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Interview: Quorthon

Black metal and death metal legend Quorthon of Bathory took some time to answer our questions while he was busy recording the Nordland series of albums. Among all the interviews we've done, this may be the most focused and articulate, with one of the most passionately intelligent figures black metal has ever produced.
1. the dominant influences on the earlier bathory work appear to be venom and slayer. were you listening to other music at the time, including hardcore punk like discharge?
I think it is very easy for people to be making that kind of connotation, simply because those two acts in particular are perhaps among the first ones that comes to mind when the roots of extreme metal is being discussed. But actually, I have never owned a Venom or Slayer album. And I don't give a fuck if people believe that or not.

I know some people believe the change of style for BATHORY, in terms of the music and lyrics around 1988-1990, happened because we must have got turned on from Manowar. That's another total misconception. I have never owned a Manowar record. And I don't give a fuck if people believe that either. Not that it matters though.

I have of course heard Slayer (an act, which by the way does have all my respect for being original and for sticking to their roots in much of what they do). And I have heard a handful of tracks by Venom.

quorthon of bathory breathing fire in one of the most iconic images of black metalIn 1986-1988, BATHORY had a drummer who was heavily influenced by Manowar. He didn't enjoy any other type of metal, but he was somehow sold on Manowar. It wasn't like we decided to copy what they were doing. However, the typical heavy Manowar beat seemed to perfectly suit my new ideas for lyrics at the time. The way it came about was this; in an effort to get away from the whole "are they true satanists or not"-discussions that went on in the media at the time (sort of drawing the attention away from what was truly important, the music), I felt I wanted to replace the whole demonic & satanic bag with something that was pure from christian and satanic bullshit.

The pre-christian Scandinavian Viking and vendel era seemed perfect for lyrics and arrangements. Had BATHORY been a japanese act, we might as well have picked up the Samurai culture. Had we been an Italian act, it could easily have been the Roman empire era. Now, we happened to be a Swedish act and the Viking and Vendel era seemed exciting in terms of writing music and lyrics. The heavy Manowar beat that this one-time BATHORY drummer came up with one day in the rehearsal place, is a Manowar contribution. But I wonder if that's enough to be called a source of inspiration or influence.

My personal reason for forming BATHORY was I wanted to create a mix of the atmosphere of early Black Sabbath, the energy of early Motörhead and the pace of early GBH. We were just three shit kids coming out of school at the time, with absolutely no knowledge at all about any other acts. Remember, Metallica released their first album around the time we entered the studio for the first time. Slayer too released their first album at the same time. We were totally in the dark about any underground movement in Europe. It wasn't until way after we had already released our first album that we learned about tons of others acts in Europe and elsewhere playing basically the same type of primitive and dark extreme metal that we were making.

Around the time I formed BATHORY, I was listening a lot to an album by early GBH I believe was called "City baby in attack of the rats". We based half of BATHORY's initial sound and style on that GBH album. I may have listened to some Discharge, but I don't remember any of their songs or any of their titles anymore. The "Ace of Spades" and "Iron Fist" Motörhead albums also meant very much when we formed BATHORY. So did the first handful of Black Sabbath albums.

bathory has always stood above other bands by having a melody connected firmly to a rhythm in the anthemic style of most great metal bands. how did you learn to play guitar, and what methods do you have for conceptualizing the songwriting process?
I don't think I worry too much about whether to include a melody line or not in a song. That will come along in a natural fashion. I have always said that a song and a lyric writes itself. I really don't think too much about the actual writing, the arrangements or even the playing. It's second nature by now.

I don't know if having a melody line in a song would place BATHORY "above" other bands, but sure it does add something special to a song. Extreme noise and brutalities are always fun to do. But if you're trying to tell the audience a story, which we do a lot in BATHORY, I think a melody line will add atmosphere and personality to the story.

I don't see myself as a guitar player. I just use the guitar for writing songs. I may use the bass or a piano when writing other times.

I always write the music first. The lyrics will be added at a very late stage. The mood of the music will determine what the lyrics are to be about. Very seldom will I change anything in a song just because the lyrics might have turned a certain way. In the end it all works out somehow. It puzzles me as much as anybody else.

on "blood, fire, death" an epic sound is present through the use of longer songs with greater symbolic significance to their movements and motifs. what inspired this change from the dark, heavy and primitively simple music of "under the sign of the black mark"?
Probably from reading biographies on masters like Wagner and Beethoven and their works. I began to listen to classical music shortly after forming BATHORY, and from 1985-1986 it was all I would listen to. I had been playing various types of rock in various constellations since 1975, so picking up Wagner, Beethoven, Haydn and others really broadened my musical awareness extensively. The motif signature naturally comes from the world of opera.

