On /mu/ every year they have this thing, you could call it a challenge or a celebration or both or neither, /nothing but black metal november/. It might actually go beyond /mu/ and 4chan, I don’t really know or care. All I know is that it’s a big thing on /mu/, they have a general thread which rolls on for the entire month. The premise is simple, you simply listen to nothing other than black metal and affiliated styles of music (so blackgaze, certain dungeon synth records, whatever Black Magic SS are, etc. are also acceptable) for a month. So this year I decided to take part, and I listened to a lot of stuff. I listened to many classic albums that I already really enjoy or think are great, but I also heard 36 albums for the first time, both classics and some more obscure recommendations I got from the threads that were up. I’ll upload a pic of the full chart listing everything I tried for the first time at the end of this post.

I had an idea that I might make a post about it before I started, and then sometime after starting mid way through the month I began to form a very different idea about the kind of post I would make, and now that has changed again. At first I thought, I’ll probably just talk about the albums I liked most, the ones I disliked most, and that will be it. Something a bit like my series on The Cure, just talking about the music. Then as it went on and I started to feel some effect from listening to this kind of music exclusively for so long my idea changed entirely. In fact I was seriously considering including the post I intended to write about this month in my Alternate states series. See I’ve had this idea for a post where I compare music to a drug for a while, and this last month has really solidified my position in this regard.

Music is art, sure, but it does also function like a drug in many fascinating ways. It changes your perception, it can have a serious impact on your mood, and yes there are people who develop a kind of addiction to it. I think that there are some people who would find it very difficult to give it up, people who are reliant on it to get through life. There’s no physical dependency like with cigarettes or opium, and as far as I understand it’s not going to have a negative impact on your health to listen to music every day, but there is some emotional or psychological dependency/ reliance that people have with it. It may be harmful as well, modern popular music that we can listen to for hours every day is a relatively new phenomenon.

Even as recent as 100 or 150 years ago and certainly throughout most of human history, music was more of a rare treat. Especially if you weren’t from a wealthy background or knew no one who could play an instrument. Music is generally split into three categories, Popular music, Classical and Folk. There are a number of different ways to distinguish between the three, regarding structure and content and so on. But these categories are somewhat porous, and so while you could for example describe classical music as being distinguished by the fact that it requires much more engagement to be enjoyed, there are people who will argue that there are examples of popular music which have a level of complexity matching some classical pieces.

I’m not qualified to really give an opinion on that specific debate, or many others like it regarding the nature of this categorisation. I am able to enjoy some classical music without having any understanding of notation or music theory, although I’m sure if I did my appreciation would be far deeper, and I don’t doubt that there is popular music that is very complex just like a lot of classical is. The distinction I like between these three categories though, is this. Folk music is spread by memory, classical in written form, and popular by recording. Popular isn’t just a synonym for “pop music”, any modern music from an obscure project on bandcamp to an internationally famous rock band fits the description.

Why am I mentioning this trivia though? Because it’s noteworthy that popular music is only as old as modern recording equipment, in the grand scheme of things it’s very new. Yet it has a huge effect on our lives, it plays a major role. It is the soundtrack to modern life, when before there wasn’t one really. Music went from something special, to something normal. One day we the world changed because we were granted the ability listen to music, and there was exponentially more of it than there ever had been before, all day long if you were at home. Then more recently we’ve gained the ability to take it wherever we walk as well, thanks to the invention of portable music players and headphones.

Using headphones can certainly have a negative impact on you, since my brief run in with tinnitus I’ve been leaving the volume lower but I still use them a lot and I should do it less. See I go to this park near where I live now every day I’m not working, just for a walk. I usual go for about an hour and a half or two, and every time I use my headphones while there. In fact, I use those earphones which go inside your ear which are even more potentially damaging. It’s not hard to find news articles warning about the dangers of in ear headphones, how they can lead to deafness and other issues related to ear drum damage. Yet I continue to use them, because the experience is worth it I suppose. Although I should really look into getting some over ear ones at least to minimise any damage.

