005 - The Playlist of Chapter 2

It has been AEONS since I've logged in to my NLBMe blog to contribute. I was surprised it was viewed more than 1300 times since its creation; I had deemed it improbable. I really thought nobody gives a shit - and perhaps they don't - but these views certainly were not all mine!

Anyway, I will continue where I broke off, and that's a short overview of what chapter 2 will offer - I am still, by the way, not finished fine tuning the document. This one deals with the sacred "First Wave of Black Metal". It deals with the nostalgic 1980s in which hair was curly, high, and wide, pants were ball clenching tight and metal vocalists often sounded like screaming girls. But it was also the era that introduced real corpse paint, bullet belts, an abundance of spiked leather, and a more than an average amount of Satan! Finally, metal had connected with the only true source it needs to acknowledge.

This chapter cannot start anywhere else than with the mighty Venom, whose first two albums Welcome to Hell and Black Metal have shaped the music I have dedicated years of my life to: black metal.

Naturally, the playlist progresses through the standard prime movers of the black metal scene of its days, the falsetto driven Mercyful Fate, Slayer, Sodom, Destruction, Kreator, and - as far as shaping a scene goes - the far more important Hellhammer and Bathory. Surely these bands were not the only ones contributing to the amorphous umbrella genre that was black metal - still synonymous with Satanic metal. Heavy and/or thrash metal bands like Future Tense, Second Hell, Skull Crusher (to name three Dutch ones) pass the light, but a band like Mötley Crüe as well. If it weren't for the mentioned pioneers of black metal, Satanic metal could have evolved from this glammy line (notice the black pentagram on the black cover; it is classy!).

The growing tape trading circuit and growing amount of people that were interested in releasing extreme music gave us a taste of the more extreme niches in far away places. Black metal planted its seeds in South America, where primitive bands like Sepultura and Sarcófago unleashed an avalanche of bands that crushed the fully drained heavy metal genre, the thrash hardcore crossover metal trend, and the boring hard rock that was terrible noise to the average Joe on the streets. Sarcófago packed more blasphemy, graves and bullet, belts imaginable and combined that with a primitive wall of sound that came straight from their black hearts!

Naturally, the 1980s offered more than metal as 'devil music', but those bands and/or albums are a rare breed. The inclusion is therefore limited and drawn from 'inspirations' of bands that appeared in the late 1980s. It's coming down to experimental artists like Zero Kama and Diamanda Galas to fill those shoes. And eventually, the metal part of the chapter builds up to the birth of what would become one of the defining bands of the genre - the Norwegian Mayhem.

But before this black metal could be borne, another thing had to emerge from the extreme metal scene, death metal. And that's where chapter 3 - and another blog entry - comes in!

004 - The Playlist of Chapter 1

I have chosen to write the book alongside a personal selection of tracks from albums that matter (or don't matter at all but just have to be mentioned) to the international black metal scene, or more general, to an international conglomerate of occult songs or albums. To keep the book readable, I have mixed both the chronological order of things with a more instinctive order, based on the story presented...

 

The first chapter deals with occult music that existed before black metal was born. I have decided to include compositions of the following classical composers as my starting point: Giuseppe Tartini, Niccolò Paganini, Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Modest Mussorgski, Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, Peter Warlock, and Carl Orff. Surely I could have chosen Wagner, or any other bloke that's in the famous LaVey list of 'Satanic Classics'. Since I find this list ill-informed and incomplete, I have labelled it as being a 'writer's favourites' list.

 

Surely, darkness is shining through in a lot of compositions, but that's also due to a fair amount of writing skills. Mozart might have been a rebellious odd fellow, writing a great requiem march, but I don't think that it has been born from the occult. On the other hand, I have also included stuff by, Dominique Frontiere (hardly a Mozart, by the way), but I doubt his Pagan Festival album is really rooted deeply in heathen soil. It's possibly his attempt to create 'exotic' music.

 

I did chose to include field recordings by Aleister Crowley, Anton LaVey, Alex Sanders, Gerald Gardner, the mass murdering Reverend Jim Jones, and - continuing with infamous cult leaders - also the primitive country ramblings of Charles Manson and his Family.
 

 

I also fly past recordings of Sammy Davis Jr., Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and some voodoo inspired stuff like Screamin' Jay Hawkings and Dr. John. But they are the minor players of the story. The first ones that are obligatory features are blues artists Peetie Wheatstraw and Robert Johnson. This last one laid the foundations for a lot of modern rock, and especially for occult driven bands in these genres - and that includes The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin - because of the famous crossroads legend. It also gives me the opportunity to side-track into material by The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper and Helter Skelter), The Eagles (yes, that's Hotel California and no, it's not Satanic), soundtracks for Invocation of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising, and The Omen (remember those intro's from black metal shows back in the early 1990s?), and sect-based releases like that of Ya Ho Wha 13.

 

The 1960s and 1970s unbottled loads of occult driven music, ranging from folk artists to psychedelic rock to experimental electronic music to hard rock and proto-heavy metal bands; both under the influence of outside the influence of the newly found freedom in psychotropic substances. You can think of bands like Sam Gopal, Dave And Toni Arthur, Donovan, H.P. Lovecraft, Strawberry Alarm Clock, King Crimson, Satan And Deciples, The Gun, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Burn, Bedemon, Boudewijn de Groot, Jacula, Lucifer, J.D. Blackfoot, Zior, White Noise, Roky Erickson, Bruce Haack, et cetera, who have all contributed in big or small ways to the unexisting genre of 'occult music'. I even managed to squeeze in a bit of Elly & Rikkert somewhere - despite their childrens gospel reputation!

 

Things all came together in the late 1970s, when more extreme music presented itself as both punk rock (hardcore in the United States) and heavy metal (with the NWoBHM as a powerful representative). The explicity of AC/DC's Highway to Hell, Venom's Welcome to Hell, Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast, and Death SS' Horned God of the Witches demo all predated the one album that started it all: Black Metal by Venom, released in late 1982. And that's where the second chapter kicks in...

 

If you have suggestions, please do so in the comments!