Around 1986, I realised we were actually just writing albums full of religious hocus-pocus, satanic rubbish and demonic crap. I was not a Satanist and knew absolutely nothing about occultism or demonic affairs, so I asked myself why should I really be writing about that shit. I mean, we actually got to make albums, so why not try something different. That's when the idea to bring the whole pre-christian Swedish Viking era into BATHORY came about. Not that I knew any more about that period in time, but it was at least a fresh source to draw stories from.

When people ask me today, if I am ever ashamed of the early albums and the lyrics they contained, my answer is "no". We're not ashamed of anything, we all go through stages in life when one thing may be cool for a period of time, and then something else comes along that inspires you in a different way.

Originally, we picked the whole demonic bag up because we didn't feel we could write the same sort of lyrics that the big boys would write. We didn't know shit about riding down the highway on a Harley, drinking whisky out of the bottle while fondling all these loose women. We knew nothing about that life, so we picked up influences from the horror comics we had been reading while growing up, magazines like Vampirella and Shock, as well as all the horror movies we had watched as kids. It was all very innocent. I wouldn't have known the devil even if he jumped up to bite my ass.

"Thus if being-toward-death is not meant as an "actualization" of death, neither can it mean to dwell near the end in its possibility. This kind of behavior would amount to "thinking about death," thinking about this possibility, how and when it might be actualized. Brooding over death does not completely take away from it its character of possibility. It is always brooded over as something coming, but we weaken it by calculating how to have it at our disposal. As something possible, death is supposed to show as little as possible of its possibility. On the contrary, if being-toward-death has to disclose understandingly the possibility which we have characterized as such, then in such being-toward-death, this possibility must not be weakened, it must be understood as possibility, cultivated as possibility, and endured as possibility in our relation to it." -- M. Heidegger, "Being and Time"
do you think later bathory was aiming more toward being a progressive or epic heavy metal band, where early bathory had a good deal more punk/venom-style metal influence on it?
We didn't have any ambitions at all to be any of that. About being progressive or epic, we weren't thinking in those terms. It was just a natural evolution, it wasn't planned or calculated. It just happened. It is so very easy for people in the year 2002 to sit back and name certain periods and labelling people and bands. When you have history and all facts at hand, people tend to file and classify past in a way we never did 20 or 15 years back in time. My recommendation to anybody who has problems getting a good view of all the styles and sounds out there is "- Don't bother - just enjoy. It's just fucking metal."
how have your tastes changed across the years of making music?
Probably in much the same way we all change as people. We develop as we widen our perspectives. This is true for music as well. I'll listen to everything from Glenn Miller to The Beatles, from Wagner to Sex Pistols, from Nick Drake to Beethoven. I hardly ever listen to metal. The only metal I will listen to, is vinyl that I bought 20 or 30 years ago like Mountain, early Kiss, early Saxon, early Motörhead or early Black Sabbath. I haven't bought a metal CD in ten years. The last metal CD must have been Motörhead's "Overkill". The last CD I bought of any kind was last summer, George Harrison's "All things must pass (1971).
bathory at the time of 'blood, fire, death' in full regalia do you think that ideology changes the worldview of an artist, and that this is reflected in their music?
I have personally never allowed for any personal ideologies to influence my music or lyrics. For some years German metal media would say BATHORY was glorifying war and the holocaust in the lyrics. This is not true. We were writing about war and the holocaust in the very same way we were writing about all the other things we have written about; incest, the nuclear arms race, the world wars, the environmental issue, female BATHORY fans, serial killers, religion and fuck knows what else. In other words, as facts, not glorifying. I am not religious and have no political ideals, so for myself personally, writing lyrics is just painting with words and creating a scene.
black metal today has gone through a shaping process of which bathory was part. what do you think are bathory's contributions to the methodology of metal making?
I have absolutely no idea about what's going on out there. I am not going to shows, I do not read the metal media and I do not buy or listen to any modern metal albums of any kind. If you'd play me ten tracks by ten different top extreme metal acts I couldn't tell you what you're playing. I wouldn't be able to tell you where even one out of a hundred extreme metal bands comes from. People seem to believe that I have great knowledge and full view of the scene. I tell you, I know nothing. Nothing. Period.

