Showing posts with label black metal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black metal. Show all posts
Opened grave, empty belly
Soundtrack - at least the riff at 1:30 or so - for an alternate version of Kuhle Wampe in which the desperate boys racing around town on bikes, searching for any work, circle through a necropolis, a skeleton-rattling dance and rage version of Berlin, hunger grins lit by sputtering torches of outmoded propaganda. (given that the film was made in '32, that change may make no difference whatsoever)
Abominates but fails properly to negate
Mark Fisher reviews Hideous Gnosis in the new issue of The Wire, sidesteps the more inane attacks on theorizing what's already a genre so obsessed with auto-theorizing (albeit from the perspective of willful non-knowledge), and takes on a claim I made rather cryptically about failed militancy. For the next incarnation: melancology (i.e. blackened ecology of sorts) in London, early 2011. I'll leave behind politics and headless objects per se for ecologies of hostile manufactured objects, those rare exceptions of the man-made dotting the icy creep of black metal landscapes like Blackwood's malignant willows.
The 3rd Key
San Francisco Argento Three Mothers-themed metal. Yup. Thanks, Aesop, for making my, and brightening this, grayer day.
While he strips my carcass...
Gentlemen, start your engines: may the race to the first Joe Stack themed black metal concept album begin...
Now that Burzum is back, Varg, we're looking at you.
Hideous Gnosis gains material form and online purchasability
Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Edited by Nicola Masciandaro. 292 pages. $20.00. ISBN 1450572162. EAN-13 9781450572163.
Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised.
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous" (Lovecraft)
“Poison yourself . . . with thought” (Arizmenda)
CONTENTS
Steven Shakespeare, “The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils Itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling’s Underground.”
Erik Butler, “The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.”
Scott Wilson, “BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum.”
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, “Transcendental Black Metal.”
Nicola Masciandaro, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya.”
Joseph Russo, “Perpetue Putesco – Perpetually I Putrefy.”
Benjamin Noys, “‘Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal.”
Evan Calder Williams, “The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
Brandon Stosuy, “Meaningful Leaning Mess.”
Aspasia Stephanou, “Playing Wolves and Red Riding Hoods in Black Metal.”
Anthony Sciscione, “‘Goatsteps Behind My Steps . . .’: Black Metal and Ritual Renewal.”
Eugene Thacker, “Three Questions on Demonology.”
Niall Scott, “Black Confessions and Absu-lution.”
DOCUMENTS: Lionel Maunz, Pineal Eye; Oyku Tekten, Symposium Photographs; Scott Wilson, “Pop Journalism and the Passion for Ignorance”; Karlynn Holland, Sin Eater I-V; Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani, Black Metal Commentary; Black Metal Theory Blog Comments; Letter from Andrew White; E.S.S.E, Murder Devour I.
Black boredom
Black metal slow jam interlude. A great landscape of bad infinity: hovering synth, arbitrary drum-beats, Kenny G-esque sax noodling, and Satan's mumbles. Greek black metal, in this form, understands well that what's truly evil doesn't just dwell in the cold north or in necrotic threat. It's mundanity and drift, it's goofiness that can't sniff itself out, the purposeful not-knowing-when-to-quit. It's a shitty date too polite to end, a grocery store cereal aisle, it's the bored proximity of those trapped in a halted elevator while this song plays on and on.
6:30 to Infinity
OK, indeed, black metal is anti-transcendent, yes. (Sin-eater, perhaps, as Niall claims, but once eaten, rarely passed on.) But then there are songs like this (see also nearly everything by Sombres Forets, or, in a very different register, Paysage d'Hiver). Which make evident that the issue is not so much anti-trascendence impossible negativity, not flailing roaring mess, but a deeply unmodern patience. An accretion, a willingness to wait and wait for one moment that doesn't so much justify what preceded it as leave it behind. For all that ceaseless internal speed, all lines in tremolo, over-picked, the velocity of circulation, it mocks the equation of speed and progress. It moves glacially slow, through the piled fuzz and grime, so much so when a single clean riff 6 and a half minutes rings out over the hoofbeat-gallop, it becomes the fitful, soaked-sheet dream of all pop producers, the hook that got away and found itself in the wrong hands.
Head already removed, the axe’s swing is a magician’s trick
A follow-up and small extension of my take on black metal as failed dialectic and headless fantasy. This is a subsequent, initial move from the acephale (without head) to the cephalophore (the head bearer), a sort of proposed second step, particularly toward the question of the leaderless collective that escapes blind irrationality or waiting for the messianic potentially fascist unifier of retroactive integrity. (Albeit a move that, as Ben has stressed in response to me, may be necessarily deferred, that pushing in such a way may be to leave its terrain entirely. We will likely forever disagree on this.) Thanks to Nicola, who I finally met in NYC, not only for being one of the severed minds behind the emergent black metal theory crew, symposia, and volumes (thinking that California may need to become the 3rd venue in this circuit: we have enough redwoods here to properly tackle the question of black metal and nature) but also for pointing me toward the figure of the cephalophore and on beheading in general, on which he's written a bunch.
But to speak of beheading, we must ask: what happens to the head? And whose was it to start? For the acephale (the headless) is the ground of black metal, its fundamental and unstable condition, but also what dooms it to both its fascism-in-spite-of-itself and to the lingering sense of the bad faith to not follow through on its convictions. The acephale needs to be taken as a first gesture, not as a permanent condition. Not in order to recuperate or excuse, neither to denigrate nor to valorize, but to see that the act of becoming headless opens the way for the second gesture, that of the cephalophore, the head-bearer, the one defined not by the condition of being without head but by the act of picking the head back up.
“Head” here should be taken in its full range, for the acephalic is a fantasy both of the leaderless (the “body” of the people rules alone, brought about by that revolutionary act of beheading the sovereign, materially or in principle) and of the irrational (headless, the body rules in its singularity and decides on the basis of the affective, and phenomenal, taking on unreason as its shared principle). As such, the acephalic condition of black metal must surpass itself and extend this to a total condition. It isn’t enough to remove the leader and imagine the hard collective – of cold Northern sovereigns to be – merely touched by this act of negation, for the outcome is one of three inevitabilities:
1. Resubmission to the bellicose repetition of the act (which is perhaps fine with black metal, at its most raging-in-place).
2. A slide toward the directionless muddled chaos of a crowd of loners.
3. Most disturbingly and more determinately fascist, the elevation of a new leader capable of both retroactively verifying the absent and deferred integration of the mass, as well as yoking concretely together the necessarily linked and distanced practices of politics and aesthetics.
In other words, the crowd itself must not only sever all. It must also pick up the pieces after. And more than that, to realize that the destructive undercurrent of this is above all an affective stance and an aesthetic tendency. The heads are already severed, reason cast to the ground. Black metal makes appear as decision what is in truth a general state of affairs, not just of its imagined post-apocalypse but of the systemic chaos and non-direction of the contemporary world. Hence the performative theatricality: the head already removed, the axe’s swing is a magician’s trick, tracing the negative space there all along between the body and the head.
For to remain in the acephalic is to rest in one of two unacceptable options, each of which can then go in one of two ways.
There can be an acephalic leader, which means either heterogeneous sovereignty (the elevation of a singular, irrational, decisionist leader to prop up the whole collapsing sphere of homogeneous and ordered life) or that crowd of individuals against rational leadership only because it is the wrong kind of rational leadership (i.e. liberal, plural, “diverse” and contemporary, rather than something more metal, European, singular, and ancient).
And there can be an acephalic crowd, either stuck in waiting for a properly headed leader to emerge and give direction, or caught in riotous, irrational, affective bloodbath, stumbling and flailing around, confusing an attack on totality with an attack on everything and anything within reach, wounding itself as it goes.
