My purpose in researching/writing for this project is to understand my feelings about the deeper, personal contexts of black metal and it's social & historical relevance. The following quote is by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix from his essay titled Transcendental Black Metal.
"The historical development of extreme metal is not a chance series of stylistic shifts. It is teleological - governed by a dimly understood but acutely felt Ideal, or a final cause."
This is exactly how I feel about black metal; as I listen to the music of the genre, a strong gut feeling grows inside of me like a mushroom cloud. I don't quite understand why I feel this way, but I know there is a definite call to action. The goal is to determine what that action is.
***************************************************************************
"This final cause is named the Haptic Void.
The Haptic Void is a hypothetical total or maximal level of intensity. It is the horizon of the history of metal.
Orientation towards the Haptic Void is expressed as feeling. The feeling is a unity, but as a thought we can break it down into four elements:
There is first of all a certain muscular clenching, a constriction of the jaws, fists, arms and chest.
Secondarily there is an affect: a certain aggression or brutality, a paradoxical sense of power, destruction, fullness and emptiness.
Thirdly it features a primordial satisfaction relating to the affect which acts normative. Good metal produces a satisfying bouquet of clenching, constriction and brutal affect.
Finally, there is a barely discernible je ne sais quoi that says 'not enough'. A complementary dissatisfaction - as though no brutal breakdown can be quite brutal enough. It is a fissure, a crack, a lack of being. An insufficiency compared to the promised plenitude. Maybe it's the inability of any concrete song to measure up to the inspiration that gave birth to it. Paradoxically this dissatisfaction is felt in direct proportion to the level of it's complement."
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
RE: Reee SURCH
EEEEEEE. This has been a stupid-hard year for me. My life has kept getting in the way of my goals at school and I am massively frustrated. The scope of my paper went from being an academic analysis of black metal, and has morphed into a discussion of the division between active participants/consumers in the scene versus scholars studying the scene's history/social relevance. It's simultaneously exhausting and exciting to be exploring the disparity between the two camps. But, whew. I'm beat.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Why do you quote?
(In-class Freewrite)
You quote in order to give credit where credit is due. If you neglect to quote/cite your source, that is plagiarism.
Also, quoting is a nice way to say things you may not want to be credited with saying, a way to "cover your ass", if you will.
You quote in order to give credit where credit is due. If you neglect to quote/cite your source, that is plagiarism.
Also, quoting is a nice way to say things you may not want to be credited with saying, a way to "cover your ass", if you will.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
bibliography sources
Works Cited
Hunt-Hendrix, Hunter. "Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism." Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Charleston, SC: urge Llc, 2010. 53-65. Print.
Ratliff, Ben. "Thank You, Professor, That Was Putrid." Http://www.nytimes.com. The New York Times Company, 14 Dec. 2009. Web. Feb.-Mar. 2011. <http://www.nytco.com>.
Shakespeare, Steven. "The Light That Illuminates Itself, The Dark That Soils Itself: Blackened Notes From Schelling's Underground." Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Charleston, SC: urge Llc, 2010. 5-22. Print.
Until the Light Takes Us. Dir. Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites. Perf. Varg Vikernes, Gylve Nagell, Harmony Korine. Factory 25, 2010. DVD.
ANNOTATIONS FORTHCOMING
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
NY Times article
Thank You Professor, That Was Putrid
The bald, beefy moderator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in darkness. “It is my revolting pleasure,” he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, “to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who will present his paper ‘The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.’ ”
And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”
You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not just because plenty of people like to make fun of academics discoursing on youth culture but because the subject was something like the music that dare not speak its name.
Black metal, which has been a self-conscious genre since the early 1990s — with a prehistory in some ’80s metal bands — remains metal’s most underground subspecies. (Black refers to a bleak outlook on life.) Musically it’s all scoured howls, nonsyncopated blast-beat drums, and cold, trebly guitars. It sounds like it’s rotting, and that’s the point: black metal represents decay, radical individualism, misanthropy, negativity about all systems, and awe of the natural world. (Death metal, on the other hand, is more proactive, body-centered and psyched about gore.)
