A couple of things led me to using this week’s post to reflect on my recent zine reading. First, I finally got through the last of my current zine stack; the completely essential first edition of Horrified. Second, after spending all week and part of last week listening to Vassafor’s gargantuan Obsidian Codex I finally accepted that I was not ready to review it and require at least another week with the album to even begin coming to terms with it. A week is rarely enough time with an album to fully make sense of it, but Obsidian Codex is particularly challenging, given both its scale – the album is 90 minutes long – and the impenetrable darkness of the album’s insanely down-tuned fusion of black and doom metal. So, here we are; an attempt instead to make sense of some of my recent reading of others’ writing regarding black and death metal.
It is perhaps unnecessary to make explicit, but I cannot endorse the practice of zine writing and reading enough. Like underground bands and the labels that support them, those writing zines are committing serious time that could otherwise be spent on any number of other endeavours – spending time with loved ones, engaging in physically or mentally rewarding hobbies, sustaining friendships – to their passion for extreme music. I fuck about on this blog, but zines require a much deeper commitment, given that their production is not only time consuming, but they require a financial and physical investment in printing and distributing them. Regardless of the quality of the material produced, this commitment is deserving of serious respect (with one notable exception among the zines reviewed here). These (again, with an exception) are all the product of passion for extremity, and these mother fuckers all deserve our hails.
Through the Void, Issue Two
Price: $6AU ($9 shipped)
Purchase: from the author
Through the Void was birthed from the mind of one of the freaks behind Adelaide black metal horde Entsetzlich, and it comes with a free Entsetzlich patch, which is a great inclusion. Most of the interviews here are drawn from the musical or geographical context of the author. Entsetzlich’s label Wolfsvuur Records, and recent partners on a split Initiation are both reviewed. Various luminaries of Australian black metal also appear, such as Rattenkönig, whose member Bloodoak handled Through the Void’s logo, Old Burial Temple, whose sole member is in Drohtnung, who in turn share members with Grave Worship, also interviewed here, and Forgotten Kingdoms, the dungeon synth project of Drowning the Light’s Azgorh.
Genre-wise, the projects interviewed are all based in black metal or dungeon synth. Honestly, I know so little about the latter genre. For the most part, it just seems like a bunch of fucking fantasy losers who jerk it to Warcraft playing dress ups while poorly ripping off incarceration era-Burzum and early Mortiis. I’m listening to Cernunnos Woods as I write this, described by Through the Void as ‘Pagan Fantasy Dungeon Synth’, and fuck this is some comically incompetent shit. This poor cunt won’t even get an invite to DJ his town’s next medieval fair. A shame, since he was probably holding out a hope that spinning his favourite synth-flute tracks would’ve finally given him the opportunity to show off his personally embroidered cape to the local ‘fayre mayden’ – the only woman in his town who attends these fairs, who is cripplingly obese and spends her spare time writing medieval-themed Twilight fan fiction.
Dungeon synth also tends to piss me off because although much of it claims to be grounded in some kind of reverence for the medieval, these cunts know fuck all about the subject. Take Azgorh, for example, who I must admit deserves respect for his work with Drowning the Light, where he has revealed a deep devotion and commitment to hateful black metal. Explaining the themes underlying Forgotten Kingdoms, Azgorh discusses his romanticisation of ‘oppressive kings and tyrants who ruled with a ruthless and iron fist’, which he describes as ‘totalitarianism’. Azgorh might touch himself up over hack history books, but I’m a historian of medieval and early modern European history, and this understanding of the medieval world is piss (setting aside the difficulties in even reifying a term such as ‘medieval’, none of which he’d fucking know about).