Before the Walkman was introduced in 1979, the idea that you could have this musical bubble with you wherever you walk was unheard of. An experience like the one in that post I just linked above would have been impossible. Yet now it’s normal, when I’m on the train I take to get between the different places I work at it’s not uncommon for half or more of the passengers to have some kind of headphones on. It’s funny I mentioned opium a second ago because there’s another use for it as a metaphor here. Opium in it’s unrefined form can be analogous to music more generally speaking, and modern equipment has refined it in the same way that modern techniques have allowed the refinement of opium to create drugs far stronger such as heroin and fentanyl.

In fact thinking about this was what led to an older plan I had for an entry in that Altered states series where I would give up listening to music entirely for a month (as much as possible, of course you hear it just walking down a city street) and in doing so explore whether it affected me and also talk about this idea I have of music as a drug. I’m also curious how much more I’d appreciate the songs and albums I love after the month was over. There are a lot of interesting parallels after all, I think it’s something worth talking about. See I made the comparison with opium to make one point, but music itself doesn’t really affect you in the way an opiate does. I think alcohol is probably the most similar in how it affects you in fact, although there are crucial differences even there.

See I think alcohol appears to heighten whatever you’re already feeling when you drink it. My dad is an alcoholic, and although he drinks far less now than he used to (because I don’t allow him to continue to drink every night while he still lives here) he is always trying to sneakily find an opportunity to drink. So I have been observing the effects of alcohol on a person since I was very young, my whole life really. My mother would drink half a bottle of wine a night also, so I suppose she was technically somewhat dependant on it as well, but not at all to the same extent as my father. He used to drink six or seven bottles of beer every evening, and usually it would just make him act more silly and a little more aloof which was actually fun to be around as a kid.

When he would argue with my mother though, and he’d been drinking, well the arguments were far louder and scarier than the ones they had while sober. He never hit her, in fact neither of them ever hit me as a punishment which I think might be part of why I’m such a weak willed person as an adult, he pushed her over once but that’s the worst that happened. A lot of stuff got broken over the years, smashed pans and plates, holes in the wall, stuff like that. Incredibly mild stuff compared to what some kids grow up around, but it did lead me to think even as a young boy that it seems like alcohol seems to enhance whatever is going on already under the surface. Of course since then I’ve had alcohol many times, and I now understand that this is because alcohol lowers your inhibitions.

It doesn’t so much enhance emotion as just make it easier for you to express it, and so of course what is expressed appears more intense because most of us suppress our feelings while sober. In fact even while drunk you can still control yourself to some degree, less so the more you drink but always a little. People are lying if they say otherwise. What I’ve noticed though, is that music actually does function this way. Of course it depends on the music, but if you can find the appropriate music to go along with your current mood then it really does intensify the very feeling itself. The difference here then is that alcohol appears to intensify emotion externally, whereas music can actually do so internally.

In that respect music is actually unlike a drug, which tend to be classified according to the specific thing they enhance. Stimulants increase energy and motivation, depressants relax you and decrease inhibition, psychedelics rapidly increase brain activity and alter perception, and so on. Or alternatively it is in a class of it’s own, not that these classes are entirely meaningful anyway as there are several drugs which are placed in multiple categories and really an individual drug should just be taken as a unique thing. A little like the three classifications for music I just mentioned, they’re not entirely rigid. They exist for a reason though, it’s good to have some kind of categorisation. Music then, I guess we can call it an “amplifier” or something like that.

So as I’ve said this month I’ve been exposed exclusively to a specific kind of music, one which while fairly diverse in sound and ideas for a somewhat niche sub-genre (in the chart at the bottom you’ll notice I deliberately tried to give many different styles and ideas a go to keep things as interesting as I could) has a pretty uniform atmosphere. In fact that was one of the things I was going to talk about even from the first idea I had for what this post would be, the atmosphere or feeling is more core to black metal in my opinion than a particular kind of guitar playing or vocal style even though black metal does of course also have it’s hallmarks. If you have listened to more than a few records you’ll notice a pattern in the evil/ demonic vocal style, the fast paced guitars, the deliberately poor production quality, etc.

