Negative Energy

[empty mirror]

anyone remember that early 90s phenomenon of coating your joints with toothpaste? i never did it but kind of marvelled at this. they did this to cigarettes, too. supposed to destroy your face.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

god this guy sounds pathetic, an utterly overindulged child.

well, of course. I think that goes w/o saying.

that is a big part of what makes it, & that entire scene, interesting - these utterly naive Scandinavians who didn't realize that Venom & more generally shock rock was, yunno, a put-on, a spectacle. & they wound up the dank basement of a shop in Oslo in corpse paint, then burning churches & stabbing each other. for absolutely no reason, really. rebelling against having nothing to rebel against. re-enacting their own private version of the Eastern Front of WWII in btwn covering Conrad Schnitzler songs & making 14 minute minute opuses about crying orcs & all this. the utter patheticness of it is what makes it interesting.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

a black metal anecdote

about 7-8 yrs ago I went to Milwaukee Metal Fest - which is a huge fest, tens of thousands of people - as a 17 yr old traveling crusty punk. Gorgoroth, who are like as absurdly grim & kvlt as it gets, were headlining. I & a friend managed to sneak in & we saw Gorgoroth play in full corpse paint/spiked arm & shin guards/inverted crosses regalia, blastbeast & screeching & all this.

the day after they played some punks were walking down to the river to get drunk & we passed Gorgoroth sitting at an outdoor cafe. they were wearing turtlenecks & jeans, no face point. one punk kid - already drunk, swaying back & forth - walked up to the singer Gaahl (rather an unappealing fellow) & asked "are you dudes Gorgoroth?". they all kind of looked appalled. Gaahl was all "yah, ve are Gorgoroth". the kid slurred, totally unexpectedly "you dudes suuuuccckkk", there was a long moment of silence & then we all burst out laughing uncontrollably. Gaahl looked utterly, utterly crestfallen, like a child who's ice cream had just been knocked off the cone.

I think it's still the funniest single thing I've ever seen.

 

[mms]

well, of course. I think that goes w/o saying.

that is a big part of what makes it, & that entire scene, interesting - these utterly naive Scandinavians who didn't realize that Venom & more generally shock rock was, yunno, a put-on, a spectacle. & they wound up the dank basement of a shop in Oslo in corpse paint, then burning churches & stabbing each other. for absolutely no reason, really. rebelling against having nothing to rebel against. re-enacting their own private version of the Eastern Front of WWII in btwn covering Conrad Schnitzler songs & making 14 minute minute opuses about crying orcs & all this. the utter patheticness of it is what makes it interesting.

yeah i read that book, it is interesting, their negative energy got an explanation after the events, from prison also with the lamenting and equally as pathetic burzum project, and statements like these, as the characters grew they seem to try and find a reason for their implosion, usually it comes out as misanthropy like that above, weedy, emotionally stilted guys finding empathy with the machines that would crush them in a second.

 

[Dunninger]

the other night, my cat turned on my stereo at 3 or 4 AM and i woke up to Ministry's The Mind Is A Terrible Thing to Taste (on cassette!) at an ear-splitting volume (interestingly, my first thought was that my water heater was knocking---and about to explode; it sounded like industrial noise in the literal sense). that album has given me the howling fantods since jr high; i have to say i had to pull the covers over my head that night. (dream song on that album is still so haunting)

I remember when I saw the Just One Fix video the first time (I think I was ~13 when that came out) it really scared me, the two kids on turkey and old Burroughs with a shotgun, proper bad vibes.

 

[Mr. Tea]

A couple of years ago I'd gone out to a club, then back to a friend's house, and was making my way home on a grey Sunday morning when the liberal quantities of pills and skunk I'd consumed started to get the better of me rather badly. The front doors and unlit windows of the houses I was walking past began to look like faces with yawning mouths and empty, black eyes and the phrase "He felt a touch of his old madness returning..." entered my head completely unbidden, almost as if someone had whispered it in my ear, which royally freaked the shit out of me as it made me think I was going to end up like I did on the occasion of The Mushroom Incident.

Anyway I got to my bus stop and decided it'd be a good idea to listen to some music - I had a portable CD player at the time and the disc in the player happened to be Ministry's The Land Of Rape And Honey, quite possibly the most bilious, misanthropic album of all time. But within about five seconds of 'Stigmata' starting I was right as rain, just because the music is so familiar to me. I had a big pilled-up grin all the way home on the bus, listening to Ministry. Got home, drank tea, went to bed. Nice one, Al!

