SODOM

Seeing as this is kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinda black metal I'll make a post. And seeing as assessment for ol' MSTU2000 is done, I'ma swear in this entry :) .

HOLY FUCKING HELL! Extremely ass-kicking concert. Here's a quick rundown.

Gospel of the Horns

- ripped my head off with their brand of black/thrash metal. Really heavy, evil stuff with a definite old-school feel about it all. Massively impressed.

Sodom
- legends of thrash, my favourite of the German thrash scene's "big three" of Destruction, Kreator and (duh) SODOM. They have this status for good reason - some SERIOUSLY intense music OVERFLOWING with attitude and power.
- from memory, they played a pretty nicely rounded setlist, including a couple of numbers I'd been dying to hear ('Napalm in the Morning', 'Ausgebombt'), as well as a badass cover of Motörhead's 'Ace of Spades' . Unfortunately, their version of the Udo Jürgens' hit "Aber Bitte Mit Sahne" didn't get a play :( .
- the crowd was fantastic - plenty of energy, but without the dickheads that seem present at every other gig that make you fight like a Spartan to keep your crappy fourth row position. Incidentally, my friends and I managed to stay in the second row. Giggidy. There were also some really cool denim/patched jackets to be seen.
- got to meet the band after the set. Pretty cool guys :) .

Check it out...

...I'm checking in. To say that this final essay is an epic task :) .

Black Metal UK

So now that I've discussed the music and its makers, I think it's about time I had a look at the way BM's fans can interact. To do this, I'll focus on Black Metal UK, an online community with over 9,700 members.

The first thing that struck me about this site was how democratically it seems to be maintained. It is "run on a non-profit basis", and the submission of news articles, album and live reviews, interviews, etc. by its members is strongly welcomed (hell, the site RELIES on it). The site provides services and coverage related to practically every aspect of the black metal community - in addition to the archive of reviews, interviews and news articles, the site hosts an extensive image library, promotional tools and links to other websites of interest to the BM community (such as online stores, record labels, zines...).

Perhaps of greatest value, though, is the site's quite active forum. It provides a space for BM fans and artists to discuss recordings and live events, general issues, current events and, quite unusually, politics/religion/philosophy. There is also a dedicated "trading post" forum, in which members can organise the exchange of recordings, merchandise and musical equipment.

Though the "UK" in the site's name suggests that it might focus mostly on BM in the UK (hehe, abbreviation overload), this is not the case - tours of the US, Europe , even Australia are discussed on the forums, and reviews are by no means limited to UK bands. I suppose this is an indication of the increasingly global nature of BM, and of music fan cultures in general.

The existence of such open online communities as Black Metal UK clearly makes participation in fan cultures considerably easier than it was "back in the day". This can only be a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

"Life Metal"

Just saw the term "life metal" (as opposed to death metal) in someone else's blog about Christian music. Haha.

VBS-TV Doco - True Norwegian Black Metal

Greetings, readers :) .

A few days ago I was made aware of documentary on BM that focused on a key member of the scene and, rather than rehashing tired and glamourised ideas and images of the genre, attempts to offer an honest picture of the BM movement as it is today. Naturally, I had to write about it...

Though the documentary is presumably intended to be an illumination of the genre as a whole, it's based quite strongly on Gorgoroth/the singer, Gaahl. This is for good reason - Gorgoroth are a textbook BM band, sonically (employing blastbeats; abrasive, aggressive guitar playing; screamed vocals), visually (long hair; massive spiked armbands; inverted crucifixes; corpsepaint; pig heads on stakes set up in front of the stage) and when it comes to extra-curricular activities (Gaahl was imprisoned in 2005 for "torture-like violence"; guitarist Infernus was released on parole in March this year). Phew.

Anyway, the doco starts off with some concert footage, a background of the style and the band. Only when we get to the stuff with Gaahl (dubbed "the most evil man alive" by Terrorizer magazine) does this documentary start to show its unique value.

Interviewees suggest that Gorgoroth is a band fueled by ideology more than aesthetics, and judging by the interviews with Gaahl, he plays a large part in this. Living in the tiny town of Espedal (a town apparently owned and inhabited mostly by his family), he is isolated from the general population. The documentary crew are said to be the first journalists permitted to visit Gaahl at his house. As further rejection of contemporary society, Gaahl lives without a lot of modern technology - he has neither a phone nor plumbing (in fact, one journalist mentions having to walk a kilometre through mud to go to another house just to "take a shit" (pardon the language...actually, can we swear in this?)). Individualism is clearly a big thing for Gaahl, which he makes clear by sharing his philosophy of "following the god within yourself".