What defines black metal is this pagan spirit, of course in particular a very northern European spirit (think ancient forests, and harsh open snowscapes) what with black metal really having it’s roots in the Norwegian scene of the early 90s. Although there are some great bands from other parts of the world, in the chart at the bottom you’ll see some Greek bands, some from Eastern Europe, and even one from Arabia. What I love so much about black metal is that a lot of it really feels ancient, of course they’re using modern instruments and recording techniques but somehow they just capture the sound of old and once powerful gods who have now withered away. As blackened and burned as their idols. The anger present behind a lot of black metal doesn’t feel like the impotent human frustration behind most other angry music (whether it be death metal or hardcore punk music or even pretty accessible stuff like Nine Inch Nails), instead it feels like these bands are somehow channelling a deep ancestral rage.

Which is why there are so many neopagans and right wingers in black metal, there’s even a specific sub-sub-genre (not sure what to call it), called national socialist black metal which is straight up Nazi music. Black Magic SS, the band I mentioned at the start who musically are more like a psychedelic rock band who just use black metal vocals on some tracks, cover their albums with swastikas and sing about how epic and based Hitler was. Most of the members of the early second wave Norwegian scene which defined the genre had fascist sympathies. In fact spending time in the general this last month on /mu/ very much reminded me of my /pol/ days back in 2016, I imagine a lot of people in there found black metal through their new beliefs. Believe it or not that’s actually not my story, I first found myself listening to BM when I discovered the band Summoning in 2013 or maybe even late 2012.

They’re a Tolkien inspired band, they take lines of song and poetry from the man himself for a lot of their songs in fact. Really only their first album is like typical black metal, they have a very unique sound that they’ve since developed in the decades since that debut release with heavy use of synthesisers and different vocal styles but they’re still black metal because they never lost that atmosphere. It makes sense, Tolkien himself while a critic of the Nazis was still clearly a reactionary figure who’s entire literary career was essentially an ode to the old European epics. The Silmarillion (which I really do mean to read again some day) was meant to be like an English equivalent to The Kalevala.

As well as the anger, and spiritedness which that anger can sometimes bring out, there is a certain hopelessness and profound sorrow to a lot of black metal music. After all these gods are all dead, and their idols burned or lost. The majority of the members of the neopagan movement don’t even believe in the gods of their ancestors, not really. And while the neopagans and the black metal scene aren’t the same thing there is certainly a lot of crossover. Varg most famously being a major figure in both I suppose, but there are plenty of others. I think this sorrow is because they realise this ultimately, you can’t revive gods. That’s not how it works I’m afraid. These ancient religions have been destroyed, and subsumed by the catholic faith. I think in part why catholic countries are so much more devout than protestant ones as a rule, might be because Protestantism stripped away a lot of the pagan traditions and elements that had become part of Christianity.

There’s another of these sub-sub-genres called Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (yes, the name is unbelievably cringe I know) in fact which really focuses on this element in black metal and downplays the anger and other feelings. Most of these bands are not actually pagan at all, or Satanist, like many of the classic bands were though. They rather take that sadness that was always present to some degree in the music of those bands and make that the focus. The problem is that this in turn removes this ancient feeling that I’ve been speaking about and so most of the DSBM records I’ve listened to I didn’t really think that highly of. There are a couple that are worth checking out though, Death, Pierce Me by Silencer is a good one. Crazy rumours about that band as well, look it up. No, I generally don’t like most DSBM but it’s existance goes to show that there is a degree of hurt present in all black metal I think.

