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.