WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM
6.6SE
Music
VASTNESS AND SORROW
wordsby saelan twerdy illustrationby erik brunetti
More than a decade after it emergence, the extremism of Norway’s orig-inal black metal scene continues to shock and fascinate. Partly, it’s a sideshow: corpsepaint, church-burning, murder, and some of the most inscrutably dank, murky, and blood-curdling noises ever laid to tape. From another perspective, though, black metal offers a kind of authenticty that few other artistic movements of the recent past have been able to summon. In radical opposition to the course of normative Western civilization (and especially the Christian tradition), the black metal scene birthed an ideology of pure evil-worship, turning not so much to Satanism as to the pagan traditions of Northern Europe. As exagerrated, childish, and racist as it often was, the original black metal scene still backed up their words with actions – often heinous ones.
