| A | Utica | 6:48 | ||
| B | Lelehudah | 6:05 |
| 1 | His Master’s Voice - Part 1 - Neutrino Radiation | 22:34 | ||
| 2 | Dark Energy - Silentium Universi | 12:57 | ||
| 3 | Soul Virus - Interstellar Semantics | 13:34 | ||
| 4 | His Master’s Voice - Part 2 - Ignoramus | 24:11 |
| 1 | 2.1 | 11:54 | ||
| 2 | 2.2 | 6:40 | ||
| 3 | 2.3 | 13:34 | ||
| 4 | 2.4 | 6:06 | ||
| 5 | 2.5 | 9:00 | ||
| 6 | 2.6 | 8:40 | ||
| 7A | 2.7 | 7:55 | ||
| 7B | Untitled | 6:50 | ||
| 7C | Untitled | 3:07 |
| 1 | Intro / I Put My Faith In The Lord | |||
| 2 | What Was Written Will Come To Pass | |||
| 3 | Among The Mountains And Rivers Flowing | |||
| 4 | Det Var Bättre Förr | |||
| 5 | Praeparatus Supervivet | |||
| 6 | Leedskalnin | |||
| 7 | Children Of The Masked Emperor | |||
| 8 | Outro / II (Reprise) |
| 1 | I (1) | 10:25 | ||
| 2 | II | 3:40 | ||
| 3 | III | 7:38 | ||
| 4 | IV | 6:39 | ||
| 5 | V | 7:23 | ||
| 6 | VI | 3:04 | ||
| 7 | VII | 8:20 | ||
| 8 | I (2) | 6:13 | ||
| 9 | I (rmx) | 5:08 |
| 1 | Goatsbane / Scapewolf | 3:19 | ||
| 2 | Bearer, Begetter, The Sovereign Wolf | 7:17 | ||
| 3 | Dark Eyed And Frost Scorned | 5:13 | ||
| 4 | Goatwalking | 7:08 | ||
| 5 | Razed Under Cloven Hoof And Bloody Maw | 2:20 | ||
| 6 | Wall Of Goat | 4:43 | ||
| 7 | Wall Of Wolf | 4:14 | ||
| 8 | A Black Drum Droning | 9:08 |
| 1 | Neurocosmos | |||
| 2 | Przeklęty | |||
| 3 | Armia Głupców | |||
| 4 | Martwa Noc | |||
| 5 | Zamglenie | |||
| 6 | Moc Czekania | |||
| 7 | Amnezja | |||
| 8 | To Tylko Jesień | |||
| 9 | Monotonia |
Artist: Flores Funebres
Album Title: A moment before nothingness
Album Code: AMB004
Genre: Ethereal Dark Ambient
Release Date: October 31st 2010
Running Time: 0:38:54
Tracklist:
1. Fear of Death (2:31)
2. Depressive Personality Disorder (1:27)
3. A Moment Before Nothingness (3:10)
4. Cosmic Endless Void (5:03)
5. Impressio (0:59)
6. Demones Melancholici (1:20)
7. Satan Est Spiritus Tristiae (2:02)
8. Actum De Me Est (improvisatio) (2:00)
9. Forget-me-not (2:07)
10. We All Must Die (6:11)
11. Strabilis Melancholia (4:27)
12. Desideratum Nihil (3:48)
13. So Different (1:15)
14. La Valse (1:47)
15. Sans Toi (0:47)
| 1. | Panteon (Prolog) | 03:37 | |
| 2. | Bitewna Pieśń | 05:43 | |
| 3. | Nasze Słowa Będą Czynem | 00:55 | |
| 4. | Gdzie Zaległy Cienie | 06:03 | |
| 5. | Szept Bałtyku | 01:48 | |
| 6. | Plony | 05:46 | |
| 7. | Pogarda | 04:42 | |
| 8. | Płomień w Naszych Sercach | 02:03 | |
| 9. | Poprzez Chaos | 06:51 | |
| 10. | Chory Kraj | 06:44 | |
| 11. | Ku Wieczności (Epilog) | 02:41 |
| 1 | Paranoid Theories | 4:11 | ||
| 2 | Defend To The Death | 4:39 | ||
| 3 | Blood And Honour | 3:08 | ||
| 4 | Bow Belle | 5:38 | ||
| 5 | Havamal (Part 2) | 5:33 | ||
| 6 | Here We Go Again | 3:32 | ||
| 7 | Legio Patria Nostra | 7:35 | ||
| 8 | Le Legion | 4:37 | ||
| 9 | Adieu Bel Addes | 1:31 | ||
| 10 | Storm Of Steel | 5:51 |
| 1 | Brightness Of The Rising Sun | |||
| 2 | Anthem Of The Warior | |||
| 3 | Głos Tożsamości | |||
| 4 | Altar Of The Noble Glory | |||
| 5 | Dawna Siła | |||
| 6 | When Europe Is Dying | |||
| 7 | Epilogue |
| 1 | Whose Flag? | |||
| 2 | Axiom | |||
| 3 | Iron Youth | |||
| 4 | Long Live | |||
| 5 | For A Dream | |||
| 6 | Just Say... Forbidden | |||
| 7 | Outright Blasphemy | |||
| 8 | White Hate | |||
| 9 | To Him | |||
| 10 | After The War |
| 1 | Megali Hellas | |||
