Dunkelheit
The smell of snow was crisp in the air. Sounds were ghostly, muted. A dull reddish glow suffused the night sky, the result of far away city lights mixed with misty fog which had rolled in a few hours before. Deep on the street, the snowfall was untouched, virgin. We were the first to break the smoothness, tramping through in our boots and leather jackets, breath pluming in the air. While not Norway, it was still perfect, this black metal night.
That was 1996. A lifetime ago.
Let's take a walk, I'd said earlier. We'd been listening to Burzum's Filosofem and were full of mesmerizing darkness. Outside was Dunkelheit.
The owl was sitting in the trees behind the house when we returned. His singular hooting led us to his shape among the branches - a dense oval topped by two tiny tufts. It's amazing how your eyes can see so much once you've been in the dark a while. It's amazing how much you can feel.
We watched the owl. Snow fell. Trees creaked softly. The few street and house lights were surrounded by coronas of flurried glow. The world narrowed to four points: us, the trees, the falling snow and the owl.
I can't take it. It hurts too much to remember.
It's been years since I thought of that beautiful muted night, the snow and the owl. Many miles of life have passed beneath the soles of my boots since then, yet when I hear the sawing guitars of Burzum, I'm back in the snow, under that strange apocalyptic red glow, aching with the intangible dark misery that is black metal.
On Friday, we re-watched "Until the Light Takes Us," the masterful documentary on black metal by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell. The film is poignant. Its subjects are lonely, lost in many ways, yet found as they walk their own paths. Listening to Fenriz talk about how black metal has become a comedy of itself rips my heart out. Would someone who wasn't in the movement understand what it's like to have this - it's more than music - this Way, co-opted, stamped flat, stripped of all that made it deep like the fjords and turned into a grinning, hopping parody of itself? Would anyone not of it understand what it must be like to be among the first, the creators, to watch this destruction?
The film does an admirable job of conducting this sense of loss of one's art to the larger forces of the human world. Black metal is no longer covert. It can be displayed in a gallery, made into comic books, degraded into a character in a video game. My lip curls as I write this, and I feel like the famous iconic image of Frost, an image I've always loved:
It's hard for me to describe what black metal means to me. It's always been. How do you describe that which runs through your veins, ran through them before a note of black metal ever was laid to tape, and will run until my heart beats its last? Is it even possible to put that sense of self into words? Maybe not. Maybe that's why the strains of horribly recorded guitars and phantom, painted faces rang truer to me upon discovery than any written story of spirituality or belief. This was me, finally. And I wasn't alone.
I've always chosen the darkness. My father had an old spoken world LP on witchcraft which contained a booklet featuring many old woodcuts. I spent hours pouring over those pictures. I didn't want to rescue the maiden being ravished by the devil in those drawings; I wanted to be that maiden.
The ever tightening circle of the aging metal world has brought me closer to the progenitors of black metal than I ever remotely hoped to be. I keep waiting for someone to grip me by the collar and belt and haul me out, expose me as a charlatan, a fake. It doesn't happen. Somehow I am allowed to remain. And I desperately hold myself back in these moments, because what I really want to do is grasp their hands and say breathlessly, "Are you really real?"
Of all the places I have been in the world, Scandinavia is the only place I've ever felt a sense of belonging. Not belonging to society, no - domestic society is as alien there as in the US or Japan. No, this feeling of belonging is to the earth, the sky, the water and the wind. To the before, to the after, to the forever.
Watch the film. Listen to Burzum, or if that hurts your ears, Ulver's Kveldssanger. Both albums possess the same sense of wild, ancient spirit. This is a spirit which cannot be quelled by men who worship in a silly wooden house topped with an edifice of sacrifice. It is of the open sky, the wide sea, the driven snow against a backdrop of evergreen. It is the spirit of true black metal.
Hviss lyset tar oss. Hviss lyset tar mig.
That was 1996. A lifetime ago.
Let's take a walk, I'd said earlier. We'd been listening to Burzum's Filosofem and were full of mesmerizing darkness. Outside was Dunkelheit.
The owl was sitting in the trees behind the house when we returned. His singular hooting led us to his shape among the branches - a dense oval topped by two tiny tufts. It's amazing how your eyes can see so much once you've been in the dark a while. It's amazing how much you can feel.
