Shakespeare, Steven (2014) 'Shuddering: Black Metal on the Edge of the Earth'. In: Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology. Zero Books.
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
"Machine-like repetition structures Black Metal music, which is why it is not so surprising that this bastard child of thrash and death should in the hands of many practitioners verge upon ethereal ambience. This transition from machine to ether provides a broken narrative through which Black Metal’s ritualistic perversion and performance of ‘Nature’ can be encountered.
Rituals of summoning, hunting and cleansing are prominent in (mostly Cascadian) US acts Blood of the Black Owl, Fauna, Skagos and Echtra. In this music, form and deformity interact mechanically to make ‘spirit’ tangible aurally and lyrically. Spirit is both rooted in natural unity, and longs to return to it; but also and at the same time, spirit is an ineradicable void which needs and is repelled by its natural ground. In a sense, spirit is this mechanical friction and its enduring.
In the process, the call to accelerate industrial collapse made by Skagos and Panopticon cannot simply be interpreted as a return to an untouched primal fullness of nature. Something other is going on: a meeting of extremes without unification: ‘Skagos is misanthropy and apotheosis. Skagos is love, Skagos is hate, Skagos is hope and is fear.’ Machine and nature are the two faces of a ritual by which an inhuman, monstrous spirit is born, a promise and a hatred for humanity whose ambivalence will never be dispelled. Drawing on Derrida, Baudrillard and Kierkegaard, this paper will explore the specific rootedness of this ambivalence in the soil of what is called ‘America’.
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| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Black Metal, Ecology, Baudrillard, Kierkegaard |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities |
| Depositing User: | Lauren Whiston |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Mar 2016 15:17 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Dec 2024 14:34 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/847 |
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