Black Metal Rainbows

… Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I, 2010

react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture, 2022

Metal Music Studies, 2021

(no abstract printed) While it may be tempting to some listeners to hear the album Metallica (1991) as watered-down metal and excise it from the genre, this album is not peripheral to metal music studies. Metallica’s ‘Black Album’ played a key role in creating a new archetype of American rock/metal music and masculinity. It may have had the most impact outside of the truest, most conservative, underground styles, but metal-influenced rock is just as important to the legacy and status of metal. Perhaps even more so given that some of these rock-oriented bands have larger audiences than any metal group. The album influenced the American alternative metal scene and metal bands now linked to the alt-right; both are part of the history and legacy of metal. Even if we as individual scholars or fans would not embrace either of these developments, we must devote more effort to examining them if we wish to understand metal’s evolving shape and place and influence in society.

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2013

This essay illuminates the construction of a newer, blacker, and heavier recollection of metal’s aesthetic potential. By analyzing recordings and popular press articles, and reading these through the historical and theoretical observations of academic metal studies, I argue that the precondition of 1990s black metal was the exhaustion of death metal aesthetics coinciding with the emergence of a more international metal scene. In the 90s, death metal—once undisputedly the heaviest of all metals—had become unspectacular, too familiar, and as a result less heavy. Innovating a sound heavier than death entailed a subcultural reorientation towards recordings forgotten under death metal’s hegemonic moment. In retracing black metal’s sonic origins, one finds that one of the most remarkable things about its success was that black metal had previously been the sound of amateurism, incompetence, and failure. The following essay examines how such an aesthetic turn takes place.

The emergence of Black Metal in Scandinavia in the early 1990s as a genre with pronounced ideological commitments to anti-Christian sentiments and Norwegian nationalism arose as a response to what the young, brash early Black Metal musicians saw as a puritanical, oppressively Christian social democratic state. As heavy metal grows and spreads at a global level, the established metal genres maintain a consistency in sounds while local variations on a theme alter their styles as they are conceived. In metal’s proliferation and with the ever-increasing sheer abundance of metal to listen to, many bands simply echo what has come before them, as can be seen in the advent of ‘retro’ bands and genres; even when not a trend, for some genres mimicry is the normal state of things. However, some bands in the American Black Metal scene seek to innovate the genre as a whole by creating a distinctly American sound influenced by its roots in this different context.

Metal Music Studies

react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture, 2022

A visual analysis of English black metal (EBM) reveals a mythologised imagining of the nation. This imagery pervades EBM, and the surrounding narratives of ancient tribal history authenticate and affirm notions of a fixed ethnicity. ‘White’ is asserted as the naturalised national identity and domination is authenticated by narratives of ‘origin’ based on the ancient past. The invention and mythologisation of tradition is based upon an essentialist notion of national heritage, which has the potential to legitimise an idealised exclusionary ethnic identity. As such, the political positioning of EBM bands is highly contested, both amongst the musicians and the fans; this has led to the categorisation of some as examples of National Socialist Black Metal. This paper will reflect upon a collaborative project involving EBM musicians, which was undertaken as part of my practise-led research into the construction of English identities in composition. This project reframed EBM within the context of a multi-media performance. It explored the ambiguous elements of EBM (interchangeable notions of English/British/Northern European identities), and the seemingly contradictory influences present in the music (e.g. the assertion of ‘whiteness’ through a style rooted in black music, and the influence of medieval (church) music alongside pagan elements). This study will examine the idea of power in metal, and the potential for applying Foucauldian theory as a framework for exploring power relations within composition. This will facilitate a discussion of the combination of myth-making and power, which authenticates and empowers an overtly masculine ‘white’ identity in EBM.

Ethnologhia On Line 12, 2022

The article, based on ethnographic research, discusses the creation of an album that belongs to the musical subcategory of medieval black metal. The creator of the album, Christos D., re-imagines, recreates, and presents medieval peasant traditions of resistance and revolt in his Mystras project, but through the perspective of the rebels and not through the official descriptions of the events as written by medieval authorities who belonged to the victorious sides. To achieve this, the artist referred to folklore and traditional song; he wanted to illustrate that, if these two are used within an accurate historical context, they highlight a completely different picture of medieval times than the one usually depicted in black metal, where a white, homogeneous, and noble medieval Europe is constantly portrayed as part of ethnocentric ideologies and reactionary agendas. Folklore and traditional song become ideological “weapons” in Mystras that symbolise that just as the peasants of medieval times revolted against injustice and oppression, so should the artists and audience exclude and eliminate far-right ideologies from black metal.