music | Scriptus Recensera

October 5, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Myths of Wewelsburg Castle – Edited by Kirsten John-Stucke and Daniela Siepe

Categories: esotericism, germanic, music, satanism, Tags: Brill,

In the Landkreis of Paderborn in the northeast of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, stands Wewelsburg, a castle that dates to the seventeenth century and which gained notoriety in the aftermath of the Second World War due to its use by Heinrich Himmler as a base and school for the Schutzstaffel. To ensure its function, the castle was redesigned with décor in line with the aesthetics of the SS. Particularly evocative, and a significant factor in the enduring legacy of the schloß as a symbol of Nazi occultism, was the floor of the Obergruppenführersaal in the castle’s North Tower, into which a twelve-armed Sonnenrad (sun wheel) was set in a dark green marble. In Myths of Wewelsburg Castle, editors Kirsten John-Stucke and Daniela Siepe are joined by three other writers (Frank Huismann, Eva Kingsepp, and Thomas Pfeiffer) in presenting a variety of considerations that, for the most part, are less about the material schloß itself and instead focus on how it and the so-called Black Sun symbol in the Obergruppenführersaal have been represented in popular culture, and in occultism and right-wing conspiracy theories.

Due to the savvy sequencing of articles and a cast of just five contributors, Myths of Wewelsburg feels less like an anthology and more like a single work in which the individual authors tag in and out. There is a coherence here, and very little redundancy, which is no doubt helped by Siepe providing five of the twelve entries, and John-Stucke putting her hand to three.

It is John-Stucke who opens the proceedings with the historical grounding of Himmler’s Plans and Activities in Wewelsburg, setting out the nuts and bolts of the schloß and its renovation during the Third Reich. Siepe follows this introduction with a triad of articles discussing the place of Wewelsburg in various forms of popular culture, beginning with the questioning The “Grail Castle” of the SS? in which she tracks the creation of legends about the schloß in scholarly and popular-science literature. This is a weighty piece, looking at how the theory that Himmler chose Wewelsburg as a grail castle developed over half a century following the Second World War, despite there being little evidence for it. Siepe is very thorough here, analysing each book in the oeuvre, tracking the accretion of ideas and how one author would build upon the other, until an almost unassailable idea emerged of Wewelsburg as a Grail Castle hosting Himmler’s new order of Teutonic Knights, and in some cases, housing the recovered grail itself. What is particularly interesting here is that many of these books are ostensibly historical, not speculative conspiracy fodder, and yet Siepe shows how unverified and often self-replicating speculation just churns through this oeuvre, adding grist to an often uncritical mill.

Siepe continues this vein in the next two chapters, discussing the appearance of Wewelsburg in fantasy literature for the first chapter, and in thriller novels and comics by for the second. What Siepe calls fantasy literature is not perhaps how the authors of such books would describe their work, as what is discussed here is the genre of National Socialist occult history, which is often presented as true, albeit hidden. There’s Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s Le Matin des magiciens, Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny, and heirs like Howard Buechner (who Siepe delightfully describes as being seemingly “motivated by the pure pleasure of fabrication”). When turning to novels and comics, Siepe notes how in so many of these types of fiction, Wewelsburg and its inhabitants take on an 18^th century Gothic quality, with the schloß being depicted like a looming and intimidating source of terror or intrigue, worthy of Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley. As befitting such a locus of dread atmosphere, protagonists often arrive at Wewelsburg during the night or in bad weather, with the castle exuding some unspeakable menace. This is despite Wewelsburg’s Weser Renaissance architectural style, with its ornately decorated gables, being more aristocratic than eerie, more fairy tale than fear-y tale. To match the vibe in such works, the inhabitants of the schloß invariably take on gothic roles, Himmler as a dark lord, part magician part mad scientist, with the soldiers of the SS as soulless dark knights meeting in crypts, performing rituals.

Matters now move into areas more esoteric and occult, beginning with another essay from Siepe, this time tracing the use of the so-called Black Sun floor design in the Obergruppenführer Hall; a designation that doesn’t seem to predate the end of the Second World War. Given the role of the sol niger in alchemy, and just how cool an inverted sun seems, this is an attractive association in esoteric circles, where the idea particularly flourished in the intersection betwixt speculative fiction, conspiracy theories and National Socialist remnants. Siepe gives a history of the symbol of the Black Sun as an overall concept in esoteric Hitlerism unattached to Wewelsburg, beginning with the Landig Gruppe formed in the 1950 by former Austrian Waffen-SS members Wilhelm Landig and Rudolf Mund. Incorporating ariosophical ideas from pre-Nazi völkisch movement such as Atlantis and the World Ice Theory, the Landig Gruppe developed the myth of polar Nazi survival in which the Black Sun was a mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race. These ideas were promulgated by Landig between the 1970s and 1990s with a trilogy of Thule novels, which were then expanded upon by the pseudonymous Russell McCloud in the 1991 novel Die Schwarze Sonne von Tashi Lhunpo, in which the identification of the Black Sun with the design in the Obergruppenführer Hall was made explicit. 1991 also saw the Wewelsburg design being referred to as a Black Sun by Gerhard Petak (AKA Kadmon) of the industrial project Allerseelen in his Aorta series of esoteric chapbooks, in which he presumed its presence in the schloß could be traced to the influence of Karl Maria Wiligut. Petak was already familiar with the broader symbolism of the Black Sun from alchemy and from Coil’s 1984 album Scatology, the mention of which here does lead to the inclusion of this amusing non sequitur “The subsequent CD release of Scatology showed not only the Coil star but also a naked buttocks.” Love that indefinite article.

Thomas Pfeiffer continues this exploration of the Obergruppenführer design in The Realm of the Black Sun, here focussing on its use as a proxy identifier by contemporary Right-Wing movements in Germany (where it is not legally prohibited in the way that more direct Nazi emblems are). In tracing the use of the Black Sun in Right Wing extremism, Pfeiffer does cover some of the same territory as Siepe, particularly in regards to the Nazi Occult speculative fiction of Landig and McCloud, but most of what is discussed here are examples of its appearance amongst right wing groups and also, briefly, in neofolk and other goth-adjacent subcultures. Landig also warrants a mention in Frank Huismann’s essay Of Flying Disks and Secret Societies: Wewelsburg and the “Black Sun” in Esoteric Writings of Conspiracy Theory, as do Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, of course, and other writers such as Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl of the Tempelhofgesellschaft, and Chilean esoteric Hitlerist and diplomat, Miguel Serrano.

