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You’re imprisoned—tied to a jagged stone, bound with the entrails of your own child. A snake is held over your face, venom dripping from its fangs. Your wife waits patiently by your side with a cup to catch the poison. The cup eventually runs over—corrosive venom spatters your eyes and face, and the suffering magnifies a hundred-fold. Existence is a simple cycle of pain and the anticipation of more pain. Left to that fate, to what depths do your thoughts wander?

Such is the tale of Loki and his imprisonment by the Aesir, one of the darker stories in Norse mythology and the lyrical inspiration for Greed & Rapacity’s new EP, Loki Bound. Consisting of a single 32-minute track, the EP squeezes every drop of bitterness from the material and sets it to cavernous black doom. Loki Bound marks a shift in tone for the international duo—their first demo, Ergreifer, feels like a completely different band, more in the vein of progressive black metal. Loki Bound drops the tempo, ups the production value, and dives into the atmosphere—chords hang over dead space, subterranean vocals fill the void, and the oppression never lets up. It’s a hell of an EP.

I recently had the chance to ask some questions of the band via email. One question does remain, though: who exactly did the answering? Both members are mentioned in third person. It’s unlikely (but not impossible) that they were in the same room at the same time—vocalist H. Lauer recently relocated to Portland, Oregon, while drummer D. Nahum still lives in their native Australia. No matter; just another mystery for the ages.

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Loki Bound sounds significantly different than your first demo—what led to the change in direction?

In keeping with the thematic seeds of each release, Greed & Rapacity pushed the boundaries of chaotic and imaginative black metal on Ergreifer, and those of abyssal funeral darkness on Loki Bound. The force of the violent return of the repressed, the guiding law of our creative process, defies any abstract musical classification. We will use any means dictated as necessary to manifest our psychic explorations, wherever they may take us. The transition from Ergreifer to Loki Bound was entirely natural, and we imagine future transitions will be as well.

Do you still consider Greed & Rapacity a black metal band at this point?

Unquestionably, yes. We are entirely devoted to exploring the darkest recesses of history, spirituality, and the human psyche. Thematically there is no question here whatsoever. The musical form reflects the thematic content; therefore Greed & Rapacity is black metal. That we sound different from other so-called black metal bands is part of the answer to a different question.

You’re currently spread over two continents, with one member in Portland and another in Australia. How does that affect the working dynamic?

If you told H. Lauer that his life would change so dramatically a few years ago, he would have laughed. He was ignorant. The ultimate meaning of the move to Portland is yet to be seen; but its lesson has been submission to the clutches of mystery in its fullest sense. As for the working dynamic: on principle we don’t over-think; spontaneity will always be our creative cornerstone.

Any plans to tour in support of Loki Bound?

Not right now. We undertook one live ritual in Australia with a session lineup before H. Lauer’s departure to Portland, performing Loki Bound in its entirety. It was a very special experience for us and left a shell-shocked audience in its wake. Understand: this is an intimidating composition, particularly rhythmically, and its performance exacts a high price. That said we’d be willing to do it again if the circumstances were correct.

Google Translate says the title of the first demo (Ergreifer) translates to “captors” in German. How does the first release relate to Loki Bound? Are there any direct connections besides the thematic “return of the repressed” you mentioned before?

Ergreifer actually means “seizer”. We draw it from Jung, who refers to the overwhelming power of archetypes such as Wodan with that term (“Wodan,” he says, “is an ergreifer of men”). Certainly there is a connotation of the return of the repressed, but in more than the fragmentary and nihilistic vision of the unconscious that Freud proposed. The imagery is less that of a pressure cooker exploding and more that of an avenging force of alien will. There is intention and malice, but also a purging and cleansing.

I’m curious about your use of the story of Loki. Is there any draw to Norse mythology for the sake of black metal tradition, or is it a purely thematic appeal?

H. Lauer has had a connection to Germanic mythology well before he became involved in black metal, and D. Nahum has a strong feel for its motifs as well. Extreme metal is an appropriate milieu to explore the phenomenology of Loki, but the figure has been invoked from a sense of reverence and respect that would remain were the music completely removed. “Greed & Rapacity” is itself a reference to Freki and Geri, Odin’s ferocious wolves.

The question we asked is this: “what was Loki’s experience on the rock, tortured as he awaited Ragnarok, arguably and unjust prisoner?” It is not clean work to empathize with such a figure, but it is necessary work. Peter Carroll tells us that “a God denied is a devil created;” our purpose was less to somehow sanitize Loki or absolve him of wrong-doing than to understand why his purpose ultimately becomes apocalyptic.

Where does Greed & Rapacity go from here?

We are gradually developing a full-length album, which for the most part connects back to the tattered threads of Ergreifer and then pushes harder in the direction of frenzied and chaotic black metal.

Ergreifer explored fundamentalism, fanaticism, Thanatos and symbolic immortality in a brief and often free-associative way. The lyrics and concepts of the full-length mold, sculpt, and direct these ideas into something we believe to be more intimate, embodied or tangible, and ultimately efficacious. In essence, it forms a system of bridges or threads between the spiritual, historical, and personal themes of Ergreifer.

Do you want the listeners at home—or in the event of a show: the audience—to actually enjoy themselves, or do you prefer to be approached from a serious frame of mind? Is there room for “fun” in your music?

There should often be humour in extreme music. There has to be, it keeps us honest and inoculated against unwitting self-parody. Our running joke during the writing of Loki Bound was the hope that the world at large would be simultaneously obsessed with listening to the release, yet horribly traumatized by the experience.

At some level spite, resentment, and hatred can be tremendously pleasurable, even joyous emotions. This is not something that many people are willing to admit. Given the emotional palette of our music, cathartic ecstasy might be unavoidable.

Stream Loki Bound below and purchase the mp3 for $2 or order the cassette from Greed & Rapacity’s Bandcamp.

Earlier this year, I read Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries by Jon Kristiansen. The book is a solid testament to the Second Wave of Black Metal in Norway during the late ’80s and early ’90s, but while the zines themselves are incredibly evocative of a reality that may no longer exist in metal, the written chapters in between the photocopied pages are the book’s most valuable assets. These are the confessions of a player in what is now a cultural myth, expressing the disillusionment and intensity (and sure, the drunkenness and poverty) that helped gestate something that many of us find incomprehensible–an unequivocal rejection of life, light, and happiness. But while reading about the major events in this movement, the one that always stops me in my tracks is the life and suicide of Morbid and Mayhem frontman Per Ohlin, known to many by his stage name Dead.

