According to the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, the Sweden-based “Christian” black metal band Antestor recently experienced black metal fans engaging in some real life activism.

The band left a successful gig in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to encounter a crowd of about a hundred people who, bearing banners with anti-Christian and anti-Antestor messages, attacked the band, spat on them, beat them and kicked them. According to Antestor, if it had not been for the timely arrival of the Brazilian police, things might have gotten worse.

According to a local black metal blog that reported on the attack, WarMetalBR.com, Christian black metal is a “cultural plagiarism” that needs to be disposed of. Apparently the protestors agree.

Given the history of black metal, it is hard not to see the protestors’ point. Black metal was founded as a rejection of all that Western civilization considers sacred, including humanism, Christianity, acceptance of others, kindness, hope and even “fun.” Like metal itself, black metal is a realist reactionary movement that distrusts society because of its tendency to put human moral emotions before the consequences of our actions in reality itself. Black metal musicians pointed to the church, McDonald’s, pollution, cultural loss and rising stupidity as the result of us prioritizing human emotions before nature and the consequences of our actions.

“Antestor play extreme metal with a Christian message, while those who lay in wait for us are ‘Satanists’ — they lag ten years behind musical developments development in Norway. It is just not something new that some extreme metal fans ‘hate’ the Bible and Christianity. But it is the first time for us that there is such a thing,” said Antestor guitarist Robert Bordevik.

At the Death Metal Underground, we can’t condone randomly assaulting bands (or can we?) but we can’t claim to be surprised. Black metal is music of hatred and of hating humanist ideas including those in religion and its secular counterpoints. It is nice that people are well-intentioned. Black metal, like a predator in the dark Nordic forest in winter, is not. It is based on power and competition in nature and not on good intentions.

Most people go through life in a willful denial of the results of their actions and the consistency of reality that makes it so. People want to be aware of only what they want, and they invent happy stories to justify this. They manipulate others with these happy stories and the vision of equality that makes us all feel like there is no competition or need to exert ourselves.

Like the heavy metal generations before it, black metal crashed down on these fanciful illusions by pointing out that reality is shared between us and is the ultimate arbitrator of what is true. We can deny it, but then it just grows stronger as we bury it under prayers, propaganda, good feelings, alcohol, drugs, television and Big Macs.

For those who believe this, any form of humanist or Christian attempt to make “black metal” will seem like someone spreading the opposite message of the genre within the genre, so it’s not surprising they retaliate. Perhaps this will spur the black metal community to go back to its roots and analyze what it actually stands for.

FORTRESS EUROPE (The Big Shiny Prison Vol II)’ is the sequel to 2009’s ‘THE BIG SHINY PRISON (Volume One)’ and chronicles the authors journey through the European Counterculture in 2011.

This is a nonfiction road book/music journalism expose which defies all conventions, existing in the territory of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road,’ Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’ and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas.’ This modern version of such writing follows author Ryan Bartek as he reveals a postmodern, dystopian vision of the European counterculture while interviewing a number of living legends face to face and drudging through the gutters of society.

‘FORTRESS EUROPE (The Big Shiny Prison Vol. II)’ covers all forms of extreme metal, punk rock, industrial, experimental, rock & electronic and features appearances/interviews with members of Brutal Truth, Master, Agathocles, Wolfbrigade, Rotting Christ, Killing Joke, Funeral Winds, Nahemah, Enochian Crescent, Moonsorrow, LAIBACH, Defeated Sanity, First Blood, Hello Bastards, Abortion, Panthiest, Arkangel, HATE, Repulsione, Dehuman, General Surgery, Corpus Christii, Fides Inversa, Excavated, Primordial, Splitter, Pyramido, Black Breath, Ingurgitating Oblivion, El Schlong, Spacemen 3 & legendary Detroit writer/60’s radical John Sinclair and more.

FREE DOWNLOAD (PDF)

Interview with the author on Berlin TV:

Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris will be taking his new solo/side project British Lion out on the road next month, visiting fourteen countries and twenty four cities across Europe starting in Portugal on Feb 21.

Harris comments, “It’s fantastic to get out there and once again experience the sheer vibrancy of small clubs with the fans right up front and in your face. I think the fans will enjoy that too. It’s exciting, going back to the roots, and it’s going to be fantastic. We are taking this to clubs all round Europe – a full club tour, with club shows at club prices, hot, sweaty and loud.”

British Lion is Harris’ debut solo/side project CD which was released by EMI in September 2012. Alongside him are Richard Taylor on vocals, David Hawkins on guitar and keys, Grahame Leslie on guitar, and Simon Dawson on drums. The 10 track album was mixed by Kevin Shirley, Iron Maiden’s longstanding producer, and is both similar to Iron Maiden and taking the characteristic Steve Harris songwriting in new but faithful to influences directions.

