Friday 24 April 2009 at 7:40 pm
Originally inspired by the National Day of Prayer that religious groups created to draw attention to their beliefs, the National Day of Slayer was thought to be a holiday on June 6, 2006 -- that's 6/6/06 -- but now it has grown.
http://www.nationaldayofprayer.org/
Thanks to support and enjoyment around the world, the National Day of Slayer is now the INTER-National Day of Slayer, and it happens every year on June 6 starting at hour six. On this day, metalheads worldwide stop the pointless activities of a boring world and listen to Slayer.
International Day of Slayer is bigger than one nation, or even one band. It's a celebration of metal music through one of its most articulate spokesbands. It's also revelry in the spirit that makes metal great. So on June 6, stop everything... and listen to SLAYER!
http://www.nationaldayofslayer.org/
Saturday 18 April 2009 at 4:23 pm
I was goofing off on the internet the other day and saw some commentary on the popularity of this meme:
tl;dr
Then, as I slogged through the latest round of promos tonight, another one came to mind:
dm;wr
It describes the black metal I'm hearing now that isn't utter crap. It's not bad, but it's on the high end of mediocrity instead of the low end of genius. As a result, my thoughts on it can be summarized as
Didn't mind; wouldn't reach for it again.
Hence, dm;wr -- didn't mind, wouldn't reach.
Wednesday 15 April 2009 at 11:45 am
Once upon a time, black metal had a mystical component. Its bands tried to write songs about an idea, and shied away from writing songs that were variations on a known form.
This is a split as big as the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning for rock music, which got popular because it's easy for anyone to make a variant on a template. That way, everyone could participate.
People now like to act as if black metal is still a mystical genre. They take themselves seriously, use ancient and blasphemous language, and claim grand importance for CDs that sell to 50 people who can't tell them apart from any of their other CDs.
There is no unity in the genre, just a lot of people using it for their own ends, namely to have something to do and some reason to claim they're important. "But I am Gezagorath of Impietorturous Blasphemic Anal Mayehm!"
I think it's time to just declare it rock 'n roll. It's no longer far from rock music in structure or theory; it's variations on the pop song format with pentatonic solos, minor/major shifting, and three-chord riffs about the same handful of tired symbols. Not even grandmothers are frightened by Satan and corpsepaint anymore.
It's also changed in outlook. It used to be the genre of the frontier, of singing about that which was both lawless and a terrifying confrontation with mortality, but also permitted exploration outside the narrow-minded humanist herd mentality. Now people say blatantly humanistic things to keep their music safe, and wonder why we're all bored.
Yep, it's just all rock 'n roll to me now. I don't see the point pretending the post-1994 black metal is anything more than another variation on hardcore punk, a genre which also lost its mystique and got really normal only a few years after blossoming.
Everyone can participate, and so there is nothing mysterious or unusual about black metal now. We need to start treating it like any other rock or punk music, and stop posturing and pretending we're true to some ideal that ended long ago. Burn all the idols, not just the convenient ones.
Either you make music to communicate something unique, in which case form is shaped by substance, or you make music to fit within the form that's popular, in which case substance is shaped by form.
The paradox is that all substance comes from observing the world, not from within the self (a form), so the only substance comes from reality itself. Songs about self-motivations are about the form of human beings, not the profundity of life itself. They're narcissistic and fall into the same problem as songs where substance is shaped by any other type of form.
Like hardcore punk before it, and speed metal and death metal, black metal fell into the trap of letting in the masses. At that point, the level of quality declined because the goal was inclusivity and not the art in itself. So now we have a lot of black metal that is basically dressed-up garage rock.
The solution is to be intolerant of weak metal. If you love anything, don't coddle its failures. Instead, nurture its successes, even to the point of radicalism. Acceptance is another word for lower standards, and lowest common denominator genres converge on that optimal utilitarian pop style known as rock 'n roll.
Saturday 04 April 2009 at 9:09 pm
Scheduled for release on April 9,
Beherit Engram faces high expectations. Thanks to the generosity of some people devoted to art, we were able to hear six of the seven tracks on the new album, and get you a brief review.
