If you have any sense, you will not follow Mazdak’s way.

Firdawsi, Shahnameh

This special issue of Helvete invites submissions which consider the nature of inversion in the imagery, lyrics and music of black metal and/or deploy black metal for the theory of inversion.

Nailed at the heart of many a logo, suspended from the neck, held out in Satanic blessing: the inverted cross is one of black metal’s anti-icons. The antithesis of a revelation of light, it signifies an originary blasphemy. The elevation of Satan (in orthodox or psycho-symbolic terms) as the one worthy of adoration is inevitably cast in terms of a desecration of God and all that is divine, a celebration of impious sacraments. Forsaking ascension and mining a path towards the centre of the earth, black metal finds a satanic stain lodged at the core of being.

However, the significance of this movement is not bound by a simple reversal. The inverted cross hangs above a swarming logic of inversion: the overturning of Christianity, but also a mimesis of Christian self-desecration (embodied in St Peter’s insistence on being crucified upside down as a sign of fallen humanity); the rejection of certain forms of religion, but also of modernity’s pallid enlightenment; the invocation of strange gods of the earth, even as the earth is cursed.

When thought becomes poison, it is no longer so easy to determine which way is up and which way is down. To throw down one’s head, to push oneself into the cursed earth, to occupy the place of the inverted crucified: is this to think-by-not-thinking an unconditioned rapture beyond negation and affirmation? Is inversion other than merely turning a hierarchy upside down? A more troubling subversion? And what is the place of inversion itself? Around what point or pivotal no-place is it possible?

Authors are asked to explore the theological, philosophical, political and aesthetic meanings of black metal inversion in ways that stretch and distort the boundaries of its apparent simplicity.

Send abstracts of 300-500 words to: hideous.gnosis@gmail.com

PDF

Anne Hilde Neset on Melancology in The Wire #325

2011-03-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

Interview on Radio Corax with D. Irtenkauf

2011-03-10T01:35:00.000-08:00

http://freie-radios.net/39512

Dominik Irtenkauf on BMT @ Telepolis - Part 2

2011-03-05T04:36:00.000-08:00

Einschwärzung der Theorie

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory

2011-03-02T02:59:00.000-08:00

Helvete is a new open access electronic and print journal of black metal theory.

Editors

Zachary Price

Aspasia Stephanou

Benjamin Woodard

Editorial Advisory Board

Dominic Fox

Nicola Masciandaro

Dan Mellamphy

Michael O’Rourke

Karin Sellberg

Steven Shakespeare

CALL FOR PAPERS

Incipit: Open Issue

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory (Winter 2012)

Edited by Zachary Price, Aspasia Stephanou, and Benjamin Woodard

The editors of Helvete, a new journal of black metal theory, invite submissions for the journal’s inaugural issue. This issue is open topic in two senses. Firstly, it is an open issue in that all submissions appropriate to the journal’s general theme will be considered. Secondly, however, the editors encourage contributors to consider the topic itself open just as the first issue of a periodical publication is its opening. Thus, submissions that interrogate the problematics of beginning and genesis—or of openings, apertures, holes, etc.—at the conjunction of black metal and theory will be given priority. Black metal theory is the practice of the mutual blackening of theory and metal, and thus pushes the limits of contemporary academic genres by definition. In recognition of this, the editors welcome not only proposals for articles, but also for non, para, and protoacademic works, including commentaries, fragments, and visuals. We wish to encourage engagement in black metal theory by whatever means necessary.

Schedule

1 June 2011: Proposals due
1 September 2011: Drafts due
November 2011: Drafts returned with comments
1 February 2012: Final drafts due
March 2012: Publication

Proposals may be sent to the editors at helvetejournal@gmail.com

For detailed guidelines, see the Submission Checklist on our website.

HTTP://HELVETEJOURNAL.ORG

Dominik Irtenkauf on BMTS2 @ Telepolis

2011-02-27T05:39:00.000-08:00

Verkehrte Ökologie - Melancology

Black Metal Theory @ Kaleidoscope

2011-02-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

Franceso Tenaglia interviews Scott Wilson on Black Metal Theory here.

Melancology: Black Metal Theory Symposium II

2010-11-26T05:57:00.000-08:00

PDF

Programme

12.30-1pm
Registration

1pm
Scott Wilson, ‘Introduction to Melancology’

1.15
Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Wormsign’
Aspasia Stephanou, "Black Sun-Blank Metal Perversion".
Drew Daniel, 'Towards the Re-Occultation of Black Blood'

2.15
Amelia Ishmael, ‘Metal’s Formless Presence in Contemporary Art’
Ben Woodard, ‘Irreversible Sludge: Troubled Energetics, Eco-purification and Self-Inhumanization’
Reza Negarestani, ‘_________’

Brief Drinking Break

3.30
Steven Shakespeare, ‘A Machine for Breaking Gods: Unity, Nature and Ritual in US Black Metal’
Liviu Mantescu, ‘Suddenly, life lost new meaning: Melancology as another new age metaphor for transcendental encounters’
Dominik Irtenkauf, ‘To the Mountains or: rocking against melancholy. The implications of black metal's geophilosophy’

4.30
Elliot A. Jarbe, ‘Beyond Melancology: Hüzüncology and the Thymotic’
Hager Weslati, ‘Going to Hell in Northern Deserts’
Evan Calder Williams, ‘The hot wet breath of extinction’

5.30
Eugene Thacker, ‘Sound of the Abyss’

6.15
The Black Buffet and longer drinking break

8pm
Niall Scott, ‘Blackening the Green: concluding remarks and Introduction to Abgott’

8.15 Abgott (Live performance)

Throughout the day:
Mark Patrick Oughton, ‘’Visions of Kali: Attack Sustain Release’ (Video installation)

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.

Details and registration HERE.

Black Metal Theory in HIS Voice

2010-11-15T06:04:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of Czech music magazine HIS Voice features an article by Karel Veselý on Black Metal Theory. Dominic Fox's Cold World and Hideous Gnosis are discussed.

PDF

Ein Essay zur bewussten Umnachtung -- Black Metal-Theorie by Dominik Irtenkauf

2010-10-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

@ Textem

Black Metal Theory on Expanding Mind

2010-09-30T18:26:00.000-07:00

Erik Davis, Maja D'Aoust, Eugene Thacker, and Nicola Masciandaro talk Black Metal Theory on the radio.