The funny thing is, a lot of people insist that BATHORY's so called Viking period had a greater impact on today's Black Metal scene, than pure Black Metal of the early 80's. The good thing about evolution is that what's called Black Metal today, may not remind too much of what Black Metal was 20 years ago. Black Metal, Death Metal and all types of extreme metal, will develop further. The ones who get the most out of a diverse scene and constant evolution, is the audience.

As far as BATHORY's contribution is concerned, back in 1986-1991 we used acoustic guitars, harmony backing vocals, intros and outros as well as sound effects to create that specific BATHORY atmosphere. Many bands have been copying that so thoroughly in the past 10-15 years, I believe this special atmosphere itself could perhaps be our greatest contribution.

from what i heard of your solo work (band named "quorthon") it seemed you were moving into a genre where you could use the broad style of rock music to fit in a number of melodic but hookish pop songs. is this a return to your influences, or a changing of taste?
It's funny that some people actually believe that the solo records is what I really want to do and that I only kept on working with BATHORY because it would sell like crazy. This is not true. I have written everything from extreme brutal metal to string quartets, and neither of the solo albums I did gives a more true image of what my inner music is like than anything else I have written.

Everything on the first solo album was accidental. I had absolutely no ambitions or plans. What happened was, I said I wanted to take a year off from music. Then the record company told me that I perhaps should think about a solo record, just to keep myself active. Now, that's a very interesting situation. Not too many guys get to make a solo record. Myself, I had no idea what it would sound like. The offer to make a solo album was a challenge too exciting to ignore. So I wrote some pure guitar based crunchy metal rock material and went down a small studio for a week and a half. I brought with me a guitar, a bass and a drum machine with only one intention and that was to make a record that wasn't going to be anything like BATHORY. Not that I didn't like working with BATHORY, I just thought it was a good opportunity to "kill" the very erroneous image of "Quorthon" which had developed in fanzines and within the metal scene in general. People thought I was a neo-nazi satanic Viking who drank blood and ate infants, who lived in a bats cave in the north of Sweden and tons of other stupid things. I figured, if I produced a solo album that was miles from BATHORY, incorporating a little rock, blues and even punk, perhaps the most fanatic nut cases would be scared off.

The second solo album came about because people wrote me and said they were now very interested to see what I would come up with on a second solo record. So I wrote a lot of material, mixing The Beatles, Sex Pistols and Mountain plus punk. I have no plans for a third solo record, but having said that, I might just as well record a third solo album in future if I feel like it.

when you see bands today making black metal in the style of the nordic generation after 1987 (inspired by your "blood, fire, death" and sarcofago's "INRI" in my supposition) what do you see as the possible future directions for that style of music?
Like I said previously, I do not think in terms of "genuine" or "true" metal versus "not-so-genuine" or "untrue" metal. My philosophy is; the more versatile and innovative a scene is, the more the audience will get out of it. It would be a very poor testimony if a scene were to contain only one style of music played exactly the same way, with the very same type of lyrics and image and so on. I think it's more "posing" to be copying a certain style of clothing, wear make-up and use the exact same production as tons of other acts simply because it is the flavour of the day.

As far as the future of extreme metal is concerned, I do not worry at all. I know there will be tons of great bands in the future as well. The scene will be forever. There will be new names, new styles and new topics. The dark, evil and demonic will always be a part of the scene. The mythological themes will be there as well. I agree it would be interesting to see what else will happen as far as topics are concerned.

do you think the world is on the edge of great change? if so what will change, and what is forcing it to change (what needs to change)?
I really don't bother about the world or society at all. I'll be dead in 30-40 years and neither people, politics, religion or society interests me at all.
is the metal underground an effective way of distributing niche music according to its artistic integrity, or a justification for the kind of independent distribution needed to move relatively small numbers of CDs?
There's more than one way to look at the underground distribution; firstly it will allow for acts to target the very type of audience they're targeting specifically. Secondly, people interested in a specific type of music will be able to easily get a hold of very special CD's and vinyl through underground distribution network.