We watched the owl. Snow fell. Trees creaked softly. The few street and house lights were surrounded by coronas of flurried glow. The world narrowed to four points: us, the trees, the falling snow and the owl.
I can't take it. It hurts too much to remember.
It's been years since I thought of that beautiful muted night, the snow and the owl. Many miles of life have passed beneath the soles of my boots since then, yet when I hear the sawing guitars of Burzum, I'm back in the snow, under that strange apocalyptic red glow, aching with the intangible dark misery that is black metal.
On Friday, we re-watched "Until the Light Takes Us," the masterful documentary on black metal by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell. The film is poignant. Its subjects are lonely, lost in many ways, yet found as they walk their own paths. Listening to Fenriz talk about how black metal has become a comedy of itself rips my heart out. Would someone who wasn't in the movement understand what it's like to have this - it's more than music - this Way, co-opted, stamped flat, stripped of all that made it deep like the fjords and turned into a grinning, hopping parody of itself? Would anyone not of it understand what it must be like to be among the first, the creators, to watch this destruction?
The film does an admirable job of conducting this sense of loss of one's art to the larger forces of the human world. Black metal is no longer covert. It can be displayed in a gallery, made into comic books, degraded into a character in a video game. My lip curls as I write this, and I feel like the famous iconic image of Frost, an image I've always loved:
It's hard for me to describe what black metal means to me. It's always been. How do you describe that which runs through your veins, ran through them before a note of black metal ever was laid to tape, and will run until my heart beats its last? Is it even possible to put that sense of self into words? Maybe not. Maybe that's why the strains of horribly recorded guitars and phantom, painted faces rang truer to me upon discovery than any written story of spirituality or belief. This was me, finally. And I wasn't alone.
I've always chosen the darkness. My father had an old spoken world LP on witchcraft which contained a booklet featuring many old woodcuts. I spent hours pouring over those pictures. I didn't want to rescue the maiden being ravished by the devil in those drawings; I wanted to be that maiden.
The ever tightening circle of the aging metal world has brought me closer to the progenitors of black metal than I ever remotely hoped to be. I keep waiting for someone to grip me by the collar and belt and haul me out, expose me as a charlatan, a fake. It doesn't happen. Somehow I am allowed to remain. And I desperately hold myself back in these moments, because what I really want to do is grasp their hands and say breathlessly, "Are you really real?"
Of all the places I have been in the world, Scandinavia is the only place I've ever felt a sense of belonging. Not belonging to society, no - domestic society is as alien there as in the US or Japan. No, this feeling of belonging is to the earth, the sky, the water and the wind. To the before, to the after, to the forever.
Watch the film. Listen to Burzum, or if that hurts your ears, Ulver's Kveldssanger. Both albums possess the same sense of wild, ancient spirit. This is a spirit which cannot be quelled by men who worship in a silly wooden house topped with an edifice of sacrifice. It is of the open sky, the wide sea, the driven snow against a backdrop of evergreen. It is the spirit of true black metal.
Hviss lyset tar oss. Hviss lyset tar mig.
posted by Skullgal at 5:29 PM
2 Comments:
The eloquent reactions to this film make me curious about it. I was ready to dismiss it as yet another retread of sensationalist stories.
I don't think of black metal as misery. (Bad black metal is, however.) Ideally, it's music of liberation and harnessing the animal nature of humans (I fully agree with Ravn's viewpoint in my interview with him). To me, joy, albeit not the Hallmark version, is the result. It is fierce, resistant, and inquisitive.
This joy is rare, however. The gems lie hidden under mounds of dirt. And even in plain sight, sometimes they deceive the eye. Maybe there's something to the black-drenched, two-toned aesthetic, as if the eye almost doesn't matter. Blind people would appreciate black metal as much as sighted ones, I think. You close your eyes and come up with your own images.
I don't know, Cosmo - bad power metal induces far more suicidal misery in me than bad black metal!
I agree with what you said about feelings of liberation and the fierce, defiant joy found in black metal. Those are definitely present. However, to me there is a powerful sense of trying to retrieve something which was lost and really can never be recaptured again. It's futile but we battle on anyway. That's where I find the misery.
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