But despite its recurrent anti-intellectualism and penchant for uncritical reenactment of stale dark vitalist tropes, black metal is smarter than it thinks. Appropriately for its Satanic grounding, it shares much with the integral atheism of de Sade: to take on abstraction and the generic, you have to do so on its own terms. In other words, you can’t afford to throw away the head. It must be picked up, made open use of. Not to resuture a lost order to the mediated despair of the present, not t0 stitch the head back on. Rather, to make its absence and dislocation visible, to make something better of the inherited atrocity. To be sure, a cephalophoric leader could be no better than the acephalic, now holding up the head as proof of martyrdom (how I’ve suffered for you), reconciliation (I know you were mad when you cut off my head, but I forgive you and come back whole and wholly different, ready for hope and change), or permanence (cut my head off, it won’t do any good, you’re stuck with me, foolish sheep).
And so the requisite fourth here, and the possible way for black metal out of its stalemate of wishing to lose its head even while it won’t let it go, is the cephalophoric group. Headless one and all, they hold heads aloft, not sure to whom each belonged in the first place. Removed, yes, but redistributed: the general intellect and spheres of abstraction are severed decisively from their “natural” connection, and then turned to other ends. Of course, black metal doesn’t reach here. It remains the stumbling din, and the bad faith of a rational proclamation of irrational singularity, of the acephale who knows better. The question held out in front of us, like a disjointed head, is what can be gained and seen otherwise, the sight and praxis to be found in becoming wrong-headed, one and all.
But to speak of beheading, we must ask: what happens to the head? And whose was it to start? For the acephale (the headless) is the ground of black metal, its fundamental and unstable condition, but also what dooms it to both its fascism-in-spite-of-itself and to the lingering sense of the bad faith to not follow through on its convictions. The acephale needs to be taken as a first gesture, not as a permanent condition. Not in order to recuperate or excuse, neither to denigrate nor to valorize, but to see that the act of becoming headless opens the way for the second gesture, that of the cephalophore, the head-bearer, the one defined not by the condition of being without head but by the act of picking the head back up.
“Head” here should be taken in its full range, for the acephalic is a fantasy both of the leaderless (the “body” of the people rules alone, brought about by that revolutionary act of beheading the sovereign, materially or in principle) and of the irrational (headless, the body rules in its singularity and decides on the basis of the affective, and phenomenal, taking on unreason as its shared principle). As such, the acephalic condition of black metal must surpass itself and extend this to a total condition. It isn’t enough to remove the leader and imagine the hard collective – of cold Northern sovereigns to be – merely touched by this act of negation, for the outcome is one of three inevitabilities:
1. Resubmission to the bellicose repetition of the act (which is perhaps fine with black metal, at its most raging-in-place).
2. A slide toward the directionless muddled chaos of a crowd of loners.
3. Most disturbingly and more determinately fascist, the elevation of a new leader capable of both retroactively verifying the absent and deferred integration of the mass, as well as yoking concretely together the necessarily linked and distanced practices of politics and aesthetics.
In other words, the crowd itself must not only sever all. It must also pick up the pieces after. And more than that, to realize that the destructive undercurrent of this is above all an affective stance and an aesthetic tendency. The heads are already severed, reason cast to the ground. Black metal makes appear as decision what is in truth a general state of affairs, not just of its imagined post-apocalypse but of the systemic chaos and non-direction of the contemporary world. Hence the performative theatricality: the head already removed, the axe’s swing is a magician’s trick, tracing the negative space there all along between the body and the head.
For to remain in the acephalic is to rest in one of two unacceptable options, each of which can then go in one of two ways.
There can be an acephalic leader, which means either heterogeneous sovereignty (the elevation of a singular, irrational, decisionist leader to prop up the whole collapsing sphere of homogeneous and ordered life) or that crowd of individuals against rational leadership only because it is the wrong kind of rational leadership (i.e. liberal, plural, “diverse” and contemporary, rather than something more metal, European, singular, and ancient).
And there can be an acephalic crowd, either stuck in waiting for a properly headed leader to emerge and give direction, or caught in riotous, irrational, affective bloodbath, stumbling and flailing around, confusing an attack on totality with an attack on everything and anything within reach, wounding itself as it goes.