Let's face it, some extreme metal productions will never reach sales figures around 10 000-20 000 copies. A lot of acts will be happy to sell 5 000 or even 3 000 copies. With such a small quantity of CD's sold, few record companies, even pure metal companies will even touch certain bands. The underground will be able to distribute albums made during less expensive circumstances, albums that still will have a lot to offer in terms of interesting arrangements etc. So in that respect, I think that the underground is doing a pretty tremendous job.

But the underground is also exploited by pirates, assholes, haemorrhoids and parasites. There are more illegal BATHORY CD's circulating in the underground than genuine official BATHORY albums released. There's fake "BATHORY live albums" out there, I have heard of "Quorthon rehearsal" cassettes and "lost recordings" on CD, and this absurd list just goes on and on. I will occasionally email these mailorder companies and underground metal shops, and tell them that they are distributing BATHORY fakes and illegal crap. Also, I will tell them that not only are they violating international laws of copyright and publishing rights, they allow the bootlegging pirates and haemorrhoids to use their network for criminal purposes. That's not underground, that's theft and breach of trademark laws etc.

I have heard of some really awful quality bootleg BATHORY CD's and feel sorry for the fans that buy them for 15-25 dollars. All they get is crap quality copies of tracks released on our Jubileum volumes. The fans could easily just get the genuine thing from us directly. I came from the underground and I hurt like hell when I hear how young fans are being exploited this way. Any underground shop or mailorder dealer who will help in distributing bootleg crap is killing the underground.

do you have any spiritual beliefs, or strong ideological concerns?
Nope, not a glimpse of spirit in me at all.
it seems to me that most metal musicians start their lives more antagonistic to society as a whole, and eventually as they age begin to acknowledge the need for a society but a dissatisfaction with its design. do you have any comments here as general observations?
I am sure a lot of people will mature with age and realise down the road the need for a functioning society. But that probably has less to do with social awareness or a philanthropic pathos. It will have a lot more to do with the fact they're beginning to pay taxes and want to see some results for their money paid.
how do you compose a song and, how integral are the lyrics?
I will just strike a guitar riff and continue from there. If it sounds good enough to work on further, I'll write a song in an hour or so. A day, a week or a month later I may listen back to it and just taste a few words and see what comes out of it all. I rarely plan before writing a song what it should be about. All that will come along the process. I'll say it again, I think the music and lyrics writes itself. I'm just a tool used by the demons of music.
is "twilight of the gods" a rock opera in the style of the who, progressive bands from the 70s, etc?
I don't know where that rock opera thing came from. I guess people had no idea what to call that kind of heavy bombastic arrangements 10 years ago. It wasn't Black or Death Metal, so some people felt compelled to come up with some label for it. But to call it a rock opera is laughable. "Twilight" is no mot a theme album in any way, no track two off "Twilight of the Gods" has got anything to do with eachother, they are all individual tracks with totally different stories. "Requeim" is more a theme album than "Twilight", because it contains with the subject of death in all forms may it be suicide, murder, culture death, genocide or death in war or by cult.
how do you unwind/relax, or, what do you do for recreational purposes? (what do you enjoy besides music)
quorthon and bathory outside in purple I'll read a book or stride my Harley-Davidson motorcycles and go for a ride. I used to build a lot of plastic models, paint a lot or collect war memorabilia in the past but not as much these days.
is it possible to return to metal with a different style after one has become one of the founding names of a certain style?
Depends what you mean by "return to metal". I am the same metal underground shit kid today that I was 20 years ago. I'm still playing as brutal a guitar as I have been for 20 years. So it can't be that I've been all of a sudden sliding back into a metal slot for some reason. It's not like I have been travelling the world with a can-can orchestra since last time around.

I can't see what a "return to metal" should point to. If there's no BATHORY album out for a period of 5 years (as was the case between "Blood on Ice" and "Destroyer of Worlds"), some will call that a comeback. That's absurd. Just because you're not in people's face all the time, it's not a come back to have a new album out even if it's more than a year between it and the last release.

People are so stuck with labelling acts and individuals, calling things and circumstances by so many names and whats more just to make life easier for themselves to live, it makes me sick.

the odin mythos present in "blood on ice", "blood, fire, death", and "twilight of the gods" seems to derive inspiration from the nietzschean/jungian view of the human psyche and the culmination of some of its historical inabilities. do you think these ideas are gaining prevalence at this time, or becoming more obscure as society degenerates?
"Blood on Ice" was a saga based loosely on the Siegfried legend and an original story by Robert E Howard. The "Blood Fire Death" album really has nothing to do with Vikings at all except for the title of the track "Oden's ride over Nordland". But that's not really the issue. It's not important if an album or a track is or is not about this or that shit. The important thing is if it gives you the kick inside.