“The purest black-metal artist is one who’s unknown and inaccessible,” said Nicola Masciandaro, a professor of medieval literature at Brooklyn College who organized the six-hour event.
In a way, black metal runs on a very old cultural motor: loss of faith, and the hysterical fear and sadness that come with it. But it has become one of rock’s best modes of resistance, which is why it persists, why recent books and films about it have found an audience (like Peter Beste’s photo essay “True Norwegian Black Metal” and the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us”) and why it has inspired a new American wave of bands, including Nachtmystium, Krallice, Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy.
Even as the Americans bend black metal far away from tribalism, violence or antireligious malevolence (some Norwegian black-metal musicians became notorious for murder and church burnings) and toward something more Whitman-esque, it remains ingrown. Some of its practitioners — like the Americans Xasthur and Leviathan — make records but will not perform or, in Leviathan’s case, give interviews. Talking about black metal in certain quarters seems deeply lame.
One commenter on the online-forum page of the metal magazine Decibel summed up a certain kind of black-metal fan’s attitude toward the symposium. This music, the contributor wrote, “has nothing to do with being intellectual and everything to do with not wanting to try and break every little thing apart” for analysis.
“There’s lots of resentment toward a sensible discourse around black metal,” said Mr. Masciandaro in an interview. “There’s also lots of dissent and difference around what black metal is. Its center of gravity is an essential negativity, an idea of some remainder, something that cannot be reduced.” He was inspired to organize the symposium, he said, by the conference on heavy metal, held last year in Salzburg, Austria, organized by Mr. Scott. He was there and wanted to create a more specific event. He chose a club with a bar as the setting, rather than a university, figuring it would be more “ludic.”
Was the afternoon humorous, ridiculous or at least ludic? Not really. (It could have used a few more dozen spectators and a temperature boost of about 15 degrees.) To the contrary, it felt necessary. Despite what black-metal musicians might proclaim — Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the symposium’s lectures as saying, “my music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion” — their work is basically philosophy. It is theoretical, a grid for looking at life, with ancient roots. It could use a critical apparatus, and though the afternoon’s many citings of Continental philosophers like Lacan, Derrida and Bataille might have seemed ludicrously distant to the practice of black metal, such writings relate to the subgenre’s big subjects: death and time.
Mr. Masciandaro’s lecture, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” dealt with ideas of cosmic evolution and annihilation in black metal. In “Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration,” Joseph Russo talked about, um, rot, and the “liminal death-space” in the work of Xasthur. Brandon Stosuy, a Brooklyn music critic, read from his oral history in progress of American black metal: a welcome demystification, cast in normal-dude voices.
“Transcendental Black Metal,” a lecture by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the young singer and guitarist of the Brooklyn band Liturgy, gave the Nordic black-metal tradition a stern challenge, and amounted to an artistic manifesto for his own band. He discussed how America represents “dignity, freedom, renewal and hybridization,” and suggested that these qualities could be represented in a new form of black metal. He proposed a new rhythm to replace the blast beat: the “burst beat,” by which rhythm can contract and expand in time, as in free jazz. He cited Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Ornette Coleman’s “Skies of America” as philosophical models, with their “joyful experience of the continuity of existence.” He talked of “life and hypertrophy” replacing “death and atrophy,” and in his own way he was as nonnegotiable as Ovskum: “Our affirmation is a refusal to deny.”
During a Q. and A. period Mr. Hunt-Hendrix was challenged by Scott Wilson, a professor from Lancaster University, who, like Mr. Scott, had traveled from England to attend the conference. Mr. Wilson wondered, skeptically, if transcendentalist black metal just boiled down to “all you need is love.”
“I’m not so interested in defending anything I say,” Mr. Hunt-Hendrix replied. “I only like to be judged on whether it’s interesting or not.”
But perhaps the day’s most profound lecture came from Mr. Scott, who spoke in priestly cadences about black metal as part of the ritual of confession.