Unlike that of many of his contemporaries, Dead’s darkness was pure. As a child in Sweden, he had a near-death experience caused by a ruptured spleen, which Ohlin claimed was the result of an ice-skating accident but his brother later attributed to a beating by schoolyard bullies. This brush with death left him depressed, introverted, and obsessed with dying. If the stories are to be believed, Ohlin’s original communication with Mayhem came in the form of a package containing a letter, a demo tape, and a crucified mouse. Dead was the real deal—he would cut himself onstage, bury his clothes to make them cerements of the grave, huff a dead crow he kept in a jar to get the scent of decay in his nostrils. He’s credited as the first black metal musician to wear corpse paint. Then, in the house he lived in with Mayhem guitarist and black metal svengali Oystein “Euronymous” Aarseth, Dead slit his wrists and throat before shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. His suicide note famously included the phrase, “Excuse all the blood.” Upon finding him, the legend goes, Euronymous made necklaces with pieces of Ohlin’s skull and a stew with bits of his brains. That Aarseth photographed the body is undisputed—a picture of Ohlin’s corpse graces the Mayhem bootleg Dawn of the Black Hearts.

The importance of Ohlin’s death is indescribable. Obviously, the Norwegian black metal movement came about through a great number of albums, personalities, and circumstances, but before Per Ohlin joined Mayhem they were a thrash band from Norway; with him on board they were a cultural landmark, synonymous with corporeal morbidity and the unstoppable darkness within every soul (and pig’s heads). His depression, which often alarmed and upset those around him, was a justification of the whole black metal aesthetic, because fuck, man, if someone like Per Ohlin existed, so wrapped up in his own demise that he’d gash his arm with a broken bottle at parties, then maybe this world was the Hell all the songs claimed it was—what else could birth a soul like that of Dead? But while his life was powerful, his suicide was monumental, both solidifying his role as Mayhem’s greatest frontman and driving home Euronymous’ so-desperately-desired image of the Satanic overlord unconcerned with decency or humanity.

Reading about Dead’s life and death makes Euronymous, often considered the martyred father of black metal, look like a real piece of shit. Never mind pilfering Ohlin’s corpse—many players in the movement have described how Euronymous not only allowed Dead to mutilate himself, but also encouraged these tendencies. Some even speculate that Aarseth, well versed in Dead’s mental anguish, left the singer alone in a house containing a shotgun in the hopes that he would commit suicide. All speculation aside, an undeniable fact is that when it came to acting “true,” Euronymous had nothing on Dead, and more so that he used Dead’s instability as a tool for his own mythology. Maybe this wasn’t entirely on Aarseth—Dead obviously gave a shit about how he was perceived, and was finally responsible for his own death—but one can’t help but wonder what the fuck Euronymous was thinking, or if he ever cared about his singer. From what I’ve read, Aarseth was a charismatic figure who could easily have discouraged Ohlin from self-slaughter. Euronymous himself didn’t want to die, made evident by how he fled during his murder. So maybe he wanted this genuine article to be sacrificed to his scene. In a letter reprinted in Peter Beste’s True Norwegian Black Metal, Euronymous claims that Dead committed suicide because the poser-riddled scene disgusted him, rewriting history to make his friend’s tragedy justify his existence.

Then again, those around Dead seem to think he was pretty intent on dying. Bard Eithun of Emperor said, “Honestly, I don’t think he was enjoying living in this world.” One wonders if anything could have been done to save Ohlin. Maybe he needed to go home—Sweden is a very different country from Norway, less frigid and cut-throat, and though Dead was already mutilating rodents in Sweden, maybe he would have been comfortable enough there to weather the storm. Or maybe it was Scandinavia as a whole—in Metalion, Kristiansen describes going to Australia as an eye-opening experience, full of warm, uninhibited people. Maybe Ohlin needed to go somewhere with sunny beaches and open plains to soothe his torment; a month in Greece could have saved Dead. Maybe he just needed those around him to show him more love, though given how well the survivors of the Second Wave speak of him he probably received plenty. Hell, maybe he needed medication and therapy, practices I feel conflicted about. What if Ohlin had someone to talk to entirely divorced from the scene? But all these maybes and ifs mean nothing. Had Dead been saved from or grown out of his abject misery, black metal would not have exploded the way it did. I would not feel as touched by his story, and this article would go unwritten.

That, finally, is the tragedy of Per Ohlin’s death—how much we owe him. Dead’s suicide created black metal as we know it, the perfect mixture of disharmonious music and absolute seriousness of attitude. Interestingly, Dead’s obsessions always leaned more towards the vast cold of the void rather than the glory of Satan, and this only makes him more genuine than many of the genre’s artists. Norse Satanism is steeped in the state-sponsored Christianity it rejects, finding solace in a punk-ish Anti-Your-Thing quality backed by grandiose and bestial imagery. Dead didn’t didn’t stand in opposition to everyday life, he felt foreign to it, and sought a realm where his overwhelming urges weren’t trapped in a veil of meat and emotion. That’s what black metal is, at its heart—a deep, violent revolt against the boundaries of one’s reality, the scream from the mouth of a person who has realized that they do, in fact, have a soul. In black metal, I see magical rebellion against society, but in Per Ohlin I see something more, a spirit who forsook the uncomfortable prison of living and leapt into a freezing ocean ahead of him, where he could disappear like a single drop among rolling black waves.

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[Editor's Note: Scab Casserole is a metal journalist for Invisible Oranges. He has never been to Scandinavia or spoken at any length to any member of the Norwegian black metal scene.]

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Fifteen years after forming as a band, Romania’s Negură Bunget played their first US show at Cameo in Brooklyn on Friday, 4/20. They barely made it. They came straight from the airport, and the opening band, Din Brad (comprised of NB members Negru, Gadinet, Inia Dinia, and outside vocalist Alma), had to cancel their performance when the whole Negură Bunget crew ran into visa trouble at customs. Thankfully our diligent border police let them through—Negură Bunget delivered an incredible performance.