I think people see and hear more things then I really meant to put on them albums. The "Blood Fire Death", "Hammerheart" and "Twilight" albums has been linked together as the "viking-albums", the same way the first three albums "Bathory", The Return" and "Under the Sign" has been tied into a trio. I gave up years ago trying to talk people out of all that crap. It's just atmospheric metal, I don't really bother much about the depth or context etc.

I really don't remember why I picked some stuff up from Nietzche 10 years ago, I wasn't reading much by him. It may have been through Wagner. I think cults, theories and views of all sorts will exist in much the same way for as long as there are people around.

please insert any commentary on the questions, issues addressed, things missed in the interview, or general concluding remarks you may have.
We're just right now finishing a 14-15 track new album to be released in September/October this year. Look forward to it and take care.

Hail the hordes !

Quorthon

"In a sequence of words, i.e. by a chain of symbols, something new and greater is to be represented: rhythm, dynamics and harmony again become necessary on this level of expression. This higher sphere now governs the more limited sphere of the individual word; it becomes necessary to select words, to put them in a new order; poetry begins. The spoken melody of a sentence is not just the sequence of the sounds of the words; for a word has only a quite relative sound, because its character, the content presented by the symbol, varies according to its position. In other words: the individual symbol of the word is constantly being re-defined by the higher unity of the sentence and the character this symbolizes. A chain of concepts is a thought; in other words, this is the higher unity of the accompanying representations. The essence of the thing is inacessible to thought; the fact that it has an effect on us as a motive, as a stimulant of the will, can be explained by the fact that the thought has already become a remembered symbol for a manifestation of the will, for a movement and a phenomenon of the will in one. But when it is spoken, i.e. with the symbolism of sound, its effect is incomparably more powerful and direct. When it is sung, when melody is the intelligible symbol of its will, it reaches the summit of its effect; if this is not the case, it is the sequence of sounds which affects us, and the sequence of words, the thought, remains something distant and indifferent." -- F.W. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

black mark records, a metal label that has bathory CDs Thanks to Black Mark Records.

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Classical Music Forum

Sunday 28 June 2009 at 6:55 pm For classical fans, a bit of space for discussion at our metal forum:

Metal Hall Classical Subforum

The meaning of black metal

Tuesday 09 June 2009 at 4:22 pm The guitarist/vocalist of Atomizer, Jason Healey, has started writing a book about the meaning and purpose of black metal. As he says on the site:


When I first discovered Black Metal in the early 90's it was as though some invincible force confronted me. Never had I witnessed a sound so primitive and raw, yet so atmospheric and bombastic. An essence that ran so much deeper than its fiendish visual and caustic tone would alone suggest. A bizarre paradox of ugliness, contempt and barbarism awash in philosophical revelation and profane religious fervor. Life, death, salvation and sacrifice - Black Metal truly is the malignant paradigm.

The Stench of Black Metal will attempt to corral the seemingly divergent positions its legions have granted it and provide what is hoped to be the definitive statement. This is not to suggest that the words of any one individual will bestow this, though readers may find divinity in a single declaration. It is not intended to be a guide or an explanation; rather a gateway to the determination of what dwells at its core. The quest to unveil its quintessence.


He's soliciting contributions from bands, zines, labels and fans. You can send in your statement at the website, The Stench of Black Metal, if you can address the following questions:


  1. Describe in your own words the quintessence of Black Metal.

  2. Is this point of view representative of a specific time, and if so at what point did this view manifest? (ie: March 1991)

  3. Has the definitive Black Metal statement been made and what is it?

  4. What purpose is Black Metal yet to serve?



For kicks, here's an outtake from my answer:


Quintessence to my mind means the indefinable abstract as it applies to the context of the universe as a whole. This means that an idea is needed that gets you to the starting point just before the main show. To my mind, this is a conflict between ego and id.

The ego is the agent of our consciousness about ourselves; self-awareness/self-consciousness is what separates us from animals and lets us look at reality and think how we might change it. That's the essence of our technology, which is how we have evolved out of ape status. At the same time, the ego is limited by having to put into a present tense, single-focus stream a complex reality of many factors. It does this by subtracting out all factors but one, and then focusing on that factor as a means to a single desired result. This really limits logic.