“The black metal event is a confession without need of absolution, without need of redemption,” he said. It is, he added, “a cleaning up of the mess of others.” He invoked the old English tradition of sin eating by means of burial cakes, in which a loaf of bread was put on a funeral bier or a corpse, and a paid member of the community would eat the bread, representing sin, to absolve and comfort the deceased.
“Black metal has become the sin eater,” he intoned. “It is engaged in transgressive behavior to be rid of it.”
The bald, beefy moderator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in darkness. “It is my revolting pleasure,” he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, “to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who will present his paper ‘The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.’ ”
And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”
You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not just because plenty of people like to make fun of academics discoursing on youth culture but because the subject was something like the music that dare not speak its name.
Black metal, which has been a self-conscious genre since the early 1990s — with a prehistory in some ’80s metal bands — remains metal’s most underground subspecies. (Black refers to a bleak outlook on life.) Musically it’s all scoured howls, nonsyncopated blast-beat drums, and cold, trebly guitars. It sounds like it’s rotting, and that’s the point: black metal represents decay, radical individualism, misanthropy, negativity about all systems, and awe of the natural world. (Death metal, on the other hand, is more proactive, body-centered and psyched about gore.)
“The purest black-metal artist is one who’s unknown and inaccessible,” said Nicola Masciandaro, a professor of medieval literature at Brooklyn College who organized the six-hour event.
In a way, black metal runs on a very old cultural motor: loss of faith, and the hysterical fear and sadness that come with it. But it has become one of rock’s best modes of resistance, which is why it persists, why recent books and films about it have found an audience (like Peter Beste’s photo essay “True Norwegian Black Metal” and the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us”) and why it has inspired a new American wave of bands, including Nachtmystium, Krallice, Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy.
Even as the Americans bend black metal far away from tribalism, violence or antireligious malevolence (some Norwegian black-metal musicians became notorious for murder and church burnings) and toward something more Whitman-esque, it remains ingrown. Some of its practitioners — like the Americans Xasthur and Leviathan — make records but will not perform or, in Leviathan’s case, give interviews. Talking about black metal in certain quarters seems deeply lame.
One commenter on the online-forum page of the metal magazine Decibel summed up a certain kind of black-metal fan’s attitude toward the symposium. This music, the contributor wrote, “has nothing to do with being intellectual and everything to do with not wanting to try and break every little thing apart” for analysis.
“There’s lots of resentment toward a sensible discourse around black metal,” said Mr. Masciandaro in an interview. “There’s also lots of dissent and difference around what black metal is. Its center of gravity is an essential negativity, an idea of some remainder, something that cannot be reduced.” He was inspired to organize the symposium, he said, by the conference on heavy metal, held last year in Salzburg, Austria, organized by Mr. Scott. He was there and wanted to create a more specific event. He chose a club with a bar as the setting, rather than a university, figuring it would be more “ludic.”
Was the afternoon humorous, ridiculous or at least ludic? Not really. (It could have used a few more dozen spectators and a temperature boost of about 15 degrees.) To the contrary, it felt necessary. Despite what black-metal musicians might proclaim — Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the symposium’s lectures as saying, “my music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion” — their work is basically philosophy. It is theoretical, a grid for looking at life, with ancient roots. It could use a critical apparatus, and though the afternoon’s many citings of Continental philosophers like Lacan, Derrida and Bataille might have seemed ludicrously distant to the practice of black metal, such writings relate to the subgenre’s big subjects: death and time.
Mr. Masciandaro’s lecture, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” dealt with ideas of cosmic evolution and annihilation in black metal. In “Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration,” Joseph Russo talked about, um, rot, and the “liminal death-space” in the work of Xasthur. Brandon Stosuy, a Brooklyn music critic, read from his oral history in progress of American black metal: a welcome demystification, cast in normal-dude voices.