| 2 | Oath Of Honour | |||
| 3 | The Heroic Ideal (What Once Was Again Shall Be) | |||
| 4 | Iron Will And Discipline | |||
| 5 | For Pagan And Heretic's Blood | |||
| 6 | Heathen Terrormachine | |||
| 7 | Guards Of The Solar Order | |||
| 8 | Mors Triumphalis | |||
| 9 | They've Got Attacked By The Werewolves | |||
| 10 | When The Elders Where Still Young | |||
| 11 | Marked For Genocide | |||
| 12 | Poison Of Modernity | |||
| 13 | Anti-Semitic Fundamentalism | |||
| 14 | Those Who Spoke With Death |
Black Metal and the Return of Völkisch Thought
How did völkisch ideas resurface in popular culture? By the 1960s Christianity had entered a phase of decline in the West, following a long period of growing skepticism as well as hostility from political ideologies from both Right and Left. As has been the pattern in the West since the fourth century,[1] the decline of the dominant religion coincided with a renewed interest in alternative spiritualities, exotic religions, and the occult.
Much of this interest found expression in modern popular culture, especially modern popular music. Perhaps the most striking example of this confluence is the music of Heavy Metal pioneers Led Zeppelin, whose lyrics blended Aleister Crowley, J. R. R. Tolkien, and pagan Norse and Anglo-Saxon folklore. Artists like Black Sabbath, Black Widow, and Coven also incorporated occult themes and went on to influence subsequent waves of more explicitly Satanic Heavy Metal artists, such as King Diamond and Mercyful Fate.
Influenced by Black Sabbath, Motörhead, and punk rock, Bathory emerged within this milieu. We have already seen how the Satanic themes of Bathory’s early albums were replaced by Nordicist and pagan ones. Bathory’s Thomas Forsberg articulated the view that Christianity was a foreign religion, a form of Judaic spiritual conquest that sought to crush and eradicate indigenous European paganism. During the 1990s, this view became widely influential in the Black Metal subculture, especially in Scandinavia.
Anti-Christian views within the Black Metal scene usually fall into two categories: Nietzschean (often mediated through Anton Lavey’s “Satanism”) and neo-pagan. The Nietzscheans denigrate Christianity as an egalitarian religion of weakness, meekness, repentance, confession, and self-denial. The neo-pagans generally agree with the Nietzscheans, but emphasize the foreignness and deracinating influence of Christianity compared to the more authentic European pagan heritage. This outlook is explicitly völkisch, evoking the unity of blood and soil, of race and nation, and of spirituality and the Volk. The Black Metal scene also tends to be anti-Semitic for the same völkisch reasons they are anti-Christian. Some Black Metal musicians were so militantly anti-Christian that during the early-to-mid 1990s, they embarked on a campaign of church arsons.
In the world of Black Metal, genuine spirituality and depth of artistic expression is all about delving fearlessly into the darkness of the human soul. Hence the unremittingly dark songs filled with hate, fear, melancholy, misery, and depression. Black Metal—“true” Black Metal—seeks to put the greatest possible distance between itself and the mainstream of capitalistic mass society, which it perceives as meaningless, banal, materialist, brainless, conformist, uncreative, and hypocritical.
