'And I still think that no one has really been able to touch that thing that gave life to Black Metal in the
first place, because it takes so much, it takes intense study, and it takes far
more than being passionate about the music, for to approach the dangerous and
abominable thing that gave birth to Black Metal’.
-
Erik Danielsson (Watain)
‘…those alone who pass beyond all
that is pure and impure, and ascend above the topmost altitudes of holy things,
and who, leaving behind them all light and sound and heavenly utterances,
plunge into the Darkness where truly dwell, as the Oracles declare, that ONE
who is beyond all’.
-
Dionysius the Areopagite
‘This is the plane whereon the
vestiges of all things (Kullu Shay) are destroyed in the traveller, and on the
horizon of eternity the Divine Face riseth out of the darkness, and the meaning
of “All on the earth shall pass away, but the face of thy Lord….” is made
manifest’.
-
Baha’u’llah
‘The Seven Valleys’
‘You play it like a warrior’
-Legion
(Marduk)
Black Metal has consumed me over the last few months. I have
done little else. I now own a Bathory t shirt which is unwearable in public and
I have burned out head phones and filled my new iPhone. As I continue my ascent into darkness, I want
to take stock. I don’t expect this post to be much read. Where I am, is almost
unreadable.
There are two descriptive words to say about my experience
of Black Metal and they are (1) antinomian (hence the quotes above) and (2)
difficult (hence the quotes above). All the other words are attempts to explain
the truly ineffable and therefore will be lies. Shall I therefore lie? Why the
hell not.
I will begin with the music. Metal music in general uses
discordant tritones (once called the Devil’s interval) and is in a minor key.
BM began in part as a reaction to the high technicality of Death Metal. The
idea was to emphasis the aesthetics – low fi production, a cold atmosphere,
theatricality. ‘Classic’ BM, mostly Scandinavian from the 1990s, is
characterised by slow tempo, very fast blast beat drumming and tremolo picked
guitars which play the whole of the chord in order to captivate a chilling,
unearthly sound. The vocals are screamed, growled or howled. Death Metal vocals
sound like this:
KIILL!!!
BM vocals sound like
this:
KIIIIILLLLL!!!!AAARGGHHHTRANSILVANIANHUNGERRRR!!!!!
A brilliant example
is ‘Into the infinity of thoughts’ by Norwegian band Emperor, the first track
from their album ‘In the Nightside Eclipse’.
It starts with sounds that set the atmosphere, almost industrial hissing
and grinding and howling like the beginnings of a bad hallucination. The room
temperature drops a couple of degrees in ghastly anticipation. Thunder and
lightning. Then in come the guitars and percussion, wailing and building. And
finally Ihsahn’s vocals, which alarm me every time. His voice is a high pitched
agonised shriek, inhuman as a void in space. Are there words in there
somewhere? What are they?
‘As the
Darkness creeps over the Northern mountains of Norway
And the
silence reach (sic) the woods, I awake and rise…..
Into the
night I wander, like many nights before,
And like
in my dreams, but centuries before’.
And the track ends with the words:
‘The
lands will grow black
There is
no sunrise to yet to come
May these
moments under the Moon be eternal
May the
infinity haunt me ……in Darkness’
Now to discuss the problems inherent in Black Metal, of
which there are many, and yet although it does indeed collapse under the weight
of its contradictions, it mutates and survives to continue its process of
glorious contamination.
Firstly, the music. As hinted at above, simply listening to
it is fraught and requires commitment.
In the Western musical canon, we are used to songs that have
a clear trajectory, a beginning, middle and end, and that tell a story. BM
often does none of this. It starts. I’m overwhelmed by an avalanche of noise.
Then it stops. There is no figure and no ground. Any expectations are nullified.
A pseudo-hallucination is induced – walking in the city I hear guitars shred
the construction sites and the traffic burns and howls. I am reminded of
Stockhausen’s aleatoric processes. As BM has progressed musically, it actually
owes more to the avant garde. Which is ironic, as it is also very backwards-
looking, often favouring earlier or more ‘natural’ methods of playing or
recording.
Moreover, we are used to rock music played by bands, where
the rhythm section backs the leads and vocals in a three dimensional fashion.
BM musicians often have solo projects, rather than the usual fairly stable rock
group. Examples from opposite ends of the spectrum are Burzum, by Varg Vikernes
(Count Grishnak) of Norway, and the US musician Wrest, with his solo project
Leviathan. (See under Misanthropy, below).
As for the sound, it’s often recorded with the bass down low
and best heard that way too. The vocals are put through the guitar microphones.
And vice versa. The distortion is maxed. And it contrives to be both fast and
slow at the same time. The effect is a slow horrible endless crash, or a sense
of doom that does nothing but impend, but at full noise.’ Between the desire
and the spasm, falls’……life itself, into the chasm.
