Article by Lance Viggiano.
Into the Cunt of the Witch is grainy fatalistic pap embellished with agonizing atonal voids where music should exist. When the haze clears just enough for a melody to become audible it possesses a character of passivity and reception but is always intensely grating in its pointlessness. The tired corpse of speed metal and heavy metal drags lethargically through chromatic sections that form the locus of this work. Lightly struck syncopated rhythms are relied too heavily upon and flatten into a sterile ticking that results in a pure time keeping effect not unlike a distraught prisoner tallying his cell wall; tracking his sentence until his song merely ends – a fair metaphor for the experience of this record. Individual songs are parts of four whole works and do not stand well on their own; ending abruptly without proper conclusions before jumping into the next section in a greater cycle. Vocals operate in two essential modes: an apathetic crooning within artificial caverns as well as a faux-distraught occult street preacher reminiscent of contemporary orthodox/occult black metal.
The experience is fundamentally noise however, as it amounts to peering into motifs without motives and communications without messages. Exemplary of the endemic fatalism of modern black metal, this release concludes that meaning is dead and we ought to join it in haste. In contrast, the peak of black metal saw the genre fulfilling the process of nihilism by adorning God’s vacant throne with dismembered mythology culled from humanity’s spiritual inheritance. Blliigghhtted, like so much of contemporary metal, reject value wholesale; failing as both music and as art. After all, if one rejects enduring and temporal meaning what motivation exists to create art that is anything more than a platform for platitudes and righteous indignation?
Into the Cunt of the Witch hemorrhages hysterical motifs and forgettable phrases tourniquetted with a transgressive aesthetic that suggests ideology before poetry. Frustratingly the work is deathly serious in its intent but tepid in its execution. Where this album comes closest to genuine expression is in those worn and weary laments of a broken spirit marked musically by pedantic drudgery. Death is merely a coping mechanism rather than the subject of this work as Life is both the conqueror and subjugator with the pleasure of a sudden and immanent annihilation allowing the artist(s) to function in this world. In that sense, Blliigghhtted craft another inversion of black metal culling a gradient of motifs from across metal’s musical inheritance. Instead of assembling a pastiche of random but pleasing signals, the composers excise all feeling and place leaving them bare against the lashing drive of a stark purposeless cosmos.
Tags: 2016, Black Metal, Blliigghhtted, female vocals, hipster bullshit, Into the Cunt of the Witch, modern metal, sadistic metal reviews, women in metal
Great reading. Enjoyed the article.
Every now and again, bad music inspires some greater point. The first draft had a lengthy digression into art and why modern metal fails but I managed to condense it down to a couple sentences.
I see while writing black flame two they were listening to metallica.
Thanks for the article! Could you elaborate more on the phrase “fulfilling the process of nihilism by adorning God’s vacant throne with dismembered mythology culled from humanity’s spiritual inheritance”?
God’s vacant throne refers to the loss of Christianity as a significant source of context and value in Western society. The nihilism Nietzsche fortold led to an existential crisis wherein meaning in thrown aside as merely a mental model, an artifact of the human experience and nothing more. Of course, you can tear down mental models all day long but they are the only means we have of understanding the cosmos. So, invariably, you will see propositions or searches for new meaning.
Black metal fashioned meaning in this world by using not just refashioned Christian imagery but also that of pagan and occult systems. I won’t say that the Ubermensch ever came to fruition. It was a valiant effort but one that ultimately was beat out by competitors such as progress. In many ways, black metal is also a reaction to progress depending on which artists you care to look at. Still, the Overman ultimately failed because he cannot exist in a significant margin so long as mankind continues to derive its value judgements from religion.
The idea that individuals in any significant margin could continually remake themselves into the image of values they’ve chosen is romantic but in reality also is a pale reflection of the Christ character who lived in the image of his values, in poverty no less, and died for them in a symbolic act that gave meaning to the masses.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I find something in the original formulation very evocative and rich in meaning. Especially the idea of adornment of a vacant throne with pieces of mutilated carcasses of deities and mythic beings. But also the notion of culling of spiritual ancestry and the reference to “fulfilling” the process of nihilism, its completion.
Parallel interpretations are possible. One of them is that BM turns into the spiritual past to dissect from then-living spiritual practice particular elements, which are reinterpreted and imbued with new meaning and life. Yet those also turn out to be fleeting. Due to the very process of their rediscovery they ultimately fail to provide the stability of eternal meaning and turn out for what they are: just constructions of desperate humans who – perhaps – cannot shake off their Judeo-Christian frame of mind. These idols and Icons just end up as adornments on the vacant throne. Thus the process of nihilism is completed. No solace. We now have to turn somewhere else – or rethink the ways how we think our lives and society acquire meaning.
I have a preference for dry clarity in most topics but when discussing art I can’t help but express my views with overblown prose; for better or for worse.
