The anticipation of an advancing requirement of hurling one’s individual essence into the admonishing cavity of desperation and death-summoning skepticism as an inverted process toward self-authorization fuels the Black Metal spirit forward. Once acknowledged, the throwing away of all consecrated decorations follows as a necessary procedure to achieve an immeasurable intention of self-assertion that serves as the key to the realm of the night, when all daily illusions are exposed as empty and meaningless endeavors in the grand scheme of existence. The nocturnal darkness is not an end but a process of awakening to the reality of the true essence of the self, and an awareness powerful enough to penetrate the illusions that govern the daytime operations of a degenerate social order. Black Metal aims for the death of such a system, as it seeks to incarcerate the independence of the individual spirit. It attacks with hateful passion, ferocious determination, and absolution of conviction that confounds the impotent spirit of the slave-herd.

The modern social system demands of its members automatic responsibility, liability, forbearance, and corporate exploitation in obedience to essentially empty formal laws. This inevitably leads to an inner reclusiveness which destroys high ambition with the convenience of laziness. Enslavement tools such as television have been introduced to further sustain this inner vacancy. Anything beyond self-gratification in a world of anti-reality disguised as paradise seems pointless to the common masses, who never see how much they have actually contributed to their own eventual demise through belief in a desperate and miserable illusion. They are slaves to this fantasy and even if they were granted a way out, they would tremble in fear at the alternatives and gladly remain in their despicable slavestate, which guides them to a meaningless existence in the deception of upholding ideals of the "just" and the "good", which never truly delivers on its thousands of promises. Life becomes something un-experienced. They’ve made this world, a playground for the weak and ignorant, as it is the only world in which they could thrive. Willful slaves to a technology that has taken control and left them hopeless in the event of its failure. Rather than putting this technology to the task of reducing daily obligation, they have become enslaved in dependence like never before. This mechanistic reliance has furthered the weakening of intellect and culture among humanity, as once highly honored qualities have faded along with the dust of ancient times in the minds of the droning crowd, who now only seek the comfortableness of easy endurance. No great achievements. No great art and philosophy needed in a time like this, they say. In their passivity toward life, they take no interest in anything outside of their immediate concern, and fail to behold the beauty that surrounds them, beyond the ugly buildings and terrible noises of their concrete paradise. Black Metal hates helplessness and slavery. It absolutely and defiantly refuses to be subservient to modern illusory standards and their decaying religious models.

The beauty in Black Metal lies in its orchestrated movement towards a musically artistic destiny. Its energy guides it to an evolutionary level of aesthetic profundity. The music is aware of itself as an exploration of the connection and intermingling of light and dark, of the beautiful and the ugly, the Apollonian clarity and Dionysian chaos. It searches through axiomatic paradigms to discover an expression of contemplative harmony through necrotic extremity, free of involved assessment of its ideas and passages so as to allow its substance the freedom to manifest itself, like the natural order and process of the forest. Its melodic employment raises the overall presentation beyond the ordinary capacity of a portrayal of timorous compositional diligence in motion, and discovers a previously unknown manner of musical communication through which a singular abstract expression which is entwined with the particular thematic channelization, the source of which takes control of its own motion instead of allowing itself to become passively programmed. In the beginning, there is an aesthetic visualization within the artist considered as a possibility, along with a powerful feeling for and belief in the purpose of that possibility, and the profound imagination and passion which is significant in not only the creation but in the appreciation as well. There is something to be communicated and a right way for the expression to be produced. Those who know what it means to find beauty in darkness, harmony in chaos, and can recognize themselves in the shade of death as the nature of existence in an indifferent universe, will express it and connect with it. Those who cannot identify the eternal connection that exists between all things will never penetrate its surface, and will remain alien to its meaning entirely.

Black Metal is the night. It feverishly anticipates the demise of the day, the activities of which assert themselves as significant and consecrated in its authority of command and delineation. As night falls, it unleashes itself in swarms of self-assertion and ravenous iniquity on an occupational charge of annihilation of daytime illusion and ruin of all hopeless dreams of Utopian bliss. Congregated force and the application of holy mercy are the targets of Black Metal’s nighttime furor, seeking courageous spirits to release from the chains of social restraint. Unsatisfied is its violent hate, which extends beyond this night, into eternity...an endless struggle. Fear of its sublunary nature for such flesh-limited beings as humans is not enough to discourage this intensive understanding, ignited by an inward flame which burns for the crumbling of the establishments who demand unquestioned obedience and submission. Those souls brave enough to stay awake for the carnage will witness, or perhaps even participate in, the demolition, leaving nothing but dust and ashes to greet the first rays of the sun. Those who were lost in happy dreams in restless sleep the night before will awake to another crippling day of boring robot-like subservience to a system they never think to criticize, and with no knowledge that, though the buildings and marketplaces, cars and noises, flurry and neurosis, remain in experience of sense perception, all of this was swept away from the minds and hearts of the nocturnal spirits in a merciless raid before the dawn.