If you’re a regular visitor you’re probably noticing how similar some of this talk of gods and religion is to what I’ve been talking about in the current rolling entry I’m writing about the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and it’s no coincidence. Music, as I said, has the power to greatly intensify feeling and thought. It doesn’t come across I don’t think in the three sections in that post I’ve written so far (I know I said I’d have done four by now, it’s taking longer than I thought to write the next part and I’ve been having a hard week as I’m going to get to) but I have been thinking a lot about the subject matter I’ve been talking about in that post and it has really been affecting me. I’ve been taking these long walks in the park as I mentioned earlier and listening to this really intense and at times both aggressive or depressive music and all these ideas about religion and God and related subjects have just been bouncing around in my head faster than I can even really keep track.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot actually. I’m not sure how much detail I want to go into now because I’m waiting for the weird state I was in towards the end of last month to have completely faded before talking about a lot of this stuff, and I might just save it for a conclusion section to that entry I’m still working on, but basically I’m really starting to take the idea of God more seriously. I’m not going to be calling myself a Christian any time soon, I have a bit of a history with Christianity (mostly Anglicanism, but also Catholicism to a lesser extent) in fact and perhaps I should write a post about that some time too. No, all I can say right now is that maybe I’m not an atheist any more.

It’s not like I’ve really changed much, but re-reading Xenophanes and Heraclitus multiple times and seeing a lot of parallels with the idea about God that I thought was rather unique that I talked about early on in my time on this blog has kind of shaken me a little bit to be honest. I’ve basically considered myself an atheist my entire life, and even when I wrote that post just linked I was kind of not taking it completely seriously. Revisiting it though, and again while listening to this music constantly which feels so ancient and detached from modernity, I’m kind of being convinced by myself. That and the Greeks that I’m reading of course. And by the way because I know that this subject comes up a lot in this context of neopagans and black metal, Christianity is a European religion and it owes as much of debt to Greek thought as it does to Jewish theology. I’m really seeing that influence first hand now in what I’m reading.

I want to take some time to get back to a normal state of mind though, and then I will come back to this subject with a clear head. In the meanwhile I will of course continue with that post, some of my thoughts on this sort of thing will come up when I finally get to work on that part talking about Heraclitus and then after that I presume there will be more ideas in a similar vein. I’ve got some other ideas for posts I plan to write in the next month or so as well. There’s a general election in this country coming up, I might talk about that I’m not sure. I don’t know, I might not have that much to say but I’m considering talking about it. The New Year is coming as well, and that always provides the opportunity for both reflection and to gaze into the future, as hazy as it may be.

I’m getting off track though, this isn’t meant to be an update post. It’s been an interesting month is what I’m trying to say, in fact it’s actually funny I was just mentioning the New Year because for my last New Year’s post I actually tried to evoke the imagery of Mordor from The Lord of the Rings and in a way you could also use that imagery to describe my experience this last November. Again music and mindset are very closely intertwined, and while only Summoning exclusively make Tolkien inspired music many black metal bands owe a great aesthetic debt to Tolkien and specifically the dark or evil elements of his world. Whether it be in lyrics, artwork, even some band names.

So most of my listening has taken place in this park I’ve talked about several times in recent months, I’ve been listening at home and at work of course, but the best time I’ve found to listen to a new album with no distraction is when I take these walks. And as I’ll try and help express to you with some photos I took, taking these walks really reminds one why it’s Nothing But Black Metal November, and not July or August. The sky has been grey and overcast for almost the entire month, and with the trees having mostly lost all their leaves and what little light gets through that dense cloud layer lasting less time each day it does create a really appropriate environment out there. Of course I think this park is still beautiful even in winter, I’m looking forward to seeing it in the snow, so it’s not quite comparable to the dark realm where only evil things dwell that Tolkien describe Mordor as.

Nevertheless it does feel rather cold and barren in comparison to what it looked like during the late summer when I first starting regularly visiting this park. In fact in that first post I talked about this idea of the aesthetic experience, where music and visual environment and mood come together and even intensify one another to create a slightly overwhelming effect. This entire last month has been a bit like a drawn out version of that, although of course the feelings themselves have been very different. What’s the same is that these various stimuli came together to create what I would argue is an altered state of consciousness. Not a drastic one, this month even less so than that one afternoon I first visited that park, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important or real.