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Haethen, a black metal band from New Jersey, opened the show. They’re pretty obscure, and have just one three-track demo from 2009 to their name, though apparently a full length is in the works. They’re also pretty good. Their raw-ish black metal features gruff vocals and mid-paced guitars, a mix that translated well live.

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Negură Bunget was welcomed to the stage with shouts and horns from a crowd that looked to be at capacity. Clearly, Negură Bunget should have made a US trip sooner. The warm crowd reaction even seemed to catch Negură Bunget by surprise, and I found myself thinking about how cool it must be to get off a plane from Romania, run into a bunch of crap at US customs, and then walk into a sold-out venue in New York City full of screaming metalheads. Must be a good feeling.

Negură Bunget opened with “Tesarul de Lumini” off of Om, one of their best-known songs and a good one to get people in the mood for what was a powerful, but seemingly short, set that also included “Pamint” and “Cunoasterea Tacuta.” There were a few sound issues, which is to be expected with such a large band, but no one cared. They evoked all of the majesty that makes their albums so special. The vocals were spot on, and the singer—a new one that goes by the moniker Chakravartin—reached to the ceiling a few times as he belted it out. It looked, and sounded, pretty epic. In true Negură Bunget style, a pan flute and herding bells made an appearance. Despite how dead tired they must have been—who knows how many layovers there are between Romania and New York—they treated the crowd to an encore.

Negură Bunget’s long overdue first US appearance was a memorable one. It was also an educational experience: I learned that the ‘g’ in “Bunget” is pronounced like “bungee.” No hard ‘g’ (although there is a hard ‘g’ in Negură). Negură Bunget will be stopping at roughly 30 US and Canadian cities on their current tour, including Baltimore for a Maryland Deathfest performance on May 25. Catch them live while you can—who knows how long it will be before they come back.

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This photograph was originally published in the July 1987 issue of Metal Hammer, accompanying an interview with Quorthon promoting Under the Sign of the Black Mark. Image courtesy of My Gallery of Rock and Metal.

Today,  May 11, 2012, is the 25th birthday of Bathory’s landmark Under the Sign of the Black Mark: arguably the single most seminal work in the history of black metal. Earlier today, we published a thoughtful analysis of the album by Swedish Death Metal author Daniel Ekeroth; our birthday celebration continues  with some words from legendary Slayer Mag publisher Jon “Metalion”  Kristiansen.

–Justin M. Norton

BATHORY – Under The Sign Of The Black Mark

By Jon “Metalion” Kristiansen

For me and many other fanatics it is hard to point out the best of the four first Bathory albums, as they are all among the best albums ever. Bathory was already one of my fave bands when I interviewed Quorthon back in 1986. He talked about this album, so my expectations were high. Originally, this monumental album was supposed to be called Music From Under the Sign of the Black Mark. I was of course eagerly awaiting this third opus.

For some reason, I was sent an advance copy of this album by Music for Nations/Under One Flag, as they had seen the photocopied early Slayer Mags. Immediately, this was something very unique. There is such an eerie vibe going on during this entire album, it just sends shivers down my spine. The two first albums had simply been hell-paced Satanic metal. Under the Sign of the Black Mark also included some more, dare I say, melodic parts on “Woman of Dark Desires” and “Enter the Eternal Fire.”

Quorthon certainly reached a new level and set new standards for generations to come. For a lack of a better word, Bathory brought more “class” to the primal black metal. Where certain bands polished their sound over time, you can’t really accuse Bathory of that. They still embraced all their earlier trademarks. The darkness was born with Venom, but Quorthon took the total darkness concept to a whole new stage.

I reviewed Under the Sign of the Black Mark in Slayer 5. When I randomly got a copy of the U.S. version of this album on New Renaissance Records, they had printed one of my quotes as a selling point sticker on the cover. I’m still very proud of that achievement! The quote was: “One of the best death metal LPs ever recorded. Bathory shows that they stand head and shoulders above everyone else.” Now, I know we can discuss for eternity what death metal really is and so on, but back then it was OK to describe an album just as DEATH/THRASH/BLACK METAL…. I still stand behind those words written in 1987 now in 2012 and beyond…..

One more thing I need to brag about. I was personally thanked on this album, and that was a great thing, getting credit on one of the best albums ever. I guess I most have done something OK. Heads up high for this unique album. Thank you, Quorthon, for sharing this with us. R.I.P.

Normally they stick to the editorial side of things in their Philly headquarters, but this past April Decibel Magazine set out on their maiden tour voyage, bringing Behemoth, Watain, The Devil’s Blood and In Solitude to your state (or Canadian province).

In metal we cherish our history. It’s a shared bond that unites all of us across decades and continents and keeps our community strong. Pop music might be disposable but classic metal albums are timeless. Tradition still matters.

There are few albums as timeless in the metal canon as Bathory’s Under The Sign Of The Black Mark, which turns 25 today. Some of today’s most influential black metal bands – particularly Watain – were enormously influenced by this album and its otherworldly take on the early black metal sound. Invisible Oranges has collaborated with our friends at Bazillion Points to offer posts by two people who know Bathory the best: Swedish Death Metal author Daniel Ekeroth and legendary Slayer zine publisher Jon “Metalion” Kristiansen, who quite literally wrote the book on black metal and was among the first to review this album. We’re honored to share their thoughts on this album and encourage you to remember Quorthon, who died at 38 and should still be with us today. Enter the Eternal Fire.

– Justin M. Norton

BATHORY AND THE ESSENCE OF TRUE BLACK METAL

By Daniel Ekeroth

Now that black metal is such an institution in the extreme metal universe, defined by genre rules and regulations, it’s hard to remember the freeform juvenile stage of black metal. Generally, the Norwegian scene of the early ’90s is considered the starting point, and Venom is cited as the grandfathers of it all. Bands like Sarcofago, Hellhammer, Possessed, Mayhem, Darkthrone and Burzum are tossed around as black metal innovators. Sure, these are all great bands who certainly deserve a spot in the black metal hall of fame, but they all pale compared to a one-man force from my native Sweden: the mighty Bathory.

In the early ’80s, unlike the satanic party rock of Venom and the occult heavy metal of Mercyful Fate, the music of Bathory really set the controls for something brand new. Extreme in every aspect, Bathory created a total concept of darkness that reached perfection with 1987’s Under the Sign of the Black Mark. This album became the blueprint for virtually all subsequent black metal. Under the Sign turns 25 today, May 11, 2011, and to celebrate the occasion, let’s enter the dark world of main man Quorthon.