The existential despair of Black Metal is not an endpoint. It is a pathway that leads to an activated skepticism, which confronts the individual with the most arduous challenge of painful introspection, in search of any illusion within that has dared to stifle what life can be. If one’s will is weak, and cannot therefore overwhelm the inner disease of deceptively comforting slave-like values, one is thrust back into the world of safe but empty convenience, where meaningless ‘happiness’ is offered at every infected turn. But the strong-willed will become a warrior and stop at nothing to kill all lies which have been secretly injected within, and will be reborn in a world now seen as it was before the age of illusion struck men down to their bleeding knees and tricked them into sheep-like submission. Time will become undone in the eyes of the Black Metal warrior. He has burned to the ground all institutions of deception that commanded from him his will and absolute faith. An examination of human history will show that there is not much room for divergence, and many who have sensed this through vague knowledge, too afraid to seek an alternative or struggle for a better way, have sacrificed themselves to the system for its clever promises of materialistic reward. The Black Metal warrior takes inspiration and knowledge from an ancient past and applies those values, now appropriately modified, to the current time as way to initiate a change where so many others passively and fearfully await one. In a world of unmotivated stagnation and willful apathy, non-action occupies the weak of mind. Black Metal warriors are unafraid of the nonrepresentational and bewildering, but rather drawn towards them as sources of truth. For the Black Metal warrior, there is no time to waste. There is a life to be experienced in all its terrible glory... Death has no mercy. It does not pity the pathetic circumstances of its victims.

The knowledge gained from experience and observation, carefully reflected upon and formulated into clarity of awareness, is acknowledged by Black Metal as the most potent of all weapons put to attack in the war upon modern slavery. This knowledge penetrates through the loud voices and deceptive imagery of the social system and its adherents with furious contempt. Knowledge has no superior. It exists of its own accord, there to be acquired for those who have the necessary capacity and courage to access it. Once gained, it remains free, pledging no faithfulness to those who use it. It is the weapon that most effectively identifies the slightest trace of impotence and affliction in any opponent. It presents itself to its enemies and acquirers in always the same manner: an embodiment of inner dread with all the potency to extinguish from its encounterer any remaining entertainment of falsely-determined fantasies. As only a cognitive concern, it has no interest in matters corporeal, as these are transient and it is eternal. Its lack can be detected in the vacuous look of willful ignorance on many faces, or in a verbal expression that exposes an individual as afraid of its acquirement. Either way, the anguish is a dependency the cure of which comes with a heavy price: entrance into the realm of nothingness, where one can either confusedly wander in despair of one’s own insufficiency, disoriented in aimless fatalism from the terror of reality, or heroically embrace the unavoidable certainty of death and to find existential meaning within that reality. A sorrowful triumph celebrated in Black Metal.

"Too long I have suffered the desert sands of time But as I drown in darkness it will release the sign My soul will leave this mortal coil of flesh and earthly life
to fly into the mist of night
into the nightside eclipse
and experience existence on the other side" -- Emperor - "The Majesty Of The NightSky"

Against a world alien to its fundamental principles Black Metal screams its infernal hatred in venomous retribution. Always attacking with clear and certain focus on its agenda so as to never fall victim to its own excessive passion, directing its wrath toward those sources which practice and encourage a refusal to sense and understand, within themselves as well as without, the individual emotional condition in a cold and unforgiving world. As human beings are mere agents of an infinite universal order, there is a danger recognized in the most penetrating of Black Metal music in thinking oneself, the meager individual who passes in and out of existence simply to maintain the species, as somehow beyond natural reality. This is the way of stifling oneself with a lack of vision, limiting one’s experiences and awareness to the boundaries of individual necessity, and losing environmental and universal perspective. This manner of unenlightenment chokes away the spiritual richness and emotional depth of existence. Black Metal’s hatred and bitterness toward the dominance of universal social and religious rule is the path toward this understanding. Breaking away from the established conditions and normalized standards passed off as the best possible system is the way towards discovering what life can be, in seemingly endless possibilities. This withdrawal will only ever be carried out by the strongest of will and most independent of spirit, which are necessary qualities to persevere through the certain moments of suffocating loneliness and countless sources that wish to seduce one away from the pursuit and back into the realm of illusion. The current system is destructive to natural beauty and spiritual harmony, which fuels the hatred of Black Metal which yearns to be free to exist according to the order and process of nature. Though the individual human being is nothing in the vast scheme of the cold universe, it is capable of providing itself and its world with meaning and substance despite its limitations as an Earthbound being. It is natural for this individual being to explore its maximal power in an effort to engage with its environmental surroundings and fellow humans. In the context of an uncaring and endless universe, the individual is left to care for itself and to create its own values in a world that is antagonistic towards it. Black Metal spits hateful venom in the face of all that seeks to restrain this.

