Come to a lecture about Black Metal as dark thinking at Studenterhuset 🌲

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A STUDENT TO ATTEND!

Arranged by Folkeuniversitetet Aalborg

Does Black Metal music contain its own thinking? Is it the epitome of spoiled cultural introspection, or does it bear witness to an authentic longing for meaning in a spiritless and disenchanted world?

For this blast of a lecture, the lecturer takes as his starting point the second wave of Black Metal, which emerged in the early 1990s in Norway. The black and unforgiving sound was created in the shadow of the oil boom and represented, as drummer Fenriz from Darkthrone has put it, the “prosperous and tormented art that came from the exhaustion of the easy life”. With this paradoxical context as a backdrop, we examine Black Metal as a cultural fix point, historical product and social symptom – and as a revival of an aesthetic tradition that goes far deeper than modern subculture.

Black Metal is based on romantic ideas, which both form the focal point for the central events of the lyrics and the framework for the sonic subversiveness of the songs. The genre basically consists of a rediscovery of the night and of the dark sides of man – of the demonic undercurrent in the forests, mountains and rivers of the North. We trace the genre's night and death orientation even further back in spiritual history in an investigation of how to understand what the worship of darkness in Black Metal – on a subconscious, perhaps repressed theological level – actually stems from.

Today's teacher researches, among other things, anxiety and night motifs in literature and culture.

BOOK: The event is based on the book Skriget ved historiens ende, which has been edited by today's teacher. The book contains contributions from all over Scandinavia, including by Aksel Haaning, Mattias Faldbakken, Joni Hyvönen, Mads Peder Lau, Susanne Christensen and the German artist Martin Eder, and will be published this autumn by the publisher Multivers.