('Dream Song' FTW, by the way - that track is so fucking freaky, it's like a prayer to Nyarlathotep or something.)

 

[Pestario]

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[nomadthethird]

no, you lot are talking about wicky sticks- joints dipped in embalming fluid & then smoked once dry. tho I've never been clear on whether "embalming fluid" is actually that, PCP (tho it is slang for PCP) or something else entirely. anyway, kids used to talk about them when I was growing up (I had the good sense to stick to proper drugs, none of this inhalants/weird chemicals shite), I think it's something of a Chicago thing. supposedly when smoked they'd cause you to "freeze up", be unable to move - I've never done K but perhaps similar to that.

formaldehyde itself is just a chemical compound. I don't think you can smoke it.

either way, smoking PCP or somehow getting "high" on embalming fluid, that is indeed some "brutal shit".



AFAIK "sherm" is just generic slang for PCP.

Sick Boy you must know - PCP is hella popular in Canada. especially in Montreal, in my experience. the runaways & street kids & so on are way, way into it, in place of crack or heroin or whatever. every time I've been there I've been offered PCP by some dude or another.

In Philly they call them "dippies", cigarettes dipped in PCP. That shit is crazy. I have friends who are so beyond brain dead from that shit I rarely bother talking to them anymore. It's fun like twice, and then it's just stupid. Like living in the most psychotic cartoon world ever and it lasts waaayy too long.

 

[bassbeyondreason]

All this black metal talk...I'm gonna pull rank on you fuckers tommorrow, with your Norwegian centric talk. You all have your electronic knowledge, but I have an infinity of growing hair and ordering cassettes from russia and not getting laid.

Yes drunk.
Yes codeine.
Yes homo.

 

[bassbeyondreason]

Ok, you should probably ignore that.
But the annoying thing about the mainstream, Norway-centric view is that there were contemporary scenes all over the world who WEREN'T doing idiotic shit, and were making music that was just as great and intense. The Finnish guys were crank calling the Norwegian guys!

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Ok, you should probably ignore that.
But the annoying thing about the mainstream, Norway-centric view is that there were contemporary scenes all over the world who WEREN'T doing idiotic shit, and were making music that was just as great and intense. The Finnish guys were crank calling the Norwegian guys!

yeh weren't they meant to be having a feud w/Beherit? (who wound up making electronic music - psytrance, I think) & alright sure there's the South Americans (Sarcofago, Masacre, etc.) & the Finns & Swedes, plus totally unique weirdos like Sigh or whoever.

but I mean that particular generation of Norwegians defines black metal for better or worse. they were the unifying scene/image/etc. that brought all those other disparate scenes & bands together. like without that scene it wouldn't be possible to go back & retroactively cherrypick out examples of "contemporary BM scenes" cos there would be no BM standard to judge them against. it's like trying to make a jungle scene out of just the Squarepushers & Alec Empires. plus it's kinda like punk innit where at a certain point it becomes ridiculous - any lo-fi garage tune from 1965 onwards becomes "proto-punk".

it's like any mythic origin scene. like Detroit - of course at the time there were people in other places combining the same influences on the same equipment with similar ideas. but Detroit is what brought all that stuff together - whether you were/are for or against it that's how you defined yourself.

also just sonically the Norwegians were massively influential. I think this kinda gets lost in all the sensational headline stuff. cos I don't care what bollocks anyone wants to cite - "oh such & such a band had blastbeats in 1984 & Mercyful Fate & Hellhammer blah blah blah" - those Norwegians bands were the dudes who brought that whole sound together. again, for better or worse.

 

[bassbeyondreason]

But the whole view of Norway being central didn't come in until at least 93, with the Kerrang! article, by which time most of the classic records had been made. The big thing about BM, and what Euronymous was trying to do with Deathlike Silence Productions, is that it's international, and came from this huge global network of tape-traders and letter-writers, with local scenes dotted everywhere. Obviously now with the internet even moreso, with strong scenes in places like Lebanon, but even in the late 80s/early 90s there were bands in places like Singapore and Malaysia who were in contact (and even influencing) the European bands.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The big thing about BM, and what Euronymous was trying to do with Deathlike Silence Productions, is that it's international, and came from this huge global network of tape-traders and letter-writers, with local scenes dotted everywhere.