Long-time progressive rock, alternative rock, death metal and Voivod crossover band Supuration (sometimes called S.U.P.) are releasing yet another album of their eccentric yet interesting music.

Cube 3 will hit the CD stores on February 25, 2013, or you can pre-order it here on Listenable Records. Expect more unusual but logical death metal.

Supuration‘s material ranges from early death-grind, recently released on a demos compilation Ultimate Sessions 1992-1993, to this kind of rock-metal fusion that keeps the metal at the forefront and while it is experimental, never forgets to actually write a song.

Unlike most of the rock-metal hybrids now, it is not so much jazz-based as rooted in the oddball progressive and folk rock of the 1970s and the alternative rock of the late 1980s, giving it a richness against which it can play its rougher metal elements.

Following up on Supuration‘s greatest success, 1993’s The Cube, this album promises to restore this band to the spotlight at a time when most “progressive metal” bands can noodle all day long but never write a coherent song.

Here’s the released teaser track, “Consummate,” from the forthcoming Cube 3:

We are proud to launch the DeathMetal.org podcast series which features the type of music and thinking you expect from your favorite nihilist death metal maniacs.

Covert DJ Rob Jones brings you the esoteric undercurrents of doom metal, death metal and black metal in a show that also exports its philosophical examinations of life, existence and nothingness.

If you miss the days when death metal was a Wild West that kept itself weird, paranoid and uncivilized, you will appreciate this detour outside of acceptable society into the thoughts most people fear in the small hours of the night.

The playlist for this week’s show is:

Derketa – Obscurities of Darkness (In Death We Meet)
Extract from Aubade by Philip Larkin (read by Larkin himself)
—
Deathless Order – Tentacles of Circumstance (Obeisance)
Goatcraft – Vestibule to the Abyss (All for Naught)
War Master – Into the Abysmal Fire (Pyramid of the Necropolis)
—
Beithíoch – Arm Na Déithe (Summoning the Past)
Uriel – Azathoth (Arzachel)
Swallowed – Unsavourably (Swallowed)
Chthe’ilist – VeÆcoiitnÆaphnatÆsmaalÓ (Amechth’ntaas’m’rriachth)

A transcript of the dialogue embedded therein:

Death metal is a reflection of our every fear. It thrives upon our sense of our own mortality – the unavoidable feeling of horror that comes from the knowledge that we and everything we cherish and hold dear will eventually all amount to rot.In a world without god there is no respite from this fear; no comfort or deliverance from the terror that wakes us in the night.

To face this darkness unflinchingly is wisdom. To act in spite of the over-arching fear of death is godly.

The very existence of life and consciousness, and all things fleeting and impermanent in this reality are themselves a contradiction and a challenge to the crippling endlessness of death stretching before us and behind us – for if life came from nothing and is only going back to nothing, perhaps here and now is actually something special and sacred?

Death metal like a Lovecraft story presents the world to us in a way that is grotesque and fantastic, contorting and parodying things that at one level should be ordinary and rational but defy explanation – but are also all too familiar and real in their prescient sense of horror at death, despite how obviously mythic and over the top the presentation may be.

Indeed, arguably the surreal outward appearance of death metal is entirely appropriate for discussing death – for death and the cessation of consciousness are to us now as they always have been to man – beyond the normal bounds of our thinking – semi-mythic, inexplicable and more than the mundane sequence of things we grow accustomed to.

The last incomprehensible, more-than-real event our lives will encounter in this secular and rationalist age.

***

Metal music is quite deliberately not very sentimental or excessively introspective about death; but rather by its raging implores us to be actively conscious of death and to endeavor to live life.

For, as death is certain, it is no more meaningful to live in willful ignorance of it than it is to wallow in self-pity about it. Both of these responses are passive, and are little better than being dead before your time. Knowing that, there is perhaps nothing left to do but marvel at the awesomely uncrafted beauty of everything, and to treat life as a constant challenge or adventure – which, paradoxically perhaps, we seem to instinctively know is the most fulfilling way to live.

For by great striving and fortitude life justifies itself, both with each moment and in the reaching towards some future moment or goal – in defiance of the entropic power of decay and death.

Relish the madness. Submerge in the surreal.

During most of its active life, this one-man band (with occasional collaborators) was ignored for being primitive, primal, raw and feral. Its few-chord songs and droning incessant beat made it an obvious target for mockery; from a distance, it sounded like a mis-tuned Toyota with a broken fan belt.

However, as the 1990s wore on and it became clear that black metal had expressed itself fully and wasn’t “coming back,” people listened to the advice of our reviews and decided that Ildjarn was, after all, part of the essential black metal collection.

In the mid-2000s, Ildjarn re-surfaced with a spate of re-releases on Northern Heritage Records and Full Moon Productions, but then vanished as its creator moved on to other things. However, as of this month, Season of Mist Records plans to re-release the entire Ildjarn catalogue, first digitally and later, on CD and LP.

