Ecology, Estrangement and Enchantment in Black Metal’s Dark Haven

Abstract

Darkly enchanted environments are an important part of black metal, an extreme underground heavy metal music culture that emerged from Northern Europe in the 1980s-1990s and spread worldwide. Black metal’s distorted music and stark imagery portrays natural landscapes resonating with occult folklore, myth and fantasy; yet this music bewitched with ancient nature relies on electrical instruments, amplification and distortion, and is primarily performed and consumed in urban settings. This article examines constructions of dissonance and disenchantment in these intense utopian/dystopian juxtapositions of mystically idealised nature and apocalyptic urban society, hearing them as attempts to deal with darkness and ruin in the abstract violence of industrial modernity. Through analysis of recordings, reception, zines and online discourse, the article examines black metal’s navigation of tensions about ecology and marginal religiosity; its potential articulation of a reactionary politics of restriction, and its sonic evocations of a sacred yet desecrated environment.

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