On the Distinctions Between "Art Metal" and "Metal-as-Art"
Analyzing Saskatchewan-based Blackened Noise Duo Wold and others, Adam Lehrer Makes Distinction Between "Art Metal" and "Metal-As-Art"
A friend of mine is a very serious musician of extreme music. His personal tastes demonstrate a brutally purist vision of black metal music, and he has nothing but contempt for the bands that have diluted the genre’s bleak, transcendent evil. To some extent, I agree with him. Black metal, at its best, is primordial. It’s an expression of a specifically Northern European alienation, connection to nature and the cosmos, and rejection of modernity. The artist Bjarne Melgaard has described black metal as a contemporary iteration of Munch’s The Scream: “something in the sense of utter decay and darkness and murder.”
“The lexicon of black metal is comprised, to an extent unmet by other forms of music, of references to the enduring, the abiding and the transcendent: the arctic tundra, the unyielding night of the northern winter, virgin woods and wastelands, stone, mountains, the moon, and the stars,” writes cultural critic Erik Butler in “The Counter-Reformation In Stone And Metal: Spiritual Substances.” The dilution of black metal over the last 20 years has resulted in all sorts of splinter genres that have obscured black metal’s troubling orientation with all kinds of vulgar, American aesthetic affectations, more palatable politics, and grotesque marketing signifiers. Antifa black metal. Blackgaze (a hybrid of black metal and shoegaze). There’s even now “psychedelic black metal,” which is particularly annoying given that black metal at its origins – with its satanist and occultist themes and noise-drenched, tremolo picked guitars – already was deeply psychedelic. American bands like Deafheaven, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Bosse-der-Nage play music that sounds like cowardice itself; like they are attracted to the black metal aesthetic but unwilling to accept the social ostracism that they’d have to face when truly embracing a music with a rooting in ideologies ranging from nihilism to satanism to national socialism. In these bands, black metal is little more than a stylistic statement. They are to black metal what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is to socialism. Vacant and fraudulent. They ape its signifiers while distancing themselves from its ideological origins, troubling history, and its embrace of violence as a sometimes necessary means of emancipation.
And yet, when I asked this same friend his thoughts on Wold, a Saskatchewan-based duo that has released a handful of mesmerizingly brutal albums that fracture the boundaries between black metal and avant-garde noise, he agreed with me that they were astonishing. He even relayed a story about seeing the band play at heavy metal fan Matthew Barney’s studio, and said it was one of the best performances he had ever seen. You’re probably wondering: “But wouldn’t this Wold band be exactly the kind of self-consciously arty black metal bands that purists of the genre should hate?” What is it then about Wold that transcends the black metal opportunism of Deafheaven? How is this self-consciously avant-garde band able to appropriate the genre signifiers of black metal without making a mockery of the very genre that they’re appropriating?
In her 1978 essay, “The Velvet Underground,” American rock critic Ellen Willis isolated the aesthetic innovations and philosophical underpinnings that made The Velvet Underground such a radical, seminal and enduringly fascinating rock n’ roll band. Willis deciphers what it was about The Velvets that opened up the path towards punk and underground rock in opposition to the “art rock” bands of the 1960s – like Genesis or The Moody Blues – that were quickly recuperated by the corporate music industry and rehashed in obscene drivel like Yes or ELO. She detects a key difference in “art rock” versus what she takes to describing as “rock n’ roll-as-art,” or simply “rock n’ roll art.” Art rock is a sophomoric attempt at making rock n’ roll more formally complex and “elevating” it to an allegedly higher art form; a cowardly retreat from the emotional purity and formal minimalism of rock n’ roll and its legacy as an aesthetic artifact of the black rural south. “Rock n’ roll as art,” while also made by often art educated sophisticates with little historical connections to the rock n’ roll canon, treat rock as formal material from which one can make a deeply original art that nevertheless remains utterly respectful towards rock music and its rather homogenous history. “While art rock is implicitly based on the claim that rock-n-roll could be as worthy as more established art forms, rock-and-roll art came out of an obsessive commitment to the language of rock-and-roll and an equally obsessive disdain for those who rejected that language or wanted it watered down, made easier,” she writes. Rock n’ roll art is a philosophical and artistic exploration of rock n’ roll as a form: its aesthetics, its limitations, and its emotions. Conversely, Art rock is a monotonous attempt at “adding” aesthetic signifiers to its formula. Rock n’ roll-as-art is an act of deconstruction and fragmentation. In the fragmentation of the rock n’ roll form, The Velvet Underground created the legacy that would eventually give us punk rock, post-punk, noise rock, and other subgenres that innovated new musical forms without disrespecting the legacy of rock n’ roll outright.