If above link is not working, download here.

Hideous Gnosis featured in Miasma Magazine

2010-09-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.miasma.org/uusinlehti/

Black metalin pelottava tieto

– Voiko black metalista puhua teoreettisesti?

Joonas Tanskanen

Kuvat: Nicola Masciandaro

”Black metalin soundi on kuultavissa teoriana.”

”Black metal on sisäisesti ristiriitainen, paradoksaalisesti yhtä aikaa ei mitään muuta ja kokonaan toinen kuin musiikki jota se on.”

”Odotan mielenkiinnolla herättääkö kirja kiinnostusta tutkijoissa, jotka eivät muuten ole kiinnostuneita black metalista.”

Mitä tapahtuu, kun kasa akateemikkoja laatii pinon tekstejä black metalista? Jos tahtoo tietää vastauksen, kannattaa hankkia käsiinsä kirja Hideous Gnosis.

Muutamia kuukausia sitten kirjamarkkinoille ilmestyi mielenkiintoinen black metalia käsittelevä opus Hideous Gnosis – Black Metal Theory Symposium. Nimensä mukaisesti kirja on syntynyt viime vuoden joulukuussa järjestetyn black metal -symposiumin myötä. Kirja dokumentoi symposiumissa vaihdettuja ajatuksia kolmentoista esseen ja muutamien muiden dokumenttien ja liitteiden voimin.

Otin yhteyttä kirjan toimittaneeseen, Brooklynin yliopistossa työskentelevään Nicola Masciandaroon ja pyysin häntä kertomaan tarkemmin kirjasta ja näkemyksistään black metalin teoriasta. Kristallisesta kirkkaudesta häntä ei voida syyttää, koska mies verhosi monet vastauksensa erikoiseen mystiikkaan.

Black metal -symposiumi

Hideous Gnosiksen tekstit muodostavat hajanaisen kokonaisuuden. Monesti tekstit lähestyvät black metalia hyvin erilaisista lähtökohdista. Aihetta tarkastellaan estetiikan, politiikan, symboliikan, maantieteellisyyden jne. kautta. Aina ei puhuta puhtaasti black metalista, kuten esimerkiksi Eugene Thackerin kirjan loppupuolella olevassa pitkässä esseessä Three Questions on Demonology, joka on mielenkiintoinen kirjoitus demonologian historiasta, demonien luonteesta ja siitä, miten demonit voidaan lopulta ymmärtää.

Yksi puute kirjassa on, ettei se pidä sisällään selvää johdantoa, jossa kerrottaisiin tarkemmin sen syntyhistoriasta. Siksi tahdonkin, että herra Masciandaro selvittää haastattelun aluksi black metal -symposiumin ja sen pohjalta syntyneen kirjan taustoja.

– Kirja perustuu black metalin teoriaa käsitelleeseen symposiumiin, jonka järjestäjänä olin viime vuonna. Hideous Gnosis on kokoelma tapahtumaan liittyneitä papereita ja dokumentteja. Se esittelee laajan otoksen näkökulmia ja käsittelee hyvin erilaisia aiheita aina telluurisesta ideologiasta apokalyptiseen humanismiin.

Masciandarolle black metal ja sen teoria on eräänlaista alkemiaa, prima materian eli ”mustan materian” esiin tuomista ja yhden tekemistä joksikin toiseksi.

– Symposiumin perusajatuksena oli synnyttää teoreettinen diskurssi, joka ei kohtele black metalia vain akateemisen ja teoreettisen ymmärryksen objektina tai fanityylisen tunnepohjaisen ihailun kohteena. Diskurssin lähtökohtana on pikemminkin sekoittaa raja black metalin ja teorian välillä. Viittaan tähän Black Metal Theory -blogissani seuraavin sanoin: ”Ei black metal, ei teoria, ei epä- black metal, ei epä-teoria, vaan black metal -teoria, teoreettinen metallin mustaksi maalaaminen, metallinen teorian mustaksi maalaaminen. Molemminpuolinen mustuminen”.

– Black metal -teorian etsiminen on jonkin kolmannen etsimistä, jotain joka syntyy black metalin ja teorian vuorovaikutuksesta. Eräässä mielessä se on jotain uutta, mutta toisaalta se on jonkin jo olemassa olevan (teorian ja black metalin) aktualisointia. Kirjan tarkoituksena on luoda jotain uutta tästä parivaljakosta. Näyttää siltä, että black metal on ajattelun muoto ja teoria on musiikin muoto selvästi havaittavassa paikassa. Se, että tämä paikka on vaikea ymmärtää sekä akateemikoille että metallifaneille, vain alleviivaa projektin tärkeyttä. Tätä aihetta käsitellään myös useissa kirjan teksteissä. Jos black metal on sotaa, niin black metal -teoria ei ole teoriaa sodasta, vaan teoriaa sotana. Se on taistelukenttä molemminpuolisille valtauksille musiikin ja filosofian välillä.

– Tämän lähtökohdan jälkeen projekti löysi pikku hiljaa oman auransa ja alkoi elämään omaa hämärää elämäänsä. Nimi Hideous Gnosis on lainattu Caïnan samannimisestä kappaleesta, joka ilmaisee jonkinlaisen negatiivisen ilmestyksen Jumalan katoamisesta tai kuolemasta: “I've seen demons / And I've been shown things that no-one should see / And I know why birds alight from cables with no-one beneath / Who's on the side of the angels / Who's on the side of Satan / God's not there anymore / I know why birds fly / No-one's there anymore”.

– Loppujen lopuksi minulle kirjassa tärkeintä oli sen tekeminen, eikä niinkään saavuttaa jokin selvä ja yhtenäinen lopputulos. Kirjan esseet puhukoot itse itsestään.