Atmospheric Shrouds

You can’t read a review of a modern black metal record without catching a reference to the album’s atmosphere. This cornerstone aspect of black metal is easily traced straight to Bathory, who went far beyond other pioneers of the genre—Venom was basically a primitive Motörhead, and groups like Sodom and Destruction are great but definitely lack in dark atmospheres. With weirdly distorted guitars, excessive use of treble, echoes and reverb, and even keyboards and acoustic guitars, Bathory summoned an eerie feeling into the mania of extreme metal. Within this hellish sound, a magical world materialized that was accentuated by the lyrical themes of Satanism, death, and destruction.

In many cases Bathory’s unique soundscapes were the result of poor recording resources and lack of skill. The echoes and reverb were used to disguise limitations in the production, and some outright mistakes. But, hey, this is often how great art is made. Jackson Pollock’s “action paintings” evolved almost at random when he was more or less out of his mind. The Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies more or less invented guitar distortion after destroying his amp in a rage and being forced to use it afterwards.

Tormented Screams

Though Quorthon initially sounded like a ferocious version of Cronos, he gradually developed the tormented screams that are one of the cornerstones of modern black metal today. On Bathory’s second album he had already changed his voice a lot, grunting like a possessed demon. He reached perfection on Under the Sign of the Black Mark and Blood Fire Death. His tormented howls are unique in the way they are completely audible, while simultaneously containing oceans of soul, hatred and pain. Quite simply, there has never been a better black metal vocalist.

Infernal Speed

Although thrash metal mavericks like Metallica, Exodus and Slayer have been analyzed to pieces, Quorthon has never really gotten recognition for speeding up metal. While Venom had their occasional fast moments, Bathory really put the pedal to the metal. Songs like “War” and “Armageddon” shifted up a gear, courtesy of drummer Jonas Åkerlund, nowadays a celebrated director of videos of artists like Lady Gaga and Madonna. When …The Return was unleashed in 1985, it was draped in insanely fast blast beats. Under the Sign of the Black Mark had even faster songs, like crushing opener “Massacre” and the majestic “Equimanthorn.” As the conquest for the “fastest band in the world” title roared in the mid-80’s, Bathory was often my main contender. The hyper-speed of a ’90s band like Marduk can definitely be traced back to the infernal hammering of Bathory, not Venom, Mercyful Fate or Hellhammer.

Diabolical Composition

Bathory’s first two albums are pretty basic mixes of dirty heavy metal and crust punk, but Under the Sign of the Black Mark brought all-around black metal perfection with all-out fast songs like “Massacre” and “Chariots of Fire”, heavy songs like “Call from the Grave” and “Enter the Eternal Fire”, and songs with tempo changes like “Woman of Dark Desires” and “Equimanthorn”. Not just every style of song was perfected, but the composition of the album was also structured to create an album larger than its individual parts. As I see it, Bathory was the first black metal band to fully realize how far you can take the concept of storytelling through music. As the album challenged the listener’s expectations, that mysterious formula was repeated countless times by subsequent black metal bands that wanted the same power.

The Mystery of Bathory

All things considered, Bathory’s most notable aspect still is the aura of complete mystery. Nobody seemed to know anything about them in the mid-’80s, not even in Sweden. The albums featured no band photos and no names except for the pseudonym Quorthon. Interviews were scarce and they never played live. All you had were albums loaded with fiendish music. Bathory seemed to exist in another dimension, and that made the impact all the greater. Little did we know that a lot of the mystery was due to the fact that most of the time there was no real band, eventually no other members than Quorthon left. Live gigs were impossible, since there were no band members. Jonas Åkerlund claims he remembers a couple of early-’80s gigs, but the details seem foggy. No other black metal bands have ever remained confined to such a dark and hidden reality. In its obscurity, Bathory still stands out as unique in the history of black metal.

R.I.P. Quorthon, R.I.P. Bathory… You will never be forgotten!

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HEAR “UNDER THE SIGN OF THE BLACK MARK”

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Bathory – “War”

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Bathory – “Massacre”

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Bathory – “Call From the Grave”

‘Black metal. Noise. Limited releases. Anti-Profit. Kvlt.’

These are a few things that Milam Records stands for as outlined by their BandCamp page, and coincidentally they are statutes that aren’t too far off from our own metal vendettas here at IO. Thus, it is with great pleasure that today we are able to put up for grabs two prize packages of the label’s newest releases.

Greed & Rapacity’s Loki Bound, Mare Cognitum’s The Sea Which Has Become Known, and The Widow’s Dhumavati will all be included in a collection of records that conjures tones of the occult. To enter to win, tell us in the comments below about what small-numbered release is most prized in your music collection. TWO winners will be selected by email, each receiving all three albums listed above. The contest will end at midnight on Thursday, May 17th, and as always you must have a mailing address in the US or Canada to enter.

But consider yourself warned: this prize pack contains dangerous amounts of vile Portland black metal. Exercise caution.

LISTEN TO MILAM RECORDS RELEASES

Milam Records (BandCamp)

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BUY MILAM RECORDS RELEASES

Milam Records (CD/Vinyl)

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Antichrist (movie clip) – “Nature Is Satan’s Church”

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Satan, Lucifer, Samael, Baphomet. Call it what you will—though those four things are not the same—the devil has been a part of heavy music from almost the beginning:

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Arthur Brown – “Fire”

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For the uninformed or illiterate, that was Arthur Brown performing “Fire” on Top of the Pops in 1968—a full year before “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath on Black Sabbath. Strains of Arthur’s musical-DNA, such as corpse paint and melodrama, remain.

But Arthur Brown was not a satanist. His idea of using satanic imagery without the ideology persists; only a handful of pre-’00s metal musicians profess to be actual Satanists. Even fewer claim to worship the devil—most out-Satanists in metal music follow(ed) Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, which does not believe in Satan as an actual entity. The Church of Satan’s beliefs boil down to extreme individualism with hedonistic overtones—its followers fall between Atheist and Desists. For all the flak fired at LaVey, his religion is the left hand path equivalent of Unitarian Universalist. King Diamond is LaVey’s most public follower in the metallic sphere, but the Church of Satan’s fundamental belief in self-worth—and hypersexual overtones—still show up in contemporary metal.