The id is less limited. It is not self-controlling like our ego, and in contrast is a wild west of impulses and emotions and aesthetic notions. When our ego is put into a social situation, it starts treating the world like a personality, which screws up our sense of cause/effect logic. The ego then becomes overactive because it sees humans as the cause of the world, not vice-versa, and so we get caught up in social notions like popularity, democracy, "safety," social status and abstract moral conceptions.

Social thinking uses negative logic to organize us against what we fear to deny it or banish it. This long chain of events means that we get ruled by fear, through our ego as it interacts with other egos. The id knows no such boundaries. It likes what it likes because it seems cool, or epic, or beautiful, so it's not always trying to censor itself to avoid threats. It just goes ahead and does what it thinks is a pleasurable mental experience, even if that means horror or cruelty or amoral acts.

Black metal resembles European literary Romanticism -- stuff like Blake, Goethe, Wordsworth and Coleridge -- because both see the individual destroying the individual as a gateway to the id. Lose yourself in the beauty of contemplating ancient ruins, or in martial arts, or in meditative thought and soon you are beyond good and evil. You are no longer self-aware, but aware of the abstract structure of reality and how its goods and evils interact to produce a constant, renewing reality. That is beauty and it's the domain of the id, not the ego, which fears beauty that might be deadly.

If you had to try to put the quintessence of black metal into two words, it would be just that "deadly beauty" or "lawless beauty." Like all metal, it views the world from a historical sense of the epic, in which the individual is a means of seeing truth but not a goal in itself. This anti-human view lets us escape our self-awareness and social thinking to see reality as a series of logical processes.

Nature is a process that ignores the individual. It is a blind, simplistic process that works like a big organic machine. It tries everything, and then kills off the failures. This is why nature seems cruel to us, because we're thinking from the view of the individual. "What if I were the mouse in the Eagle's claws?" Yet it's that cruelty that gets us not only life itself, but higher form of life, because each puzzle in our environment that we beat made us more intelligent, more capable as a species.

All of our social thinking is in denial of this fact. We detest predation, inequality, death, defecation, disease, horror and fear. Metal has since 1969 been reminding us that these things exist, and we cannot just shut them out of our minds, or we blind ourselves to the good and bad in life. Black metal took this furthest by using the emphasis on logical structure that came from death metal, and adding to it a sense of melody and atmosphere.

In doing so, it fulfilled an archetype of European art that has been struggling for a voice for centuries: the primal Romantic outlook. In this view, we must live for what is beautiful, and we must not be afraid to see some things as better than others and -- some would say "arbitrarily" to please their friends -- select those and praise those highly while letting the others suffer in the dark.

Romantic literature can be summed up in this phrase from Blake: "The cut worm forgives the plough." Forget morality, because it's focused on the means, which are individuals. Focus on the ends -- what is beauty? How do we create it? If we do that, we find life isn't a plodding process of obedience but an onward quest for improving ourselves through adversity and a basic reverence for the process of life itself. That's the meaning of black metal that I see.


I hope this project makes it to print. It has obstacles ahead. But it's a worthy goal, putting into words what the vague images of music and visual arts made us feel.

The death of post-metal

Monday 01 June 2009 at 4:12 pm Heavy metal came from horror movie soundtracks, loud rock, and progressive music mixed into a single package. This style differentiated itself by singing about epic, historical views of humanity and the dark subjects such thinking brings up, in opposition to the self-centered ramblings of rock musicians. It also brought in a new style of playing, where lead rhythm phrases were made of moveable chords into "riffs" which allowed greater complexity in songs, even if it reduced harmonic depth. With such a momentous birth, it took metal a couple generations to catch up with itself.

After its birth, it almost got assimilated by heavy rock and glam bands, but then bounced back by mixing aggressive punk hardcore into the mix. This new style evolved through thrash, which was crossover music for skateboarders, and speed metal, which was more traditional heavy metal, before exploding into form with death metal and black metal.

These styles fulfilled what Black Sabbath had started: creation of an entirely alien, post-human, horror-infused lifeform. Death metal introduced structuralism, or a way of linking together riffs that made the structure of the song the guiding force in lieu of harmony, and black metal pioneered using melody and atmosphere within the death metal framework to make a complete new style.