But despite its recurrent anti-intellectualism and penchant for uncritical reenactment of stale dark vitalist tropes, black metal is smarter than it thinks. Appropriately for its Satanic grounding, it shares much with the integral atheism of de Sade: to take on abstraction and the generic, you have to do so on its own terms. In other words, you can’t afford to throw away the head. It must be picked up, made open use of. Not to resuture a lost order to the mediated despair of the present, not t0 stitch the head back on. Rather, to make its absence and dislocation visible, to make something better of the inherited atrocity. To be sure, a cephalophoric leader could be no better than the acephalic, now holding up the head as proof of martyrdom (how I’ve suffered for you), reconciliation (I know you were mad when you cut off my head, but I forgive you and come back whole and wholly different, ready for hope and change), or permanence (cut my head off, it won’t do any good, you’re stuck with me, foolish sheep).
And so the requisite fourth here, and the possible way for black metal out of its stalemate of wishing to lose its head even while it won’t let it go, is the cephalophoric group. Headless one and all, they hold heads aloft, not sure to whom each belonged in the first place. Removed, yes, but redistributed: the general intellect and spheres of abstraction are severed decisively from their “natural” connection, and then turned to other ends. Of course, black metal doesn’t reach here. It remains the stumbling din, and the bad faith of a rational proclamation of irrational singularity, of the acephale who knows better. The question held out in front of us, like a disjointed head, is what can be gained and seen otherwise, the sight and praxis to be found in becoming wrong-headed, one and all.
From dead of winter to a grip of frost
A fitting song for the day. Not enough snow here, but rumor has it, play this loud enough through a speaker made of abandoned elk bone, and a storm will come.
Mutual blackening goes digital
In the burnt tundra aftermath of the Hideous Gnosis symposium, documents float to the putrid surface like so many buoyant corpses borne aloft by Luciferian eels. Or something like that. Thanks to Nicola for all the work on this, and keep an eye for the volume to emerge from it, with writing from me and the other usual suspects on this, plus surprise appearances from the likes of Eugene Thacker and Reza Negarestani.
The headless horsemen of the apocalypse
[unfortunately couldn't make the black gathering of Hideous Gnosis, but I was present in absentia. Here's my contribution...]
At its raspy start, black metal begins with the obscene purity of the end: with Pure Fucking Armageddon, the title of Mayhem’s first demo from 1986. Of course, black metal never really begins. It’s always been out of time, eternally out of joint with a world it hates, even as it cannot leave that world behind. But if we take one among many points of departure, it may as well be this one, from the good old dark days, a declaration of where to go from there. The name itself is a founding gesture, and we take it as such, as a formal template and an injunction to be fulfilled: black metal will be pure fucking Armageddon. Or, to specify, it will operate beneath that constitutive fantasy, and it will be constituted by how it keeps reproducing its distance from such a fantasy. That is, it promises itself as pure and as Armageddon, even as it dismantles any possibility of ever being either. Rather, it is impure fucking apocalypse. (As for the fucking issue, that remains spot-on and relatively uncomplicated. To follow Sargeist, it’s the difference between “black murder” and “Black Fucking Murder.” It is one of BM’s great modifiers, endlessly recombined to specify the blackness and metalness of things, ranking up there with necro, grim, dark, cold, Northern, pestilent, Satanic, and in certain periods, Carpathian and Transylvanian.)
At its raspy start, black metal begins with the obscene purity of the end: with Pure Fucking Armageddon, the title of Mayhem’s first demo from 1986. Of course, black metal never really begins. It’s always been out of time, eternally out of joint with a world it hates, even as it cannot leave that world behind. But if we take one among many points of departure, it may as well be this one, from the good old dark days, a declaration of where to go from there. The name itself is a founding gesture, and we take it as such, as a formal template and an injunction to be fulfilled: black metal will be pure fucking Armageddon. Or, to specify, it will operate beneath that constitutive fantasy, and it will be constituted by how it keeps reproducing its distance from such a fantasy. That is, it promises itself as pure and as Armageddon, even as it dismantles any possibility of ever being either. Rather, it is impure fucking apocalypse. (As for the fucking issue, that remains spot-on and relatively uncomplicated. To follow Sargeist, it’s the difference between “black murder” and “Black Fucking Murder.” It is one of BM’s great modifiers, endlessly recombined to specify the blackness and metalness of things, ranking up there with necro, grim, dark, cold, Northern, pestilent, Satanic, and in certain periods, Carpathian and Transylvanian.)