“Transcendental Black Metal,” a lecture by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the young singer and guitarist of the Brooklyn band Liturgy, gave the Nordic black-metal tradition a stern challenge, and amounted to an artistic manifesto for his own band. He discussed how America represents “dignity, freedom, renewal and hybridization,” and suggested that these qualities could be represented in a new form of black metal. He proposed a new rhythm to replace the blast beat: the “burst beat,” by which rhythm can contract and expand in time, as in free jazz. He cited Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Ornette Coleman’s “Skies of America” as philosophical models, with their “joyful experience of the continuity of existence.” He talked of “life and hypertrophy” replacing “death and atrophy,” and in his own way he was as nonnegotiable as Ovskum: “Our affirmation is a refusal to deny.”
During a Q. and A. period Mr. Hunt-Hendrix was challenged by Scott Wilson, a professor from Lancaster University, who, like Mr. Scott, had traveled from England to attend the conference. Mr. Wilson wondered, skeptically, if transcendentalist black metal just boiled down to “all you need is love.”
“I’m not so interested in defending anything I say,” Mr. Hunt-Hendrix replied. “I only like to be judged on whether it’s interesting or not.”
But perhaps the day’s most profound lecture came from Mr. Scott, who spoke in priestly cadences about black metal as part of the ritual of confession.
“The black metal event is a confession without need of absolution, without need of redemption,” he said. It is, he added, “a cleaning up of the mess of others.” He invoked the old English tradition of sin eating by means of burial cakes, in which a loaf of bread was put on a funeral bier or a corpse, and a paid member of the community would eat the bread, representing sin, to absolve and comfort the deceased.
“Black metal has become the sin eater,” he intoned. “It is engaged in transgressive behavior to be rid of it.”
The fine art of Summary.
"What have you learned/noticed about the art of summarizing that you will apply this weekend?"
After sharing my summary of the Wired article with my group, it came to light that I only brushed the surface of the act of summarizing. I Analyzed each paragraph and filtered it down to one sentence. This turned an article into a collection of 9 statements. I found that this was far too elementary to accurately re-state what was said, especially because I didn't put my own voice into it.
This weekend I plan on summarizing one of my sources by distilling the general point, inserting my own voice while being sure not to change the scope of the bibliography ("putting a spin on it").
+ karla +
After sharing my summary of the Wired article with my group, it came to light that I only brushed the surface of the act of summarizing. I Analyzed each paragraph and filtered it down to one sentence. This turned an article into a collection of 9 statements. I found that this was far too elementary to accurately re-state what was said, especially because I didn't put my own voice into it.
This weekend I plan on summarizing one of my sources by distilling the general point, inserting my own voice while being sure not to change the scope of the bibliography ("putting a spin on it").
+ karla +
Monday, February 28, 2011
New awesome source!
I found an awesome book on Amazon called Hideous Gnosis- it's a compilation of essays on Black Metal theory and it is my new source for my research paper.
There is also a blog behind the book- here. Descriptions from Amazon:
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." - H.P. Lovecraft
"Poison yourself . . . with thought" - Arizmenda
______________________
So far, I have only read one essay- Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism, by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. It's slightly dry and very abstract, but pleasing revelations have come from reading it.
Here is a sample passage:
"The technique of Hyperborean Black Metal is the blast beat. Pure black metal, represented by Transilvanian Hunger, means continuous open strumming and a continuous blast beat. But the pure blast beat is eternity in itself. No articulated figures, no beginning, no end, no pauses, no dynamic range. It is a bird soaring in the air with nowhere to perch even for a moment. What seemed at first to be a great clamor atrophied hum."
+ karla +
 |
| Black Metal theory has never looked so grim. |
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." - H.P. Lovecraft
"Poison yourself . . . with thought" - Arizmenda
______________________
So far, I have only read one essay- Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism, by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. It's slightly dry and very abstract, but pleasing revelations have come from reading it.
Here is a sample passage:
"The technique of Hyperborean Black Metal is the blast beat. Pure black metal, represented by Transilvanian Hunger, means continuous open strumming and a continuous blast beat. But the pure blast beat is eternity in itself. No articulated figures, no beginning, no end, no pauses, no dynamic range. It is a bird soaring in the air with nowhere to perch even for a moment. What seemed at first to be a great clamor atrophied hum."
+ karla +
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