It was very real, perhaps comparable to a microdose of certain psychedelic drugs or having a very tiny amount of alcohol. That is, the effect is a minimal one that doesn’t impede your normal functioning, not that the effect is like either of those drugs. It has been noticeable though, there’s been no light or easy music to escape to, I know it might seem silly but it did get to me a bit after a while. Again it wasn’t that I experienced a drastic change, but I would say that by the end of the month I was more generally misanthropic and bitter in my attitude to people around me than usual. I actually got into a bit of a confrontation with one of the customers at work. I don’t want to go into it really, but this guy sperged out because apparently I was rude or something (I don’t agree, although I wasn’t exactly beaming with joy the entire shift admittedly), and demanded I give him the boss’ phone number or e-mail so he could make a complaint about me. I told him to get out though, and that if he wanted to complain he’d have to do it without my help.

It was great when the month was over though, I have to admit. As much as I do really like a lot of black metal, I like a whole lot of other kinds of music too. The first thing I listened to was a new song that was released by MGMT, in fact it wasn’t even officially released but they performed it live and someone uploaded it to youtube. In The Afternoon is the name of the song, I’m very excited for a new album from the band if this is the kind of sound it’ll have. Speaking of a new album, I was finally able to listen to the new Have A Nice Life record last Monday, which released early in November annoyingly and so I had to wait. The first album from that band, Deathconsciousness, is one of the most important of all the albums I’ve heard in my life. It’s very special, I may have even talked about it before and I know I’ve used the art from the cover and a lyric from one of the songs in a previous blog title.

So I got to hear a lot of different opinions on the album before I got to give it a listen myself, and it seemed to me that they were mostly negative. People seemed quite disappointed, saying it didn’t live up to Deathconsciousness. They have had another album inbetween the new one (Sea of Worry) and that, but it’s pretty forgettable. It’s more of a compilation of songs which didn’t make the cut for Deathconsciousness and some ideas which really were fully developed on Dan Barrett’s other musical projects. Dan Barrett is one of the two members of HANL, and in fact one of his other projects is a depressive suicidal black metal one called Nahvalr. You’ll notice in the chart at the bottom that I tried it for the first time recently, even though I’ve been intending to for a really long time.

The album was really good though, no it wasn’t like Deathconsciousness but then the band members aren’t the same people they were back in 2008 when that album came out. Deathconsciousness is hopelessness and resentment in pure music form, but Sea of Worry is actually quite hopeful. It’s still gloomy as hell, but there’s this strong current running through the entire thing that is actually kind of life affirming. I’m going to need to listen to it quite a few more times before I can really form a proper opinion on it, but I will talk about my experience on the first listen to end this post. First though, I will need to quickly provide some context regarding the situation I was in when I first listened to it. Basically last Monday morning I woke up and decided that I should stop talking to the girl in this post from a couple of months ago.

I don’t really want to go into much detail, I was thinking about writing another whole long post about the situation but it’s really not that interesting. I basically just realised why we stopped talking the previous two times, and this time instead of continuing to try and talk when I didn’t really want to and waiting to be ghosted I decided to send her a long e-mail to explain my thoughts and suggesting we stop talking and say goodbye properly this time. So we did, and actually she was really sweet in her response even though I said a few things about her that were in hindsight rather mean. So the morning started when I wrote down a basic draft for that e-mail, and then as it was my day off work I went for my usual walk in the park and decided to finally play this new album.

Most of the time when going to the park I actually recreate the slightly awkward route to get there that I took in that initial visit, and that’s what I decided to do this time as well. So I played the first track and I was enjoying it, in terms of sound it’s quite similar to something from Deathconsciousness but there is this lightness present even here, it’s just subtle at first. I crossed the bridge and down the stairs, and I was following the road when I began to feel this warmth. I put my arm out, and saw sunlight, just as the second song began to play. This is really where the record comes into it’s own, and that subtle hopeful line running through the last song grows to take over this one as it continues to play. And I just remember thinking that it’s appropriate, for obvious reasons I was quite upset about the whole situation with this girl but actually I realised that I was doing the right thing.