Matters of particular interest to readers of Scriptus Recensera can be found in Siepe’s Esoteric Perspectives on Wewelsburg Castle: Reception in “Satanist” Circles, where she exhaustively documents the importance given to the schloß by occultists, in particular, Michael Aquino of the Temple of Set, and Nikolas and Zeena Schreck of, well, lots of different groups at different times. Aquino was a bit of a pioneer in this regard, having written the article That Other Black Order in The Cloven Hoof whilst still a member of the Church of Satan in 1972. A decade later he visited the castle and undertook what he would call the Wewelsburg Working in the crypt, a ritual in which he called upon the powers of darkness and founded the Order of the Trapezoid, a suborder of the Temple of Set. Siepe includes a photo of Aquino standing in the crypt, something which is then echoed pages later with an image of Zeena LaVey in the same spot from 1998, taken when she, Nikolas Schreck and other then-Setians also performed a ritual in the crypt. Throughout this essay, Siepe is thorough and generous in discussing the intent of the Setians in visiting Wewelsburg, drawing on many references for a comprehensive overview where it would be so easy to simplify and scandalise. What is also of interest in this essay are briefer discussion of two lesser-known occult groups who attach some significance to Wewelsburg, both of which emerged from a German grotto of the Church of Satan: the Ruhr-based Circle of Hagalaz, and the Swiss Ariosophical-indebted Schwarzer Orden von Luzifer (founded in 1999 by Satorius of the metal bands Amon, and Helvete/Mountain King).

Eva Kingsepp follows with two essays concerned with film, the first of which, Wewelsburg Castle, Nazi-Inspired Occulture, and the Commodification of Evil, considers the spectre of returning Nazis. The two variations of this trope add a little twist to the act of Nazi recrudescence, not merely reappearing but taking on new enhanced forms: Space Nazis and Zombie Nazis; as seen in the movies Iron Sky and Outpost respectively. In her second essay, Factual Nazisploitation: Nazi Occult Documentary Films, Kingsepp gives a brief survey of the stylings of exploitative documentary films about Nazi occultism, in which she lays out common structural elements, often of the lazy and gauche type. She gives a few examples, however it’s all over too quickly, as if she’s just getting started but was called away.

Symbolic Bridges Across Countries and Continents: The “Black Sun” and Wewelsburg Castle in International Right-Wing Extremism by Thomas Pfeiffer is the final full essay here and returns to his concerns with right-wing movements. He traces the appearances of the Black Sun, noting in particular examples of violence (such as the 2019 mosque attacks in Christchurch, the attack in Halle an der Saale in the same year, and the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville), as well as its use by groups such as Chrysi Avgi in Greece, Atomwaffen Division, and the Azov Regiment in Ukraines.

In lieu of a conclusion, Myths of Wewelsburg ends with Current Tendencies Concerning the Myths of Wewelsburg Castle by Kirsten John-Stucke, which with its couple of pages mentions a few bits not covered elsewhere in what is a thorough work with something to appeal to almost everyone, whether you come to the subject from an esoteric, political, historical or conspiratorial place. Myths of Wewelsburg is a substantial volume, coming in at a little over 300 pages of quality paper stock and bound in a sturdy hardcover with a handy cloth bookmark. It is illustrated thoroughly throughout, with many of the in-body images, particular exemplars from pop culture, in full colour, making it admirably comprehensive.

Published by Brill

September 2, 2022 by ScriptusScribe

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult: An Anthology

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Categories: egyptian, hellenic, hermeticism, magick, music, shamanism, witchcraft, Tags: Aeon Sophia Press,

Published by Aeon Sophia Press, Music in Witchcraft and the Occult concerns itself with exactly what it says on the tin, but it approaches this theme from a practical and experiential perspective, with a variety of musician writing about the ways in which music and the occult interact within their work. But first, a little caveat, as this anthology includes an essay from this reviewer, discussing her creation of devotional music for Hela under the name Gydja. Suffice to say, we will be neither critiquing nor lauding that particular contribution, but even without that, there’s plenty more to explore.

We usually leave matters of aesthetics to the conclusion of reviews, but the appearance of Music in Witchcraft and the Occult impacts on reading to such an extent that it informs what follows. There is unfortunately a haphazard quality to the layout, with no consistent style and with each entry apparently retaining its contributor’s source formatting. As a result, the inherited styling of subtitles, footnotes, footnote numbering, indents, captions, page beaks, line spacing and paragraph returns are all inconsistent; though mercifully, the same serif face is used throughout for the main body. This inevitably makes the book feel rushed, lacking in cohesion and genuinely hard to read in some places; such as the first entry in which the text is interrupted by strange, abrupt digits as the footnote numbering has been formatted at full scale instead of superscript. Most jarring of all are the main titles which have been left however the author minimally formatted them in their submission, resulting in barely any typographic hierarchy. Similarly, if an author didn’t include their name at the start of their original submission document, then it hasn’t been added here for publication, meaning that without recourse to the contents page you can dive into some entries with little context, hoping that the author’s name is mentioned latter on.

There are some interesting contributions in Music in Witchcraft and the Occult which makes it all the more frustrating that it doesn’t look better, especially when only a little tightening of the layout and the addition of hierarchy and consistency would have done wonders. After something of a broad introduction with a few personal specifics from Aaron Piccirillo of Synesect, the first entry comes from Kakophonix of self-described Black Ritual Chamber Musick project Hvile I Kaos. This is a comprehensive consideration of the music of Hvile I Kaos, with a guide to their performances as live rituals, an analysis of the theory behind some indicative pieces and albums, accompanied by notation of particular motifs, including a setting of the Agios O Baphomet sinister chant. It’s all rather interesting, though the lack of formatting makes it feel rather desultory, with huge half-page spaces left between sections and little in the way of typographic hierarchy.

Zemaemidjehuty, author of The Book of Flesh and Feather, published by Theion Publishing, lays his Kemetic cards on the table with his contribution, which focuses not on any music they themselves make, but on a ritual that takes the form of a conversation between Djehuty and Barbelo/Sophia. The dialogue is spread across an exhausting sixteen pages at a fairly large point size and with a lot of leading between the lines, with the words spoken by Sophia being differentiated with some hideous underlining as if we’re still living in a world of manual typewriters instead of one in which any variation of formatting could have been chosen.

Moving swiftly along, another author, Jack Grayle, whose book on Hekate, The Hekatæon, was published by Ixaxaar, provides a dose of erudition with Gravesong. Once again, though, this piece feels a little divorced from the overall theme of this anthology, though it is tangential, with Grayle focusing on funeral songs, particularly in the intersection of Aeschylus’ trilogy of plays The Oresteia and the Greek Magical Papyri. Again, and through no fault of Grayle, the formatting here leaves a lot to be desired, with subtitles capitalised but otherwise unformatted (and in one instance, widowed at the bottom of a page), and with the endnotes kept in Microsoft Word’s deplorable default Calibri styling.

Ilya Affectvs mirrors the entry from Hvile I Kaos with a thorough, fifteen page, multi-section overview of his ritual ambient project Corona Barathri. It begins with a general biography and statement of intent, followed by Oratio Sacra, a part-manifesto sermon that is exemplary of Corona Barathri’s diabolist themes and lyrics, finally ending with the lyrics of two songs, Hymn of Nahemoth from the album Womb Ov Sheol and the title track from Speculum Diaboli.

In Baron Samhedi, Edgar Kerval gives a broad outline of his project Emme Ya before turning to the baron of the title. Ostensibly this is done to illustrate how Kerval has worked profoundly with Baron Samhedi since 2009 and how the attendant methods of invocation include sonically-induced trance states. In practice, though, this is more of a six page general biography of Samhedi with a concluding ritual, and one that could have benefited from proofing and editing to corral Kerval’s otherwise enthusiastic prose.

A different style of writing is provided by Keeley Swete and Jessica Rose of Portland’s She Scotia with their Music as Ritual, which invites the reader to reject the commodification of music in favour of something with a more sacralised intent. This is a considered and eloquent piece with a voice that blends a New Age style of metaphysical speculation with a witchy underpinning, a little self-help, a little inspi- and aspi- rational. Jon Vermillion’s The Souls (sic) Expression Through the Universal Vibration of Sound follows and feels somewhat cut from the same cloth, with a focus on frequencies and sound waves, and visualising a violet sphere of light. There’s an obvious debt to Robert Monroe’s idea of altered conscious using audio techniques to achieve hemispherical synchronization, and quite a bit of the New Age with talk of Kryst Consciousness, meditation and etheric bodies. Sitting within the same pages as Emme Ya’s Baron Samhedi and Corona Barathri’s diabolism, this makes for some incongruent company.

Iceland’s enigmatic NYIÞ offer one of the most interesting contributions here, situating their work within the folklore and magick of their homeland, beginning with a broad overview of such. They then pull back the curtain, explaining the symbolism behind various choices of instruments (the organ being linked to death, skin drums with shamanism, etc) and then showing how these elements can be combined with more conventional instruments and intent to create their intersection between music and magick.

Finally, zenKOAL of the ritual noise duo Brujentropy wields the longest-titled entry here, offering Strange Spells Spontaneously Evolving into Art: Avant Punk, Spoken Wyrd, Ritual Noise and Deathdream Electronics Unveiled no less. It’s also a pretty long piece in general, with zenKOAL writing dense paragraphs in a lyrical and effusive manner that, given the abrupt and indecisive formatting elsewhere in this volume, is quite welcome and even comforting. Like a lot of the entries here, this feels like a manifesto, with zenKOAL describing her practice, both magical and musical, as one in which creative works are birthed as sentient entities that gradually form over time, and eventually perpetuating themselves independent of their creator.

In all, Music in Witchcraft and the Occult has promise but is let down by the presentation and lack of attention to detail. It is presented in an edition of 200 hand-numbered exemplars, bound in cloth with a metallic foiling of the title and a stylised flame on both the cover and the spine. There are multiple images used throughout, both graphic and photographic, with some at full page or as spreads, while others are awkwardly marooned on their own and not integrated into the text, as if they’ve retained the practical formatting of their original submission document. Accompanying the book is a CD that compiles music pieces from the various contributors: Gydja, Khtunae, She Scotia, NYIÞ, Hvile I Kaos, Brujentropy, Corona Barathri, Emme Ya and Synesect.

Published by Aeon Sophia Press

July 13, 2021 by ScriptusScribe

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory – Issue 3: Bleeding Black Noise – Amelia Ishmael

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Categories: music, Tags: Punctum Books,

The first two volumes of Punctum Books’ Helvete journal have been previously reviewed here at Scriptus Recensera and 2016’s third instalment, edited this time by Amelia Ishmael, continues this often tangential consideration of black metal with a focus on the idea of black noise (and black metal as this black noise), thereby moving away from obvious touchstones to more outré realms. Written contributions come from Kyle McGee, Simon Pröll, Nathan Snaza, and Bert Stabler, while there are visual pieces from Alessandro Keegan, Bagus Jalang, Faith Coloccia, Max Kuiper, Michaël Sellam, the duo of Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert, and a combination of both written and visual by Susanne Pratt. As this line-up shows, there’s considerably more pictures than prose here, suggesting, perhaps, that there’s only so much theory one can write about black metal and that that limit may have been reached. But given this visual emphasis, let’s begin with the art side of things for once.

Inevitably, given the focus on things black, there’s a rather singular palette used across these works, each to varying degrees of success and not without a little fatigue and a creeping of sameness. The highlight comes, once again, from Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert, whose work has featured in previous issues of Helvete and was, by this reviewer, well received. Titled 1558 – 2016, these four pieces follow a varied approach to black with midtones and scratched texture providing interest across images that are so abstracted that little is identifiable, other than a sense of intrigue and mystery. Not quite as stunning but still well composed are parts 3-5 of Bagus Jalang’s Distraction, where his acrylic painting on paper creates negative spaces, one part topographic map, one part spectral absence. Two further entries from Max Kuiper and Faith Coloccia show that there is perhaps a successful, almost obligatory, ‘black metal theory photographic aesthetic’ at play here, with grainy abstracted textures of water, ink and decay, and with depth of field blur and saturated blacks a bonus. Other pieces are less successful, like Alessandro Keegan’s exploration of candle soot and white gouache on paper, where aimless feathered motifs floating against soot clouds are explored in five variations that seem to have had said all they had to say by the time you turn from the first example to the second.

Susanne Pratt’s Black-Noise combines the written and visual in a consideration of a similarly-named installation she created in 2013. Subtitled The Throb of the Anthropocene, her essays details how the work was created in response to Australian coal mining and its impact on both the environment and people, with the constant sound of industry creating a black noise of machinery and mining blasts. Pratt took recordings of these low frequency sounds and played them back in the gallery using speakers to influence trays of coal dust and water. Four prints are provided as photographic documentation of this work, the water and dust creating landscapes of black ripples, waves and tones. Pratt draws comparison with Carsten Nicolai’s infrasound artworks and links her considerations to black metal via just one band, Wolves in the Throne Room, whose concerns with ecology, and perhaps their more responsible image, also ensure a disproportionate presence throughout both this volume and the entire series, including an appearance in Timothy Morton’s first volume essay At the Edge of the Smoking Pool of Death: Wolves in the Throne Room; which Pratt references.

Simon Pröll’s Vocal Distortion turns to black metal’s use of the voice as a gateway into a wider discussion of how black metal obscures its delivery of information, whether it be through indecipherable vocals, unprinted or untranslated lyrics, or the obfuscation employed in some band logos. The exploration of the use of native language and topography as part of this insularity and exclusivity provides an interesting, albeit brief, diversion into black metal’s regionalism, highlighting how the genre contrasts strongly with pop culture in which English remains its lingua franca.

In Leaving the Self Behind, Nathan Snaza employs a disorientating and confounding experience of listening to Blut Aus Nord’s 2006 album MoRT as a device to explore ideas of dissolution in this volume’s longest contribution at seventeen pages. Snaza situates black metal’s idea of the annihilation of self in opposition to the Enlightenment, preferring instead a practice of Endarkenment; a term taken from a track title by another French black metal band, Obscurus Advocam. Endarkenment as described by Snaza is an inversion of Enlightenment and its goals, being an attunement to the dark which animates the world via strategies of interference. But it’s also effectively just a fancier name for the kind of fair-is-foul foul-is-fair rhetoric that can be found in any black metal album or interview.

Bert Stabler’s False Atonality, True Non-Totality mirrors his contribution to the previous volume of Helvete, being a little aimless, beginning with a several page discussion of noise theory via an interaction between Seth Kim-Cohen and Christoph Cox in the pages of Artforum, before going, well, all over the place. Stabler has a tendency to write in flowery, categorical statements that easily grate, especially when these utterances and metaphorical models seem off the mark despite their attempt at glib profundity. Black metal, for example, apparently hopes to evoke “leftover radiation from the Big Bang… or the ancient poisonous corpse-sludge of petroleum” but instead its “familiar roar is of the throng and its bloody flag flapping turgid in an icy gale, visible by the dim embers of an incinerated basilica” whatever that picturesque image is supposed to mean. Similarly, and quite categorically, black metal apparently “derives its potency from just the lack of interest in getting-anything-done,” and black metal “evokes the formlessness of physical and mental background buzz, at the same time as it attempts to be an anthem, a hymn, or a retort.” At four pages, this lack of interest in getting-anything-done it is mercifully short, huzzah.

In this volume’s final piece, Kyle McGee devotes a substantial fifteen pages to Pennsylvania’s purveyors of industrial black noise T.O.M.B. in what amounts to a paean to their sound, gushing with torrents of picturesque praise that are appropriate given how much their music conveys ideas of bludgeoning cascades and violent sanguine flows. It is because of this relation to its subject matter that there is an appropriateness to McGee’s theoretically dense yet bloody and visceral language, as typified by the glorious subtitle Grotesque Indexicality, Black Sites, and the Cryptology of the Sonorous Irreflective in T.O.M.B; unlike Stabler’s bewildering landscape of flaccid flags and dim embers. McGee views T.O.M.B.’s music with a suitably corporeal analytical model that he calls an excarnation of place, a stripping away of flesh that stands in contrast to the Church’s investment in incarnation, in which there is a profanation and deterritorialisation of spaces, objects and bodies. Of course, this doesn’t preclude one from being pragmatic and saying that this elaborate paean could equally be an exercise in hyperbole and ornamentation, reading far more than necessary into what could equally be viewed as just some hideous racket.

With its emphasis on stygian artwork and only five written contributions, this third volume of Helvete feels a little lacking. None of the written pieces really stand out in the way others have in previous volumes, and only Pröll’s Vocal Distortion and McGee’s grandiloquent consideration of T.O.M.B. manage to be both enjoyable and memorable. Otherwise, there’s an impression of diminishing returns, and given that there was never a fourth volume in this series, this murky well seems to have run dry.

Published by Punctum Books

December 15, 2019 by ScriptusScribe

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory – Issue 2: With Head Downwards: Inversions in Black Metal, edited by Steven Shakespeare and Niall Scott

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Categories: music, satanism, Tags: Punctum Books,

The first issue of the Helvete journal was previously reviewed here on Scriptus Recensera and was described as an interesting if flawed look at black metal through an academic lens. This second issue continues that approach and features contributions from Elodie Lesourd, Reuben Dendinger, Brenda S. Gardenour Walter, Louis Hartnoll, Erik van Ooijen, Bert Stabler, and editors Niall Scott and Steve Shakespeare. In their introduction, Scott and Shakespeare identify the inverted cross as emblematic of the themes of this issue, providing an overview of the contributions within and arguing that the power of inversion is not simply one of parodic reversal, instead opening new ways of thought through the collapsing of light into darkness, pointing beyond a narrative of salvation (in which one master is replaced with another, darker hued), and instead “towards an identification with the earth in its reality, in its corruption.”

Obviously, one of the appeals of black metal, to fans and academics alike, is aesthetics, and indeed the discussions here focus more often on things visual than things aural. The appeal of the imagery of black metal gives some of these contributors license to wallow in its dark glamour, employing its eldritch visual lexicon for equally florid prose. Brenda S. Gardenour Walter, for example, opens her piece Through the Looking Glass Darkly drawing a scene set in “sempiternal night, ice-laden autumn winds twist through gnarled and blackened woodlands as shadows grow long beneath a freezing moon.” Here, inverted crosses, inverted pentagrams and the severed heads of sheep “flicker in the firelight cast from the conflagration of Christian stave churches in the distance.” Walter presents black metal as a multi-layered darkened mirror that contains multiple inversions upon inversions which thereby conceals several potential identities for its devotees. She identifies within the first layer of the mirror the ability for black metal to act as a path to liberation and self-empowerment, with the embracing of what mainstream society and religion abhors creating an assured identity in opposition; albeit one whose principle of reactionary abjection binds it to its object of hatred through a co-dependent jouissance.

Taking black metal’s elitism and contrariness to its ultimate extreme, Walter argues that there is another identity that can be found within the darkened mirror of black metal, one that moves beyond the validation by opposition seen in the Satanism-Christianity antinomy. Rather than being a subscriber to some of black metal’s more pervasive orthodox tendency (the true bands, the right clothes… no sneakers or tracksuits, please), this figure in the mirror, acknowledged here as illusive and distant, is more a Luciferian and intellectual ideal, refusing to submit to anyone’s will, be it God, Satan or the black metal group mind. Here, Walter again returns to her kvlt, grim but picturesque language, describing this Byronic figure as a “single blackened self, standing alone in a barren waste, much like a gnarled and blackened tree against a northern winter sky.” Embracing the language of anti-cosmic Satanism, this nihilistic and blackened self experiences a moment of dark illumination as it sees its inverted reflection reverberating into a formless void, a void in which they achieve true liberation through destruction. “At the still point, in a moment of ecstatic union with the darkness, the self is annihilated in blackness and absorbed into the Oneness of Nothing, unfettered at last.”

Equally heavy on the lovely language is Reuben Dendinger who discusses black metal as folk magic in The Way of the Sword, with said sword being, in his eyes, totemic of metal itself and synonymous with the inverted cross. Dendinger presents the history of metal music as a modern yet ancient myth with its practitioners euhemerised into wielders and workers of steel, building motorbikes in the 1970s, and then going underground in the 1980s where they forged great blades and freed the witches, pagan heroes and the exiled pagan gods that would come to embody the genre from their imprisonment in Hell. Heady stuff; though unfortunately it doesn’t give a mythic explanation for hair metal, or Stryper for that matter.

Things stray away from black metal when Erik van Ooijen turns to the death metal/deathgrind of Cattle Decapitation in Giving Life Harmoniously. This continues the issue’s theme of inversion but this is not a case of religious antithesis, though it is a moral one, with Ooijen considering the way in which Cattle Decapitation inverts the traditional hierarchy of human and animal. With its vegetarian stance that turns factory farming and industrialised slaughter against its humans perpetuators, the band’s imagery, Ooijen argues, challenges and inverts the familiar violent themes, misogynies and hierarchies found within the grindcore and death metal genres as a whole, thereby enacting a queering of the carnophallogocentric (to use a term from Derrida) form. This is something hiding in plain sight in the band’s name, able to be read as the conventional decapitation of cattle, or the inverted and righteous revenge of decapitation by cattle. This conceit, and in particular its representation in the band’s cover art, has a precedent in the reversal of power relationships seen in the 14-18^th century topos of mundus inversus, the world turned upside down, typified here in a series of Dutch woodcuts that includes scenes of an ox flaying a suspended butcher, or a goose and rabbit roasting a cook on a spit.

Another musical tangent is seen in Bert Stabler’s A Sterile Hole and a Mask Of Feces which takes as its launching pad An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood, the title of the third full-length studio album by Gnaw Their Tongues, an act perhaps more associated with metal-accented dark ambient and noise. There’s not a lot of Gnaw Their Tongues here, though, and after an initial mention, Stabler swiftly moves away from them, grounding his discussion in the works of Hegel as interpreted by Slavoj Žižek, presenting a textually and theoretically dense consideration of themes of ecstatic disintegration and the embracing of the abjected in sublation/aufheben. This narrative wanders somewhat aimlessly and erratically, with Stabler swinging various theoretical models around recklessly and dropping examples and diversions out of nowhere, with those drawn from black metal often feeling tacked on to an existing whole.

Like the first volume of Helvete, there is a visual component here, with Elodie Lesourd and Amelia Ishmael curating Eccentricities and Disorientations: Experiencing Geometricies in Black Metal, featuring artwork by Dimitris Foutris, Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert, Andrew McLeod, Sandrine Pelletier, and Stephen Wilson. As one would expect, given the title, this collection explores themes of space and geometry, with the vaults, beams and buttresses of churches being a constant reference. Bouschet and Hilbert reprise their blackened aesthetic from Helvete 1 with a regrettably brief contribution, but the most striking pieces here are stark, detailed shots of Sandrine Pelletier’s sculpture Aeg Yesoodth Ryobi Ele_emDrill!, a linear three-dimensional pentagram whose blackened beams recall the remains of a scorched cathedral as much as they do some impossible, Lovecraftian non-Euclidean geometry. Lesourd and Ishmael accompany this selection of work with text that occasionally breaks from standard formatting into more idiosyncratic, not-entirely successful layouts indicative of the theme, pushing the text into geometric shapes or inconsistent column widths.

This second volume of Helvete makes for some interesting, diverting reading, with, for what it’s worth, the non-black metal contribution from Ooijen being the most engaging and well written; albeit long. He ably combines theoretical models with an integrated consideration of Cattle Decapitation, weaving in related factoids or anecdotes where relevant. As with the first issue of Helvete, there are some issues here, with questions inevitably arising over whether black metal is written about simply from the perspective of a dilettantish embracing of something exotic and transgressive. Similarly, Norwegian black metal continues to loom large, almost to the point of eclipsing all others; something that literally happens in Contempt, Atavism, Eschatology, where Louis Hartnoll mistakenly but consistently refers to the nineties Norwegian scene as the first wave of black metal, rather than the second, giving it primacy over all that went before and thereby casting Øystein Aarseth as some sort of black metal prime progenitor.

Published by Punctum Books.

October 1, 2019 by ScriptusScribe

Minóy – Edited by Joseph Nechvatal

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Categories: art, music, Tags: Punctum Books,

Published in 2014 by the Punctum Books imprint Dead Letter Office (home to “work that either has gone “nowhere” or will likely go nowhere”), this is a suitably appropriate paean to prolific sound artist and noise musician Stanley Keith Bowsza, better known as Minóy. A significant figure in the mail art and noise scene of the 1980s, Minóy produced over a hundred works before abandoning music in the early 1990s. Following his death in 2010, the collection of Minóy master tapes was entrusted to musician, past collaborator and long-time fan PBK (Phillip B. Klingler) who now curates the reissuing of these releases via Bandcamp.

Being a Dead Letter Office release, Minóy is not a long work and is comprised of essays almost entirely by editor Joseph Nechvatal, with the exception of one by Amber Sabri. Sabri’s piece is a prelude, in turn, to the visual component of Minóy, featuring a selection of images she took of Bowsza in the 2000s. This creates an interesting contrast, as Nechvatal’s writing is frequently dense and academic, while Sabri’s memoir is, by its nature, more personal and informal, and her images provide the only visual evidence within of the book’s subject.

Nechvatal kicks things off with the gloriously verbose title that is The Saturated Superimposed Agency of Minóy, which provides a thorough biography of Minóy and his work, before descending into considerably more philosophical territory. He draws attention to the echoes of La Monte Young in Minóy’s use of length as a compositional technique, arguing that the extended length allows deep subjective perceptions of the present moment to come to consciousness, thereby offering “a sonically ontological vision of the world as superimposition, one that shows us in place inside of a saturated world.” This idea of noise in general and Minóy’s in particular as a queer-like force that acts in resistance to conformity and mundanity, is one that permeates Nechvatal’s writing here. He doesn’t employ the lexicon of queer theory, though, using instead his own language of hypernoise theory, often referring to the ability of Minóy’s music to create an interplay of the human and the nonhuman.

Nechvatal concludes The Saturated Superimposed Agency of Minóy with an addendum in which he provides reviews of a mere eight of Minóy’s works, culled from a variety of sources and writers, principally Sound Choice but also Lowlife and Option magazines. For those unfamiliar with Minóy’s output, these give a sense of the soundworlds he was creating, and more importantly, how they were perceived by his contemporaries.

In Whatever Happened to the Man Named Minóy? Sabri writes a memoir of the man she knew, not as Minóy but as My Life as A Haint. By becoming a haint, a term used in the vernacular of the southern United States to refer to a ghost, apparition or lost soul, Bowsza drew a line under the Minóy that had obsessively created music for a decade and instead, now largely bed-ridden with physical and mental illness, turned to digital art as a form of expression. There’s something in the use of the word haint that evokes Mishima’s description of slipping through life as a ghost, sitting on the outside and divorced from convention. This is evidenced in Bowsza’s work as both Minóy and as Haint, and his personal life, in which he was divorced from confines both societal and temporal, with persistent agoraphobia and a tendency to sleep little and work long (sometimes staying awake for days on end in manic marathons of creativity).

Sabri’s photo essay, credited to her glorious pseudonym Maya Eidolon and created in collaboration with Bowsza and his partner Stuart Hass, is tortuously called Minóy as Haint as King Lear and shows Minóy/Haint as Shakespeare’s titular character in 60 black and white images, presented two to a page. Framed horizontally and largely with only head and shoulders showing, the images convey a sense of psychotic ferocity, with Bowsza moving in and out of great washes of long-shutter speed blur, abstracting into clouds of movement until briefly emerging again, as if from water, with recognisable, anguished features. While the images convey in strict representational terms of sign and signifier what one would expect the whirl psychosis to look like given form, there are other questions here, concerned primarily with identity and its loss. Sabri’s title conveys this with its cast of three characters, and within these images the trinity of Minóy, Haint and Lear all appear to be asking Lear’s own question: “Does any here know me? This is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, or his discernings are lethargied – Sleeping or waking? Ha! Sure ’tis not so! Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Nechvatal’s response to Sabri’s images makes similar observations, arguing that rather than seeing Bowsza’s performance for the camera as “a descent into the thick eerie nonhuman,” it is instead an illustration of “a very specific way of living mad in the intensified flow of superimposed becoming” before tying the ferocity of the images back to the musical leitmotifs of Minóy: “we can almost hear in these images his Lear-like scream into an unbounded white noise.”

As befits Minóy’s elongated musical forms, Nechvatal continues his own musing on Minóy with an addendum, The Obscurity of Minóy, which, it transpires, is but the first of several afterwords. Like the never-ending ending to the cinematic incarnation of Return of the King, this continues with the amusingly-acknowledged After After Words of The Aesthetics of an Obscure Monster Sacré and the After After After Words of Hyper Noise Aesthetics. Indeed, these after (after after) words from Nechvatal take up more space than his main contribution, allowing him to take flight with his philosophical notions of noise.

Now we must turn to the de rigueur justification for reviewing a book on a noise musician on a site ostensibly concerned with occult titles. While there is little in Minóy’s themes, both musical and titular, that suggest the magickal or the mystical, it is the response to this music that offers almost inevitably an interpretation arcane and anagogic. PBK’s documented enthusiasm for Minóy’s work after first hearing it has something of the religious and ecstatic about it, memorialised here with his description of it as “dream-like, nightmare-like, but also sometimes spiritual.” Similarly, Nechvatal’s use of philosophical and theoretical models inevitably leads to language that is redolent of the exploration of the unconscious and the internal, of intersections betwixt the mundane and the mystical. Like PBK’s description of Minóy’s music as both nightmarish and spiritual, Nechvatal frequently invokes the figure of the monstre sacré, using it a description of Minóy himself, and often of noise music in general.

If there is a voice that’s missed here it’s that of PBK, whose recently adopted role of Minóy archivist and legacy documenter has made him a significant player in the current revival of interest in his oeuvre. While PBK is heard here and there, variously quoted and paraphrased in Nechvatal’s pieces, there is nothing of whole cloth by him here, which seems a shame.

A similarly-titled album was released to coincide with the Minóy book, featuring nine compositions from between 1985 and 1993. Drawn from recently discovered archival material, the selection was made by Nechvatal, in collaboration with PBK, with the latter remastering the tracks. Given the long-form nature of much of Minóy’s work, PBK and Nechvatal had the difficult task of finding complete works that were varied enough and short enough to fits on a single CD and still be representative of his music. The CD version of Minóy is still available at time of writing but a fittingly limited edition cassette run is sold out.

Published by Dead Letter Office/Punctum Books

August 22, 2019 by ScriptusScribe

Left-Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009 – Bruce Russell

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Categories: hermeticism, music

The copy of Left-Handed Blows that sits before this reviewer has an interesting provenance, having been withdrawn from the library of a tertiary institution I used to work at. Quite who there would have ordered a book by the Dead C.’s Bruce Russell is hard to fathom, as the music department at this institution, both teaching staff and students, could hardly be said to have adventurous tastes. And the pristine, un-issued state of this book suggests that any optimism of usage by whoever ordered or requested it was severely misplaced, and it held no interest for a demographic for whom Sgt. Pepper’s was probably a bit too weird.

Consisting of material on sound and its role in culture written over sixteen years, Left-Handed Blows compiles essays, liner notes, catalogue contributions, as well as most of the previously published content of the Russell-edited Logopandocy: The Journal of Vain Erudition, published by Ekskubalauron Press. Anyone familiar with Russell’s work will not be surprised to see a collection such as this reviewed amongst our usual selection of occult books, as his work has always had a stream of esotericism, qabalah and Hermeticism running through it, right down to the choice of Corpus Hermeticum as a record label name. And it is musings along these themes that provide the most interesting readings amongst these pages.

Russell begins with a dense and lengthy essay that bears the same title as this book, establishing theory and methodology and drawing on a variety of principally Marxist figures such as Guy Debord and György Lukács to discuss the idea of improvisation and its resulting improvised sound work (AKA noise) as not only a critique of music, but a form that perpetually critiques its own existence by its very method of creation. This theoretical investigation is intended by Russell to provide a prism through which the subsequent writings are viewed, though he warns the reader against expecting any coherent theory, choosing instead to refer to the various bits of content as ‘gilded splinters.’

As is perhaps typical of their origin in Logopandocy, some of the contributions here have a distinctly zine-like feel to them, such as the free noise manifesto What is free? from 1994, a ten point (with multiple subpoints) declaration originally published in the legendary Bananafish and then reprinted in Logopandocy. Another list is found in Contra-Fludd/contra-Kepler, presenting ten theses extolling the disharmony of the spheres, where noise and improvisation is set in opposition to the mechanistic vision of the music of the spheres, freeing humanity to make music no longer celestial but human. Adorably, what are brief, usually one-sentence statements actually run to four pages due to the extensive footnotes that rise towards these ten theses like a threatening tide of small point-size information; providing a thorough background to the references to Pythagoras, Robert Fludd, Johannes Kepler and the like. Finally, another numbered list is found in Russell’s notes towards an epistemology of tape music, Time under the rule of the commodity, which concludes by stating that by foregrounding the medium and its method of operation, tape music makes destruction and human choice central to art.

Three of the contributions here take the form of interviews or conversations, allowing for a consideration of many of the themes featured elsewhere in these pages but in an informal and, well, conversational manner. The more conventional of these is an interview by Marco Fusinato for Axe magazine in which Russell describes performance process in practical terms, detailing his different approaches in the Dead C. and A Handful of Dust, as well as providing information about the Lyttelton circle of musicians and his labels Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum. It is the most rock musician-like interview here, and the other two focus more acutely on the theoretical. In a dialogue with Alastair Galbraith, a frequent collaborator with Russel as one half of A Handful of Dust, the two muse on improvisation and its virtues, with Galbraith approaching the metaphysical by describing how randomness opens realms within which the very randomness creates its own melodies, almost as a sentient spirit operating on those who are open to its influence. Improvisation, structure and randomness is also considered in a 1993 conversation with Russell led by Danny Butt, now Associate Director (Research) at Victoria College of the Arts but also a one-time member of Flies Inside The Sun and one half of Tanaka-Nixon Meeting with Michael Morley. Here the conversation turns to Russell’s interest in neo-Platonism, Hermeticism and the philosophia naturalis of Fludd and others, not as a conscious metaphysical justification for, as he describes it, “this kind of din,” but as an unintended intersection betwixt musical praxis and philosophical truths. Russell reveals a love and sympathy for the worldviews professed by these archaic predecessors, ones which fell quickly away with the emergence of the materialistic materialism of Cartesian thought and the various aspects of Newtonianism that inform the modern scientific paradigm. While he doesn’t subscribe to these older ideas in their entirety, he laments the now lost holistic principles and attendant concepts of the macrocosm and microcosm, seeking to develop a dialogue between the worlds of then and now.

In To think is to speculate with images, Russell details another intersection of his praxis with Hermeticism in a discussion of the search for a reformed philosophical language that would replicate the universal and presumably divine language spoken in Eden before the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. For Russell, the way in which Giordano Bruno, and subsequently Fludd, designated post-Babel languages as less capable of “communicating a profound level of intersubjective meaning than images” mirrors his belief in improvisation. The use of improvisation, he argues, is closer to real, direct communication, whereas the rules of academic musical tradition create impediments to this lingua adamic-like flow between musician and listener with the use of premeditation and intellectual mediation.

Not all the writings here directly concern Russell’s own music, and there are liner notes for several releases by Ralf Wehowsky as well as considerations of two of Russell’s fellow New Zealanders: Douglas Lilburn and Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel. In a piece I remember reading in The Wire in 2005, Russell reviews the then freshly-released complete electronic works of Lilburn, arguably New Zealand’s greatest composer, and someone he memorably describes as wearing an acrylic sweater and looking like his uncle. Russell’s discussion of Kneale, meanwhile, is from the liner notes to the Birchville Cat Motel album Gunpowder Temple of Heaven, whose hallucinatory slabs of noise are given a religious analogue: the massive drones of metal pipe organs, the cavernous acoustics of cathedrals, the walls of Jericho succumbing to Joshua’s barrage of sounding trumpet.