Black Metal transcends the superficiality of organized systematic lifestyles and its obligatory practicality which forces humans down to their knees in subservient sustentation as though they were meant to spend their lives as tools in some soulless machine. Black Metal looks to the majesty of the nightsky and beholds an infinity of thoughts beyond the countless stars and the cold silence of black eternity in absolute purity. Nocturnal solitude in the midnight forest of beautifully wild resplendency bathed in the luminosity of the brilliant full moon. In the depths of the night all aspects of existence and the world come through to the mind with alarming and striking clarity. Its darkness extinguishes the distractions and activities of the day, allowing for an alteration in the mental state, which turns contemplative and reflective, pushing aside the analytical and pragmatic for a sincere consideration and love of nature’s beauty and power. Indiscriminate experience of the world in the objective sense, unpolluted by personal interest and need. Reverence of death as the ultimate source of initiation and transition to urgency in the discovering of life’s meaning individually defined. Understanding the necessary process of death crushes the significance of all projected values. It is not what lies beyond the threshold that is of signification for Black Metal, but the idea of the transition itself, which urges a life of passionate intelligence simply for the fact that death is beyond prediction. This Romanticism of Black Metal checks itself only to the extent that it recognizes that this fleeting existence is claimed by indifferent death without any explanation as to why, when, or how, and for that reason one must not allow one’s passion for life get too carried away to the extent that the consideration of existence ceases with individual particulars. Existence itself is beyond the transient individual.

The mechanistic structuralism of modern society is averse to passionate emotion. Black Metal’s Romanticist response is to retrace emotion to the abstract elements that constitute the motivations for the continuation of human existence. In Death Metal, these elements were deconstructed and contorted into a crude expression of corrosion and abjection. Black Metal was aware enough to assert its essential strength through a number of formidable works just as Death Metal was experiencing its own corrosion. It reacted by merging a bewildering misanthropy with a deep reverence for natural beauty in a style of Metal that expressed a sublime veneration for the natural darkness of night with a heretofore unexplored emotional arousal and Romantic passion for the experience of existence allowed only on the condition of an inevitable death. It nihilistically transcended the realm of intentional regulation. In the worldview of Black Metal, humans are phenomenons of the nothingness of this self-generated universe, who have an innate understanding of their hopeless alienation, yet have been cursed with the burden, or blessed with the gift, of finding their own path toward meaning. Most never reach this level, and drown themselves and their lives in willful apathy in self-consumed disregard for anything beyond their immediate sphere of reference, slaves to the fear of what it means to invest oneself into the full experience of living. Existence in this state becomes nothing more than a series of instants decisively altered into an immeasurable waste flowing into a sea of empty lives. The enhanced melancholy of Black Metal represents the complementary blossoming and natural beauty that unites together those who are sensitive and brave enough to allow themselves to become subjected to it. The contradiction of passion and rationality is the source of anxious human suffering, and keeps us in longing searches for a home in this world, whether in a devout fondness for life or a self-sacrifice in honor of the uncaring boundlessness of the cosmos. Intelligent activity and a capacity for knowledge chains us to ourselves, frail corporeal beings with the ever-present knowledge of unavoidable death looming over all action and thought. Desperation in the grip of hopelessness finds an anguished voice and warring spirit in Black Metal, which incorporates a scorching misanthropy and affection for the truth in purity found in natural reality in a suffering expression of passionate rage.

The epic in Black Metal is motivated by a powerful surge of inspiration, which fuels the hearts of the deeply tormented and blasphemously rebellious, who have unyielding faith in the synergy of elemental depravity and alteration. These dissatisfied visionaries refuse to consent to a world order that is anything but natural. They recognize the reality of the unrestrained forces of nature as the only true order of this world. They understand that the essence of our demise is carried within us from birth. They feel the frigidity and wildness of the winter winds in their souls and the frozen streams flowing in their veins. Yet there is a warmth within that produces the affection for the entirety of the process of life and death. Black Metal recognizes the myth of unearthly paradise and worships the unstoppable force of nature, and the aesthetic beauty it produces to ease the misery of our journey.