This new style most clearly resembled early Baroque or ancient Greek music in its atonal framing in which modal patterns are used to build melody, and inherited the tradition of bands from classical to Tangerine Dream of making spacious, lengthy compositions that eschew the verse-chorus tradition of pop music. Metal had transcended rock music.

Once that new wave of music, emboldened by the new easy (mid-1980s vintage) of printing and selling CDs, exploded from its indie roots to popularity, it lost direction. Too much of its impetus had been based on being tiny and alienated; now it was big. Now the crowd wanted to come to it, but they also wanted to change it to be more like the rock music and punk with which they were familiar.

Around 1994, the old guard started to pull back in confusion and pursue other things. In rushed the newcomers. They created two new styles which were basically the same thing: rock done in metal technique. The first, metalcore, mixed punk songs with metal riffs, but never "got" the death metal way of linking successive riffs in context. The second, nu-metal, added hip-hop bounce and alternative choruses to metal, but was basically metal riffs on top of rock songs.

Most death metal from the period 1994-2009 began to resemble metalcore. The riffs were no longer linked, but were variations on riff/chorus structures, and the swing and offbeat emphasis of rock music, and the desire of punk music to provide randomness, replaced the moody explorations of death metal. Black metal in turn got assimilated by underground punk, a cross between crustcore and shoegaze, which eschewed the ragged melodies for more predictable minor key pop songs.

For a long time, it seemed like the newcomers triumphed. Metal was bigger than ever before, in the numbers of fans and CDs sold. But a problem kept cropping up: it had produced no great works, only lots of "good" CDs. People bought "good" CDs and forgot them a few months later because they were not particularly distinctive in content, even if they were distinctive in form. Nothing quite made it to the epic stage of being timeless.

Starting in 2006, and slowly accelerating, this trend -- which is as old as the hills, since the first thing that happens to every new genre is that they hybridize it with rock music -- began to fade as labels found they couldn't pump out the new music fast enough because within weeks its novelty wore off and it was forgotten. Profits turned to losses, and then in 2008, a recession hit, driving many labels and zines out of business.

This lucky break helped traditional metal come back into the spotlight. Over the last two years, band reunions and the formation of new bands by old school personnel have become commonplace. Many of the results at first were bad as old school metallers tried to compete with the new sound; however, over the last six months, the balance has shifted and now old school bands are making old school music.

As the Maryland Death Fest illustrates, the crowds are turning out for the old bands and old style bands, even the youngest audience members. They're looking for a substantial musical experience and are tired of buying an underground version of the same thing they get on the radio.

The linked article illustrates the revolution that is happening in metal: younger people, newer fans and older fans alike are wanting the genre to uphold the styles and tradition of quality it once had. They're tired of disposable garbage and endless hype that just leads back into the same blender of all quality that is commercial rock music. Bring back the metal, they say, and people are listening.

ANUS predicted this trend in the middle 1990s, and made comparisons to hardcore and past generations of metal, and now we're being proven right. We knew that there would be a surge of newcomers, and then their lack of ideas would catch up with them, and people would abandon their contentless music for something more substantive. It just took a dozen years to manifest itself.

Blaspherian - Allegiance to the Will of Damnation

Saturday 30 May 2009 at 07:21 am

While most of the world has gone nuts trying to make black metal into a blasphemous yet trendy extreme, Blaspherian go back to the roots of the death metal genre. Allegiance to the Will of Damnation uses the simple riffs in complex formulations that made bands like Morpheus Descends and Asphyx favorites among the old school.

Nodding to the American punk tradition, Blaspherian also employ a number of one- and two-chord rhythm riffs that ride an unsyncopated rhythm into bounding, pummeling heaviness. Vocals resemble the occult rantings of Sadistic Intent or Resuscitator, and song pacing calls to mind the spirit of the aforementioned Asphyx. At its heavier moments, this EP will appeal to those who enjoyed early Obituary or Infester.

While it does not work to distinguish itself in style, this music gains a voice of its own by how it combines the artifacts of the past and finds a new voice for them within that style. This expression, while somewhat chaotic as first releases always are, surges forth with a voice of its own despite keeping itself firmly anchored in the old school tradition. In that, it succeeds where others have gone nuts over style and forgotten substance.

National Day of Slayer -- June 6

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/

dm;wr

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.

If you like metal, why tolerate weak metal?

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.

Beherit - Engram

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

Amor fati

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"

Is downloading MP3s "stealing"?

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.

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