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King Diamond/Mercyful Fate Interview

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New satanic bands—like Akercocke below—reject LaVey.

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Akercocke Interview

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More contemporary bands talk about satanism than ever—the Decibel tour celebrated theistic satanism as much as the magazine that sponsored it. And art fueled by genuine faith has a powerful character—one distinct from music just about opposing the conventions of others. For proof, head down to your local youth-oriented megachurch, or a christian rock festival, and watch the band. The last time I saw something like this the performance captivated me while the lyrics and dominant major chords repulsed me.

And perhaps theistic satanism is the most interesting thing about these bands. Musically, Watain, The Devils Blood, and In Solitude all harken back, instead of pressing their genres forward. Performing in live animal blood is not new, neither is torches—that’s all descended from Mr. Brown. Their individual knacks for excellent songwriting is overshadowed by their collective ability to work the press in their favor while keeping up mystique.

Some find that elusiveness precious and irritating, but keeping hush-hush can be a gesture of respect. Consider the trailers for action films anxious to show something explode at the end or some starlet’s anorexic behind in a swimsuit. Satan is the big fight scene at the end. The money shot. Don’t you want something to look forward to? The new satanism does not dispense with Arthur Brown’s theatricality, but at least treats its subject matter with some genuine awe.

They talk about Satan the way christian bands talk about god—as a solution, as opposed to a symbolic middle finger, or subject matter for a creepy narrative. It’s one thing to make critiques—and criticizing religion is as metal as headbanging—but offering an alternative is mature. I see the theistic satanism of Watain, as well as the radical atheism of bands like The Ocean, as a sign of the genre’s growing sophistication.

Think of it this way: Browns’ satan spooks parents. Mainstream/old school/classic metal satan doubles for “fuck you”. Specifically a pointed and directed “fuck you”. The new satanism explores what does the fucking. The Norma Evangelium Diaboli crowd and their contemporaries celebrate their faith more than damn others. And like their Abrahamic opposition’s vanguard, they evangelize. The point of bringing “black metal” back to hooks and catchy songwriting is to make Satan interesting enough to explore and research. We are apes—things which hold our attention, but promise complexity fascinate us.

That complexity budded—at least in a prominent way—on Dissection’s comeback album Reinkaos.

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Dissection – “Starless Aeon”

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Not the band’s strongest moment musically, but the seeds of theistic satanism’s metal tropes all appear on the record. You could call it the template for postmodern satanic metal. Dissection pulls quotes—also an evangelical trait—from holy books in multiple languages. Persian, in the case of “Starless Aeon”. But primarily “Starless Aeon”, and new Satanism in particular, portray Satan as an apocalyptic force—an actual entity that eats light.

These young men and women are taking concepts from contemporary science and applying it to their spirituality, keeping their views modern.I spoke with Selim Lemouchi from The Devil’s blood about this on the first date of the Decibel tour. I asked him what the purpose of his religion was, and he told me, “Freedom from all laws, the laws of man, the laws of the spirit and the world.”

“When you say laws of the world you’re talking about the laws of reality—you’re talking about particle physics?”

“Yes. Freedom even from matter.”

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Watain – “Stellarvore”

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“Black Hole” Metal makes a more fitting genre tag. The same image of all-consuming void pops up in Stargazer, The Devil’s Blood, Deathspell Omega, Saturnalia Temple, Negative Plane . . . the list goes on. In that image, the new Satanism escapes its binary relationship with Abrahamic religions. It took the Catholic church hundreds of years to accept Galileo’s teachings—Watain look liberal in comparison.

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Melancholia (movie clip) – “The earth is evil; we don’t need to grieve for it.”

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The new Satanism borrows more from traditionally Eastern philosophies than Christian ones. Hinduism sees reality as an illusion, a Māyā, that binds us—the goal is to escape it. Bushido’s teachings oriented samurai toward death as an inevitability and a liberating force. With that in mind, the Maha Kali EP seems like a logical step for a band that once did Storm of the Light’s Bane.

None of that is original in and of itself. But for the first time since Arthur Brown, the devil in rock seems complex. His followers’ attitudes toward him carry more than distilled “fuck you”. Their lyrics anticipate the moments of satan’s arrival with awe, but also an awareness that something will be taken away. The philosopher-speaker, for example, in Deathspell Omea’s “Sola Fide I”, has anxiety toward his master, and colors satan as a being that might love his subjects a measure of order less than they love him. It’s called ambivalence—playing devil’s advocate to the devil himself—and it’s setting the tone for Satanic metal for the foreseeable future.

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Weasel and I met last December for a lengthy chat about jazz, metal, and the intersections between these styles. Below you’ll find an abridged version of the Q&A, which focuses on metal-centric topics. Visit my blog, heavymetalbebop.com for a much (much!) longer, more jazz-oriented cut of the interview.

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I was trying to pinpoint when blast beats came in to your playing, and it seems like the Luttenbachers record Revenge was one of the first times when I heard you use that technique. It sounds very native; you sound natural playing that. It seems to me there must have been a time when you heard death metal and consciously said, “I want to learn blast beats.” What was the process of assimilating that style like?

When I was a teenager I had no inclination towards heavy metal as a subculture. I was more interested in the punk aesthetic. Punk was a great way for me to get into non-mainstream music, and I think a lot of people from my generation entered the same way. However, I quickly got into No Wave and free jazz and all this other crazy stuff and heavy metal, in the ’80s, just seemed kind of laughable to me, because most of the mainstream metal I was exposed to didn’t have the amphetamine edge I was looking for in the music I liked. It always seemed like everything was kind of half-time and a little lazy and swollen and bombastic in a way that didn’t really resonate with me. I was never really interested in heavy metal.