right but I mean that wasn't specifically a BM thing, it was just a metal thing. it existed before "black metal" & Euronymous & all this. I'm dubious about a lot of those "scenes" as well - in Sweden, maybe Finland, but most of the bands that always get cited (Von, Blasphemy, Tormentor, etc.) come across more as lone weirdos existing on the fringes of whatever extreme metal scene there was - thrash or later on, death. whether or not they were trading tapes with dudes in Brazil or Singapore or wherever.

the point anyway isn't that the Norwegian guys were unique, that no one was else was mixing similar sonic/aesthetic elements. it's they were the image around which other stuff coalesced. if that's an argument that the media made black metal "black metal" then fine. cos that's true, as much as purveyors of kvlt grimness would like it not to be. w/out that media coverage "black metal" never would have happened. as such.

I dunno about DSP either - every single release besides Sigh (who are much more in-a-vacuum auteur weirdo types than part of a Japanese BM scene) is a Norwegian or Swedish band & part of that inner circle. tho I guess Euronymous could've planning a totally sweet series of releases by Malaysian bands when he died.

 

[bassbeyondreason]

Well Blasphemy were definitely part of a scene with Witches' Hammer, but I meant more like the Czech scene and the Singaporean scene, which had as many bands as Norway, and were just as closely linked. And yeah, the mainstream "black metal industry" type stuff (Candlelight records etc.) got its kickstart from the Norwegian coverage.

You're right about it being a "metal thing" though, but black metal IS still a form of metal, despite what some of the post-Burzum "intellectual" types want to believe.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I would suggest that "black metal" & metal which is black metal are two separate things which sometimes overlap. I'm still unsure about scenes - are you simply retrospectively deciding that they were BM scenes, the way that the Cleveland/Akron scene of the mid-70s retroactively became "pre-punk" - but let's say they were. & so? the point is that everyone defines themselves by or (in your case) against the Norwegians, that "black metal" is inextricably linked to them & their legacy.

*EDIT* another piece from surrealdocuments, this one on the economics of Deathlike Silence Productions. re: the international metal underground:

Aarseth's dreams of DSP as an multinational underground organization are a little grandiose, the type of fantasy inexperienced young people often have...

 

[bassbeyondreason]

I say they're black metal cause they were calling themselves black metal and sound like black metal, and there are still bands that sound like them that the black metal "scene" accepts as black metal. I agree that earlier in the 80s it wasn't easily defined, but certainly by 1990 it had emerged as a definite style.

 

[zhao]

i hate this thread, the world, and everyone in it including myself.

fuck you.

 

[Mr. Tea]

i hate this thread, the world, and everyone in it including myself.

fuck you.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.....................................................

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I say they're black metal cause they were calling themselves black metal and sound like black metal, and there are still bands that sound like them that the black metal "scene" accepts as black metal. I agree that earlier in the 80s it wasn't easily defined, but certainly by 1990 it had emerged as a definite style.

yeah this is all pretty fair. tbh I more or less agree w/you. I was mostly just trying to make a Sunday at work pass quicker, tho now I see we've upset Zhao. I do think that there is kind of an (understandable) anti-Norway backlash, like w/out all the burnings & killings & subsequent media coverage those guys still would have been massively influential. if for no other reason than, being in an affluent & stable -1st world- country it was easier for them get their music out & devote themselves to that subculture - at least compared to metal kids in Colombia or Singapore or death-throes-of-Communism Czechoslovakia.

on the other hand re: "black metal" vs. black metal I do think that all BM that came after them is infused with the Norwegians, like it or not - their mindset, ethos, this strange mix of misanthropy, angst, misplaced elitism & so on - has all been internalized. it is a part of BM's DNA just like sound system culture is in the DNA of nuum musics even if it's not always explicit. sonically that's less clear but I do think there is a certain power - getting back on rhread - in some of those classic Norwegian records that is unique & definitely linked to all the extracurricular stuff - or rather, the mindset that lead them there.

also, sidenote - the only early/proto BM band from Singapore I'm familiar with is Abhorer. who, tbf, totally shred. what were the other bands in that scene worth checking out?

 

[bassbeyondreason]

Oh, of course post-94 BM is undeniably haunted by Norway (but if you ask the true black metallers, post-94 BM is shit anyway ) As for Singapore, there was Impiety, Beheaded Nasrani, Nuctemeron, Thartarus...and some other band with a really common name I'm forgetting...