• Norse (EP)
• Ildjarn (album)
• Strength and Anger (album)
• Landscapes (album)
• Svartfråd (EP)
• Forest Poetry (album)
• Hardangervidda (album)
• Hardangervidda part 2 (EP)
• 1992-1995 (compilation)
• Eksistensens Jeger (single)
• Nocturnal Visions (EP)
• Minnesjord – The Dark Soil (EP)
• Ildjarn 93 (EP)
• Ildjarn Is Dead (compilation)
• Sort Vokter – Folkloric Necro Metal (album)

All 15 reissues will be available digitally in the upcoming weeks and most of them will hit the stores in physical editions later on.

The label warns us: “Please note that Ildjarn ceased all musical activities a long time ago and therefore does not do interviews and does not run any official web page or social network.”

We know what the vast majority of the public have moved on to, which is the hipster/indie/emo hybrid of the -core genres, but it’s hard to blame them since underground metal is underproducing.

Underground metal is in stagnation. For the last 18 years, nothing new has come of it, although there have been standouts in the old style. We’ve been relegated to the “old school” category.

It isn’t that the talented musicians are gone. It’s that they got overwhelmed by untalented imitators interested in fame, money and socially popular topics. The good was marginalized by the mediocre.

Death metal is the ultimate evolution of metal. Black metal added melody to it. The next stages will have to do something substantially distinctive, or do it substantially better, in order to get noticed to the degree that musicians want. Three chords and the truth will not do it.

Perhaps all of metal should go back to Metallica’s “Orion” and try to re-innovate from there.

Reminiscent of Zoyd Wheeler, a California stoner who dives through plate-glass windows in order to keep qualifying for government mental disability benefits in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a 47-year-old man in Sweden is on the dole for his addiction to heavy metal.

“I’m still addicted,” said Hässleholm resident Roger Tullgren, according to The Local. His addiction, which is seen as a mental disability, allows him to receive benefits to supplement his income because he listens to too much metal to hold down a full-time job.

Since we all know that jobs are jails, and 75% of what goes on in offices is redundant and could be eliminated, it seems a positive trade. After all, he’s receiving only the equivalent of $150 per month, and spends much of his time with his band. The whole thing might just be a promotional stunt.

But this brings us the broader question: we are Hessians united by a culture and a vision. Our cultural belief includes the attitude that jobs should be done efficiently so people can go on to do more interesting things with their lives. Why are we still sending everyone to kill eight hours a day at jobs? One explanation is that people simply don’t know what to do with themselves otherwise.

Another view is that we could do this, but then people would need to find something compelling to fill that time slot. They’d need to find a purpose, or meaning in life. At least Roger Tullgren has found his, even if many people think he’s committing himself to Satan as a result. And what’s wrong with that?

Proto-death metal ear smashers Master launch an ambitious tour in 2013 in support of their newest album, which sounds the most like modern death metal since their popular On the Seventh Day… release. Catch them in your city or suffer ignominious sodomy!

Fri. March 1st – Los Angeles, CA @ The Joint
Sat.March 2nd – Richmond, CA @ Burnt Ramen
Sun.March 3rd – Portland, OR @ The Branx
Mon.March 4th – Seattle, WA @ 2 Bit Saloon
Tue. March 5th – Boise, ID @ The Red Room
Wed.March 6th – Salt Lake City, UT – TBA
Thu. March 7th – Cheyenne, WY @ Forum619
Fri. March 8th – Topeka, KS @ The Boobie Trap
Sat.March 9th – St. Louis, MO @ Fubar
Sun.March 10th – Madison, WI @ The Frequency
Mon.March 11th – Chicago, IL @ Reggie’s Rock Club
Tue. March 12th – Warren, MI @ The Ritz
Wed. March 13th – Rochester, NY @ Bug Jar
Thu. March 14th – New England – TBA
Fri. March 15th – Brooklyn, NY @ Saint Vitus Bar
Sat. March 16th – Philadelphia, PA @ Gunners Run
Sun. March 17th – Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar
Tue. March 19th – Chattanooga, TN – TBA
Wed.March 20th – New Orleans, LA @ Siberia
Thu. March 21st – Fort Worth, TX @ Tomcats West
Fri. March 22nd – Oklahoma City@Chameleon Room
Sat. March 23rd – Houston, TX @ BFE Rock Club
Sun. March 24th – Austin, TX @ Dirty Dog Bar
Mon. March 25th – Midland, TX @ Fast Freddy’s
Tue. March 26th – El paso, TX @ House of Rock
Wed.March 27th – Albuquerque, NM @ Launchpad
Fri. March 29th – Mexicali, MX @ Bar El Andariego
Sat. March 30th – Pomona, CA @ Characters
Sun. March 31st – CA – TBA
Mon.April 1st – Fullerton, CA @ Slidebar