Issue 1 ("Incipit") of Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory. Not to be confused with metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, Black Metal Theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that count as Black Metal events — and indeed, to see how Black Metal might count as thinking. Theory of Black Metal, and Black Metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Therefore, we eschew any approach that treats theory and Metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on “some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo.” Issue 1: Incipit includes: Zareen Price, “Dilation: Editor’s Preface” — Janet Silk, “Open a Vein: Suicidal Black Metal and Enlightenment” — Timothy Morton, “At the Edge of the Smoking Pool of Death: Wolves in the Throne Room” — Elodie Lesourd, “Baptism or Death: Black Metal in Contemporary Art, Birth of a New Aesthetic Category” — Amelia Ishmael, “The Night is No Longer Dead; it has a life of its own” [featuring artwork by: Alexander Binder, Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert, Ibrahim R. Ineke, Alessandro Keegan, Irena Knezevic, Allen Linder, Gean Moreno, and Nine Yamamoto-Masson] — David Prescott-Steed, “Frostbite on My Feet: Representations of Walking in Black Metal Visual Culture” — Daniel Lukes, “Black Metal Machine: Theorizing Industrial Black Metal” — Joel Cotterell, “This is Armageddon: The Dawn Motif and Black Metal’s Anti-Christian Project”

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory: Issue 1

Politics & Social Sciences

Journal, Helvete

Doty, Andrew

Philosophy

Punctum Books

Black Metal Theory is noise. Lacking one clear manifesto or position, it fails to become an elite circle. It is amplified and transmitted electronically: through instruments, lo-fi recordings, internets, and print-on-demand publishers…yet rather than a clear direction of progress we glean only its subversive raw dissonance, disruptions, animalistic screams, resonating disturbances, high-pitched feedback, primitive growls, and its atmospheric statics, hisses, and drones. Black Metal Theory refuses to be hi-fi. It quenches its sonic thirsts from primordial-ditch stews that resemble the dark sludge of recently melted snowfall — pristine white flakes transmuted into a tumultuously sexy and delicious mixture of trash and dirt and ash and poison that swirls and splashes in ditches before seeping into the underground. Our ears drink this disharmonious black bile and our bodies suspend in its intoxicating formless complexities. 
The third issue of Helvete, “Bleeding Black Noise,” features artwork and essays that focus on the sonic aspects of Black Metal, specifically its interactions with Noise — the interruptions, creations, and destructions of signals as black noise. “Bleeding Black Noise” is a revision of Steven Parrino’s statement, “My relation between Rock and visual art: I will bleed for you.” In this issue, Rock is replaced with Noise, and Bleeding is celebrated as a release of the Black Noise — raw energy and formless potential. The essays and art portfolios included here experiment with sonic and conceptual feedback, as well as the way that black noise works through feedback as a process, resonating as background hums or drones, and cascading in foregrounded screams. 
TABLE OF CONTENTS // “Untitled,” by Alessandro Keegan — “Black Noise: The Throb of the Anthropocene,” by Susanna Pratt — “Dead Body of a Performance,” by Michaël Sellam — “Vocal Distortion,” by Simon Pröll — “1558–2016,” by Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert — “Distraction,” by Bagus Jalang — “Leaving the Self Behind,” by Nathan Snaza — “Excerpts from z/w/a/r/t24 and Z/W/A/R/T Magazine 5,” by Max Kuiper — “False Atonality, True Non-tonality,” by Bert Stabler — “Untitled,” by Faith Coloccia — “Nonevent: Grotesque Indexicality, Black Sites, and the Cryptology of the Sonorous Irreflective in T.O.M.B.,” by Kyle McGee

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory: Issue 3: Bleeding Black Noise

Arts & Photography

Music

Not to be confused with metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, Black Metal Theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that count as Black Metal events — and indeed, to see how Black Metal might count as thinking. Theory of Black Metal, and Black Metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Therefore, we eschew any approach that treats theory and Metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on “some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo.”Issue 2 focuses on the theme of Inversions in Black Metal: Nailed at the heart of many a logo, suspended from the neck, held out in Satanic blessing: the inverted cross is one of black metal’s anti-icons. The antithesis of a revelation of light, it signifies an originary blasphemy. Forsaking ascension and mining a path towards the centre of the earth, black metal finds a satanic stain lodged at the core of being. However, the significance of this movement is not bound by a simple reversal. The inverted cross hangs above a swarming logic of inversion: the overturning of Christianity, but also a mimesis of Christian self-desecration; the rejection of certain forms of religion, but also of modernity’s pallid enlightenment; the invocation of strange gods of the earth, even as the earth is cursed. When thought becomes poison, it is no longer so easy to determine which way is up and which way is down. To throw down one’s head, to push oneself into the cursed earth, to occupy the place of the inverted crucified: is this to think-by-not-thinking an unconditioned rapture beyond negation and affirmation?Table of Contents:THE SWARMING LOGIC OF INVERSION AND THE ELEVATION OF SATAN Steven Shakespeare and Niall ScottTHROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS DARKLY: MEDIEVALISM, SATANISM, AND THE DARK ILLUMINATION OF THE SELF IN THE AESTHETICS OF BLACK METAL Brenda S. Gardenour WalterTHE WAY OF THE SWORD: CHRISTIANITY, FASCISM, AND THE FOLK MAGIC OF BLACK METAL Reuben DendingerA STERILE HOLE AND A MASK OF FECES Bert StablerECCENTRICITIES AND DISORIENTATIONS: EXPERIENCING GEOMETRICIES IN BLACK METAL Elodie Lesourd and Amelia IshmaelGIVING LIFE HARMONIOUSLY: ANIMAL INVERSION IN CATTLE DECAPITATION Erik van OoijenCONTEMPT, ATAVISM, ESCHATOLOGY: BLACK METAL AND BERGSON’S POROUS INVERSION Louis Hartnoll

Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory: Issue 2: Inversions

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