"My name is a killing word"

And this will continue to be the soundtrack to my project...



Best album in a few years, I'd say. And such a political aesthetic bramble that I will need a thought sickle to get to work on it. In short: how did monarchist leaning and Action Française fetishizing French black metal "kommandos" produce the first great album of the financial crisis, an out-of-time messy slab of alternate history, the long Satanic sixties, and non-homogeneous militancy? I will properly write something on aesthetics and Fascism, but as an initial gesture: this is what radical Communist antagonism needs to sound like, in all its seasick longing and storm of bee-sounds brandished proudly.
I.E.:

4 comments:

z said...

you spend too much time on the 'hearse

May 31, 2009 at 10:17 AM
ECW said...

no such thing as too much time there. That site is satan's gift to my ears.

May 31, 2009 at 3:25 PM
Anonymous said...

Not sure why my comment didn't post earlier. I'll try again.

This is indeed a great album, and I am also having a difficult time wrapping my head around it. It is especially perplexing to be faced with such a masterpiece when one considers the imbecile (I commented on the interview with Famine elsewhere) who created it.

I'm having a harder time enjoying the likes of Akista, Peste Noire, Malveillance, Kult Ofenzivy, Drudkh etc. as of late in light of the increasingly absurd blending of racialism and nationalism with what at first glance seemed to be a clumsy albeit genuine reaction to neoliberal integration. I can imagine someone like Zizek having something Lacanian to say which would help me rationalize listening to Dolentia and Goatmoon while reading Deleuze and Guattari, although I can't help but wonder if there may never be a method for "cheating" my way out of this one. Anyway, I'm very interested in more of your thoughts on the matter.

September 7, 2009 at 12:15 PM
ECW said...

Yeah, this is a hell of a can of worms. (Or, for this sonic tendency, can of bees.)

I'll write something more fully on this (as I said I would back on the original post), but your question is a serious one.

My short answer might be three-fold. First, the vast majority of the culture we consume is ideologically contemptible, although rarely does it bare its colors so visibly as black metal. To go the Zizek route you invoked, isn't this analogous to that much cited Brecht line ("what is breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank")? The idiotic posturing - and genuinely disturbing politics - of some BM is a quiet fart against the hidden roar of the real structural violence and dangerous ideological constructions of our era. Yet we rarely tend to agonize if we listen to a bit of pop fluff, now and then, however ironically. (And I write this as someone with a great deal of love for certain pop music genres, particularly dirty south rap, but almost none of it can move me like BM can.)

Two, the gap between the sonic qualities of black metal and its avowed politics. Even if you don't go as far as I do (of seeing within the music itself a anarchistic, dialectically subtle relationship between inherited forms of the past and the networks of the present), the fact remains that barring a good deal of time spent with the lyrics sheet and interviews, you'd be hard pressed to tell apart NSBM from what we might call NSNSBM (not so National Socialist black metal).

Third, it is because that gesture - the reaction toward neoliberal integration - is abortive/aborted that it needs to be brought forth. A deep listening, one that goes past the irresponsible and ultimately banal national-racism, and a concern for the unrealized kernel that happens against the intentions of its creators is at stake. A perhaps translatable model, an apparatus of reading and willful reuse/misuse (the echoes of my salvagepunk thinking intended here).

Of course, in separating the wheat from the chaff, you need to know when all you have is a bundle of shit to be cast away and burned. Some things are, and should be, beyond recuperation.

September 8, 2009 at 1:16 PM

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