The most authentic hatred is that which inspires an expressive creation that lets itself be felt in the very bones of its observers, so that its virtue of conviction is unquestioned. This purity of total darkness is imperiously expressed in music that is driven by an unrestrained desire for corrosive blackness to destroy in sweeping rage all that cowers in fear of the reality of existence. It is beyond mere shock in the artistic method, but a philosophically fueled statement of inexorable intention. Its ferociousness is not an end in itself assumed as artistic voice, but a spirit that is raging wildly within its creators. Black Metal is not here to entertain idle minds who seek the thrill of something outrageous. Those who mock and condemn this expression do so out of fearful recognition of their own inadequacy in comprehending what this music is saying, and an intimidation in the face of the power of its presentation of a reality universally known as the true state of things. Its offensiveness is beyond childlike amusement in that it is not the ultimate agenda but rather a means to a higher aim, which is to voice a serious discontent that calls for the absolute destruction of all that seeks to overtake the independent spirit and a seething hatred for a dishonorable social order which seeks to enthrall its members in deception in despicable fashion. Black Metal is unconcerned with frivolous stupidity. Its grim and hateful expression is specifically for those afflicted individuals cursed to roam in an afflicted world of despair, who know what it means to suffer internally simply from being alive in a chaotic world, but also understand what it means to channel that suffering into something meaningful, and take a heroic and noble approach to existence rather than wallow in pathetic helplessness out of fear and weakness.

"I Immaterialize
And Slowly Drift
Into the Unknown
With the Cold Winds with Soul
The Wintry Plains Lie Untouched
I Ride on My Elements
Towards the Stars Unseen
A Quest
For Knowledge" -- Burzum - "My Journey To The Stars"

All projected values asserted in human maxims that do not correspond to the natural order of the world are stripped down and exposed for what they are by Black Metal: illusions designed to rule through social and religious law with no grounding in anything that can be perceived as reality. The temporal possessions proudly displayed by the slaves of these illusions are also targets, as they are symbols of procedure and material of manipulation, and must be destroyed if the strong of spirit and noble of heart are to be unified to deconsecrate that which passes itself off as all-important yet is nothing but dust in the wind of mayhem. The prevailing social order must fall, and when it does the essence of Black Metal will remain, as it is an idea that cannot be eradicated. The modern system is an uncommunicative affliction of overwhelming selections and overburden of superficial information. Life in this disease is devoid of any real meaning beyond subservient obligation required for survival patronizingly passed off as "freedom". Souls become vacant as the machine keeps on consuming to assure the process continues. Simply to exist is suffering enough in this universe, and yet we enslave ourselves in the name of vague ideals that no one can correctly define. The dread is known to all, under the surface of plastic smiles and fake civility, and the sickening industriousness that is ignorantly praised as a great liberator. Every aspect of this system, but particularly its insistence on employment and requisite economic consumption, is a distraction from all that makes life truly worth living. Black Metal stares fearlessly into the eyes of death, and discovers a meaning in them that reduces everything else to trifling matters. Existence is then experienced on its own terms as opposed to an idea or plan from a supreme divinity that no one can claim to have any knowledge of whatsoever. The war is not over the rights of possession of our lives, but a way in which life can be lived in accordance with what can be perceived as reality, with the assistance of the wisdom of olden times applied to the current era in order to furnish an honorable future. Black Metal doesn’t need a god. We are fully capable of governing ourselves and creating our own values. Black Metal annihilates the idea of god and any social dominance and dependency that is predicated on this idea. Black Metal is a cleansing virus to rid the disease of social submission. Its black hate extinguishes all sanctioned establishments founded on inverted or projected morals that have no grounding in reality.

Within the despairing substance of universal transmission to a disheartened human race, the black-hearted warrior of fierce independence hears the music that inflames the spirit toward a cause against the established standards in heroic notion of transcending all tangible concern. The apprehension lies in the perceptual experience of the world as a realm in which only the lifeless can translate the wisdom of olden ages. This means that now, in this time, humanity, in its full immersion in a soulless technological system, is more willing to offer up its existence as a forfeiture in the name of self-destruction. Black Metal could have never been created at any other time. It is entirely a product of its time. It is also the most extreme voice of an emotional state of a species that recognizes that its collective existence has never been closer to extinction. What will develop beyond this will be absent of an honest representational account, and will be left to invest itself in persistence of its own order. This extinction may only be a figurative one for now, but even if so, its literal death looms on the not too distant horizon. Black Metal reveres this abject hollowness, the void we feel in the core of our being, and the potentiality of what it can provide a lost soul in a time such as this. To go beyond the finality of existence requires a sufferance of the process of life which is the highest honor to be bestowed upon the brave self-assertion of seeing life through to its completion in death.