Black metaliin kätkeytyvää pelottavaa gnosista tai tietoa Masciandaro kuvailee hyvin hämärin sanoin:

– Black metalin gnosis on jotain, jota voi verrata David Lynchin elokuvassa Dyyni olevaan kojeeseen nimeltä Weirding Module. Black metal toimii kuin ylösalaisin käännetty ”vieraaksitekemiskone”. Weirding Module vahvistaa ajatuksen äänen tuhoisaksi voimaksi, mutta black metal kääntää antagonistisen energiansa ajatuksen ääneksi. Tämä ajatus ei ole käsite tai merkitys, vaan näkökulma johonkin joka säteilee tietynlaista pelkoa, siis kätkettyä gnosista. Tämä on kaiken sisäänsä sulkevaa pelkoa, se aistii kaikkialle tunkeutuvan omituisen tyynen ontologisen paniikin. Tämä kokemus edellyttää erilaisia mielikuvituksen muotoja ja spekulatiivisia näkyjä. Kuten näky, jossa koko maailmankaikkeus palaa, palaa ja palaa, ja kaikki oleva palaa siinä samalla, tai, kuten katkaistujen päiden valtava pyramidi, jonka on koonnut kosmisen yön mahtava valloittaja.

Antagonismin taide

Yksi kirjan mielenkiintoisimmista osuuksista on Benjamin Noysin kirjoittama Remain True to Earth, jossa Noys tarkastelee Peste Noiresta tutun Sale Faminen maailmankuvaa, jonka mies itse linjaa esteettispoliittiseksi oikeistolaismieliseksi radikalismiksi. Faminen ajatusten lukeminen on mielenkiintoista jo itsessään. Miehen ajattelun lähtökohtana on, että black metal ei voi koskaan olla olemassa abstraktissa muodossa, vaan aina tiettyyn paikkaan ja aikaan sidottuna. Tällainen alueellisuus on konkreettista ja todellista, poissa modernin maailman luomista, kapitalismin ja demokratian hämärtämistä abstrakteista käsitteistä. Esseessään Noys pyrkii selvittämään, missä mielessä black metalin estetiikka voi olla poliittista, vai onko black metal luonteeltaan liian paradoksaalinen, jotta sen yhteydessä voitaisiin puhua selvästä poliittisuudesta.

Hideous Gnosis -kirjan näkyvimpänä teemana voikin pitää tavoitetta valaista black metalin antagonistista mutta myös paradoksaalista luonnetta, ja samalla kysyä, miten black metalia voidaan määrittää ja onko se edes mahdollista. Antagonismia on vaikea purkaa teoriaksi, koska silloin se menettää helposti antagonistisen luonteensa. Elinvoimainen vastakulttuuri on aina haltuun ottamatonta ja määrittelemätöntä. Sitä ei voi kahlita ulkopuolelta tuleviin määritelmiin.

Masciandaro pohtii ongelmaa myös omassa esseessään Anti-Cosmosis; hänelle black metal on antikosmos ja kaaos ja samalla selvän diskurssin vastakohta. Voidaanko tällöin siis edes puhua black metalin teoriasta? Onko teoria jotain joka invalidisoisi koko genren, jotain joka on vastakkaista koko genren luonteelle?

Masciandaro selvittää näkökantaansa:

– Uskon, että black metalin teoriasta puhuminen on samaan aikaan mahdollista, mutta myös mahdotonta. Tietenkin on oltava toisistaan eroavia teorioita siitä, mitä black metal on, ei vain siksi, että ihmisen luonteeseen kuuluu asioiden teoretisointi, vaan koska black metal on luonteeltaan vahvan teoreettista. Black metalilla on soundi, mutta tämä soundi on ainoastaan kuultavissa, kun korvasi täyttyvät black metalista; ei vain siksi, että black metalilla on vahva yleinen idea joka tekee siitä tunnistettavan, vaan ennen kaikkea koska soundi tuottaa teoreettisia näkemyksiä kuuntelijassa. Toisin sanoen black metalin soundi on kuultavissa teoriana. Tämä johtuu osin siitä, että black metal on musiikin muoto, jossa ero äänen ja merkityksen välillä on samaan aikaan voimakkaasti maksimoitu ja minimalisoitu.

– Black metal on sisäisesti immanentti, joka ylittää minkä tahansa merkityksen. Se on pure fucking metal, jotain joka valtaa mielesi ja sielusi. Toisaalta black metal on riippuvainen niistä ideoista, jotka määrittävät sitä. Black metal on sisäisesti ristiriitainen, paradoksaalisesti yhtä aikaa ei mitään muuta ja kokonaan toinen kuin musiikki jota se on. Kuunnellessa sitä kuullaan käsite, ei yksityiskohtainen ja systemaattinen, vaan revitty ja hajanainen, tavalla joka pitää sen elinvoimaisempana. Black metal kiduttaa ideaa, logosta, huutonsa äänellä se luo ilmestyksen, joka ylittää kaiken tiedon ja havainnot itsestään. Black metalin ideat eivät ole selvästi musiikin esiin tuotavissa. Voidaan sanoa, että black metal ei ole asia, vaan funktio joka asettaa ihmiset kammottavaan ja ekstaattiseen suhteeseen ajattelun ja olemassa olon ykseyden kanssa.

– On olemassa myös ihmisiä, jotka tahtovat tämän suhteen pysyvän yksityisenä ja yleisesti tiedostamattomana. Heidän mukaansa black metal, kuten todellinen rakkaus, on jotain josta ei voida eikä myöskään saa puhua, aivan kuten puhe rikkoisi tai saastuttaisi sen olemuksen. Eräässä mielessä he ovat oikeassa, sikäli kun he tukeutuvat välttämättömään eroon sen välillä, mitä voidaan sanoa ja mikä voidaan ainoastaan näyttää, ja syvällisemmin mikä voidaan nimetä ja mikä ei. Mutta suurimmaksi osaksi ihmiset ovat tätä mieltä, koska he ovat kapeakatseisia ja tavoittelevat egoistista ja materialistista hyötyä.

– Vastakohtaisesti tahdon löytää black metalille teorian, en selittämällä mitä black metal on tai olemalla asiantuntija, joka tahtoo paljastaa sen salaisuudet, vaan haluan mieluummin nähdä black metalin vahvistavana taiteena ja ennen kaikkea sekoittaa eroa black metalin ja teorian välillä.