The lyrics in BM are mostly incomprehensible, yet they are
also very important. Some bands, such as
Gorgoroth, withhold their lyrics. This is a good example of the sheer demand BM puts on the listener. You have
to really mean it. I started by naively listening to the music and just letting
it saturate me. I wasn’t keen on discovering the lyrics, because the subject
matter is almost always problematic . Now I get that listening requires
discernment. BM is bombastic, ridiculous and pretentious at times, but it is
never superficial.
Equally opaque are some of the aesthetic sensibilities. BM
bands/projects often have logos that are like occult sigils, ferociously
beautiful and completely unreadable. Here is my favourite, for US solo project
Xasthur. Yes it really does say Xasthur.
Live performances are theatre, always have been. In the very
early days Dead, vocalist of Mayhem, was cutting himself on stage and throwing
pigs’ heads into the audience. In 2004,
Gorgoroth staged a controversial Black Mass in Kracow, as their live show, with
hooded naked people suspended from crosses and sheep heads impaled on the
stage. Here is the stage set, and vocalist Gaahl with a friend.
Watain, from Sweden,
keep blood and animal parts until they rot before dousing themselves and their
audiences with them
The photos give some more
idea of the BM aesthetic – black clothing, bullet belts, spiked arm bands,
corpse paint. Darkly erotic? Absolutely
not. The ratio of thanatos to eros is way out of whack here.
The pomp and circumstance
hides another important BM contradiction – this is music that was never meant
to be heard. It was meant to be played. But not heard. Black Metallers make
much of their contempt for trends, posers, and the fact that BM has a
following. It is a source of constant perplexity. They blame the media frenzy
and moral panic that surrounded the murders and church burnings in Norway in
the 1990’s, that pulled in young people and publicised BM world wide. BM music is Norway’s biggest cultural
export. All this leads to a relationship between musicians and fans that is at
least ambivalent.
Which brings me to
misanthropy. Unlike punk which was sociable and teleologically hedonistic, BM
was never a ‘movement’. Many practitioners are allergic to people, even to other
Black Metallers, even sometimes to themselves. BM sometimes sides with Nature,
or with the mythic past, but never with humans. So, how does a misanthropist
live? Some of them didn’t. Dead, vocalist of Morbid and Mayhem, killed himself,
briefly put, after 17 years of believing himself not to be human. Jon Nodtveidt of Dissection did so too, but
for different reasons. He was a member of the then Misanthropic Luciferian
Order (now the Temple of the Black Light) and believed that it was the truly
Satanic thing to kill oneself at the height of one’s powers. Niklas Kvarforth
of Swedish band Shining, who claims he ‘hates life, everything that lives and
breathes’, has encouraged audience members to harm themselves by handing out
razor blades at concerts. Self destruction is undertaken in order to gain
transcendence rather than express distress. Here is Celtic Frost, from their
album Monotheist:
‘Frozen
is heaven and frozen is hell. And I am dying in this living human shell. I am a
dying God coming into human flesh.’
There is nothing in this
world for the BM practitioner. The body putresces, the worm blackens the apple,
‘only death is real’. And much is made of eternity, here.
The sociologist announces
that Black Metal was never ‘part of Norway’s overarching narrative arc’. I am
sure many people are relieved to hear that.
This is Kvitrafn, then of Gorgoroth, on the cobbled streets of Bergen,
Peter Beste’s photo taken just as the older lady notices him:
So what made well brought up
young men in a relatively secular, liberal, wealthy, politically stable nation such
as Norway, burn churches and murder each other with a side order of neo-fascism
to boot? It’s a helluva way to solve the first world problems of ennui and
cultural dislocation.
I would have found that
easier to explain when I started out on this ascent into darkness. Now I have
only broken images to describe, rather than prescribe. Imagine this. A rite of
passage. A young man enters the limen (threshold) – the vision quest, or the
caves of Lascaux. He spends days in darkness, spirits come and strip his body
to a skeleton, and then build him again into his new self. Or he wanders and
fasts until his power animal is shown to him. The men of the village have all
been through this. They know he will be frightened, neither boy nor man, not
himself, not yet. They know he will need to be tested to his utmost, and he may
not even pass. But he is precious to them, and they will help him. He passes
his ordeal and returns a man.
Now, there are no such rites.
A young man enters the limen. He wanders, alone, in this liminal state. His
mouth fills with dirt. He sees the stars and they mean nothing to him. He is
overwhelmed. He is nothing. He is dead. He is not dead. Then the sound comes, like
a freezing wind. It strips him. It shows him. It changes him. The flesh falls
from his blasted bones. What is left is the heaviest blackest metal of all,
that of Pluto. The alchemical process of nigredo is complete. He will never
come back.
When night falls
She cloaks the world
In impenetrable darkness -
A chill rises
From the soil
And contaminates the air.
Suddenly…….
Life has new meaning’.
-
Burzum (Varge Vikernes) ‘Dunkelheit’