The Black Metal subculture glorifies war and the martial spirit. Scenes of battle are common on Black Metal album covers, and musicians often photograph themselves wielding axes or swords and wearing bandoliers, spiked arm-bands, and, occasionally, coats of mail. Likewise, lyrics celebrate war and battle, often heroic but always bloody. This militarism is often wrapped in mysticism. Typical titles include “Sunwheel on the Helmet of Steel” in Capricornus’ Alone Against All, “Nine Steps to Eternity” in Thor’s Hammer’s Fidelity Shall Triumph, and “Fire and Snow” in Graveland’s Will Stronger than Death.
Black Metal artists also emphasize nature and landscape, but a morbid and mystical sensibility is evident even here. Whether inspired by völkisch thought or mere Satanic occultism, nature is always conceived in spiritual, mystical, and Romantic terms. The Black Metal aesthetic dictactes that night and winter are eternal. Coniferous forests are preferred to tilled fields and manicured gardens. Where the glorification of war merges with nature mysticism, the emphasis remains on the latter. Viking and Folk Metal bands, in contrast, adopt a more obviously völkisch approach to nature, allowing daylight in their landscapes and generally emphasizing the idyllic as opposed to counter-Enlightenment Sturm und Drang.
The Black Metal sensibility does not reject culture in favor of nature, but instead valorizes culture and nature, both conceived organically, over civilization, which is conceived in mechanistic and materialistic terms. In the Black Metal universe, cities were never built, the Industrial Revolution never occurred, and modernity never arrived. For all its belligerence, Black Metal is inherently nostalgic, a comprehensive negation of modernity.
This negation is apparent even in the Black Metal sound, which would of course be impossible without the techno-industrial society Black Metal rejects. Thus the technological source of the Black Metal sound—that which links it to modernity—is concealed to the same degree that it is flaunted in Techno music: “raw” Black Metal bands favor a heavily under-produced, “necro” sound that deliberately avoids high-fidelity or otherwise seeks to emulate low-fidelity recording media—in contrast to other genres that favor a primitive, under-produced sound, the desired effect is not “street cred” (as in with Punk) but a sense of quasi-occult obscurity; more instrumentally sophisticated bands use layers of synthesizers to generate a volatilized mystical atmosphere that obscures the act of performance, while bands with a vehemently pagan orientation (e.g., Nokturnal Mortum) add traditional folk instruments into their mix musically to evoke an earthy sense of Volkstum.
The desired effect is always for the listener to lose himself in the sound, to go into a semi-trance, raised above the tedium of mundanity; Black Metal music aspires to hypnosis and, in the case of specifically pagan Black Metal, it seeks to create the spiritual union—with the landscape, with the collective unconsciousness, with the lost pagan soul, with the lost heroic spirit of the distant past—that was longed for by völkisch authors a century ago.
The rejection of modernity goes hand in hand with the rejection of progressivism. Like völkisch thinkers, Black Metalers, whether pagan, Satanic, or merely suicidal, are cultural pessimists. Their pessimism is often allied with the explicit adoption of the Indo-European Traditional cyclical view of history, in which history begins with a Golden Age then declines through Silver and Bronze ages to the present Iron or Dark Age (Kali Yuga), which is doomed to perish of its own corruptions or through a cataclysmic final battle, whereupon a new Golden Age will dawn.
References to such culture pessimists as Nietzsche and Spengler and to more mystically inclined authors like Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, Miguel Serrano, and H. P. Lovecraft, are common in Black Metal. Hence titles like “Decline of the West (Europe Will Rise)” in Pantheon’s Aryan Rebirth, “Eve of the Kali Yuga” in Arkthos’ Knights of the Eternal Sun, “The Gathering of the Elite to Destroy both the Modern World and Demiurge” in Beyond the North Winds’ Aryan Cult of A-Mor, “Desecration of Our Fatherland” in Darkthule’s Awakening of the Ancient Past, “Melancholy of the Inaccomplished Vengeance” in Sons of North’s Death of the White Race, “Among the Ruins” in SIG:AR:TYR’s Beyond the North Winds, “Son of the Fatherland” in Hordak’s The Last European Wolves, “A Golden Age Turns to Rust” in Drowning the Light’s The Fallen Years, and “Exiles of the Golden Age” in Weltenfeind, a three-way split with Absurd, Grand Belial’s Key, and Sigrblot.