The turning point was probably around 1993 when I was living in Chicago, and I was hanging out a lot with the guitar player Kevin Drumm. We would hang out at his apartment and shoot the shit. He was getting into free jazz and I was laying stuff on him. By the same token, one day he was sort of sitting there, talking about metal and I was kind of like, “Metal? That’s just a bunch of guys in spandex, singing falsetto. Who cares? Lame.” He was like, “You gotta be kidding me! You never heard Deicide?” I was like, “No, I’ve never heard Deicide.” He walks over, and he turns on the second Deicide album, Legion, and immediately it just clicked with me. It was everything that I wanted. It was dissonant; it was fractured; the drums were incredibly fast to my ears at the time. It was basically, like, some next-level shit that I had been waiting for but didn’t have access to because I didn’t really hang out with metalheads. I had some brushes with it in the late ’80s, but nothing that made me really want to pursue it. Something about the second Deicide album really clicked with me because it was so “prog”; it was kind of catchy and everything about it was really bombastic, but in an adrenalized way, where it just sounded like these guys were playing as fast as they could and that clicked with me immediately. That’s what I liked about hard-core free jazz: the sound of a bunch of guys playing as fast as they possibly could. (Laughs) That was the appeal of listening to Archie Shepp’s Three for a Quarter, One for a Dime; it’s just a half hour of flipping the fuck out!

So I hear this Deicide record, and that was it. I was done. I basically started scouring Chicago budget bins for dollar death metal CDs. I was buying everything. Of course, I heard these blast beats in this music and I thought, “This is the ultimate in density.” As far as being a drummer, playing a blast beat like this is like a machine gun. It’s like spraying the listener with as much incremental mass as you can possibly cram in. It’s total momentum. I would say around 1994, I started experimenting with trying to play blast beats. The first composition I ever wrote which incorporated blast beats was the first song on the album Revenge of the Flying Luttenbachers, which is a song called “Storm of Shit”, which I wrote in late 1994. I have a demo of it, playing by myself, and that song is really based off a Blasphemy song called “Blasphemous Attack”. It’s basically the same fucking song. I mean, it’s got some extra stuff in it, but I heard Blasphemy on a compilation tape of this sort of fly-by-night label JL America, and there was something about how crude it was and how the blast beat was just a static wall of momentum that really appealed to me. So I wrote this song sort of trying to figure out how I could utilize this kind of momentum.

I think that I’m better at playing blast beats now than I was 15 years ago. There is a science to it, and at that point there wasn’t really a technical doctrine of how to do this. I think now it is being taught because it’s something that a lot more people want to do. At the time, I don’t really know if people knew what to think of it. Death metal and extreme metal had no cachet in the experimental music realm. Beyond Kevin Drumm, I knew almost no one who liked this stuff. You couldn’t give it away. I spent most of the ’90s buying dollar CDs of everything: all the Roadrunner stuff, all the Osmose stuff, all that crap out of the budget bin because nobody in Chicago wanted it. It was not cool. But to me it was so obvious. It was like, “You fucking idiots!” The same way you couldn’t give away classic free-jazz records in the ’80s, you couldn’t give away death metal records in the ’90s. So, I was just cherry-picking this stuff and to me it was just, “Ah, you fools! You have no clue!”

I always have to credit Kevin Drumm. Kevin Drumm had the good taste. He lived in the shitkicker Chicago suburbs, and he grew up listening to metal. That was his thing. Now he has quite a reputation as one of the great avant-garde conceptualists of our generation, and I still know all he listens to is extreme metal. (Laughs) I mean, every time I hang out with the guy, it turns into, like, a drinking party with whatever NSBM vinyl he’s acquired, and it’s just hilarious.

In terms of the blast beats, were there periods where you had to work on it like you would drum rudiments or something?

As far as playing blast beats go, there’s a number of approaches that people take. I tend to play with two feet instead of one, which is seen as some kind of faux pas to certain people who are interested in the technique, but that’s the way I do it. It didn’t always sound good. It’s something that I had to figure out how to do successfully. One of the problems with playing extreme metal drums is that often onstage it’s almost impossible to hear what you’re doing with your feet. (Laughs) I had to learn over the years how to make sure that my feet were where they needed to be, lest it just turn into a wall of garbage. I certainly know of and have tapes of shows I played, with Hatewave or the Flying Luttenbachers, where the blast beats just sound like they’re out of control—like, it sounds like somebody just shoved a dryer down a flight of stairs, you know? (Laughs) So, obviously I’ve had many years to refine my approach and I definitely have it down. It is just like any technique. It is just like a rudiment, because if you want to master it, you have to understand it from more than just an obligatory angle.

To go back into your idea of metal technique, I, for a long time, have had some issues with my foot technique to the point where six years ago I was actually crippling myself when I was playing. I had to correct it and this is an ongoing struggle of, “Okay, I can do exactly what I want with my hands, and I can’t do exactly what I want with my feet. Am I going to deal with this or not deal with this?” I had a meeting with a local drummer. He was a guy who I thought might be able to illuminate me to what I needed to correct about my foot technique, and it got to the point where it was basically like, “Well, you know what I would recommend? You gotta do this Derek Roddy exercise video”. I had seen the video before and I was like, “Awww . . .” He was like, “Look, if you do this fucking thing a half hour a day, it will clean up your technique.” The same way that Derek Roddy on the video says “Do this a half hour a day and it’ll clean up your technique”, and sure as shit, it did. I did it for a month with a metronome and I was like, “Oh, this is helping”. It’s the kind of exercise that’s extremely simple, but if you do it, and you do it at a measured pace every day, you watch everything get cleaned up. The cleanness of the sort of “grid” that a blast beat creates, all of a sudden becomes less muddy. Everything needs to be exactly where it is.

Because I’m in the band Behold…the Arctopus, which is basically trying to play almost unplayable compositions, I’m expected to play like a drum machine. I’m expected to play like a MIDI program. I’ve spent two years rehearsing about 25 minutes of material at this point and I have had to correct and expand my technique as a drum-set player. I don’t want to say there’s such a thing as “unplayable music”, because I believe there’s a way to play all music. It’s whether or not you want to put in the extreme amount of time and frustration figuring out how to do it. (Laughs) But I got to the point where I had to work on my drum technique or I wasn’t going to be able to play the music, and I’m a “can-do” kind of guy when it comes to music. I think there’s a way to do anything you can imagine. You just have to commit to it. In the past two years, I’ve had to work on my technique in a way that I’ve never worked on it before, and I’m a much better drummer now. My goal was always to excel at what I’m doing. Not necessarily excel by everyone else’s standards, but to constantly push forward my agenda and now that I play in Behold…the Arctopus, that was a real challenge. There’s no composition that I can sleepwalk my way through; it’s always “on” all the time. I’ve had to look to death metal drummers for technical advice and guidance because it was necessary.