Above all, black metal is war. It is fought under the banner of a desired final war to come: the striving march from impure apocalypse of the present to the pure Armageddon of the end. To leave behind the messiness and imprecision of the Now, not by dreaming about the future but through a constant return to buried antagonisms (i.e. Satan’s alternate history of the world, flammable churches, pagan knowledge, ancestral legacies). To become a fierce and directed manifestation of shared hatred toward the assumed positivity of what the order of the day is (i.e. Christianity, liberal democracy, multi-nationalism, warm weather, false metal). And above all, to know finally, once and for all, what the hell to do with that hellish hatred of the present.
What is the difference between apocalypse and Armageddon? Apocalypse is a mode of vision, a process, a revelation of what is hidden, of the unclear, of the undifferentiated. To be properly black metal about it all, if the veil is lifted, the revelation is of the cursed impure that could not be grasped in this rational order. A black sun casts different light, and the growing shadows reveal only what has been hidden in plain sight all along. Consequently, apocalypse is not the end but the beginning of the end. In revealing the hidden, it starts the process of resorting, reorienting, struggling through the mess of what has been shown and now won’t go away. The apocalypse leads to the post-apocalypse. Contrary to this, Armageddon is the site of the terminal end. It is not the end itself (not the eschaton), but the battlefield on which the final confrontation will be fought between the differentiated enemies, now clear and “pure” in their opposition.
What does this have to do with black metal, or with Mayhem’s demo title as a founding gesture? It is to think of black metal as a battlefield from the start, as a phenomenal working through of that imagined site, that promised zone of contestation where the contemporary world is swept away to confront the old antagonisms. But against its endless stated reiterations, the battlefield – and the war itself – is not purified location of Armageddon. It is rather the total messiness of the impure apocalypse and the strewn landscape. A total, unceasing war not between enemies grouped on opposite sides of the final Two, but a war to try and draw forth a Two, to rediscover the possibility of antagonism and movement in the permanent fog and jumble of the present.
So stands black metal, pulled in two again and again, without enlightenment or escape. Composed of antinomies that do not, against all odds, cancel each other out. It is a blurring, buzzing, necessarily late 20th century electric mess (the howling sound of global infrastructure and transmission), but it can only think itself as the cruel and nostalgic articulation of a local heritage of ancient earth and cold blood. And it is the strident forging of the horde’s shared total enmity, yet which can only make itself appear as the individualistic work of loner devotees of Satan with too many crossbows and a love of strolling in the woods. In other words, pulled somewhere between a willingness to be unapologetic enemies of what the world has become, a deep and arcane goofiness riddled with stone-faced mediocre nationalism, a sonic blast, and a melancholia of the unwanted, black metal takes formless shape. Bellicosity and dysphoria, raging mess and lost purity.
The point of this investigation isn’t to redeem this or iron out its contradictions. It certainly isn’t to separate the musical wheat from the crypto-Fascist chaff. Rather, to dwell in the utter overdetermination and to start to grasp, as black metal itself does raggedly, what can never be separated or cleared away. Black metal is the failure of dialectical reason, and for that reason, it is a razor sharp capture of the stuck-record world it rejects. All that cohabits impossibly cannot be separated, and it therefore must be a site of war, a contested site of destruction without clean-up or resolution. That which is negated sticks around in its own negation, and it starts to reek. Restless decay that does not fade away, but only gets louder. Nihil unbound and bound to fail.
What, then, is black metal if not totality itself: overdetermination that does not cancel out, the impossible whole that lumbers on? Following Ben Noy’s application of the logic of the partisan (according to which the “bad partisan” produces the end of discernible enemies by making enmity absolute and universal), this bellum omnium contra omnes is not a war between discrete individuals all against all. It is the war fought between two totalities, between black metal’s endless antagonism and liberal capitalism’s eternal present.