I’m taking action, I’m ending things in a healthy way and I’m going to say some things I should have said years ago, I thought to myself. The entire walk as well, there was also this religious stuff I’ve been thinking about so much lately as it is constantly these days playing on my mind. I realised I’m still totally free to pursue these thoughts, in fact I started to feel like maybe I’m only at the beginning of what might a very interesting journey. There’s nothing to be upset about. I’m doing a really poor job of setting the scene here I’m sorry, it’s hard to do so for this situation. When I’ve talked about The Cure before, I’ve talked a lot about how their music has this undercurrent of sadness. Even on their more upbeat stuff, it’s just always there. This album was like the reverse of that, it’s still got a gloomy sound because the HANL sound is very gloomy, but this time there’s this undercurrent which (like when you’re travelling through a long and dark tunnel) reminds you that the sun will rise again.

And it did.

As soon as I walked into the park I was greeted by what you see in the header for this entry, it was like a totally different environment to the one I had gotten used to this last month. I walked around enjoying the sun, knowing that perhaps after that afternoon it might not come back for months. It doesn’t matter though, because it will come back. The music sort of mirrored my own state of mind at the time, because of course the situation was rather sad, but it was also hopeful. After all it’s always sad to say goodbye, and especially to do so on not entirely positive terms, but it was the right thing to do. It’s possible I will see her one day, we seem to have agreed that if I’m ever in the city she lives in, or if she is ever visiting the one I live in, we will contact one another to hang out. It might never happen, but it’s not that unlikely either.

The future isn’t entirely bleak right now, there are reasons for me to think that improvements might just be over the horizon. My dad seems to be seriously thinking about moving out by next summer, there’s still the psychedelic tests I plan to do, and I’m really starting to get into a good groove with this philosophy stuff. I’m really enjoying reading and thinking and sharing my thoughts about it. Maybe I just come across like an idiot when I do talk about it, but at least I’m genuinely starting to feel some enthusiasm again for the first time in years. The final track of the album is a sort of follow up to Earthmover, the incredible final track from Deathconsciousness, in both sound and scope. It starts off though, with a recording of this priest or pastor talking about the Christian doctrine of hell.

Slowly the guitar playing gets louder and louder, until eventually the man speaking is drowned out completely. But this is after a few minutes, and the speech is genuinely very interesting. He talks about how critics of religion and Christian belief in particular will often complain that any benevolent god would never condemn someone to hell for eternity. Something which I myself have always had a slight issue with, after all Christianity is about forgiveness supposedly. He starts to explain as he goes on, that in his opinion the entire question is flawed. That this secular wordlview which places man as the central figure is entirely wrong, and it’s only because of this worldview that such a complaint would even be made. This entire idea that we should start with man, and then build our conception of the world out from there is the problem, according to the man giving the speech.

Instead he believes of course, that we should start with God as the primary being. This secular worldview, that even most Christians tend to have, starts with man as the basic starting point of reality. I think he describes it as a worldview that priorities our needs, our desires and one other thing, and that this entire premise is the real problem in the world. Because even most religious people have this mindset which leads to atheistic thinking inevitably. I don’t know if I’m entirely convinced, certainly I don’t think the actual members of HANL are as I think they’re actually rather anti-religion hence them singing and playing over this speech to drown him out. Yet they included a good five minutes of it, so that implies to me there’s some doubt.

I have to say that I find it to be a fascinating little speech though, what little of it we get that is. I’m very interested in how people throughout history thought, and I definitely agree that people did think very differently. I think a lot of the basic premises about the world that modern people take for granted are a lot more flexible than they realise, and maybe a lot of the ideas about how people used to think are rather silly. For example, there’s this idea of the bicameral mind. Now maybe I should read more about it, but from what I’ve heard the idea seems silly to me. Regardless though, ideas like that do fascinate me. I’m so curious about the way ancient people thought, that’s one of the reasons I’m reading all this old philosophy. Who knows where it’ll lead though, hopefully somewhere. Maybe I actually will end up becoming a Christian, now that definitely wouldn’t be very black metal.