I remember seeing you play with the Luttenbachers 4 or 5 years ago, and you were playing some of that stuff with a death-metal drumming vocabulary, but it was on a kit where you had a floor tom turned into a bass drum—very unconventional. It wasn’t like you were setting up two bass drums. It was kind of making do with what you had. I guess I’m wondering, when you’re in these more conventional settings (Hatewave, 7000 Dying Rats, Behold… the Arctopus etc.), is it important to you to change up your gear or upgrade things so it sounds more “regular”?

Yes. That is a big conundrum for me, because after having played drums for 25 years, I’ve never owned a “real” drum kit, and the reason for that is lack of resources. Pure and simple. For example, also, I did several tours with Lair of the Minotaur as a drummer and that was a terribly straight-ahead metal band. I had to borrow a drum kit (Laughs) as I am right now with Behold…the Arctopus. In February, Behold…the Arctopus is playing our first shows in five years for the band, our first shows after two years of rehearsal. This is an issue because part of what Colin Marston said to me when we started playing together was, “I want you to write for the band, but if you write something, it has to be ‘metal.’ ” You know what I mean? Colin has a great appreciation of what I’ve done compositionally with the Flying Luttenbachers and other projects and he made it clear he wanted me involved, but he made it clear that idiomatically Behold…the Arctopus is a metal band. As abstract as it gets, it should be metal, and I totally accept that. By the same token, it’s appropriate for me to play on a good, big-sounding drumset. (Laughs) However, I don’t have one and I don’t have the funds so hopefully I’m looking to resort to this “Kickstarter” scenario – not Kickstarter per se, but a public-assistance approach to raising funds to get a real drum set for the first time in my life because it has to be there. I can’t really show up playing these gigs with the Beverly Hillbillies Luttenbachers drum kit. (Laughs)

I was thinking about your discography and how my favorite records of yours are the ones that have pretty strict parameters, where there’s not much “fusion” going on. For example, the Flying Luttenbachers’ Cataclysm on the “brutal prog” side or Lichens (with Gianni Gebbia and Damon Smith) on the free-improv side. On some of the early Luttenbachers records, there’s more of a hybridization of styles, and I’m not saying I dislike those records, but I’m curious: Do you think this tradition of fusing things, either in your work as a player/composer or as a fan, is ultimately helping anything?

I’m not very concerned with clever references to idioms. I’m not particularly fond of postmodernism as a concept. I’m catholic enough in my approach that I can play with Evan Parker and do that music, and I can play in a band like Hatewave and do that, and they don’t really intersect in a stylistic manner, but they intersect in the approach maybe. It’s an approach of intensity, speed, articulation, some kind of modernist aesthetic approach. I don’t feel the need to combine these things blatantly because that’s not a point I need to prove to anyone. I’m not interested in being the guy that puts heavy metal and free jazz together. I just don’t really care about that.

When I compose, I’m trying to solve aesthetic issues that I have, or I’m trying to create composition to fulfill a certain need I have aesthetically and that’s a very vague, abstract thing. I never sit down and say, “I am going to write a death metal song”. (Laughs) I’m usually like, “I would like to write a composition that is fast . . .” The composition “The Elimination of Incompetence,” which was on Infection and Decline, I said to myself, “I want to write a composition that takes some of the signifiers of death metal, but does everything wrong. I want the harmony to avoid the sort of ‘root/fifth’ power-chord sort of scheme. I want there to be constant harmonic counterpoint, and I want the counterpoint to shift constantly with the phrases, and I want there to be blast beats, but I want the relation of the blast beats to be abstractly related to the guitars”. You know what I mean? When I wrote that song, I was trying to work on these aesthetic quandaries. That’s how I wrote the song. I really didn’t want to make any sort of fusion between such-and-such idiom.

Can you think of an example of a person coming from the metal end of things who has surprised you with their deep knowledge of jazz, or vice versa?

No. (Laughs) I have turned jazz guys onto death metal. I can’t say that I’ve done the inverse very much. There are a few people out there in the metal field who are interested in experimental music, and I correspond with some of these people. By and large metal fans tend to be primarily into metal. It’s a subculture; there’s a uniform; you can be part of it. It’s something you can kind of rally behind.

I think with improvisers or jazz players, a lot of them tend to be interested in the scope of musical possibilities, even if they don’t express it—even as listeners. I played the last Mayhem album, Ordo Ad Chao, for Peter Evans and he thought it was fucking great. I said, “Check this out! It’s kind of like if Varèse wrote for rock band.” We played it and he was like, “Wow. I love this!” He has no pretense of being a metal fan. He just thought it was interesting music and it was interesting enough that he pursued it. I think that if any of that comes out in Peter’s music, it’s not going to be an idiomatic thing like, “Man, I got this thing where I do trumpet over death metal!” (Laughs) It’s really not going to turn out that way. To me, something like Ordo Ad Chao, that’s just pure music; it’s interesting modern composition. It goes beyond the clichés of black metal or death metal.

Ultimately, the composition matters. De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Those are kind of like classic-rock songs—gothic classic-rock songs with blast beats on them. If you can hear past the blast beats, it’s just like classic-rock songwriting with this sort of overt gothic/Wagnerian tinge.

Let me throw out some names and we’ll try to have some mini-conversations about several “elephant in the room” type artists in this general area of inquiry. What are your thoughts on Last Exit?

Last Exit’s first album came into my life probably around 1988. I bought it at a record store. The names looked good on the cover. I knew who everybody was and I failed to see how I could go wrong buying this record. Sure as shit, I didn’t. I took it home and I was pleased as punch with what I heard. I was looking for, you know, more intersections of this kind of nihilist punk energy and crazy free playing. That record, especially at the time, perfectly typified getting it right.

Whereas, like Painkiller got it wrong or Naked City got it wrong, Last Exit got it right, for me. They were brutal. They were egotistical. They were macho. (Laughs) They were everything that I wanted out of it. I wanted superheroes. I wanted four swashbuckling pirates coming in, kicking everyone in the face and just blowing their brains out. That’s exactly what Last Exit started out as. The concept kind of went astray later on, but what’s important is that they made a couple really great albums.

What about Black Flag?