The condition on which black metal is staked is that of militancy, of how to transition from melancholic dejection of the Now to furious rejection in the name of Then (as interstitial moment of lost pagan battle or future Ragnarok). The lyrics of Vordr’s “From Ruins to Victorious Triumph,” screeched over its D-beat stomp and churning fuzz, precisely map this envisioned arc. From “I do not care / For the earthly pleasures / Of humanity / I couldn't care less / I couldn't care less” to “Along with the unseen / I shall rise / From ruins to victorious triumph / My time is yet to come.” This may start with the frosty and properly misanthropic turn away from the accepted sphere of the human, yet it still remains trapped in the potential realm of the petulant bedroom shut-in, the dysphoric who dwells in the petty pleasures of feigning disinterest in the earthly sphere. That is, who prefers to stay home and out of the fray. The point of transition is truly apocalyptic: to rise with the “unseen”, the impure, the undifferentiated. It begins in the ruins, not in the lyrical twilight solitude of the allegorical death’s head but from the ruined ground, if not from farther below, and the accumulated broken weight of past struggle and constant failure.
To move toward a temporary conclusion, from this sense of the where, I venture three further questions about this war of fractured and antinomian totality. When does it take place? Who is fighting and leading the battle? What kind of war is it?
To start with the temporal dimension, the when of the war: black metal is the restaging of a past war that was to have been yet which missed its chance. (The beginning of the end that didn’t take, the failed start.) If, returning to that Vordr line, “my time is yet to come,” black metal hinges on the incapacity – and fury at that incapacity – of that time ever coming to be. Apocalyptically, it is caught between imminent and immanent eschaton: it predicts and describes a final battle, yet it grasps that final battle as one which has been there all along. Out of this noisy deadlock, it reaches in one of two directions. Either it hails toward a past that wasn’t there (the time of lost telluric tradition, to be approached gnostically or through embedded folk traditions), or it approaches a stance outside of human time (the sublime of Nature, the atemporal adversity of Satan, the anti-thought of nothing itself). Either the nostalgia of degraded purity, or the purity of the concept of the inhuman itself. What binds the two together, even as it remains beyond the explicit purview of black metal thought, is an underground awareness that the banality and brutality of the contemporary world is both intolerable and inescapable. And furthermore, that it is far worse than any necrotic pestilential midnight hell swarm ever conjured by Norwegians. Therein the desperation of black metal vocals: it’s just the howl of the thought that this is both the worst of all possible worlds and the only possible world. The point, then, is to find a mode of virulent resistance and acid bath negativity, and it can only ever come from afar. Not from the immanent same of the present, not from the imminent difference of the future, but from an absent past.
Who fights this war, and who leads them? Despite the constant lip service to the affective portrait of the loner individual, we should venture the contrary: black metal has no individuals, and it has no leaders. At times, it has nations, folklores, heritages, and kingdoms. It has pasts. But above all, it has that corrosive negativity which takes as its first target the very individualism black metal reifies. This is no ideological swindle or disavowal. It is there in relentless repetition of the imagery (hordes, legions, swarms, armies of the night, cults, fasces), and it is there in the music, in the sheer nihilistic impurity of the din, crushing the possibility of any individual sustaining itself as a discrete positivity. The war by the human in the name of the inhuman devours the former. And no one can lead, no one deserves such a reward of being worth a damn in the face of it all. Instead, it is the sovereignty of the partisan group, the collected enemies of the world. In this way, despite its moronic and frequent attempts to be Fascist and despite the fact that we should ourselves wage total war against all such attempts, it never can be. It is perhaps always marked by its tainted proximity and distance from it, the negative term persisting even in absence: all non-Nazi black metal is still NSNSBM (not so National Socialist black metal). But its contested and scarred ground remains the battlefield of the impure and the undifferentiated. It can never leave this, and it doesn’t want to. If we do talk about blood and land, it can only be a feeling of blood, a cold comportment against the warm torpor of the capitalist present, not a genetic coldness shared by the northern tribes. And it can only be a land to be taken en masse, not to be rescued from a untainted past. Black metal dreams a sovereign, and, in the next breath, severs his head to spatter the blood across all. What remains are the headless horsemen of the apocalypse, the acephalic leaders of a chiefless crowd marching off to permanent war.
