Black Metal Theory

http://www.lintellettualedissidente.it/musica/theoria-e-praxis-del-black-metal-parte-i/

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal TheoryIssue 3: Bleeding Black Noise. Winter 2016. Edited by Amelia Ishmael 

Issue 3: Table of Contents. 

Editors’ Preface

Amelia Ishmael

Untitled

Alessandro Keegan

Black Noise: The Throb of the Anthropocene

Susanne Pratt

Dead Body of a Performance

Michaël Sellam

Vocal Distortion

Simon Pröll

1558–2016

Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert

Distraction

Bagus Jalang

Leaving the Self Behind

Nathan Snaza

Excerpts from z/w/a/r/t24 and Z/W/A/R/T Magazine 5

Max Kuiper

False Atonality, True Non-tonality

Bert Stabler

Untitled

Faith Coloccia

Nonevent: Grotesque Indexicality, Black Sites, and the Cryptology of the Sonorous Irreflective in T.O.M.B.

Not to be confused with metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, Black Metal Theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that count as Black Metal events — and indeed, to see how Black Metal might count as thinking. Theory of Black Metal, and Black Metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Therefore, we eschew any approach that treats theory and Metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on “some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo.”

Issue 2 focuses on the theme of Inversions in Black Metal. Nailed at the heart of many a logo, suspended from the neck, held out in Satanic blessing: the inverted cross is one of black metal’s anti-icons. The antithesis of a revelation of light, it signifies an originary blasphemy. Forsaking ascension and mining a path towards the centre of the earth, black metal finds a satanic stain lodged at the core of being. However, the significance of this movement is not bound by a simple reversal. The inverted cross hangs above a swarming logic of inversion: the overturning of Christianity, but also a mimesis of Christian self-desecration; the rejection of certain forms of religion, but also of modernity’s pallid enlightenment; the invocation of strange gods of the earth, even as the earth is cursed. When thought becomes poison, it is no longer so easy to determine which way is up and which way is down. To throw down one’s head, to push oneself into the cursed earth, to occupy the place of the inverted crucified: is this to think-by-not-thinking an unconditioned rapture beyond negation and affirmation?

Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology. Ed. Scott Wilson. Winchester: Zero, 2014.

Melancology addresses the notorious musical genre black metal as a negative form of environmental writing that ‘blackens’ the cosmos. This book conjures a new word and concept that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. Black metal resounds from the abyss and it is precisely only in relation to its sonic forces that the question of intervention in the environment arises in the articulation of melancology with ethics. That is, in deciding ‘which way out’ we should take, in deciding with what surpluses to dwell, with what waste, what detritus or decay in a process of unbinding with sonic forces that traverse an earth choking in wealth and death. The book thus provides a provocative and challenging contribution both to popular and intellectual debates on ecology.