Uusi vastaan Vanha manner

Kirjassa on paljon keskustelua eurooppalaisen ja pohjoisamerikkalaisen black metalin erosta sekä toisen aallon skandinaavisen black metalin ja 2000-luvun black metalin suhteesta. Itse laitoin lukijana merkille sen, että kirjoittajien näkökulmat ovat useissa kirjan teksteissä hyvin Amerikka-keskeisiä.

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix jakaa esseessään Transcendental Black Metal black metalin kahteen kehitysjaksoon kuvaillen molempia hyvin nietzscheläisin käsittein. Ensin oli hyperborean black metal, jolla hän tarkoittaa skandinaavista black metalia. Sitä hallitsi blastbeat ja se edustaa kuolemaa ja negatiivista surkastumista. Toinen, ja hänen mukaansa kehittyneempi taso on transcendental black metal, jolla hän kutsuu Amerikan mantereella syntynyttä uudempaa black metal -aaltoa. Transsendentaalia black metalia hallitsee ”burstbeat” ja se edustaa elämää ja liikakasvua vastakohtana surkastumiselle. Se tahtoo muuttaa nihilismin affirmaatioksi, antaa black metalille uuden kehittyneemmän muodon. Transsendentaali black metal on jatkuvaa intensiteettiä, burstbeat ei koskaan saavu minnekään, se on aina vain melkein perillä, kun taas blastbeat on muuttumaton, vailla loppua, alkua tai dynamiikkaa. Transsendentaalinen black metal vahvistaa elämää ja myöntää elämän, se johtaa jatkuvaan kasvuun, ei staattisuuteen ja surkastumiseen.

Vanhan ja Uuden mantereen eroja setvitään myös Brandon Stosuyon kokoamassa keskustelussa Meaningful Leaning Mess, jossa useat tunnetut amerikkalaiset black metal -aktiivit keskustelevat oman mantereensa musiikista ja siitä, mitä tarkoitetaan käsitteellä USBM ja onko se edes relevantti käsite.

Masciandaro esittää oman näkemyksensä mantereiden välisistä eroista:

– Oma historiallinen käsitykseni genrestä ei ole kaikenkattava. Tämä näyttää olevan hyvin amerikkalainen piirre – heikko historiakäsitys, ymmärryksen puute kronologisista välttämättömyyksistä, kohtuuton ja naiivi tunne omaan napaan keskittyneistä oikeuksista… – joten en tiedä osaanko täysin vastata kysymykseen.

– Pohjoisamerikkalainen black metal on vahvan synkreettistä. Amerikkalaiset metallistit näyttävät etsivän enemmän harmoniaa kuin ristiriitaa. Jos eurooppalaisen black metalin tavoitteet ovat antikirkollisia ja fasistisia, niin amerikkalainen black metal tavoittelee spiritualiteettia ja epäpoliittisuutta, tavoite joka näyttää johtaneen selvästi merkille pantavaan isolationismiin ja lukuisten sooloartistien, kuten Judas Iscariot, Leviathan, Sapthuran, Xasthur ja Woe, esiintuloon. Tämä on hyvin karkea yleistys ja toivotan kaikki vasta-argumentit tervetulleiksi.

– Uskon, että tällä hetkellä on olemassa virtaus kohti uudenlaista yhteisöllisyyttä ja uudenlaisia tapahtumia: halu muuttaa black metalia viihteenä. Mahtava Gathering of Shadows -tapahtuma, joka järjestettiin Kalliovuorten metsissä, on iskevä esimerkki esoteerisesta ”punaniskamystiikasta”. Amerikasta löytyy myös taiteellisia urbaaneja tapahtumia, kuten Woldin äskettäinen esiintyminen Mathew Barneyn varastostudiolla jossa keikkaa edelsi painiottelu ja nietzscheläinen saarna.

Millaiseen kontekstiin sitten asettaisit black metalin osana taidemaailmaa?

– Black metal on moniulotteinen taidemuoto, joka pitää sisällään musiikkia, kuvia, sanoja, sosiaalisia rituaaleja ja niin edespäin. Se ei ole vain musiikkia, vaan taidetta yleensä. Se sopii moneen kontekstiin samanaikaisesti, eikä mielestäni tarvitse selvää kategorisointia tähän tai tuohon luokkaan. Black metal on taidetta, mutta sen merkitys taidemaailmassa (jota yleensä hallitsevat galleriat, kuraattorit, keräilijät ja kriitikot) syntyy siitä, että se on osa populaarimusiikkia jota ihmiset tuottavat ja kuluttavat suhteellisen itsenäisesti suhteessa taloudellisiin ja sosiaalisiin suhteisiinsa. Uskon, että black metalilla on taidemaailmalle paljon annettavaa dekadenttisen askeettisena taiteena. Se tarjoaa jonkinlaisen ääniesteettisen itsekidutuksen muodon, jonka kuuntelija voi omaksua ilman tartuntavaaraa.

Älykäs ja para-akateeminen

Kuten yllä on jo mainittu, kirja on kerännyt sekä ylistyssanoja että vahvaa kritiikkiä osakseen. Masciandarolle negatiivinenkin kritiikki on kuitenkin osa projektia.

– Kirja on kerännyt monia kehuvia ja asiantuntevia arvosteluja (katsokaa blogistani). Symposiumi sai negatiivista palautetta internetissä jo ennen kuin sitä oli edes järjestetty, ja kuten jo sanoin, tämä seikka on filosofisesti hyvin mielenkiintoinen. Suurin osa negatiivisesta keskustelusta on julkaistu kirjan lopussa liitteenä. Suurimmaksi osaksi negatiivinen palaute on kuitenkin ollut vain tiettyjen ihmisten itsetärkeilyä ja valtavaa energian tuhlausta. Tämän energian ihmiset olisivat voineet käyttää johonkin paljon kehittävämpiin asioihin. Palautteen voi jakaa yleisesti neljään luokkaan: välitön rakkaus, suora viha, epämääräinen ”se kuulostaa hyvältä” -asenne ja täysi tietämättömyys.

– Odotan mielenkiinnolla herättääkö kirja kiinnostusta tutkijoissa, jotka eivät muuten ole kiinnostuneita black metalista. Kirja on älykäs, mutta ei täysin akateeminen, paremminkin para-akateeminen.

