Mihai „Coro” Caraveţeanu (AXA VALAHA PRODUCTIONS): On the black metal anarchism and the senseless revolts

 

I was about to write a different type of content that night, right after I returned home from the private audition of the new Bloodway album “A Fragile Riddle Crypting Clues”, which is to be released soon, when an article by Noisey Vice appeared in the feed, speaking of some anarchist black metal band from Liverpool which wants to spark an anarcho revolution. One can simply understand that the idea of presenting the new-released album by Dawn Ray’d, named “The Unlawful Assembly”, is mainly a gimmick. The album is available for streaming on the above mentioned publication and it’s a pretty fair album, mainly in fast and middle tempo... It is the usual black metal power trio fixed on hysterical screams, with Celtic violin passages and clean baladesque-vocals heard from time to time, otherwise hard to be observed through the wave of so many good albums released this year! Yeah, their anarchist political involvement looks genuine, I noticed they scored on the scene of the super-politically correct Fluff Fest, where bands get mentioned or bullied even for having different well-argued opinions about abortion, but this anarcho-thing meeting black metal is not something new in the scene, since there were punks playing black metal from the very beginning and the raw aesthetics of the genre have been always very inspiring for many musicians.

As any other extreme form of metal, black metal attracted some of the extremest ideas, politics being included. It looks like nobody gave a shit fifteen-twenty years ago, when Pagan Front, Blood & Honour or Combat 18, together with the associated labels from all around the world – from the frozen Canada through France, Germany, Poland, to the Russian tundra and the south of Brazil – released some of the most infamous NSBM records which are still available to this day, sometimes for ridiculous prices. It’s only nowadays when bands like Destroyer 666, Marduk or even the death metal gods of Incantation get touched by the backhand of the Big Brother, who call them nazis or racists and cancel their shows. Lyric-wise, some double standards apply: while anti-christian lyrics are generally accepted, anti-islamic lyrics would qualify the band as the naziest of the week in such a peer reviewed publication as Vice or MetalSucks.

Long story short: none of these publications can’t deny the whole wave of black metal bands that got influenced by the early releases of Burzum or Darkthrone, with some of these new or almost new anarchist bands taking a generous dose of musical inspiration from the same Scandinavian masters of black metal. Yeah, I’m talking mainly about this new wave of black metal that people call post-black metal, which ridiculed most of the old black metal themes to the core. People nowadays forgot that the intolerance was so widespread in the underground scene two decades ago and thus they use a dystopian nostalgia, which is connected with the tape trading era, xeroxed fanzines, the formula “send back my stamps” and the bootleg tapes flying from one continent to another. Nobody talks about the boycott flyers, about the “with us or against us” type of attitude, the little feuds in between bands or scenes, or the dirty lists done by the NSBM musicians in almost each country, including actually the more successful musicians of the local scenes, who understood that it was all mainly about music, not politics or war memorabilia.

Black metal and anarchism is not a new thing, as you can see. There were people doing this since forever, but never felt the need to talk about it or to put this above their music. There were admittedly less black metal bands than grindcore bands being anarchist, or call it antifa (although I try to avoid the term as much as possible, since it is completely corrupted nowadays), but they were always there, my personal favourites being those from the very fertile Hellenic scene, that delivered recently some of the best names in the subterranean scene, like Natvre’s and Kataxnia.

What most of the people don’t understand yet is that anarchy cannot function as a system by itself, it’s a transition phase only, the same way there is order in the primordial chaos (a belief that has been with many black metal musicians since forever). Freedom cannot exist in chaos, as humans are not essentially alone, but can only live in packs, bigger or smaller, in villages or big metropolises. It’s not the humanity left to save, since that has long been covered by the info-matrix which builds profiles for each and every of us. What is at stake is our individual freedom, since the system gets irritated by our small excesses of rebelion and tries to slightly correct them, like it happens today with some of the extremest versions of metal. Call it black metal, it’s going to be all about Satan, conflict and disaster, anarchism by definition. Do you want to save the black metal from the NSBM stigma and present it as a legit genre within the other more mainstream styles of metal? Good news, it doesn’t need to be saved, because it was a weapon from its inception back in the early 80’s, a weapon against the conformism of any kind! If you a take a bunch of people, who merely suffer from the same latent racism, which is present in any honorable family all around the world (this is not limited to the white race only), while collecting WW2 memorabilia and listening to bedroom NSBM projects,and you think these people are more dangerous than the state authorities that simply listen, tape and profile each of us, if you think that Big Brother is a joke and that we should allow the authorities to limit our individual freedom in any way, then I rest my case, go and fight people you don’t know for a cause you don’t really understand, because you were always playing their game! Cui prodest? (For whom does it profit?)

Meanwhile, another bunch of metal bands took an inspiring direction by giving the alienated citizen of this rotten world a new meaning, from the manoeuvre of putting the marginals away from the society on their own expenses, which is to be found in the Scandinavian version of the story built by Vulture Industries to the despair of the caged living in the mental prison expressed by my country mates of Bloodway.

 

 

Yes, we need a revolution, a revolution of our senses, a revolution of the mind... Forget the idea of forgiving your adversary, because it’s just a matrix machine. It lacks emotions more than you do!