I would have to say as far as being a guitar player, Greg Ginn’s approach to phrases as strings of intervals is still pretty pertinent to what I do as a guitar player. In the way that Ornette Coleman decided to make his early music guided by the contour of the melody as opposed to a set of harmonic changes, Greg Ginn by 1984, ‘85, was taking this direction with his guitar playing where anything went with the trajectory of the melody as long as where his fingers went . . . (Laughs)

I’m not really sure if there’s a good explanation for this. Greg Ginn’s guitar playing is almost analogous in a rock setting to what Ornette Coleman was doing in the late ’50s because Greg Ginn wasn’t necessarily that concerned about tonality. He was more concerned about intervallic relationships and generating material by moving his fingers in interesting ways and letting one event lead to the next, to the next, to the next. It almost had nothing to do with the harmony or anything behind it. I could sense that early on, the same way that in 1988 when I heard Reign in Blood, I heard Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman’s solos and thought, “Ornette Coleman” immediately. “This is like fucking Ornette Coleman.”

With death metal or extreme metal, there’s a lot of harmolodic logic to a lot of the solos. Even further, some of the solos in metal are extremely expressionistic and extremely abstract. Tom G. Warrior from Celtic Frost—all of his guitar solos, they’re shambolic to the point of being inept. It’s like pure-sound playing. You can tell the guy has no clue how to play a proper solo if his life depended on it, but he’s directing the sound in these very definitive ways. He’s got this lexicon of things that he does and he arranges them in ways that seem interesting to him, but ultimately it’s very abstract.

Are you a fan of Trey Azagthoth?

Yeah, sure! He’s an incredible guitar player and his playing is very abstract. I’m assuming that a lot of his guitar solos are improvised, because I’ve never heard him play the same solo twice. That’s the interesting point: Are Kerry King’s guitar solos composed or improvised? I don’t know, but they sound great. Same thing with Trey Azagthoth. I’m pretty sure a lot of them were improvised, but his improvisations are pretty . . . they’re worthy of analysis. They’re pretty incredible guitar solos tonally, from a harmonic perspective and rhythmic perspective.

I always thought it would be funny to get some ridiculous shredder like Michael Angelo Batio and have him shred over, like, fucking Rashied Ali, if he was still alive and in his prime. I always thought it would be hilarious just to hear what that sounded like but now I just booked Mick Barr and Marc Edwards. There you go.

Let’s talk specifically about that Marc Edwards/Mick Barr thing. What did you want to do with that, putting those two guys together?

Well, I play with Marc all the time. For me to just book another gig with Marc Edwards is somewhat predictable. I was in a position in which I was asked to put a bill together, and I wanted to do my own group and at the same time I was like, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if Marc was on this gig or he could do something he wants to do away from me?” I sat there for a second and was like, “Well, who would I want to see Marc play with?” Since Marc is such a power player, a lot of people on the jazz scene can’t deal with him. They literally cannot deal with his playing. They cannot hack it. A lot of these older guys, man, they don’t want to fucking play with Marc. Marc is loud and balls-out, and they can’t handle it. I’m not castigating these guys for getting old and losing power—that’s just inevitable. But the guys in that scene, they don’t want to deal with Marc because Marc is playing like he’s 30 years old. He might be playing better now than he was before, which is a little scary! But, Marc is a unique person: one of the last people from his generation of drummers that can fucking bring it. He’s one of the few that survived.

The whole thing was, shit, what am I gonna get? Who are you going to call? There’s no hardcore free-jazz horn players in New York. So I was thinking, who should I have him play with? Duh. Fucking Mick. Mick and Marc are almost working with the same material. They work with this circular, flowing material—almost in a tempo. Mick always plays at the same tempo. He’s not trying to play 4/4, but you could put a pulse through it and the same with Marc. Marc plays free drums but he’s always playing in this pulse, this strata of pulse. He’s not disruptive the way I am. He’s more of a flowing drummer and it’s [based in] rudiments. He’s really into this one stroke, paradiddle-diddle—that is his main stroke, and that’s what he does, and he does it a lot and he never stops.

So, I was just thinking, this makes perfect sense. They’ve never played together. Mick is interested in free music but he hasn’t really had an entrée into the scene beyond a few people that we already know who they are. Mick was psyched about it because he likes Marc’s playing; Marc was psyched about it because he likes Mick’s playing. It was rather successful. They actually communicated. As monomaniacal as both of those players are in their concept, their concepts meshed exactly. I found that they were really playing with each other and it could actually progress. I don’t think that was their pinnacle, their first gig. I think their languages intersect perfectly.

As a fan of the music it was nice to go, “I’ve got an idea, let’s do this” and it worked exactly as it should have. I would like to be a catalyst. In some ways I have been a catalyst in certain scenes and to me that’s part of trying to give back and not just trying to get acceptance and recognition. The better everybody does, the better everybody does. The more people that are doing this, the less I have to do it all. I’m a music fan. I would like to go see a kick-ass band. I don’t always want to be in the band.

One last name I want to mention: J. Read, from Revenge.

Well, J.Read is what you want a metal drummer to be. He is powerful and fast and chaotic. He will be metal until he dies. He sort of typifies . . . there’s a certain point where metal drumming became so fast and technical it ceased to rock, and I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in these guys on YouTube, you know, tapping away, doing their gravity blasts and their ankle-twitch fucking kick drum from hell. It doesn’t rock. A guy like J.Read is about rock & roll, but he’s taking it to this next level of speed and power. You get him going and he just goes off.

Header photo by andy new.

Animal-loving grindcore gods Cattle Decapitation first forged the death-grind high seas back when Atlanta was hosting the summer Olympics. (That’s 1996, for those of you playing along at home.) Over the years, Cattle Decap has dealt with distribution quarrels; when their 2002 album To Serve Man and their 2004 album Humanure were released, both featured album covers that were deemed too graphic for distribution in Europe. (I guess a cow excreting human remains doesn’t digest well for those with sensitive stomachs.)

This tradition is alive and well in 2012 with Monolith of Humanity, the band’s new album, out today. As you can tell from the artwork above and relentlessly pummeling songs such as “Projectile Ovulation” and “Gristle Licker,” which you can hear via the link below, this band is not shying away from timed-0n-a-dime blast beats and vomit-inducing inward vocals anytime soon.

To win your very own copy of the madness that is Monolith of Inhumanity, tell us in the comments below about the most wretchedly disgusting song you have ever heard. This contest will end at midnight on Tuesday, September 15. You must have a mailing address in the US or Canada to enter.

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