Uusi black metal -symposiumi on luvassa jälleen vuoden 2011 alussa. Masciandaro toivoo tapahtumasta jokavuotista perinnettä.

– Seuraava symposiumi järjestetään Lontoossa 13. päivä tammikuuta. Se kantaa nimeä Melancology. Tarkemman kuvauksen melancologian ekologisesta ja luontoon liittyvästä käsitteestä voi lukea internetistä. Symposiumin järjestäjinä toimivat Scott Wilson ja Niall Scott ja se pitää sisällään Reza Negarestanin luennon. Tapahtumassa esiintyy Abgott. Myös tästä symposiumista tullaan kokoamaan ja julkaisemaan kirja. Nyt kun black metalin teorian ensimmäiset siemenet on istutettu, uskon seuraavan tapahtuman olevan edellistä suurempi.

– Toivon, että black metal -symposiumi tulee jatkumaan jokavuotisena talvitapahtumana, joka järjestetään eri paikoissa ja eri ihmisten toimesta. Tämä olisi käytännöllisin tapa harjoittaa älyllistä työtä ja se olisi paljon avoimempaa ja joustavampaa kuin jonkin järjestön tai julkaisun perustaminen. Glossator-lehdestä (glossator.org), jota olen mukana toimittamassa, on tulossa vuonna 2012 erikoisjulkaisu, jossa on 17 puheenvuoroa black metalin merkkiteoksista. Se tulee olemaan mahtava.

blackmetaltheory.blogspot.com

Black Metal Revolution on Hideous Gnosis

2010-09-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

[reposted from Black Metal Revolution]

Hideous Gnosis is a recently published book whose core aim was to explore Black Metal Theory.

Prior to commencing work on Black Metal Revolution, I was pursuing another text titled The Stench of Black Metal. The purpose of said publication was to invite Black Metal musicians of considered scope and vision to articulate their own "philosophy" of Black Metal, guided by a brief set of questions. The adoption rate was not where I wanted it to be and though I did receive some excellent insights, the project moved too slowly for my liking and I decided to put it on ice for an indeterminable amount of time.

Adopting a simpler strategy with regard to my next offensive - Black Metal Revolution - a collected work comprised of musicians and artists discussing their most revered Black Metal records, I have since been contacted by a number of people pursuing what I would call "like" as opposed to similar projects. The motivation for this blog having been born of one of those; an introduction to Hideous Gnosis.

The following is both a series of comments about Hideous Gnosis as well as relative discourse on Black Metal Revolution.

I see true merit in the expressions of many, verses the opinions of the few. Black Metal Revolution aims to expose anecdotal commentary from no less than 333 artists, withapproximately 85 submissions so far received. In my almost 20 year engagement with Black Metal, I have observed as it has evolved through a number of trends, seen it expand, gain popularity and reach unexpected levels of commercialisation. It would have once been difficult to anticipate these levels of accolade, though I wonder if that's a seemingly simplistic point of view when considering the cult of Bathory or that Venom were in their heyday a stadium-sized band, but in the wake of murder, arson and treachery, it would have been quite a leap to think that contemporaries of artists serving prison terms, well shy of a decade later, would be receiving awards equivalent to Grammys in their native countries.

Having reached the magnitude it has, as well as existing on a plane infinitely more complex than being described simply as music, it's no surprise that Black Metal has undergone an academic styled appraisal.

Black Metal is enriched by an increased presage not held by a troupe such as Venom, the term alone now failing to convey one singular focus. Ask ten noted BM musicians for an insight into what they believe te essence of BM to be and chances are you'll be privvy to ten unique appraisals.

Fundaments proffered may bear similar witness, but perhaps one way of articulating these divergent positions is to consider these deductions as plotted along a curve of extremes depicting alienation from contemporary morality, most would exist in the shadowy end of the scale, with examples manifesting as outliers - at the thinnest end of the shape.

So it was of great interest to me to learn of the existence of Hideous Gnosis via its primary architect, Nicola Masciandaro who contacted me and explained that she had orchestrated a volume of which the purpose was to traverse the concept of Black Metal Theory. Being a person always keen to explore the considered reason of others, especially those engaged in what could potentially prove to be groundbreaking pursuits, I was anxious to check Hideous Gnosis out and am satisfied to say that it was definitely worth the time.

Having put TSOBM aside for an indeterminable period to instead focus on Black Metal Revolution, I have remained true to my earlier belief that the thoughts of the respected masses provide for more engaging and credible reading than were I to compose my thoughts on 333 of my most revered BM records. What is relevant here when comparing BMR to Hideous Gnosis (not something I intend to do too much of) is that the aforementioned architect, Nicola Masciandaro seems to view the two projects as somehow similar. On a personal note, I find this somehow flattering, but at the same time believe it to be misleading should a reader be uninformed about either project with the exemption of recognizing that Black Metal is a theme prominent in both. HG was compiled by approximated 13 authors, none of who I recognise from any known bands.

BMR will be comprised exclusively by noted musicians and artists. I don't believe you need to play in a band to have an insight into the essence of BM, and I think HG proves this. It does however raise some sort of question as to how credible it may be perceived as, something I will discuss further on.

Interestingly Hideous Gnosis, like BMR are not books ABOUT Black Metal. Neither was designed to retell a series of events.

Black Metal must be bound by some conventions, however it is my contention that these don't necessarily have to be musical; as suggested earlier, "ties that bind" may be best represented in philosophical terms. Before getting to that though, the appraisal of music in this text was excellent. Particularly noteworthy, Joseph Russo's chapter in which Xasthur was the focus of discussion. The link between his perception of Xasthur's music and Malefic's personal pursuit of decay exists on a plane of analysis well above the played out role of the typical, hyperbole riddled album review.

