We all know how much desolation features in black metal, and how the genre seems to parallel Blade Runner and Neuromancer for an obsession with the coming ecocide and the wasteland it will leave behind. But now a black metal symposium of academics will present papers on the symbolic relationship between ecology and the mythos of blackness, melancholy and darkness.
Entitled Melancology: Black Metal Theory Symposium II, the one day event "dedicated to the mutual blackening of metal and theory" will feature presentations, readings and discussion, much as the first round did a year ago. The object is to get academics more in touch with black metal and to use the academic way of looking at the world to figure out what black metal is about.
The academics summarize their topic thusly in the call for papers:
This environment of absolute evil is exactly the same as the absolute good of black metal itself: the expenditure of a sonic drive that propels a blackened self-consciousness, a melancological consciousness without object that is the necessary prior condition to any speculation on or intervention in the environment.
The Black Metal Theory Symposium thus invites speculation and interventions on the blackening of the earth, landscapes of extinction, starless aeon, sempiternal nightmares, black horizons, malign essences, Qliphothic forces from beyond ... in a general re-conceptualization of black ecology.
If you can get all that, that is. My brief summary: black metal rejects morality but has its own way of looking at the world that approximates aesthetics, and so while it isn't well-meaning ecology or morality, it constitutes a preference and a lifestyle in itself.
While their use of the word "ecology" differs from how many of us would, I think it makes sense to point out that the original waves of black metal were entirely peopled by what we might call deep ecologists, even if they chose to express that in tongue-in-cheek or artistic ways (like Impaled Nazarene calling for nuclear war, or Blasphemy celebrating the cosmic event of dethroning God that would bring about a flaming, earth-scouring apocalypse).
You can find out more at the official website, where they discuss both theory and pragmatics of what they're doing.
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