Thank You, Professor, That Was Putrid

The bald, beefy mediator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in the darkness. "It was horrible my pleasure," he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, "to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who currently is its role in 'The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual elements. ' "

And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about the black-metal music - his second-wave, primarily in the Norwegian form - as an enigmatic expression of Catholicism. He started in 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early 1990s Norwegian black metal Gorgoroth-Bands and death, he framed black metal in respect of some of the orthodoxies stone, compared to the heresies of disco and punk, and he spoke of troubled black metal with "the strong and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon."

You can think of some order of hatred toward "dreadful Gnosis," the six hour theory lecture on black-metal music started Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not only because plenty of people have fun academics discoursing on the youth culture but because the subject is something like the music that dare not speak its name.

Black metal, which is a self-conscious genre since the early 1990s - with a prehistory in some '80s Metal Bands - remains most underground metal's subspecies. (Black refers to a sad outlook on life.) Musically it all scoured howls, nonsyncopated blast-beat drums, and cold, trebly guitars. It sounds like it's deteriorating, and the point: black metal represents decay, radical-its, misanthropy, negativity about all systems, and awe of the natural world. (Death metal, in contrast, is more proactive, body-centered and psyched about the gore.)

"The purest black-metal artist is one who is unknown and inaccessible," said Nicola Masciandaro, a professor of medieval literature from Brooklyn College organized in six hour event.

In a way, black metal is running a very old motor culture: loss of faith, and the hysterical fear and sorrow that come with it. But it became one of the best modes of rock resistance, which is why it continues, why recent books and movies about them have found an audience (as Peter Beste's photo essay " True Norwegian Black Metal "and the documentary" Until the Light Takes Us ") and why it has inspired a new wave of American Bands, including Nachtmystium, Krallice, Wolves in the Throne Room and liturgy.

Although the American black metal bend away from tribalism, violence or antireligious malevolence (in some Norwegian black-metal musicians became notorious for murder and church burnings) and toward something more Whitman - esque, it remains ingrown. Some of its professional - such as Xasthur and Leviathan Americans - make records but not perform or, in Leviathan's case, lecture. Talking about black metal in some deep dwelling seem lame.

One commenter to the online forum page-metal magazine Decibel summed up a certain kind of attitude black-metal fan's to the interviews. Music, the contributors wrote, "has nothing to being intellectual and everything to do with not wanting to try and rest every little thing apart" for analysis.

"There is much resentment toward a sensible discourse around black metal," said Mr. Masciandaro in an interview. "There's also a lot of dissent and difference around what black metal is. Its center of gravity is a very negativity, an idea of some butt, something that can not be reduced." He was inspired to organize the interview, he said, by meeting the heavy iron, held last year in Salzburg, Austria, organized by G. Scott. And he has wanted to create a more specific event. He chose a club with a bar as the setting, rather than a university, will be figuring more "ludic."

The afternoon was coming, coming, or even ludic? Not really. (This is used a few dozen spectators and boost the temperature of almost 15 degrees.) For the band, it felt necessary. Despite what the black-metal musicians can express - Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the lectures of the lecture saying, "My music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion "- their work is usually philosophy. This is theoretical, a grid for searching in life, the ancient sources. It can use a critical tool, and although many citings afternoon of Continental philosophers like Lacan, Derrida and Bataille have seemed ludicrously far the training of black metal, such as writings related to the topic of large subgenre's: death and time.