This leads me to my general affection for this work. My position on Black Metal is that it is an expression that has been liberated from stylistic shackles and that the adoption of various elements, eccentric to its original core may not be necessary to its survival, but serve as both engaging and rewarding for listeners seeking satisfaction across the breadth of musical experience, (as well as new currents of extremity with which to bolster the lyrical platform) which encapsulates a host of elements including orchestration, atmosphere, intention, articulation and conviction. I often find myself pondering the divide between the lyrical expression and the music. Both work in unison to create the overall declaration. Where the music was dull and insipid, how strong does the message then need to be in order to compensate for this limitation? Can the music exist without the lyrical force and still be as potent? Can this also work in reverse? Abruptum achieved a measure of this on their DSP full lengths whereas Havohej expressed an inversion of the idea by unleashing an exclusively verbal tirade on 'Dethrone The Son Of God'. Granted, it's a little harder to take these diatribes quite as seriously as the sinister aura of Abruptum, but it takes me closer to the concept of an exclusively verbal and/or written communication being a befitting medium for the conveyance of Black Metal. Does the Ondskapt 'Manifesto' contained in the 'Draco...' album make the music more credible? If Abruptum's anti-ambience can be accepted as a tool of BM, the same manner in which Paul Ledney's unconventional metaphors have been, I come to question how Hideous Gnosis has been met in various circles with animosity.

Certainly, it is an ambitious work and it no doubt flies in the face of those who wish for their model of black metal to remain as the "one true god". If BM can evolve beyond a genre, a style of music, then why should it be considered an abomination for those with the means to place it under the microscope of academia? And why are so many quick to assume that individuals wishing to explore deeper levels of what may or may not have been intended are outsiders or have some bizarre agenda beyond this being their nominated vehicle of expression. it may not be a contribution to the art of black metal, but why can't a contribution based on the experience of said art be worthy? Why would the ever stable platform of the album review or interview somehow be considered as elevated in merit. Granted, the artists own words, verses those interpreted by the authors of HG may be more direct but it's not to say they should be excluded. I expect some of the artists featured would be envigorated to see their creations examined in such depth.

I would however have prefered more direct artist imput and thought that the employment of "secondary data" was something of an admission that many artists wre not interested to participate in such a text. Further, it is unclear as to who the intended audience for this book is. Assuming the book was compiled solely for academics, it is questionable whether contemporaries of the authors would possess a grounding evolved enough to appreciate and facilitate a seasoned enough understanding of the text. As there is no preface, no introduction or explanation of the mission of the work, I can understand why it has been derided. Most likely assessed with the idea of "who are they to discuss what is sacred to us..." As an individual never arrogant enough to assume there to be an area of learning on a topic of interest that I can't benefit from, it is always with an open mind that I approach works such as this and as previously stated, found the experience to be a rewarding one for the most part. Still I feel that Benjamin Noys discourse on Peste Noire would have benefited from direct imput from the band, as opposed to material sourced from an interview in Zero Tolerance Magazine. It's true that research is a valid tool, but it feels less endorsed in this context. After all, I want to believe this is not strictly an academic work.

It may be a gross generalisation, but I question how much of the book's true meaning will be extrapolated by the average BM acolyte. For the most part, it doesn't seem that anyone (with the exception of Eugene Thacker's "Three Questions Of Demonology") has considered their most likely audience when utilising their nominated language and phrase. It's dense, wordy and on occasion unnecessarily clever; but on the other hand, so were the philosophers they have been inspired by, so why not?

Still, criticisms I have seen have generally been base and petulant, reactive and unconsidered; uninformed! Of course this is just my opinion, and I'm not exactly writing this as a studied consideration, as much as a once read impression. I don't intend to arbitrate over what should and should not be - frankly, I have my own interests to pursue outside trying to convince someone of the worth of something than can decide for themselves.

Though impossible to cover all degrees of relevance, it was interesting to note that certain events were viewed empirically amidst a sea of cited theory and speculation. The omission of Bathory as the true architect of Black Metal's sound; the unquestioned acceptance of Euronymous' romanticised position on Dead's suicide being some grand scene related action and the omission of understanding as to where it was that Darkthrone's calling to play Black Metal came from served the book no favours and in a sense seem redundant in what should generally be viewed as an ambitious, if sometimes questionable collection of ideas.

Should "rules" apply to some and not to others? Should conviction not be the barometer with which expressions are accepted, or at least considered? If you have a mind to read HG, read it...

Buy the book from Book Depository - cheap and free postage!

Tammy L. Castelein & Bram Ieven Review Hideous Gnosis at Culture Machine

2010-08-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

HERE

Occultural Studies 1.0 -- Eugene Thacker on Hideous Gnosis at Mute Magazine

2010-08-24T06:52:00.000-07:00

(reposted from Mute Magazine)

Occultural Studies 1.0: Black Meta

Increasingly DIY and nihilistic, it's not surprising that contemporary philosophy is drawn to the untilled fields of undead subculture. Recent book, Hideous Gnosis, unleashes a bloodthirsty plague of para-academic commentary upon Black Metal, but, asks contributor Eugene Thacker, ‘how to talk about a music that refuses to be talked about?’

The book Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium is based on a symposium held in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in December of 2009. Now, for many, the idea of an academic symposium dedicated to black metal is about as ridiculous as a black metal band with songs like ‘The Subculture of the Tritone Chord and its Posthuman Discontents’ or ‘The Hegemony of Your Biopolitical Jouissance.’ Certainly those familiar with the various mutations of cultural studies – particularly in the US – will not be surprised to find academics talking about culture and music. But that metal, that most anti-intellectual of all musics, could be the topic of intellectual inquiry would seem to be the height of absurdity. Either these guys take themselves way too seriously, or they’re so self-aware of being ‘meta’ that they end up enjoying themselves just a little less. One imagines professors giving the ‘horns’ sign during a lecture for emphasis (definitively replacing the more tentative ‘bunny quotes’ gesture). At the very least one would hope to find all speakers donning corpse paint or monkish, hooded robes. Whatever the case, the event caught the attention of the New York Times, which ran an article on it immediately.^ⁱ A short time after the symposium, the talks – along with additional essays – were collected together in book form as Hideous Gnosis (a second symposium, entitled ‘Melancology’, is planned for January 2011 and will be held in a London anatomy theatre).

Image: Hideous Gnosis book

I’m being a little droll here because I myself am one of the contributors to the Hideous Gnosis book. Whether one comes to it from philosophy, cultural studies, political theory, or some other field, cultural commentary always places one in a tenuous position. As a scholar and academic one treats the material one is commenting on with a certain degree of seriousness and rigour; but as a fan (or consumer…) one is also aware that, at the end of the day, it’s all a big joke. So I begin this review with the following: ‘black metal theory’ not only challenges what is or isn’t black metal, but it also challenges what cultural commentary is, and the claims it makes.