In the depths of the soul lies a darkness uncovered and embraced by few who taste this life. It is where the origins of Black Metal lie. Those who are unfeeling of anything that doesn’t caress their comforting worldview can never know what it means to become one with spiritual blackness. Slaves of the light, for they have not the knowledge of its association with the darkness which grants it its power and significance. In their daily activity, uniformed in robotic compliance, they remain ignorant of their own inauthentic nature. They take as actual anything that reveals itself to them in handy convenient presentation, confident that what they perceive in the illusory world of consumption and production is the most important aspects of existence. Their inner suspicion shows itself in their hollow eyes, and it spills forth into the world they have created for themselves, so that in order to make it through the day one must assert falsely in the interest of self-protection, for the recognition that within the core of the rationalization of this masquerade they betray their very natures. They separate themselves from natural reality from fear of the spontaneousness of death, and choose rather to function as ignorantly unaware, stylishly combinatory and all too important members of a corrupt system masquerading as a promised land, in which they willfully sacrifice themselves to the drudgery of social obligation to continue the process, keeping them away from the reality of nature until death seizes them indiscriminately. Self-imposed slavery for an age upholding a treasured "freedom" as the reason for their enslavement. Black Metal has no tolerance for this sick contradiction.

The shrill scream that is the voice of Black Metal’s essence is an expression of a tortured hatred the likes of which is bewildering to the ordinary. Ignorant as to what it means to be moved so deeply that such venomous emotions are ignited within, they stammer through life like programmed machines, never loving or hating enough to understand the hopeless desperation that is the hatred of something that threatens what one loves the most. A violent hate as that of Black Metal can only arise as a result of a pure love. Love and hate need each other. Like light and dark, the meaning of one is found in the other. The Black Metal scream is the voice of an ancient oath kept alive and sacred within the horrors of the present time. Beyond the words, and into the very actuality of the screaming voice itself, the spiritual key to a world existing in the absence of light is provided. This key is the affirmation of an inner force whose potency is only decreased by enshrouded trepidation in the face of death. Those who have access to such a key are few in number but their combined strength is enough to overcome the masses united in nothing but a modern form of slavery. It is not passionate affection for the completeness of life that drives them onwards but a fear of failure in the event of the collapse of their false world. At all times it is the state of fear that threatens to eat away one’s self-assurance, inner intensity, and heroic charge under the sign of death. The current order is a fear-spreading machine that uses this tool as a way to enforce slavery. Fear of natural reality keeps them in soul-sucking employment day after day. Their fear of Black Metal comes from the same source as their fear of a midnight winter forest, where alone, they must find a way to survive the seemingly endless and bitterly cold night. This conception of the music of frostbitten darkness and primal nihilism could have only ever derived from those of an unrestrained spirit. For Black Metal, to be free means to be in control of finding one’s own means instead of being handed a lifestyle wrapped in plastic packaging. This self-sufficiency allows one to discover an inner decisiveness to be applied to the challenges that frustrate those who choose the path of turning away. The free spirit of Black Metal transcends unfeeling materialism towards previously undiscovered realms of self-formulation. This self-defining process is the way to individual awareness, necessarily involving the anguished acceptance of death in a piercing moment of breaking away from rusted chains. The process of defiant nonconformity is extolled in the nihilism of Black Metal.

The hateful chill of Black Metal’s icy melodies, destructive rhythms, and emotional isolationism is a unified expression of a soul paralyzed with frigid loneliness. Through an unwavering determination that is only the quality of the strong of will this loneliness becomes an inward solitude in which the soul is freed through its own awareness, and its understanding of death as a grim necessity in the universal process of life. This acknowledgment does not come without a certain shock to the system in the form of ultimate self-insignificance in the context of the universal order. This is the sublime experience of losing oneself in the majesty of the nightsky. The meaninglessness of the individual is communicated in infinite blackness to the awe-inspired beholder. The meaning to be supplied for this transient journey is now in the possession of the individual, in the realization that there is nothing in the physical properties of this world that can supply our lives with an inherent purpose, as the world is indifferent to human interest. Existential meaning is the burdened gift of the free spirit. The vast forests and cold winters held in passionate admiration by Black Metal are the objectification of beautiful death, manifestations of an eternal function, phenomenons to be yearned for yet never to be possessed, as they possess themselves. The wonders of this world do not need us, but we need them, and therein lies their beauty. Nature, wild and free, unobstructed from its process. A freedom to be longed for, in the hopes of being purified of all earthborn connection, to leave behind the comfort of routine and crush the chains of slavery. Black Metal offers liberation from all standards of paradoxical occupations, and represents the heart of nature in its primal attack. It is the visible moonlight which, from its undefiled source, guides the midnight forest wanderer, who seeks refuge from an afflicted order among tall trees under a black canvas.