Explicit references to völkisch thought are rare, but they occasionally surface: there is a Finnish band called Armanenschaft; Hate Forest’s Blood and Fire EP contains the song “Aryosophia”; Vril released a demo entitled “Once and Again Thule”; Werewolf’s track “Vrilmacht” appears in their Fidelity of Ideology split EP with Semper Fidelis; there is Apriaxia’s Blood and Soil EP; and Adalruna’s Wer ist der Starke von Oben shows a photograph of Guido von List standing by the Heltentor with members of the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft in 1911.
References to specifically Nazi mysticism and esotericism are also not infrequent: there is Bilskirnir’s EPs Ahnenerbe and Hyperborea, and the song “Reconquering the Atlantean Supremacy” in the album Wotansvolk, Hakenkreuzzug’s Centurions of Thule EP, the song “Jewel of Atlanteans” in Graveland’s Memory and Destiny, and the song “Hyperborean Ascention” in Contra Ignem Fatuum’s Detritus, among others.
The emergence of explicitly National Socialist Black Metal should not surprise, for the original völkisch current was the incubator of Conservative Revolutionary tendencies, including National Socialism, and by the mid 1990s Black Metal had re-created the same cultural logic that led to National Socialism 80 years earlier. But the readiness with which Black Metal came to embrace an outlook and sensibility so thoroughly stigmatized following the Allied victory in 1945 still needs to be explained.
The answer lies in the nature of Heavy Metal’s genesis following the collapse of the popular music subculture of the 1960s. Deena Weinstein identifies two strands within this genesis, an idealist one and a conservative one, which were fused at the point of Heavy Metal’s inception.[2]
Heavy Metal emerged at a time when its original core demographic—white working-class males—were experiencing a growing social, cultural, economic, political, and demographic displacement, thanks to the rising tide of radical feminism; belligerent black activism; discriminatory legislation in housing, education, and employment favoring minorities; non-white immigration from the Third World; and a serious economic downturn that drove the most marginalized whites to the wall. These developments aided the formation of an implicit white community that was strongly ethnocentric, and which, in a world where whiteness was increasingly de-centered, came to make a badge of honor of its negative marginality: Heavy Metal fans are what Weinstein calls “proud pariahs.”
The Heavy Metal culture was defined by its working class roots, and working class culture is by nature conservative, with well-defined male and female roles, a readiness to express strong emotions, and a distrust of government and corporations. It is a culture that is decidedly out of step with modern mainstream liberalism. Not surprisingly, then, Heavy Metal tended to resist radical changes in its form, celebrated heroic masculinity, and was predicated on an ethos of integrity and authenticity that deplored its own commercialization. Indeed, “[f]or fans, perhaps the worst thing that can be said about a heavy metal band is that it has ‘gone commercial.’”[3] Nevertheless, Heavy Metal gained many fans from the lower middle class, and subsequent offshoots have followed this pattern. The lower middle class is the same demographic that Mosse identified as formulating the völkisch critiques of modernity a century earlier, and indeed the key features of Heavy Metal culture are highly compatible with those critiques.[4]
Even in its rawest forms, Black Metal tends to appeal to a more elitist and culturally sophisticated sensibility than its parent genre, but it has not radically changed the basic anti-modern, anti-liberal, anti-commercial, anti-cosmopolitan outlook it inherited from Heavy Metal. It only made it more serious: deepened it ideologically, elaborated it artistically, and radicalized it metapolitically. From the beginning Black Metalers were proud pariahs in the modern world, and, as such, were receptive to anti-establishment ideologies that were compatible with Black Metal’s own constitution.
In sum, a good portion of Black Metal’s intellectual and aesthetic features are völkisch. Crowley, Satanism, and Tolkien also boil in the Black Metal cauldron, to be sure, but these too have been appropriated to the extent that they are consistent with the völkisch worldview. Therefore, one can plausibly characterize Black Metal as a revival of the Conservative Revolution, profoundly transformed in the context of a modern musical subculture, but recognizable nonetheless.
Lessons
My characterization of Black Metal will inevitably lead radical elements within the white nationalist movement to ask, “How do we use Black Metal to start the revolution?” Those asking this question will likely be thinking of how rock music in the 1960s helped to disseminate and popularize among the young the “progressive,” liberal, and anti-Western ideas that had been festering in the catacombs of the academia since the 1930s and even earlier.
I am not convinced that Black Metal has an application in that political sense. The music of the 1960s enjoyed broad appeal, whereas Black Metal seeks and revels in its own marginality and obscurity. Student engagement in radical politics during the late 1960s is only mirrored by the modern Left, and enjoyed, as it does today to a much greater degree, media and institutional support. Fans of Black Metal, on the other hand, detest politics even more than the Conservative Revolutionaries: theirs is a strategy of negation and of escape from mundanity.