The symposium and Hideous Gnosis book is the brainchild of Nicola Masciandaro, who teaches at Brooklyn College and is trained in medieval literary studies. Hideous Gnosis is a strange kind of book – it’s not exactly an academic anthology, in that the texts range from poetic evocations of black voids, to black metal manifestos, to band interviews, to historical essays and scholastic commentary. It’s also not quite music journalism, in that many of the texts are quite demanding, freely dropping quotes from Carl Schmitt, Arthur Schopenhauer or Michel Foucault instead of album reviews or the requisite history of the genre.

In music writing of this type, one typically finds a focus on one of four things: musical form, lyrical content, subculture and aesthetics, or politics and ideology. Each contribution to the volume touches on all of these to varying degrees, but what really distinguishes the writing in Hideous Gnosis is that each contribution revolves around a fundamental contradiction: how to talk about a music that refuses to be talked about? Or better: how to think about a music that negates all thought (in so far as ‘thought’ denotes order, system, and the production of knowledge – by human beings, for human beings)? As Masciandaro has noted in an interview, ‘there’s lots of resentment toward a sensible discourse around black metal… . Its center of gravity is an essential negativity…’^ⁱⁱ

Image: Poster for Hideous Gnosis - Black Metal Theory Symposium

This central antagonism runs through nearly all the writing in Hideous Gnosis. That no one can agree on what is or is not black metal is not surprising – every music genre is defined by such debates. What’s more interesting is that in Hideous Gnosis, each attempt to think about black metal also puts itself forth as an antagonism, as a negation – an anti-natural nature, an anti-political politics, and an anti-philosophical philosophy.

Some of the authors think about black metal in terms of nature – but a concept of nature quite different from the romantic-hippie view of a nature beneficial for us (much less a nature we are ordained to save), as well as from the blood-and-soil view of nationalism. A casual look at black metal album covers and song lyrics reveals an ambivalent approach to nature, at once predatory and decaying, undergoing a constant metamorphosis that produces nothing. This is reflected in much of the writing: Steven Shakespeare’s more poetic text evokes pantheism, Schelling, and the idea of ‘absolute sound’; Aspasia Stephanou traces the motif of the wolf, lycanthropy and the forest in black metal; and Anthony Sciscione comments on its themes of cold and fire.

Other authors think of black metal in terms of politics – but a politics that attempts to avoid the poles of right and left, nationalism or ecology. Scott Wilson discusses the concept of sovereignty in the history of political thought, contrasting the archetype of the warrior to the soldier in black metal; Joseph Russo points out the central role that the body plays in black metal, albeit an ambivalent body of decay and rot; and in a sort of tête-à-tête the essays by Benjamin Noys and Evan Calder Williams approach black metal from different viewpoints – Noys questions both the left-wing and right-wing tendencies of black metal (both retaining a fidelity to Carl Schmitt’s maxim ‘remain true to the earth’), while Williams sees black metal as raising the stakes on what politics can mean, imagining a body politic without a head, a ‘war by the human in the name of the inhuman.’^ⁱⁱⁱ Whereas for Williams, black metal’s antagonism is really about the ‘war of totality against itself’, for Noys the best black metal can manage is the kind of self-reflexive ‘meta-fascism’ one can also find in punk and industrial music.

In addition to nature and politics, still others in the Hideous Gnosis volume think of black metal in terms of philosophy – or mysticism – because in black metal they increasingly become one and the same. Erik Butler examines black metal in relation to early modern monastic traditions; Hunter Hunt-Hendrix provides a manifesto for ‘transcendental black metal’; Masciandaro utilises the medieval catena or ‘chain’ form of writing to comment on the relation between black metal and cosmos (order); Niall Scott provides some ruminations on black metal as a form of religious confession; and my own contribution borrows the Scholastic quaestione to trace the role of demons and demonology vis-à-vis black metal.

Whether Hideous Gnosis definitively answers questions about nature, politics, or religion is beside the point. Nearly all the contributors agree that there is something here worth thinking about, though what that is differs a great deal from one text to another. Strangely, while I imagine the Hideous Gnosis contributors are also fans of the music, almost no one defends black metal, at least not to the hilt. And, in a way, black metal is indefensible – which makes it both appealing and frustrating for the philosopher.

Image: Poster for Melancology - Black Metal symposium part II

Music and language exist in an antagonistic relation to one another. The most verbose and baroque of writers often trip up when writing about music and its effects – for instance, while music was central to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, in The World as Will and Representation he only manages to scribble down a few paragraphs, and even those are riddled with vague comments about music as some kind of inhuman, cosmic ‘Will’. At the same time, music bears a close relationship to poetry, with its emphasis on meter, cadence and rhyme. Many a classical composer has set pieces to poems – indeed western classical music, from the liturgical texts of Christian masses to modern opera, is so closely tied to language that it is nearly impossible to separate them. This back-and-forth is perhaps best symbolised by John Cage’s anthology of writings, scores and performance texts enigmatically entitled Silence.

If there is an antagonism between music and language, things get even more messy when we consider language about music. There’s something superfluous about music criticism, let alone something so grotesque as a philosophy of music. As with any specialised field, everyone has their opinion, debates ebb and flow, and the alibi of subjective aesthetic experience serves to keep the discussion or debate alive.

All of this is fine. But it is when we come up against a music that is so saturated with antagonism – both internally and in its relation to the world – that we see how these antagonisms endemic to music become apparent. I would argue that black metal is an example of such a music. There is a certain impasse in black metal, an abyss at its core that is, in a way, what black metal is. My own take – and many may disagree with this – is that the abyss at the core of black metal shares many affinities with negative theology, and what scholars often refer to as ‘darkness mysticism’.^{^iv} I would even argue that to understand black metal beyond a music genre, a marketing category, or a subcultural style, and to understand it aesthetically and politically, one has to read Dionysius the Areopagite or John of the Cross. This is the musical equivalent of negative theology – without god. One of my favorite quotes from Hideous Gnosis comes from Erik Butler, who reminds us of why metal is heavy:

The heaviest metal found on Earth is uranium: enriched uranium is plutonium, a substance that conjures up the Lord of the Dead. Heavier elements occur only in space, where Pluto mournfully orbits the Sun at a distance of 3,666 million miles. Somewhere still farther off in the void floats the philosopher’s stone, black metal.v

We live in a time of levitation; everything from the information we process to the bodies we wear is portrayed as weightless, mutable, and subject to infinite, personalised variation. At the same time, we are constantly reminded of just how leaden and earth-bound we are, from the thick, viscous oil that seeps onto the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, to the sheer biomass of waste produced by the world’s major cities. Perhaps this is why metal is heavy – not because it is about nature, politics, or religion, but because it gets at a central ambivalence surrounding material culture.