Black Metal’s violence towards Christianity is rooted in thousands of years of dogmatic enslavement upon lands that were foreign in their very essence to its doctrine. The mockery of the Christian faith is a reaction to the hypocrisy that has strangled its teachings to the degree that even the most devout have lost their true faith, and have bended their knees now to a technological system which provides the only truth they can perceive. Blind to their own twisted rule, they have been deluded by the very forces they once opposed, and now those forces have asserted their authority. Their function is deformed in reflective perversion, having waged war on themselves through an inversion of good into evil, becoming what they have long claimed to despise, a demented reflection of the essence of their beliefs lost to destructive visions. They have created a world overflowing with accelerated and demanding destruction, with hopes lost to a barren future of desolation and humiliation. On the bleak horizon awaits an apocalyptic revelation to sweep it all away with searing winds carrying the cries of lost souls who’ve wasted their lives in frightful and excruciated pursuits, knowing all along the world’s collapse was theirs to initiate. The activation of life is a continuation of itself, consuming itself in the intention of self-regeneration which is the natural framework of the universe divided into varying degrees of purpose. The process of recreation stops at nothing. Its individual manifestations are not what construct the world, though nature instills them with the illusion of such to grant them the veneer of self-importance as a tool for perpetuation of the species. The Christian concept of this process is a justification of its tyrannical domination disguised as interpretation of universal essence in the form of a god. Those who see through this smokescreen understand the formulation as necessity of eternal process. The Christians were led astray the moment they lost faith in their own inventions, and instead bowed their heads to a system perpetuated by a greater evil than that which they originally ascribed the term to. Black Metal turns to its own mysticism, too obscure for those unable to penetrate the darkness: reverence for the eternal order and process of natural reality.

In beholding humanity as a species falling into ruin, daily struggling against the impulse to surrender to hopelessness, Black Metal retaliates with strength of will and life-affirming death worship. A flawed species paralyzed by the fear of its own inherent degeneracy, recognizing that there is no avoidance of their own demise, as consequences are real, and their lack of understanding the basic laws of causality have led them to commit atrocities the repercussions of which they never thought to seriously consider. The contagion was spreading before the fear began. Black Metal is the voice of those who know this inner corrosion is a fundamental feature of existence. Life feasts on life to make way for future life in the eternal death process of existence. While the numb masses turn towards their amusing distractions in willful denial and ignorance of this condition, Black Metal turns towards the abyss of existence known as death to discover a beautifully frightening truth. Its music transcends the limits of tangibility of a soon to be abandoned material realm. Its expression is aflame with craving desire for the possibility of what this life can be. This is what keeps it from being swallowed up by its own pessimistic darkness, which is not the ultimate agenda but a key to the gate of comfortless knowledge required to experience transcendent beauty. There is no utopia. The maturity of age gradually reveals the world as it really is: a hopeless realm of needful death. True strength arises from facing this hopelessness head on, determined to experience this fleeting existence in meaningful and fulfilling ways, until the cold touch of death tears us from this mortal realm.

This is grim and anguished music of suffering human emotion in an age of rampant superficiality and frivolity. Its croaking, monumental, revolting, and terribly warlike nature is an intentional artistic resistence to a world bent on enslaving through technological possession, inverted morality, and a system based on an incoherent denial in its functionality. Black Metal shatters this illusion with piercing clarity of perception, undeterred by the harsh forces of reality, but rather in celebration of them. Its spirit craves liberation through darkness.

Death’s whisper can be heard all around. It is the condition of entrance into this world. Black Metal is the unhallowed music which strikes venomously in the name of eternal darkness against all that obstructs the individual from asserting itself in self-defined ways so as to live in the full sense of the word. Its atmosphere beckons the twilight to benight the forests. Primal rebellion pulses in its black energy, an enduring activity of relentlessness like churning dark seas under threatening skies. The scourge of cold death raging in its dynamic shifts. Hatred for the weakened fear of death in its desperate and tormented screams. Its wisdom is that one must accept death as a process in order to be fully alive. Black Metal is a philosophical and aesthetic war on all fearful and impotent fabricators who distract themselves from reality in the functionality of servility in chains of their own apathetic ignorance. In their ears Black Metal sounds the coming of hellfire devastation to their beloved democratic materialism, and they cower in pathetic fear disguised as mocking laughter.

Fueled by rebellious power, Black Metal crushes the dream of centralized force and command. It is the creation of the self-willed and emphatic, who violently resist any form of authority over the individual spirit. Self-sufficient, they spit on the weakness of dependency. Black Metal ascribes its own values, and attacks with scorn and feral passion any attempt to force it to its knees. The individual will, asserted in an independence of conception, is ascendant. In defining the self, one liberates themselves from their surroundings and the circumstances of years past, and sets a course towards an unidentified future, unafraid of the dark obscurity in the knowledge that it grants a wisdom for going beyond it, a passage from nothingness to a self-created purpose. This is what Black Metal offers through its nihilistic depreciation that wipes clean the slate of existence for a new creation of meaning and intent to be established. A beautiful gift and heavy burden all the same. It is a transformation that eliminates the significance of condition of sequential events of ambitions and beliefs considered in the particular. Black Metal’s intention is to rid this assumed importance of contextual extension and show the way to the designs of natural function.