Heavy metal is arguably the last form of guitar music with any kind of modernism at all, but its dynamic now is similar to the one detected by Willis in rock n’ roll in the 1960s. There is “art metal,” and there is “heavy metal art,” or “metal-as-art.” Art metal bands sound like they are apologizing for the very style of music that they have chosen to play. Deafheaven, for instance, makes “metal” that is attached with stylistic signifiers that are more palatable to an audience of petty bourgeois, hipster cool kids (that would probably find metal to be beneath them otherwise). And while Deafheaven has cited none other than Burzum as its “blueprint,” it’s clear that the group was never comfortable in being a “black metal band” in its pure form. If that was their aim, then they wouldn’t have gotten all those festival slots, nor would they have ended up alongside Kendrick Lamar or Lorde on Pitchfork’s end of the year album lists. Their valor is stolen. Their aesthetic is one that they have mimicked from artists that never had intentions of crossing over or earning attention from the established music industry, and perverted. Deafheaven is “art metal.” Wolves in the Throne Room is art metal. Art metal is a bastardization of the black metal canon. Black metal – an inherently avant-garde and modernist style of music that doesn’t necessitate gluttonous stylistic monikers to make it more so – is a form of music that seems to attract cowards and fakes that wish to steal its extremity, but wear that extremity as a brand identity through which they can further ingratiate themselves to a music market. It shouldn’t be any surprise that music “critics” like Kim Kelly have risen in the last decade whom have to attach their left liberal politics to black metal and thus neutralize the troubling character that has made it so fascinating for so long, thieving a rich history and remaking it in an image that doesn’t challenge them intellectually. These people don’t have the courage to face their own passions. But black metal is a genre built on hate and rejection. To deny this is to deny its power. Deafheaven and Kelly are in denial.
But Wold isn’t art metal. Wold is black metal art, or metal-as-art. Comprised of musicians Fortress Crookedjaw and Obey (who might not be in the band anymore, but whatever, Wold hasn’t released a record since 2014, so it doesn’t really matter), Wold locates the delirious dissonance and atonality of the black metal genre to excavate the genre’s inherent modernism and clearly radical, avant-garde potential. “The fact that Wold is so far removed from what many would describe as ‘trve kvlt black metal’ and yet still invokes one of the genre’s classic tropes is uncanny,” wrote Joe Davenport in 2014. There are very clear reasons that can explain why Wold can be simultaneously alien when compared against the average black metal band, and still beloved and respected by genre purists. For one, Wold isn’t hybridizing the black metal genre with unrelated genre tropes to make it more salient to a mass market. On the contrary, the band’s albums are anathema to the dull tastes of a broader audience. Wold operates at the intersection of noise, metal, and electronics; they cut incisions into these various sounds and let them bleed into one another, resulting in a chaotic vortex of deconstructionist black metal violence. Wold’s power is located within its unearthing of qualities that are already dispersed throughout the genre as pioneered by its second wave icons: Burzum, Darkthrone, Mayhem, and otherwise. Moreover, Wold refuse to apply the genre’s aesthetic signifiers to philosophical and cultural content divorced from its origins, and instead explore its ideological basis in the occult with a layer of artistic distance and analytical remove (they also dive into gnosticism and freemasonry). They appropriate (yes, cultural appropriation is a good and vital aspect of art history) black metal’s philosophies as a kind of cultural criticism. Wold isn’t stealing the valor of black metal extremity to give college kids with spiky hair cuts an edgier record to add to their collections of screamo and Arcade Fire albums. Wold is a conceptualist noise group with deep respect for the black metal form. Though they come from worlds outside black metal’s homogenous culture, they approach it as anthropological sorcerers who conjure its essence directly from its tomb to create something even more diabolically evil. Wold is heavy metal art, or black metal-as-art, and not art metal.
To clarify this concept further, below are analyses of three other bands that avoid the “art metal” label in favor of adhering to something closer to heavy metal art.
Hissing
While a “black metal” scene has risen in and around Seattle over the last 10 years, it’s also the exact kind of “black metal” scene you’d expect from the city that gave us artisanal coffee and CHOP. Seattle “black metal” bands like Addaura is exactly what happens when American libtards try to appropriate black metal’s implicit connection to nature and convert it into the same nonsensical ideology of moral purity that the American environmentalist movement uses to sell the Green New Deal. Predictably, it doesn’t make for very interesting art,
And though Hissing also hails from Seattle, the group rejects the city’s Thoreau-fetishizing, commune forming, body odor embracing anarchist musicians in favor of a sound far more troubling, chaotic and mesmerizing. Hissing has a familial connection to one of heavy metal art’s most important pioneers: guitarist Joe O’Malley is the brother of Stephen, he of Sunn O))) and Khanate fame. And much like those bands, Hissing is self-aware enough to avoid attempting something like a “purist black metal” band, and instead opts to create a dense and multilayered collage of death metal growls, gruesomely down-tuned and slow, blackened sludge guitars and industrial sound effects. The band’s songs, like “Frayed Rhizome off of 2019’s Burning Door, have a demented sinking effect. The songs get sicker throughout their duration, as on this one, inevitably plummeting towards `an abyss of pure black misery. Tortured black metal screams interweave throughout hedonistic slabs of white noise. Art metal this is not. This is the product of artists locating art forms within an already existing modernist style of sound.