I’m also reminded of Blake’s famous line about the ‘dark Satanic Mills’ of industrial London – perhaps mills similar to the steel factories outside the schoolhouse in Aston, where a young Tony Iommi listened to their incessant, inhuman churning.

Eugene Thacker is a New York based writer and the author of Horror of Philosophy (forthcoming from Zero Books). He teaches at The New School and is a scholar-in-residence at the Miskatonic University Colloquy for Inexistent Cryptobiology

INFO

Nicola Masciandaro (ed.), Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium, New York: Createspace, 2010.

FOOTNOTES

i The article is online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/arts/music/15metal.html?_r=1.

ii Ibid.

iii Hideous Gnosis, p. 136.

iv On darkness mysticism see Denys Turner, The Darkness of God, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

v Ibid., p. 30.

Black Metal Theory Symposium II: Melancology

2010-06-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

MELANCOLOGY

Black Metal Theory Symposium II

13 January 2011

The Fighting Cocks

Old London Road

Kingston-upon-Thames, London

1-11pm

Another gathering dedicated to the mutual blackening of metal and theory

Live Act

ABGOTT

Plenary Speaker

REZA NEGARESTANI

‘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 Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss’

MELANCOLOGY

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.

Inquiries & abstracts to Niall Scott & Scott Wilson
NWRScott@uclan.ac.uk
S.Wilson@kingston.ac.uk

Hideous Gnosis Reviewed in Wire Magazine by Mark Fisher

2010-05-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1

Nicola Masciandaro (Editor)

CreateSpace Pbk 292pp

“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

68 / The Wire / Print Run

Hideous Gnosis Reviewed @ Aquarius Records

2010-02-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

From Aquarius Records:

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.

Hideous Gnosis is Here

2010-02-10T09:29:00.001-08:00

Available from Amazon (US) and Createspace
Wholesale orders via email: hideous.gnosis AT gmail.com

Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Edited by Nicola Masciandaro. 292 pages. $20.00. ISBN 1450572162. EAN-13 9781450572163.

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.

"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" (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.

Publication Imminent

2010-02-05T13:50:00.000-08:00

Coming soon . . .

Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Edited by Nicola Masciandaro. 292 pages. $20.00. ISBN 1450572162. EAN-13 9781450572163.

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.

“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.

Black Metal Theory Symposium I (2009) - audio

2009-12-18T11:47:00.001-08:00

Sound recordings of select presentations distributable as one file. Download here.

Or individually:

Anthony Sciscione - ‘Goatsteps behind my steps’: Black Metal and Ritual Renewal (mp3)
Brandon Stosuy - Meaningful Leaning Mess (mp3)
Erik Butler - The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances (mp3)
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix - Transcendental Black Metal (mp3)
Joseph Russo - Perpetue Putesco - Perpetually I Putrefy (mp3)
Niall Scott - Black Confessions and Absu-lution (mp3)
Nicola Masciandaro - Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya (mp3)
Scott Wilson - BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum (mp3)
Steven Shakespeare - The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling's Underground (mp3)

Hideous Gnosis: Schedule and Flyers

2009-10-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

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HIDEOUS GNOSIS
Black Metal Theory Symposium
December 12, 2009
The Public Assembly
70 North 6th St
Brooklyn, NY
1:00-7:00 p.m.
$10 cover

A gathering dedicated to the mutual blackening of metal and theory.

I: 1:00-2:15
The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling’s Underground
Steven Shakespeare
The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances
Erik Butler
BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum
Scott Wilson
(moderator: Niall Scott)

II: 2:20-3:30
Transcendental Black Metal
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya
Nicola Masciandaro
Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration
Joseph Russo
(moderator: Steven Shakespeare)

Interlude: 3:30-4:30
Nader Sadek, Baptism in Black (Phase II)
Sym-posium (together-drinking)

III: 4:30-5:45
‘Remain true to the earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal
Benjamin Noys (in absentia)
The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Evan Calder Williams
Black Confessions and Absu-lution
Niall Scott
Meaningful Leaning Mess
Brandon Stosuy
(moderator: Scott Wilson)

IV: 5:50-7:00
Black Metal and Evil
Aspasia Stephanou
Red in a World of Black: A Discussion of Blood in Black Metal
Murray Resinski
‘Goatsteps behind my steps’: Black Metal and Ritual Renewal
Anthony Sciscione
(moderator: Erik Butler)

Sculpture by Lionel Maunz

Sponsored by Glossator and Show No Mercy
Organized by Nicola Masciandaro

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Why do you compel me to divulge things that would better remain unknown to you?--Silenus

What coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?—H.P. Lovecraft, The Unnamable

He is not a return to the past; he has undergone the corruption of the “present-day man” and nothing has more place within him than the devastation which it leaves . . . the memory of Plato, of Christianity and above all—the most hideous—the memory of modern ideas, extend behind him like fields of ashes. But between the unknown and him has been silenced the chirping of ideas, and it is through this that he is similar to “ancient man”: of the universe he is no longer the rational (alleged) master, but the dream.—Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness.—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The black tablet of vision, I hold dear for the sake
That to the soul, it is a book of the picture of the dark mole of Thine. —Hafiz

Painting by E.S.S.E. (Eternal Secret Society of Entities)

“I’ve seen demons / And I’ve been shown things that no-one should see / And I know why birds alight from cables with no-one beneath / Who’s on the side of the angels / Who’s on the side of Satan / God’s not there anymore / I know why birds fly / No-one’s there anymore” (Caïna, “Hideous Gnosis,” Mourner [Profound Lore Records, 2007]).