Engram thrusts forward through the past in a return to form for black metal, but takes it to the next dimension past Burzum's
Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, which effectively ended black metal by taking it to ambient in the first place. Developing on the concepts shared between ambient music and metal,
Engram is really raw but intensely structured, with a deepening mood.
Instead of opting to make a black metal/ambient fusion,
Beherit combine the ideas of raw primitive ambient black metal with atmospheric music that works with the texture of sound more than discrete notes. Faster than
Drawing Down the Moon, it resembles the material from the Archgoat split given more structure and prismatic depth without losing its primitive gestalt. This is a smart way of not trying to reinvent black metal, but recontexting its riffs in such a way as to pick up where Burzum's
Hvis Lyset Tar Oss left off, which is an attempt to create a mood where one is barely aware that there's music but gets lost in the muscular clarity of a raw emotion reflecting a primal, naturalistic reality.
The use of repeated non-distorted motifs reminds me of Burzum's
Hlidskjalf as well. There's a clear Sarcofago influence, and something that sounds like a fusion between Bathory albums
The Return and
Octagon, sometimes augmented with a noisy, melodic cornering reminiscent of later Darkthrone. Like most
Beherit works, these songs uncannily grow on you like mysticism in the darkness.
Black metal has been so stale and boring for the last fifteen years, it's awesome to have something to look forward to with excitement again. This does not just rehash the past, but inherits it, and subtly develops its ideas consistenly and yet with creativity, moving to a new space for this music to flourish.
Engram may win you over surprisingly quickly; it's organized, has heart, and in the transitions of its dark moods tells us something for the ages about how to survive humanness with elan. Perhaps it is a template for the next generation of black metal.
01. Axiom Heroine
02. Destroyer of Thousand Worlds
03. All in Satan
04. Pagan Moon
05. Pimeyden Henki
06. Suck My Blood
07. Demon Advance
Length: 43:02
Spinefarm pre-order page
Saturday 04 April 2009 at 08:37 am
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it -- all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary -- but love it.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Why I Am So Clever" in Ecce Homo, section 10
This a great summation of Nietzsche's method; an outlook unswayed by the petty gusts of popular opinion, or
common knowledge, in pursuit of what is real, including acknowledging both the "ugly" and the "beautiful."
It is also essential to the approach taken by metal: recognize the world for what it is, pull no punches in describing it and use this relentlessly regardless of mere social consequences.
ATHEIST, one of death metal's most cosmically literate bands, seems to agree:
Another notch in a cosmic climb
Reveal our sanity, reveal your plan divine
To grasp reality is to grasp your biggest fear, you see
Every circumstance is very meant to be
- ATHEIST, "Piece of Time"
Thursday 02 April 2009 at 3:04 pm
Stealing depends on the intent of the downloader and the artist.
With death metal, for example, where 5000 CDs sold is an out-of-the-ballpark smash, artists love it when you download their music -- much of which is out of print. They gain fans; sometimes, enough fans leads to CDs being re-pressed.
If the artist wants to gain fans, and the downloaders want to buy the CD if they really connect with the music, the situation is good.
As with all downloads, there are some people who will never buy anything and will just leech. However, they weren't going to buy the CDs anyway. Leeches just leech. DRM doesn't stop them, but it does hassle ordinary users who might want a second copy of Deicide's "Legion" for the car or something.
In my view, downloading is a boon to small and niche genres with fanatical fans; it's a loss for big box store style pop genres, whose fans only care for novelty. Oh well -- the destruction of that music is a win for art :)
TechCrunch
Death metal never plays by the rules. People buy the music because it's eternal, not new. They want to own it so they never lose it, not because it's worth something outside of its enjoyment. And, almost everyone else hates it and thinks it's degraded noise made by failed reprobates. But luckily, not playing by the rules means you're outside the popularity leads to money and power game. Instead, you can focus on the art itself. That's transcendence of a kind.