So how do we relate this to BM? Gaahl's defiantly individualistic way of living and thinking matches up perfectly with the violent rejection of Right-Hand Path, collectivist religion that is found in BM. His rejection of technology is also similar to several common BM musical practices, such as the rejection of highly developed instrumental technique and the use of lo-fi production. At one stage Gaahl actually makes his attitude to creativity and convention explicit - he attributes his dropping out of art school to the failings of its rules and expectations ("you cannot go to school to become an artist"). For him (and the genre of BM), "the process of creating is based on being away from people" and convention.

Perhaps the most extreme example of isolation and struggle in the documentary is when Gaahl leads the crew on a walk up a snowy mountain to a hut his grandparents built. Several members of the crew don't understand why he would bother with a "nature walk" when it's supposed to be a documentary about metal, and struggle with both the concept and the task considerably. There is one thing that really struck me about this scene/idea - the suggestion that isolation is a part of Gaahl's heritage thanks to the fact that Gaahl's grandparents would build a hut at such an impractically high altitude, where there are no trees (which would require them to carry the logs up the mountain themselves). Could it be, then, that as well as being a rejection of contemporary society and values, the very BM idea of privileging isolation is an acceptance of the previous "way of doing things"?

Makes sense to me.

You can find the video here.

How does Black Metal work?

To answer this question I'll examine Darkthrone's seminal 1991 LP "A Blaze in the Northern Sky". One of the most vicious, chaotic releases of the genre at that time (though many (including myself) would argue that it still holds that title), it embodies black metal thought better than perhaps any other album. It's for this reason that I have chosen it to be the "ambassador" of the genre. A song from the album can be heard on a fan-created MySpace located here

One of the first things that you’ll notice when listening is the harsh, almost painful-to-listen-to guitar tone. It’s been manipulated to make the music more violent and really hard to make out exactly what the guitarist is playing. This is exemplary of BM’s use of alienation and destruction to get across its message of the value of the individual/rejection of collectivism.

Further increasing the potency of this message, the riffs beneath the guitar tone are active rejections of popular structures and scales. They step out of the “comfort” of seven-note scales (such as the major, minor scales that are used most commonly in Western music) and branch out into uncommonly-used chromatics – something of a black spot on the musical spectrum. In addition to this, you get the feeling that some riffs “go on for too long/not long enough” – your understanding of musical structure gets violated by “A Blaze in the Northern Sky”. Now if that’s not a violently individualistic rejection of collectivist ideas I don’t know what is.

The song’s drumming further alienates the listener – it’s extremely crude and aggressive, alternating between blastbeats (see the Immortal and Keep of Kalessin videos in my previous post for examples of this technique) and brutally simplistic beats.

Vocals are screamed and layered quite heavily with reverb. Similar to the guitar tone, in a way – it’s a more violent, alienating (and therefore effective) way of delivering the band’s musical message. As you’d expect, the lyrics are dark, violent and somewhat cryptic, keeping in line with the violent/alienating nature of the album, the band and the style as a whole. Have a look at the title track’s lyrics –

Hear a Haunting Chant
Lying in the Northern wind
As the Sky turns Black
clouds of Melancholy
rape the Beams
of a Devoid Dying Sun
and the Distant Fog approaches

Coven of forgotten Delight
Hear the Pride of a Northern Storm
Triumphant sight on a Northern Sky

Where the days are Dark
and Night the Same
Moonlight Drank the Blood
of a thousand Pagan men

It took ten times a hundred Years
Before the King on the Northern Throne
was brought Tales of the crucified one

Coven of renewed Delight;
A Thousand Years have passed since then -
Years of Lost Pride and Lust

Souls of Blasphemy,
hear a Haunting Chant -

We are a Blaze in the Northern Sky
The next thousand Years Are OURS

The way the song ends with an outright declaration of war to (what is presumably) the current order and its conventions says it all, really.

Some interesting stuff on eBay

It seems there's quite a market for BM memorabilia these days. Supposedly a Burzum demo and an accompanying photocopy of a letter written by Varg Vikernes (the musician/Odinist/national socialist behind the project) sold for 300 euros not too long ago. Morgan Hakansson from the Swedish band Marduk is rumoured to be about to put on eBay a TONNE of similarly cult merchandise. It is said to include -

