More black metal

Only links this time, though some of this might make its way into future posts. Maybe not though.

From a 2005 edition of The Observer, here's Chris Campion profiling Mayhem that outlines the early history of Norwegian black metal. It's about what you'd expect, and I'm mainly linking to it because it's the first time I've seen this article and I find it fairly amusing that it's in The Observer. Not that I have any illusions about black metal being all kvlt and underground and what not--I first started listening to it in the mid to late 90s after reading about it in Guitar World magazine: black metal has been on the fringes of the mainstream for nearly fifteen years now--but it is funny that it's become Sunday paper material.

There's an interview with Famine of the French black metal band Peste Noire here. He mainly comes across as a prat who resents that people listen to his band, and there's a lot of the racist stuff that you'd expect from him, though he raises a couple of interesting ideas about black metal being inherently right-wing and about the contradictions or lack thereof between radical individualism and nationalism. I think he's wrong there on both counts, but that will have to be the subject of a future post or posts.

Finally, there's the blog Documents which sadly appears to be defunct. The blogger responsible for the blog, Valter, takes an ethnographic approach to (mainly early Norwegian) black metal, and he draws very heavily on the writings of Georges Bataille to draw insights on the scene. There's a lot that can be gained, I think, in looking at black metal in that way as it emphasises the excessive and the transgressive. I think one of the big failings of my posts recently about black metal and the extreme right is that they seek to force connections between music and politics. I think that this might be a fruitful approach in some cases, but not in all of them. Here are three posts that I find especially good: The Political Economy of Deathlike Silence Productions, Euronymous's involvement in the Marxist-Leninist group Rød Ungdom and anti-myths, and Euronymous as Kafka. It's overintellecualised, sure, but is extremely compelling nevertheless.

I'm seeing Until The Light Takes Us tonight. I don't have high expectations for it. Here's the trailer anyway: