Table Of Content

Mors Mystica: Black Metal Theory Symposium M M ORS YSTICA Black Metal Theory Symposium Edited by Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro First published in 2015 by Schism Press An imprint of Gobbet press schismmsihcs.wordpress.com MORS MYSTICA: BLACK METAL THEORY SYMPOSIUM © The authors and Schism Press This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0. Cover image: Magdalena Gornik on Good Friday (http://zupnija-sodrazica.rkc.si/MagdalenaGornik/ mistika_A.html) ISBN-13: 978-0692492093 ISBN-10: 0692492097 CONTENTS Introduction: On “Heroes/Helden” 1 Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro Following the Stench: Watain and 53 Putrefaction Mysticism Drew Daniel Ablaze in the Bath of Fire 69 Brad Baumgartner Mycelegium 81 James Harris dying to find I was never there 99 Teresa Gillespie On the Ecstasy of Annihilation: Notes 147 towards a Demonic Supplement Charlie Blake Autonomy of Death, Nothing Like This 169 Daniel Colucciello Barber “It’s a suit! It’s ME!”: Hyper-Star and Hyper- 177 Hero through Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle The Tongue-Tied Mystic: Aaaarrrgghhh! 201 Fuck Them! Fuck You! Gary J. Shipley These Flames Will Lick the Feet of God 215 Heather Masciandaro Mystical Anarchism 219 Simon Critchley Die Maske des Black Metals 257 Dominik Irtenkauf Xenharmonic Black Metal: Radical 269 Intervallics as Apophatic Ontotheology Brooker Buckingham The Perichoresis of Music, Art, and 279 Philosophy Hunter Hunt-Hendrix On Darkness Itself 293 Niall Scott Haemál 307 Jeremy Dyer From Black Bile 317 Eugene Thacker “This Place is a Tomb”: Infinite Terror in 325 Darkspace Dylan Trigg Seven Propositions On The Secret Kissing Of 333 Black Metal: OSKVLVM Edia Connole Wings Flock to My Crypt, I Fly to My Throne: 367 On Inquisition’s Esoteric Floating Tomb Nicola Masciandaro Symposium Photographs 383 Öykü Tekten APPENDIX Bound to Metal (Interview with Edia 399 Connole for Legacy) Dominik Irtenkauf Theoria e praxis del Black Metal (Interview 403 by Fabio Selvafiorita for L’Intellettuale Dissidente) Nicola Masciandaro On “Heroes/Helden” Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro To be a hero—in the most universal sense of the word— means to aspire to absolute triumph. But such triumphs come only through death. Heroism means transcending life; it is a fatal leap into nothingness. – Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair Freedom? it’s my final refuge, I forced myself to freedom and I bear it not like a talent but with heroism: I’m heroically free . . . I don’t impart confidences. Instead I metallize myself . . . I construct something free of me and of you—this is my freedom that leads to death. – Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva [I]n the seething blaze, you turned to ash. . . . Like a forest fire the flame roared on, and burned your flesh away. Next day at dawn . . . we picked your pale bones from the char to keep in wine and oil. A golden amphora your mother gave for this—Hephaistos’ work, a gift from Dionysos. In that vase . . . hero, lie your pale bones . . . We . . . heaped a tomb for these upon a foreland . . . to be a mark against the sky for voyagers in this generation and those to come. – Homer, The Odyssey Realization is for heroes who, while the knife is slashing their throats, take pleasure in the pain of dying. – Meher Baba They who thus conquer / In the storm of love / Are veritable heroes; / But they who take any rest / And do not continue to the end / Are rightly condemned. – Hadewijch 1 MORS MYSTICA The idea of this commentary is to consider “Heroes/Helden,” a cover of the famous Bowie song by Tombs,1 in light of the fires of mystical death. In the weeks before the Mors Mystica symposium, the music video by the Brooklyn-based black metal band spontaneously suggested itself as an index of the event. Whatever the secret or obvious links between black metal and Bowie—“I was influenced by Bowie” (Necrobutcher of Mayhem)2—this seems like an unlikely musical gloss on a black metal theory symposium dedicated to self-annihilation. On further reflection, the setting of the video by Tombs in New York City, the promise of a metallic blackening of the pop romanticism of the original (“Bowie simply glosses over the boundless idealism of his song called ‘Heroes’ [sic] by being ironic about it right from the start”),3 and above all the profound spiritual connection between heroism and mystical death, their unending cotermination in dying to oneself through love—“Being is dying by loving” (MB)—show “Heroes/Helden” to be a perfect song for this commentary (and proper way to introduce this volume). If the “heroes” of the song are only heroes “for one day,” all the more so does “Heroes/Helden” point the way to the sword-path upon which true heroes “die daily” (1 Cor. 15:31).4 1 Tombs, “‘Heroes’ (Official Music Video),” directed by Jacyln Sheer and Samantha Astolfi (Relapse Records, 2014), https://vimeo.com/ 108837545. 2 Dayal Patterson, Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2013), 150. 3 Tobias Rüther, Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 135. 4 “This Path is strewn only with hardships, and only heroes can tread it. Many pundits are there to give lectures and speak about philosophy, but only a hero can tread the Path. It is like balancing oneself on the edge of a sword. What am I to do? I have to keep you alive while jabbing my knife in your chest, which causes you to cry out. What can we do? This is our situation” (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, 1027, http:// http://www.lordmeher.org). Cf. “Life with Meher Baba was like walking on the edge of a sword—walking on it even though crippled in one leg! Such a life cannot be imagined. Daily, one had to bear lightning-like blows; yet, strangely, one would be in such a condition that, although paining from the wounds, one would not like to be left ‘unharmed’ without them! On the one hand, the mind would reel under the attack, but on the other, the heart would desire more punishment! Thus, because of the continuous shower of ‘blows to the ego,’ the mind was becoming 2 CONNOLE & MASCIANDARO – ON “HEROES/HELDEN” “Heroes / Helden” As seen in the closing credits of the music video, Tombs dispense with the quotation marks which conspicuously enclose the title of Bowie’s original in an “ironic distance”—a distance nonetheless always already closed by the sonic immanence of the love of music (music of love) wherein the twin correlational hallucination of the for-us and the in-itself is inversely overcome: “There is no outside! But we forget this with all sounds; how lovely it is that we forget!”5 Counter to the critical reception of Bowie’s self-citing title as a camp gesture whose sophistication the naïve listener or believer in heroism must be instructed in,6 Tombs erect an unadorned powerless and the heart strong” (Lord Meher, 3669). On the traditional significance of the sword bridge, famously traversed by Sir Lancelot, Doña Luisa Coomaraswamy writes, “It is because the Thread of the Spirit is at once so tenuous and of such wiry strength that the Bridge is so often described in the traditional literature either as a ray of light, or as consisting of a thread or a hair, or as sharper than a razor or the edge of a sword” (“The Perilous Bridge of Welfare,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 8 [1944]: 196–213). 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 175. 6 “Bowie was slap-bang in the middle of what Susan Sontag defined as the sensibility of camp . . . ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It is not a lamp but a “lamp”.’ Or, in Bowie’s case it is ‘Heroes’, not Heroes, implying an ironic distancing lost in its live power-pop renditions” (David Buckley, “Still Pop’s Faker?,” in The Bowie Companion, ed. by Elizabeth Thompson and David Gutman [London: Macmillan, 1993], 4–5). “For all of its latter-day recognition . . . ‘“Heroes”’ is still widely mistaken to be an anthem to fist-pumping optimism, when in fact Bowie is singing about the self-delusion of clinging to a relationship that might last, at best, ‘just for one [more] day.’ The title, moreover, is framed in what Bowie would 3 MORS MYSTICA heroic monument and monument to heroism under cover of the cover itself, over the aegis of the undying artist-hero whose epigraphically present name now both signs the work’s authentic saying and serves as the ur-quote mark presiding over its freedom from “the vicious circle of authority and citation.”7 This is Tombs’ “Heroes/Helden,” not “‘Heroes/Helden’” by David Bowie. The cover’s interment of the song as writing—not “by” but “written by”—puts to rest its unsung, musically invisible quotation marks. Activating the principle of the cover as citation in toto, Tombs encrypt “‘Heroes’” in a tomb of total citation that resurrects the song from semantic suspension, paradoxically restoring it to itself in a new version which always-never existed, a lyrical hybrid of “‘Heroes’” and “‘Heroes/Helden’.” Such is the order of black metal: “black metal perpetuates itself via a satanic logic that corrodes and occludes its own resources while allowing them to remain apparent. You could say that black metal practices what Benjamin called ‘the art of citing without quotation marks.’ Rebelling against the logic or order whereby the citation produces authority, black metal weaponizes citation against its own authorizing aura. For black metal, repetition IS the original.”8 And such is the real point, the whole point, of Bowie’s original marks, which is not to be ironic about heroism but to get it by knowing that the joke is on you if you do not presently die to yourself and become who you really are, i.e. be a hero—whatever the artist and critics say about the song, or what anyone says about anything for that matter. As Sir Gawain must remind Yvain, lest he become “one of those men . . . who are worth less because of their wives,” “Now is not the time to dream your life away but to frequent tournaments, engage in combat, and joust vigorously, whatever it later refer to as ironic quotation marks—suggesting that the ‘only true heroic act’ available, as he told Melody Maker’s Allan Jones shortly after the song’s release, was to enjoy ‘the very simple pleasure of being alive’” (Thomas Jerome Seabrook, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town [London: Jawbone, 2008], 179). 7 Giorgo Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martiez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 74. 8 Nicola Masciandaro, “Black Metal Theory: Interrogation I: Nicola Masciandaro,” Avant-garde Metal (2012), http://avantgarde- metal.com/content/stories2.php?id=245. 4