Speakers
Owen Coggins
Owen researches ambiguity, mysticism and noise in popular music, especially extreme metal. His book based on ethnographic research on metal and religious symbols, Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal, was published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and was awarded the International Association for the Study of Popular Music book prize in 2019. Owen is currently working on a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, studying controversy and ideology in black metal. He is Secretary of the International Society for Metal Music Studies, and co-runs Oaken Palace, a record label and registered charity which raises money for endangered species by releasing drone music.
‘Lost in the Grand Disorder of Postmodern Era’
Navigating Progressive Utopias and Black Metal Esotericism
in Remmirath’s Shambhala Vril Saucers
​
Owen Coggins
Progressive rock is often portrayed as attempting to assimilate rock, jazz, classical and ‘world’ styles into a virtuoso musical utopia. Black metal, by contrast, values orthodoxy, rawness and primitivism, paradoxically attempting a true, pure conservation of transgressive iconoclasm. Both may therefore involve a certain elitism, though in starkly differing forms: the former’s cosmopolitan mastery of all musics bordering on neocolonialism; and the latter’s underground misanthropic separatism rejecting all else as unworthy.
Many bands attempting to expand their musical horizons from black metal are accused by self-appointed gatekeepers of abandoning, even betraying, the subgenre. But precariously navigating through this fraught terrain is the startling 2015 album Shambhala Vril Saucers by Slovakian band Remmirath. The album deploys musical and ideological signifiers that connect black metal’s strict codes to an exuberant progressive experimentalism. This includes incorporating gruff, distorted vocals and tremolo-picked guitars, the primary sonic signifiers of black metal, into chiptune videogame music, jew’s harp spaghetti western homage, musique concrete, Islamic chant and cosmic jams, in songs about Hindu avatars, lost cities, and Traditionalist thinkers Julius Evola and René Guénon, as well as nodding to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Twin Peaks and X-Files, and featuring Nicolas Roerich’s luminous, visionary paintings of holy mountains.
Remmirath’s outlandishly omnivorous sound and idiosyncratic bricolage of pop culture mysticism evokes symbols of an apocalyptic esotericism that is layered with irony and misdirection, yet is also increasingly influential in contemporary cultural politics and, via figures such as Steve Bannon and Aleksander Dugin, filtering into powerful circles around world leaders. Incorporating detailed musical analysis and investigation of the album’s reception, the presentation examines how Remmirath play with the sounds and ideals of progressive and black metal musical cultures, and investigates the cultural, religious and political implications of their self-proclaimed ‘postmodern music against the postmodern world.’
​
Keywords: Progressive black metal, esotericism, ideology, occultism, Traditionalism, elitism, utopia.