1. LETTERS FROM DEAD
2. LETTERS FROM EURONYMOUS(INCLUDING ONE BLOODSTAINED....THAT CONTAINED PART OF HIS SKULL AND TWO SHOTGUN PELLETS)
3. DEAD's DRAWINGS.(INCLUDING THE ORIGINAL "DISSECTION DEMO" ONE)
4. BURZUM,,DEBUT CD...WITH NO BARCODE!(ONLY 500 PRESSED) WITH THE PACKAGE HANDWRITTEN BY EURONYMOUS.
5. BATHORY...UNDER THE SIGN (1987/ MUSIC FOR NATIONS)....WITH "ROUGH MALE" BAND CENTRAL LABEL ON ONE SIDE!.... MISSPRINT... AN INTERNET SEARCH DOESNT EVEN THROW ONE OF THESE UP....
6. ORIGINAL HELVETE CATALOGUE.
7. EURONYMOUS's MALLEUS MALIFICARUM LIBRARY BOOK...SIGNED, WITH HIS HANDWRITTEN ADDRESS...A GIFT HE DID NOT RETURN.... HA HA!
8. A DSP (Deathlike Silence Productions) PROMOTIONAL CD!.... TRY FINDING ONE OF THOSE!
9. THE ORIGINAL "DAWN OF THE BLACK HEARTS" SONG LYRICS ...HAND WRITTEN BY FENRIZ... !!!!!!
10. DEADS SUICIDE NOTE IN FULL... SWEDISH WITH ENGLISH TRANSLATION.
COPY OF DEADS OBITUARY FROM THE NEWS PAPER
APPROX 100 ORIGINAL OLD MAYHEM PHOTOS.
11. A MACE LIKE THE ONE VARG IS HOLDING....ONLY AROUND 5 OF THESE WERE EVER MADE BY STIAN JOHNSEN (ARCTURUS)

plus some other stuff.... (source - a very sketchy http://www.fmp666.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7628).

"Blackground" Information

Yeah, I figure some is probably needed. Lifted straight from Wiki (though nonetheless accurate) -

Black metal is a type of extreme heavy metal music that started in the early 1980s. The genre is characterized by an aggressive and abrasive sound, coupled with a dark atmosphere and rejection of Judeo-Christian values.

The first bands with black metal characteristics included Bathory, Mercyful Fate, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost and Venom. These bands were mostly thrash metal bands that formed the prototype for black metal; they are referred to collectively as the First Wave. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a Second Wave emerged in Norway, including prominent bands like Darkthrone and Mayhem. Although there is no well-defined Third Wave, modern black metal bands have incorporated new musical and lyrical trends into their music.

Black metal has been met with considerable hostility from mainstream culture, mainly because of the misanthropic, hateful, and anti-Judeo-Christian attitude of bands contributing to the genre. Additionally, a few black metal bands have been known to have associations with church burnings, murder, and National Socialism."

-

And here's some info on the Second Wave, which is what I'll mostly be discussing -

The "second wave" of black metal in the early 1990s came in part with the rise of Norwegian bands such as Darkthrone, Mayhem, Burzum, Gorgoroth, Immortal, and Emperor. This wave not only added new atmospheric elements, but many of these bands would also be responsible for a rash of criminal controversy, as seen below. Classical elements were also introduced to a small degree and popularized the genre for a growing underground audience. Philosophically, an abrasive anti-Right Hand Path sentiment became a must for any band to be finalized as "black metal." In fact, bands that didn't exemplify such beliefs through actions beyond their music were often criticized by extremists within black metal's subculture. A dark, misanthropic mentality was complemented visually with the use of corpsepaint, which was also most prevalent during this wave as a statement to separate black metal bands from other rock bands of the era.

...

An abraded, very low fidelity recording style was common in most black metal at the time, and was often intentional to preserve an underground quality of the genre. Sometimes artists would branch off into related subgenres, such as death metal, keeping their Satanic and occult mentality intact. Such a style has been deemed "Blackened Death Metal." Mayhem's career, for example, began mostly in the death/black roots, moved to almost pure black, then towards death again in their later career. It was experimentation like this that aided black metal's growth, but would ultimately mean the end of the second wave by the mid-1990s, as more modern black metal bands started to raise their production quality and introduce new instrumentation such as synthesizers (commonly seen in industrial metal) and full-symphony orchestras.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_metal

Here, have some videos.

Satyricon - Mother North


Satyricon - Dark Medieval Times (only worry about the audio for this one)




Keep of Kalessin - Come Damnation


Immortal (check out the guy's sweet dance move at 1:10)


Drunk interviews are the best.


This is an embarrassingly awful rendition of a classic song, but it's good for a laff.

OMG LOOK WHAT I DID

Created a blogizzle for uni. In it I'll discuss the music, people and (probably) media coverage of BM. Or who knows, I might even have a gander at how it relates to authenticity. Or New Media! OR LOCALITY!! Possibilities are many.