Azorgh’s ignorance of medieval history is principally wrong on two grounds, and this is a problem because it reveals that all this bullshit about medieval influences relies not on a serious encounter with history, but on some trite fetishisation of the past that ultimately obscures this past for the inventions of the present. First, ‘-ism’ suffixes are a product of the post-French Revolution world; they are a nineteenth century coinage, and ‘totalitarianism’ is a term that was popularised in the twentieth century. In other words, no-one prior to the nineteenth century could have understood their world as characterised by ‘totalitarianism’. It is an anachronism, an artefact of a contemporary conceptual schema projected back onto a past alien to such language.
Second, this bullshit about ‘oppressive kings and tyrants’ ruling with an ‘iron fist’ is just incoherent. Certainly, the time period Azgorh is referencing was a time where executions and torture were considered acceptable, but not in all contexts. This period was also defined by intellectually rich and complex legal systems, which often precluded torture. Moreover, monarchs were not particularly powerful, given that that this world precedes the development of modern states; this is not a period characterised by strictly delimited and comprehensively regulated territories. Such lack of power is unsurprising: in a time when communication was reliant on carrying messages on horseback, it is ridiculous to expect a monarch to have been able to maintain rigid continuous control over an extensive area. Hence, guilds and other administrative organisations held expansive roles: without a strong centralised power, a network of small powers governed the day-to-day.
The interviews are a good read, for the most part. A lot of them feature some pretty similar questions, at least in opening, and this can get boring after a while. There is a good attempt in each interview, though, to ask the relevant band questions specific to them and their work; there is no sense here that these bands have all been sent the same set of pro forma questions. I was confused, though, why Wargun from Brazilian band Evil is interviewed, and a few pages later, Evil are also interviewed. Even more confusing, both interviews include Evil’s entire statement regarding the band’s deportation from the US, which is over a page long.
The reviews are a highlight. The author doesn’t fuck around with a play-by-play of tracks, but goes straight to a discussion of how it feels to listen to each record. This approach is exactly what I want from a music review; an attempt to make sense of the experience of listening. The prose is awkward at times – ‘[t]he sounds that this tape emits are intense’ – but the intention is solid, and meaning clear.
Through the Void is a solid and passionate read, if imperfect. My main complaints are not about the zine as a zine, but rather about the choice of subjects and the performance of interviewees, the latter of which the author is not responsible for. If you like dungeon synth, you’ll likely get more out of it than I did, but I enjoyed reading it, and will definitely be watching for a third issue.
Horrified, Issue One
Price: $6.40AU including shipping (purchased as part of a bundle of 10 zines)
Purchase: from the author
I bought Horrified principally because it is an Australian death metal zine, and my support for the Australian death metal scene knows few bounds (all melodic death metal). Even if you aren’t a fan of death metal, though, Horrified remains an essential purchase, as it is the work of Sam Vince, the mind behind the fucking elite Down and Out zine. There, Vince focuses on his passions for black metal, power electronics, and hardcore. In Horrified, he turns his gaze exclusively upon death metal. I have heard there will be no second issue, which is both a shame and another reason you should be emailing him right now to get your hands on this fucker.
Horrified takes its task as focusing on those death metal bands revelling in ‘the deepest and darkest depths of humanity’. The death metal featured here is exactly what I fucking love in death metal; crushingly heavy, disgusting, and unrelentingly dark. That Vince prefers death metal in this vein makes sense. His passion for seething raw black metal and disgusting power electronics shares something with the evil and filthy metal covered here. Consistent with the best aspects of contemporary death metal, Vince sees no purpose in simply yearning for a distant past in death metal, but is committed to those bands finding ways to build on old school death metal today.
It’s weird reading Horrified in 2017. This zine was published at the start of 2016, which means it was likely written in 2015. Despite being nearly two years old, it feels surprisingly contemporary. Spectral Voice and Contaminated are both interviewed, and Blood Incantation’s Astral Spells is reviewed. All three of those bands are central to contemporary death metal; Blood Incantation are about to tour Australia, Spectral Voice are about the drop one of the biggest death metal albums of 2017, and Contaminated are signed to fucking Blood Harvest.