The writings in Left-Handed Blows are never long, providing easily digested little excursion into particular areas of Russell’s interest, but with each running to usually three pages or more, they are always complete and fully realised. Russell’s ability to draw from Marxist philosophy, various strands of occultism, as well as music both conventional and atypical provides the collection with diverse frames of reference that makes you feel smarter just for reading it.

Funded by Creative New Zealand and supported by the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, Left-Handed Blows was designed by Warren Olds and sub-edited by Gwynneth Porter. It is bound in a rich brown card with full-page French flaps, and the title and author foiled in gold on both the front and rear covers. Double-sided end-papers feature full page black and white photographs by Russell, providing the book’s only visual accompaniment.

Published by Clouds

The soundtrack for this review is The Dead C: Vain, Erudite and Stupid: Selected Works 1987?-?2005

February 21, 2019 by ScriptusScribe

Zazen Sounds #5

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Categories: art, esotericism, magick, music

Zazen Sounds is both a record label and the name of this small sub-A5 magazine published by Acherontas V.Priest of the similarly named black metal band Acherontas, and the dark ambient project Shibalba. The magazine’s goal appears as a legend beneath the title on the cover, “serving the spiritual background of the art of music” and to this end it combines interviews with predominantly black metal musician and occult artists and publishers, plus a few articles about matters magickal.

Being my first encounter with this magazine, the thing that strikes you immediately about this fifth issue of Zazen Sounds is the look, which creates the chronometrically-disorienting feeling of reading a ‘zine from decades ago. While it may not have the physical cut-and-paste construction of yesteryear, there’s a rough and ready quality to the layout that all the digital tools of today haven’t corrected. Things are also really tight, but more about that later.

The bands featured in interviews here are an interesting bunch with different styles but some certain commonalities. It’s here that the old-zine feel is confirmed, with references to various Satanic and magickal groups known primarily for their time in the early-to-mid nineties, such as the Order of Nine Angle and the Order of the Left Hand Path. Just as some of the black metal aesthetics on display here don’t seem to have moved on much from that period, so these references to older magickal groups feel almost nostalgic for a simpler, and yet more mysterious time. This is affirmed when some of the artists, betraying their age, wax lyrical about the pre-internet days of tape trading and the returning of stamps, while lamenting some of the characteristics of the modern age.

This interview line-up consists of Lvcifyre from London, Germany’s Dysangelium, Finland’s Slave’s Mask and Iceland’s glorious Svartidauð, while the Greek-born/London-based Macabre Omen kind of get double-billing with Alexandros Antoniou interviewed twice, both as a member of Macrabre Omen and as his project The One. For the non-metal side of music, there’s an interview with Liesmaic of the delightful Deverills Nexion, which naturally sees some of those references to the ONA; and showing their roots in black metal, some de rigueur bemoaning of the genre’s current state compared to nineties glory days.

The language in some of the interviews is what you would, perhaps unfairly, expect from black metal bands, a little vainglorious, a little pompous, all caught in the bind of having to say things without coming across as too enthusiastic or risk having the little masks of occult obscuration fall. As a result, it’s something of a relief to take a break from the turgid prose with the first of the article contributions here, a piece on Voudon Gnostic oracular systems by Sean Woodward. This is a refreshingly well-written piece, though it does descend into a swamp of gematria words and values later on, which can make your eyes glaze over if you’re not that way inclined.

The other articles in this issue are an exploration of the German poet Stefan George by Cornelius Waldner, and two pieces that one could describe as discussions of personal process. In the first, When Reason Fails, the Soul Speaks, painter and illustrator David S. Herrerías, who may be familiar for work in both occult publications and on metal albums (with a book forthcoming from Atramentous Press), gives thoughts on art as a magickal method and a way of connecting to and exploring the unconscious. Meanwhile, Multi Layeredness by Tay Köllner Willardar Xul-Lux considers just that, the idea of layers as a principle that can be applied to either magick, music, or any other form of art.

In addition to the interviews with musicians, Zazen Sounds has interviews with Finnish record label The Sinister Flame, and with two Canadians, occult publishers and artists respectively. Gabriel McCaughry of Anathema Publishing talks largely about his exquisite publishing imprint (and a little about his black metal band Blight), while in the longest interview in the magazine at 13 pages, Chris Undirheimar of Blood and Fire Ritual Art covers, naturally, a variety of topics relating to his art, philosophy of life and working out. His rather spectacular painting Loki Thursakyndill also graces the cover and (in mirrored form) the back of this issue.

The layout in Zazen Sounds doesn’t exactly make it conducive to reading, nor does it do the content justice. While titles and lead text are rendered nicely enough in an archaic serif face (all caps for the titles, italic for the lead), the body copy is crammed into fully justified, heavily-hyphenated columns of a monotonous and somewhat incongruous sans serif. Paragraphs are treated inconsistently, sometimes within the same section, and can have either a first line indent or no indent at all. Interviews suffer the worst as questions and answers sit snuggly next to each other, differentiated only by the bolding of the former, creating impenetrable walls of dense typographic colour. Also, some sections don’t end on their own page, and instead the remainder flows onto another page, making the following interview start up to a quarter of the way down. This contributes to everything feeling claustrophobic, and it doesn’t need to, as a little adjusting of the layout for more space, such as the removal of small or often redundant images, would have allowed things to breath. Then there’s a lack of attention to detail that sees a couple of images pixelated into illegibility, little to no proofing and editing on the contributions from non-native-English-speakers in particular, and one interview that accidentally repeats a page worth of questions and answers, woops. It’s a shame as this lack of rigour distracts from the content, and just a little polish would have helped live up to that noble aspiration of combining music, magic and art.

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Categotry Archives: music

Myths of Wewelsburg Castle – Edited by Kirsten John-Stucke and Daniela Siepe

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult: An Anthology

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory – Issue 3: Bleeding Black Noise – Amelia Ishmael

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory – Issue 2: With Head Downwards: Inversions in Black Metal, edited by Steven Shakespeare and Niall Scott

Minóy – Edited by Joseph Nechvatal

Left-Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009 – Bruce Russell

Zazen Sounds #5