Jute Gyte
Adam Kalmbach is an academy-trained musician, guitarist, and composer from Missouri who has been recording music under the name Jute Gyte for over a decade. A lot of music. Like, possibly too much music. But I can also appreciate the commitment to quantity, even if you do have to sort through a lot of skippers before finding some quality. But the quality that there is can be nothing short of face melting.
Jute Gyte isn’t a black metal project. But it also isn’t an “art metal” project, sharing little in common with the Pitchfork-approved metal bands mentioned above. Jute Gyte is an expression of a modern composer’s authentic fascinations. Amongst his aesthetic interests, black metal is a defining element. But so are the modern compositional theories of Ives and Cowell, the industrial sound collages of Coil, and the IDM head-fuckeries of Autechre. Kalmbach’s music appropriates black metal without being black metal, nor a dilution of black metal. If anything, his intense microtonal guitar improvisations (he’s said that at least 25 percent of his music is improvised) and headily philosophical lyrics indebted to Schopenhauer, Thomas Metzinger, Nietzsche, David Foster Wallace, Houellebecq, Ligotti and others make Jute Gyte even less appealing to a mainstream audience than your average sub-underground European black metal. It’s alienating music, but engrossing when given the time. Pseudo-intellectual philosophical thought has always saturated black metal music; its reliance on the ideas of Ernst Junger, Nietzsche, Bataille, Crowley and others has always made reading its artists’ interviews a rare treat. This is surely an aspect of black metal that fascinated Kalmbach as an artist, but one that he doesn’t appropriate outright. Instead, he takes the black metal pseudo-intellectual tendency and applies it to theories that are most important to him. He’s not “adding to” black metal in the way that the art metal bands like Deafheaven do, he’s employing black metal form into a new art totally his own, divorced from genre confines. In his work, Brassier’s “genre is obsolete” theory finds a peculiar proponent.
Just read this snippet from the liner notes from Jute Gyte’s best album, 2016’s Perdurance, to get a sense of Kalmbach’s intellectual rigor.
“The pitch content that opens “Woodcutter” is a microtonal extension of the opening theme of Brahms' first piano quartet, though it's not easy (or necessary) to hear the source in the final arrangement. The guitars play transformations of this material created through standard serial operations and also by winding or spiraling through a complete or partial array as if it were a labyrinth, a technique of Ursula Mamlok's described in Straus's Twelve-Tone Music in America.”
Pretentious, surely, but sometimes I like pretentious.
Sutekh Hexen
At the outset of Sutekh Hexen’s career, the group was making intriguing conceptualist statements on the rigidity of black metal purist cults. For their first few releases, they’d put their music on MySpace and claim that they were from Norway. Some people were fooled! The music the new fans heard was so violent and atrocious that it could have only come from Norway, right? But not so fast. When those same fans found out that the trio was actually from tech industry hell San Francisco, there were hundreds of threads denouncing these imposters as frauds, fakes, and liars. There is something interesting to be gleaned from this postmodern prank.
Black metal is such an undeniably emotionally overwhelming sound that it has won over legions of hardcore fans. And because the genre has been battery rammed by pretenders and fakers for so long, they are also among the most easily triggered fans in the world, who might overlook any music – regardless of how good it is – if it is not an authentic product of northern European, satanic rage. And this is why I’m writing this article. Because Sutekh Hexen is metal-as-art, not art metal. They aren’t trying to be a blogosphere friendly black metal band, but to be an extreme music project that extrapolates ideas from black metal music. Citing influences ranging from Celtic Frost to John Fahey, the band’s multi-instrumentalist Kevin Gan Yuen said, "I think a lot of people try to assign a tag or title to what we do. It's just jargon. But at the end of the day, it's a sound-- a sound that we enjoy, a sound that we want to hear ourselves."
On the group’s most recent and best self-titled album from 2019, black metal is liquidated and sublimated into a sound that more closely resembles blackened noise rather than black metal itself. Manic, no wave drums barely keep pace as shards of guitar and electronic noises interlock with both death metal growls and black metal screams, in-between long interluding passages of occultish ritual ambience. Despite its musicians being obvious art nerds from an expensive American metropolis, it’s hard to imagine listening to them and simply writing them off as fake black metal screamo pretenders. It’s intense. It reminds me more of what The Velvet Underground did to garage rock on White Light/White Heat, or what Royal Trux did to boogie rock on Twin Infinitives. Sutekh Hexen treats black metal and extreme metal as raw material. It is material that is deeply respected by the artists, but nevertheless cut-up, disassembled, and collaged into something unique and unrecognizable. It is not the application of outside genre signifiers to make it something more appealing to an indie audience. No, it is not art metal. It is metal art. It is black metal-as-art.
Images:
1. Art by Bjarne Melgaard
2. Wold
3. The Velvet Underground
4. Deafheaven
5. Wold Postsocial
6. Hissing
7. Jute Gyte
8. Sutekh Hexen