Ecology, Mysticism and Extreme Ideology in Black Metal Music

A short interview with Dr Owen Coggins at Brunel University, ahead of the ‘Eco-creativity: Music, Religion, Activism Conference’ where he will be speaking about ‘Ecology, Mysticism and Extreme Ideology in Black Metal Music’
Visit our conference website for more details, if you would like to dip in for a session

Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your research background, and what interests you as a scholar?

After an MA in Religions at SOAS my main academic interest was the study of mysticism, especially in the work of Michel de Certeau who, I think, really addresses the key issues of what happens in texts, and what kinds of things happen between the texts, authors and audiences that get called ‘mystical’. Music seemed to me to be an interesting area to explore in this context, as it blurred the distinction in a lot of mystical scholarship between ‘text’ and ‘experience’. I was also really into extreme music as a listener, and around drone metal music specifically I noticed a lot of talk and symbolism about ritual, altered states, meditation and religious experience.

I got my doctorate in Religious Studies and Music from the Open University in 2015, having investigated the extreme music culture of drone metal, specifically its discourses and practices relating to mysticism and religiosity. Certeau’s work on popular culture and on mysticism provided an opportunity to think about how musicians and listeners were drawing on aspects of religious traditions, with metal music itself sometimes appearing as one of those (sort of) religious traditions.

An extension of this research was published as the book Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

I’m interested in how mysticism and ritual are understood in popular music, particularly in musics situated as ‘extreme’ like noise, metal and experimental avant-gardes. This relates to how various ideas of noise intersect with religion, whether anthropologically as in Mary Douglas’ ideas about order, dirt and ritual; in an informational sense where noise both disrupts the signal as well as providing information about the status of the signal; and in more overtly sonic terms such as the relationship of distortion to tone, or between subjective constructions of noise against silence, music or speech. Ambivalence, disruption, and even violence in more or less abstract forms appear in all of these discussions, and I think there’s a lot of room for exploring how they connect in ways that haven’t been fully investigated.

You’re speaking at the conference about Ecology, Mysticism and Black Metal Music. For someone new to this area, can you explain a little about how these different themes come together? 

Black metal is another extreme subgenre of metal music, with its own history of religious iconoclasm, transgression and violence associated with particular kinds of extreme sounds and noise in the music. Perhaps less explicitly interested in mysticism (though what people mean by that term varies drastically anyway), black metal is heavily engaged in symbolic discourses about religion: different kinds of Satanism, occultism and paganism are all strong themes that bleed into one another in interesting ways.

Environments are important too, with bands often keen to sonically, musically and thematically index their connection to locality, or sometimes to distant places that are imagined in mythical terms. So Nordic landscapes are part of the iconography of black metal given the influence of Norwegian bands in the subgenre’s development, and there are ‘Viking’ metal bands from Barcelona as well as from Bergen. But Scandinavian musicians also sometimes evoke other places- the band Carpathian Forest, Darkthrone’s album Transilvanian Hunger, and the influential Swedish project Bathory all reference Transylvania in Central/Eastern Europe. Other bands more overtly draw on local folklore, sounds, and traditions while adopting this style of metal developed in northern Europe but now spread across the globe. In each case there’s a sense of the environment or landscape infused with a sense of myth and mystery that’s quite powerful in combination with the sounds.

Areas of popular culture can be thought of as ecologies in their own way too, and in black metal there’s a particularly heightened consciousness of defining and delimiting, even gatekeeping certain boundaries. The combination of a self-consciously transgressive aesthetic, an obsession with the music subgenre’s own past, and the murky extremity of the sound can produce complicated layers of antagonistically contested irony and authenticity.

This is a current focus of research for you – can you tell us a bit about the kind of things you’re currently exploring in this area? And what kind of directions is this likely to take in the future?

Well, it’s difficult at the moment given that live music has been shut down, as ethnography at events was part of the planned research. But it's interesting to see what the responses are, in some cases people suggesting that responses to crisis might be to make black metal more underground, more militant, more extreme.

Otherwise, I’ve been reading a lot of black metal zines, underground publications with various antinomian, obscure or esoteric editorial perspectives, and it’s been interesting to look at how a kind of black metal ‘cult’ ideology or performative identity is constructed in this discursive interview format as well as in the somewhat idiosyncratic construction and distribution of some of these publications.

I think it’s always important too to try and understand how musical sounds connect to the cultural implications of the music, and for black metal that means musical and thematic/ideological connections between illegibility, low fidelity, distortion and disruption, as well as the deployment of signifiers of locality, tradition and a kind of imagined rural past. Black metal has existed since the late 1980s, but I think it’s currently struggling with a kind of crisis between an underground, occult kind of notoriety, and a greater contemporary exposure that’s exactly a response to that kind of mediated controversy.