Alongside these interviews and reviews of bands that have since become relatively large is an extensive supply of other creeps who have remained deep within the underground. Gath Smane and Cryptic Excision are also interviewed, and reviewed bands include Reverie, Impure Consecration, Of Corpse, Encenathrakh, and Patibulum. Importantly, the centre of the zine is devoted to a bunch of photos of decapitated and hanged bodies. With this centrefold and the zine’s macabre cover, Horrified encapsulates the best of death metal aesthetics.
The interviews here are really fucking well done. Vince asks extensive questions, with basically no repetition between bands, encouraging detailed and interesting answers. Vince’s questions shift between specific details regarding the band in question, and broader questions about contemporary death metal, and the band’s place within and relationship to the genre. More specifically, The result is that you come away with an appreciation not only of the specific bands interviewed, but of death metal itself as something vital, developing, and diverse.
As ever, Vince’s reviews are a highlight. Like Through the Void, the reviews focus more on the feel evoked by a record than a detailed breakdown of the music on offer. Vince, though, has an exemplary command of metaphor. At times, these reviews press the limits of absurdity, but his use of metaphor to convey the effect of listening to a given record captures something more literal prose cannot. Take, for example, the following lines describing the way in which technical riffing emerges from the murky mix of Hebdomas’s Spirytualny Defetyzm: ‘it is like picking a fight over the phone, not knowing how big the fucker you are challenging really is, but once it is there, right in front of you in all of its skullcrushing glory, only then does the realisation of what you are up against begin to fully sink in’.
This is essential reading if you’re a fan of death metal, of Australian death metal in particular, or simply a fan of metal zines in general, and want to see a guy at the top of his fucking game showing you how it is done. Vince has given years of his life to zine-writing, and the quality of Horrified is evidence of how fucking hard he has worked at this, and how committed he is to sickening extreme metal. I can give this no higher praise.
V.I.T.R.I.O.L, Issue One
Price: 10 euros including shipping
Purchase: from the author
Most rules have an exception, and to my rule that zine writing is deserving of respect, V.I.T.R.I.O.L is the exception. And what a fucking exception it is. V.I.T.R.I.O.L is almost unreadable, a worthless testament to its author’s incredibly misplaced narcissism. I have dealt with this zine in detail elsewhere, so I hopefully won’t overdo whingeing about this miserable shit again. The main things to note are that the author put on a black metal gig in a cave that included welcome drinks and a dinner break halfway through, and seemed to think this was the peak of ritualistic black metal, and that there is barely any discussion of music, as interviews are devoted almost entirely to the stupid wanker writing this piss telling the band what dumb ideas he has about Gnosticism (‘Let’s talk about nexions…. To me a nexion is a very special place…’).
Bands interviewed include Thy Darkened Shade, the pretty fucking boring (musically and intellectually) Hetroertzen, who the author loves, which seems telling, Serpent Noir, Nightbringer, and Ascension. There are no record reviews, but a few accounts of gigs. The gig reviews are mildly better than the interviews, as this prick is required to at least make some attempt to think about the music itself. Even here, wank obscures all – ‘Vassafor’s dark sonorities seem to elevate straight upwards from Tehom’ – as this cunt is constantly desperate to show off how many books he’s misunderstood. There’s some bitching about what types of stage outfit he disapproves of. Who cares.
Actually, that’s not true. Dismissing this as something not worth caring about might seem desirable, but V.I.T.R.I.O.L is worse than that. To take the devotion of bands and turn them to a chance to show off one’s personality disorders is a disgrace. Interviewing a band is a responsibility, for it requires that the interviewer be somewhat involved in the process by which bands represent and explain themselves. Many bands get few such opportunities, so these things matter. Turning an interview, as the author does here, into an opportunity to subject musicians to one’s overinflated ego is disgusting. It is worse than a waste: it is to rob a band of their expressive capacity for the author to flaunt his glaring incapacities. This is gross and anyone involved should be deeply ashamed and have the fucking respect to never set pen to paper again.
<$6.66 