Finally, what kind of war? It is the war of totality against itself. Always caught mid-flight, black metal is the negative insistence: no transcendence, no redemption, no revelation. Yet this negation does not hack and slash open a clear spot on Armageddon’s planes. It does not allow for apocalyptic krisis, the clarity of separation and judgment, or for the understanding of what the battle has been about from the start, the secret history of the world made bloody well clear. Black metal is the obsessive yearning lunge toward such clarity, and it is the abortive impossibility of reaching it. What is all this desire for, and talk about, purity but the mislocation of real lust for clarity, for knowing who your enemies are? Because it knows, with imperfect gnosis, that the enemy is something immense and diffuse, and so it becomes that enemy itself, singing of the far-off End’s clarity with the voice of autophagic contradiction.
And so it is sonically. It is a static war, restless and bristling, but it is also a war of static. A war both by and against static: the buzzing howl nearly drowned out in the constant growl of late capitalist totality. For despite its hailing back to the absent origin, black metal is the sound – and politics, for there is no divorcing of the two – of this infernal and eternal present turned up and back on itself. It is feedback literalized. The pickups register, amplify, and ramp up to overdriven fever pitch all the circuits of the world order, the pathways of circulation, the electrified hum of production and calculation. And above all, the inhuman voice of the once-human nearly lost in the roar.
Black metal brings out the deadlock that was there from the start, between individuation and totality, and between a principle of negativity and the inertia of the positive. If the condition on which black metal is staked is indeed that of militancy, its impossible solution is collective militancy: that alone can make the deadlock tremor. To strike a totality by becoming a negative totality together, not the smooth individual rods of a fascist bundle, but a storm and swarm of the anti. To take on the abortive passage of the apocalyptic as a mandate and injunction, not to do right, but to do wrongly to a wrong world. Never to fall into sadness or dejection at the prospect, but to rage with joy. The crooked grin of the misanthrope who finds his grim horde, the smile hidden behind the shared illusion of non-pleasure. And above all, to do this together. To become totally singular and negatively universal is to take on the acephalic mess that we are and to undo the idiocy of any nostalgia for a purer time. Only from there do we forge Luciferian, not Satanic, collectivity: knowing very well that we can’t take the throne, and doing it all the same. There’s a reason that it isn’t Wolf in the Throne Room. It’s Wolves, that strident, impure, unwanted pack of inhuman negativity, the absent crown shattered into knives for and against all.
Turning a blind ear (NSNSBM)
A comment discussion from an older post is worth posting in full here, as it's a gesture toward explaining a bit about - and raising perhaps more fully the deep problems of - what it means to listen to and really love a cultural mode (black metal, i.e. BM) with a frequently fascistic politics, ranging from implicit to very, very explicit. Any thoughts on any this are seriously welcome, as any explanation I might give doesn't take away my persistent uneasiness. I know some of you also have my same combination of far left politics with a cultural taste that includes some seriously fascistic (with the caveat that we again need a better conception of the gap between fascist aesthetics per se and culture that espouses fascist politics) culture, some misconstrued as such (I think here of certain attacks on Brutalism), some rightfully designated as so.
The anonymous commenter asked:
This is indeed a great album [the album in question is Peste Noire's Ballade Cuntre lo Anemi Francor, about which I've written a bit - S a/o B], 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.
My very short answer is four-fold, aside from saying that the Goatmoon/Deleuze combo sounds awful for more than a few reasons. (What I say below also leaves out my real interest in the politics of misanthropy itself, and the ways in which certain misanthropic aesthetics have tended to marshal the signifiers of the 20th century's nastiest modes and moments.)