The Anti-Geldof Compilation that I sponsored and released through my record label remains to date the sole extant example of engagement with current affairs and everyday politics in the Black Metal scene—and even in this case it was largely an emotional response on the part of the participating artists against the pious hypocrisy of self-indulgent rock stars. This is significant when one considers that the Encyclopedia Metallum currently lists over 17,000 Black Metal bands.[5] Then, again, most of the participating artists were associated with the NSBM scene, and, as we know, one aspect that distinguished the National Socialists from the Conservative Revolutionaries in Germany was their willingness to engage in mass politics.
At best, we can see Black Metal as proof that it is possible for a cultural space to exist, even today, where anti-egalitarian thought can find honest artistic expression and forge an alternative positive identity among whites through the praxis of style. Our task is to understand the mechanisms that enabled significant parts of the Black Metal scene to exist as an explicit white community in the first place. Our task is also to create other such cultural spaces, to expand the constellation of stylized activities, so that we may eventually build a parallel cultural universe wherefrom they can be afforded institutional support and thus gain momentum and consolidate, once the liberal establishment collapses by the weight of its own corruption and ideological bankruptcy.
This is an important task, because inasmuch as Black Metal artists have developed and inspired an evocative style or aesthetic that (implicitly or explicitly) is uniquely white and European and/or celebrates whiteness in all its diversity of history and heritage, Black Metal is a genuine object of study in the context of a cultural war where the opposing faction seeks to suppress, defame, and eradicate whiteness. Humans are sentimental and emotional animals, more readily persuaded by an appealing style than by a rational argument, so winning the cultural war will require more than hard facts and superior logic. It requires that we successfully appeal to sentiment and emotion by becoming masters of style. Black Metal contains important lessons in this respect.
| 1-1 | Reflecting In Shadows | |||
| 1-2 | In Absence Of Light | |||
| 1-3 | The Well Of Sadness | |||
| 1-4 | Deep Enshrouded | |||
| 1-5 | Moulding And Destruction I | 7:48 | ||
| 1-6 | The Eternal Horizon | 11:02 | ||
| 2-1 | The Transformal Landscape | |||
| 2-2 | The End Of The Key | |||
| 2-3 | Metamorphyses Phase IV | 7:22 | ||
| 2-4 | Mouldering The Forlorned - I | 7:56 | ||
| 2-5 | The Transformal Landscape | |||
| 2-6 | The End Of The Key | |||
| 3-1 | Dawn Of The Metal Projection | 30:02 | ||
| 3-2 | Dawn Of The Metal Projection | 29:34 | ||
| 3-3 | The End Of The Key | 8:05 |
| A1 | Arbeitsfront | |||
| A2 | Im Werk | |||
| B1 | Stahlarbeit | |||
| B2 | Schichtende |
| 1 | Deadbeat I | 5:25 | ||
| 2 | Mantrap | 4:25 | ||
| 3 | In Harm's Way | 5:05 | ||
| 4 | God's Shadow On Earth | 4:20 | ||
| 5 | Angelus | 4:19 | ||
| 6 | And Never The Twain... | 3:43 | ||
| 7 | Souls Lost | 4:25 | ||
| 8 | Deadbeat II | 4:19 | ||
| 9 | A Bolt Out Of The Blues | 5:33 | ||
| 10 | Beyond Retrieval | 8:33 |
| A | Blood Axis - | The Dream | 6:28 | |
| Fiddle - Annabel Lee Lyrics By - Walther von der Vogelweide Producer [Produced By], Recorded By, Keyboards - Robert Ferbrache Vocals, Percussion - Michael Moynihan | ||||
| B | Andrew King - | Fröleichen So Well Wir | 3:56 | |
| Artwork By [Image Scan] - Lloyd James Drums - John Murphy Flute, Organ, Loops, Sampler [Samples] - Hunter Barr Lyrics By - Oswald von Wolkenstein Producer [Produced By], Recorded By - Andrew King , Hunter Barr Vocals [Vox], Bells [Sleigh Bells], Loops, Sampler [Samples] - Andrew King Voice [Sprecherin] - Anne Schliephake | ||||
| A | Hollow Earth | 4:34 |