My hypothesis:
The promise of nihilism is to find meaning in life when none is given, to extract it from within one self, after realizing that there can be no objective meaning, no objective good or evil, that there are probably no gods, and that even if they existed, they could not give these things.
the process of nihilism*
It doesn’t often conclude this way as “The Individual” is rarely the source of his own values before religion. For some reason, in order for human beings to exist in this world, they must believe in the objective existence of transcendent values which they must manifest in the world.
My path has not yet reached its conclusion, but it happened to me like that.
First, realizing, despite what people around me seem to think, that there is no objective value.
Then, realizing that there is such a thing as value, in the same way that there is such a thing as thoughts, or emotions. They exist in the same place.
Then, finding what my such values are, by looking in to myself, and thus, having a reason to exist.
But without objective value, what will you use to beat others over the head with? How will you spread Proper Taste? How will Reality have its day in the minds of man?
Haha.
Good old Vigilance.
I’d remove the imperative from that and re-word this as: For some reasons, people (almost) universally see things/ believe in the existence of things which aren’t there. My idea re: why this happens would be that it’s related to the ‘invisible triangle’ phenomenon (searching for this will provide visual examples): One function of the brain is to detect patterns by using imagination to overcome a lack of actual information. This is useful because it enables making sense of something despite being provided with incomplete information. OTOH, this means people are also prone to making up ‘sense’ in situation where none exists.
The everyday example of this is ‘the weather’: It exists. It’s vastly more powerful than we are. We don’t really understand any of it but how ‘the weather’ ‘acts’ is literally a matter of life and death to us, more so in earlier times, eg, when (primitive) subsistence agriculture was the most common mode of existence. This less-than-ideal situation cries out for finding intelligent, creative solutions to it. Enter the thunder-god etc, whose displeasure can be avoid by behaving correctly and whose power might be utilized to further a certain cause in the same way. At this point, transcedental values appear: A ‘value’ is something which is literally valuable because it avoids displeasure of the god(s) and/ or ensures their support. After a few thousands years of philosophical refinement, the result is Christianity or Islam or any other modern religion with a huge number of followers.
As an amusing twist, mindlessly casting this aside, eg, rejecting Christanity because it’s considered inconvenient instead of for more philosophical reasons, eg, those provided by Nietzsche, casts the still primitive man back into the original wilderness: The modern “fashionable atheist” more often than not lives in holy terror of a beast god called ‘Climate’.
The modern ‘fashionable atheist’ lives in a nice apartment in a large city where the weather doesn’t really scare him and really only affects his wardrobe choices. Unless you’re talking about some climate change shit.
I thought that was obvious.
It should have been but I’m an idiot. ‘Climate Change’ would have been easier for me to recognize.
You could state, alternatively, that modeling weather in terms of personhood is a means of understanding nature as an irrational phenomenon and an expression of will rather than a will less mechanism arbitrary moving throughout empty space bereft of a maker.
I suppose the lady on the cover is the “witch” whom’s “cunt” we are going “into?”
Either that or it’s just a 12 year-old boy with a tiny vagina photoshopped to his forehead.
I like this article a lot. Most SMRs are too quick and painless…
She’s one of the band members, if I recognize her.
I’ve talked to three of the members about various stuff in the past, and they are the biggest tryhard edgelords I’ve ever heard of. The guy that releases all their stuff thinks he’s the savior of metal but can’t write a decent riff to save his life so compensates by referencing kiddie porn and incest, murder, blasphemy, every schtick in the shock rock book basically. He might have made a splash in punk rock 35 years ago but he’ll need to develop his songwriting skills well beyond this point before metal fans take him seriously.
There is an interview with him around here somewhere, it’s pretty funny but reinforces my allegations.
The interview:
https://www.deathmetal.org/interview/interview-with-viranesir/
I tried to read that but stopped at the ‘religious’ question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARyjrT2Hjao. The way he put that was just too rambling.
Yeah, don’t you see she’s got a cunt on her forehead? This means you’re really going into her mind, bro. Really deep stuff. Hey bro bring me another Pabst while you’re at it
That is a tight looking forehead snatch. After 3 or 4 more PBR’s I think we could make a go at DPing that shit until it gives out like the sleeve of a child’s jacket.
Dude, but it’s like totes gay if the swords cross if ya know what I mean. Pass me another Pabst, will ya?
The problem with this and all these “Merdumgiriz bands” is that basically this one person has done dozens of albums within couple of years with all the possible provocative song titles, whining about freedom of speech etc. and now this album with tragic suicide back story, it just makes me question the purpose of these project. Too much attention seeking with not enough good music.
He got his bandcamp page shut down by breaking their rules over and over and then threw a huge bitchfit (about bandcamp enforcing their policies) on facebook, claiming victimhood and oppression. He’s a professional attention whore.
I’d rather be Wacken off to an Amon Amarth stadium ready anthems than anything merdumbgeraz puts out which completely fails at basic music.
that chick died? ok, bummer… I was just starting to search for good photos of her.. curious what she was like w/o corpse-paint, but in colour pics .. and , well you know the rest
;)