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 not-so-hidden din of the dangerous ideological constructions of our era and the way in which they prop up systemic and structural violence against massive portions of the global population. Yet we rarely tend to agonize if we listen to a bit of pop fluff, now and then, however ironically. This isn't to excuse the stated politics of BM whatsoever, simply to question the investment of our anxiety. (And I write this as someone who has a great deal of love for some pop music genres, particularly certain hip hop and old Memphis soul, and who has little interest in attacking pop for being pop. That said, 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 self-consuming 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 (National Socialist black metal) from what we might call NSNSBM (not so National Socialist black metal). However, this perhaps only attenuates the sense of listening to something that bristles with the wrong kind of hate. And hence, perhaps, is all the worse, letting us turn a blind ear to what we suspect, correctly, is going on just below the buzzing surface.
Third and this I delay for a far longer post, much of black metal that is secessionist, telluric, and insistent on the autonomy of local zones (things behind which many of us could get, at least in a non right wing militia or intelligent design teaching school district form) gets lumped in with the real NSBM, or at least the muddled and murky pond of ethnic/racial nationalisms on which a large amount of BM depends for its lyrical content. There is a major difference between a simple hailing - or heiling - of your proud white frosty nation and attempting to preserve local cultural traditions and historical figures of anti-imperial rebellion. (This is not to assume that there is a very messy hinterland between these two tendencies.)
Fourth, 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.
"Satan has nothing to do with this"
New interview, and they don't happen very often, with Sale Famine from French black metal band Peste Noire, who makes some of the best off-kilter carnival joy and anthemic buzz to date, well-described in the interview as "carefree and sardonic". He also says things which range from the more standard (bullshit racial determinism, shout-outs to Satanic perversity, anti-internet "fuck the scenesters" rhetoric, and serious pride in one's medieval heritage) to the more unusual, which here would include an explanation of his fondness for nihilistic gangster rap, the connections between boy scout hazing and Satanism, and an explanation of why his belief in ecologism and feminism are precisely the reasons for his "right-wing views and ethno-nationalism."
(Thanks to Ben for sending this my way)
"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.
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.
Wolv(erin)es of Blood & Iron
In case anyone was wondering what the ideal type is for black metal covers, Finland's Satanic Warmaster (whose name is pretty flawless as well), a BM horde consisting of only one member (Satanic Tyrant Werewolf), nails it all the way through the spectrum.
From the terroristic stance replete with weapons (although not nostalgic spears, meaning that we've moved beyond early 90's Satyricon releases), Nazi-echo names (though Mr. Werewolf denies any NS leanings, he just enjoys mining the bleak depths of European history, à la Laibach), obligatory inverted crosses, black and white photography, and indiscernible nationalistic-seeming eagle resting on... that's right, a black nimbus encircling the balaclava-clad hed of our protagonist...
... to your standard heavily inscribed logo with a photo of Werewolf in the BM equivalent of bling (nail sleeves and an inverted-cross chain) in his corpse-painted glory in, where else, a dark forest to...
... to a wolverine behind a tree. I love the sincerity of this (and his tongue poking out, presumably at the decaying hull of the Christian faith). Wolverines are cold-dwelling nasty creatures capable of waging war on you. Apparently, this little fellow is capable not only of biting your shins, but of doing so as a satanic warmaster of the night.
From the terroristic stance replete with weapons (although not nostalgic spears, meaning that we've moved beyond early 90's Satyricon releases), Nazi-echo names (though Mr. Werewolf denies any NS leanings, he just enjoys mining the bleak depths of European history, à la Laibach), obligatory inverted crosses, black and white photography, and indiscernible nationalistic-seeming eagle resting on... that's right, a black nimbus encircling the balaclava-clad hed of our protagonist...... to your standard heavily inscribed logo with a photo of Werewolf in the BM equivalent of bling (nail sleeves and an inverted-cross chain) in his corpse-painted glory in, where else, a dark forest to...
... to a wolverine behind a tree. I love the sincerity of this (and his tongue poking out, presumably at the decaying hull of the Christian faith). Wolverines are cold-dwelling nasty creatures capable of waging war on you. Apparently, this little fellow is capable not only of biting your shins, but of doing so as a satanic warmaster of the night.
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