"Hear a Haunting Chant
Lying in the Northern wind
As the Sky turns Black
clouds of Melancholy
rape the Beams
of a Devoid Dying Sun
and the Distant Fog approaches" - DarkThrone - "A Blaze In The Northern Sky"

The urgency of Black Metal is a recognition that in its current age the individual who sincerely lusts for spiritual freedom must be prepared to unite its essence with its anxiety, combining wrath with logic. Dependence on a technological system of deceptive ideals is a foreign concept to this desire. The isolation from which this determination arises is a product of its exposure to an alien modernity, which becomes a loneliness tormenting in its nature from the condition of its artificiality as a social product. This externally manufactured isolation becomes merged with a fear that must be overcome in order to identify sources which may potentiate a meaningful perceptual experience and confirmable motivation. This is to be contrasted with contemplative solitude which is an entirely natural state intentionally sought in the endeavor of a higher purpose in understanding or creation. Industrial alienation is a product of a systematic invention of structuralism, and as such is a mechanism for the initiation of self-suppression through a fear that commissions the destruction of anything standing in its way towards global domination. Yet, this spread of materialistic structuralism is powerless against its inherent corruption, a spiritual abyss reflecting a natural condition of decay. Knowledge becomes a method of corruption when its possessor lacks the inner wisdom to apply it in conjunction with natural order. The self-conquering of this system breeds a race of regulated and serviceable substitutions, as its design calls for a decomposable and neurotic application. This becomes the character of the social order, a self-dominating people who have sacrificed their independence of being to a clustered yet fragmented systematic process which distracts them from the truth of awareness with the false impression of self-importance. It broadcasts its agenda in tones suggesting death as dream of negation, never seriously considered as the primary reality that supplies existence with significance in the minds of those who are not intimidated by its finality. They fail to see the darkness of this reality as a passageway to individual liberation, and the system thrives on this failure. The ones who pass through the terrifying darkness discover a grandness of natural being and a passionate affection for the experience of life in a fusion of desires. The enveloping frigidity of Black Metal is such a pathway.

This music harbors no tolerance for the transiency of trends. It is an idea unto itself as an expression of individual rebellion and passionate desire. Its curses, profanations, savage wildness, and deconstructionism has no pity on those who lack the capacity for understanding its message. All life ends, and only death is real. If you cannot grasp the meaning within this, you cannot go forward into this feral and bestial music that is liberated from the restrictions of normality through its exploration and celebration of darkness and hatred.

Black Metal’s anti-humanism is rooted in its reverence for the harsh realities of this world. The coldness of winter, the persistence of atmospheric conditions, the deadly strike of the feral predator, the dark obscurity of night; forces and phenomenons that are indifferently hostile to human needs. In a time when ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’ are trumpeted about as unifying ideals, Black Metal anticipates the approaching doom in the form of natural disasters and the catastrophes of war. Death and destruction to false utopia. Devastation to a civilization grown morbidly obese on its own waste. Black pestilence upon the lands of illusion and conniving deception. Humanity suffering from its own self-deceit. Black Metal sees that the horizon is indeed bleak for this depraved society, which has no culture save for the capacity to produce and consume. All empires must crumble and face the moment of truth in the terrifying void of death of which they desperately endeavored to distract themselves from contemplating. It is the unquestioning conformance and unfeeling imperativeness of monotony and egalitarianism of modern society and Christianity that fuels Black Metal’s rebelliousness. The individual is not a functional machine to be programmed and categorized into accepted obedience to a social order that contaminates the natural environment, ruins cultural traditions, wrecks communities and relationships with its insistence on monetary value above all else. Black Metal is a reaction against this with ferocious and shrieking hatred. It refuses to be paralyzed by fear.

There is nothing to satisfy the aims of the strong-willed and noble-hearted individual in this modern wasteland. It is the land of the emotionally dead and spiritually vacant who march uniformly towards a hopeless future, with vanity as their mantra. They despise the future they have set for themselves in their absence of the wisdom of the past. Black Metal heeds this ancient wisdom as a guide through its journey in the frozen realms of lifeless timelessness. It is a journey that must be taken as a way to separate oneself from the essence of life as a process of becoming one with it. The depressing state of society and its forward march into ever more stifling conditions frustrates the philosophically aware and uncompromising individual into a withdrawal from it, turning to a solitary exploration of the truths denied by the rapid activity and maddening noises of modern civilization. The strength of independence evokes a disgust for the weakness of needy socialistic behavior. The arrival of dark storms of obscure chaos is anticipated and accepted as a necessary occurrence for replenishment.

