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Helvete - Call For Art

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

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

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Anne Hilde Neset on Melancology in The Wire #325

Interview on Radio Corax with D. Irtenkauf

http://freie-radios.net/39512

Dominik Irtenkauf on BMT @ Telepolis - Part 2

Einschwärzung der Theorie

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory

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

 Verkehrte Ökologie - Melancology

Black Metal Theory @ Kaleidoscope

Franceso Tenaglia interviews Scott Wilson on Black Metal Theory here.

Melancology: Black Metal Theory Symposium II

 

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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

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.

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