The vast majority of the world’s population live in the thrall of unquestioning despair concealed within the normality of their compliance to an order they never think to interrogate. This condition is fueled by an inner impoverishment that compels them to remain within the design of the safe and convenient, governed by an energy that ultimately aims to protect them from existential fear through the reinforcement of its own agenda. These are the modern slaves of this age, who can never comprehend the unrestrained passion and bitter misanthropy of Black Metal. Its refusal at offering a pleasing worldview and its rebelliousness against standard methods of popular music alienate them from it as noise which has no artistic purpose or meaning beyond its own antagonism Those few who understand and feel the grim beauty of this music comprehend its darkness as an essential method of communication that represents a power that provides an entrance into another realm. Its darkness expresses what the world of light cannot. Its essence, just as existence itself, is incapable of being translated into a convenient paradigm. It defiles such happy and easily satisfied standards with the scourge of knowledge and the consistency of natural reality.

Black Metal’s functional resemblance to ambient music is its method of establishing and maintaining a dark atmosphere of stillness within its repetitive motion. In this constancy, a veneer of conversance and reliance is implemented to lure the listener into a black hole of vulnerability in the presence of an incomprehensible darkness. This foreboding musical event functions like moonlight in an unfamiliar forest in which the wanderer identifies itself in the paleness of the moon that is its source. It is a concentrated moment of recognizing one’s mortality and its relationship with the external world which possesses the power to render our inventions ineffective, averse as it is to artificial mechanism. The cold darkness of the trance of this minimalist execution tranquilizes the listener into a state of timelessness, in which occurs an awakening to an awe-inspiring yet impossible truth, a quandary of pulsing life pressing against the void of death. The transition into a shift of rhythm, an alteration of melodic sequence, and a dynamic of emotional fluctuation, portrays the sudden awareness of being the progeny of an ancient race, originating from the necessity of death. The artificial world outside, buzzing with its triviality and dissipation, flushed in unworthy occupation, its agents sick with depression and self-consciousness, intent on disrupting all sources of creative excellence, seems so alien in comparison to this experience. Black Metal is the virus festering in the shadows of a decrepit order, corruptive in its intention towards it. Its climactic power functions like the harshest winter winds to blow away all that cannot withstand its extremity of force. Its primary aim is its absolution of death. Its coldness spreads a motionless silence over those who exist in the ignorance of their own oblivion. It is the music of the frighteningly grievous and absurdly furious who have scornfully withdrawn from a world of lies, which sought to enslave them with commitment, addiction, rapacity, and destitution. This substance of cold struggle must be expressed in the eloquence of transcendent and poetic yet monochromic motion. It must make itself clear that it is the creation of those who have freed themselves from social dependence for their own self-identity, and driven to vigorously express their discontent with a music that burns for the devourment of its despised objects, while in its evolution it is always ascending to triumphant levels in freedom from the afflictions of the world it detests.

The substance of Black Metal is its abstraction of emotion, which frees it from the limitations of contemporary standards and allows it to go beyond the expectations of convenience. Its antisocial isolation converges with the natural course of the universe, affected by the force and beauty of existence in ways the ordinary, who always require something concrete and undemanding, can never truly understand. The realm of the nonsubjective is inaccessible to them. Only those free spirits who can get beyond the self can know it in any real sense. As it becomes ever more challenging to find a place in this world untouched by human corruption, one may need to seek the realms of the abstract consciousness to revel in the idea of setting free the chaotic and suppressed emotional urges, and escape from the ever-increasing exasperation of monotony of systematic process and social torments in a world that fails to acknowledge itself.

No unveiling of this music’s obscurity of aesthetic process can be successful if the audience in question cannot transcend the limits of normality. This music cannot be stigmatized in a genial, explicable responsibility to a predictable tangibility. This is because its obscurity is alien to such attempts, and impossibly out of reach for those who wish to have everything handed to them without a challenge. It is emancipated and savagely primitive, unrestrained in its hatred for limitation and impotency. It is the voice of a soul that will not submit to a misrepresentation of expansive development. Rather than fall prey to an illusion of happiness, it chooses to stand alone in heroic self-assertion in the cold embrace of its own enigmatic essence. Black Metal is the realm of a frozen soul, unafraid of its own mortality. It gazes into the potential of death with a misanthropic lust for destruction, awake to its unrestraint in the knowing that death is the salvation from the excessive requirements of an invalid dream, a lost hope of existence that promised much but delivered little, in the torment of constant desire in a world unconcerned.

In a civilization ruled by authorities who are defiant in their ignorance of death, the social syndrome moves on in its inherited ignorance. To the questioner, the thinker, the dreamer, this is self-imprisonment. A willful cage of fear in which the inferior of mind and weak of conviction dwell, afraid of the sentience of observed and undiscovered possibilities. Their allowance of complication is jeopardized by submerging fears that their own beliefs may be grounded in illusions. Faithful to their assigned repetition, they are brainwashed with an acceptance of command and regulation. They become reliant on this condition for survival to the degree that their dreams have been reduced to nothingness. Their hopes are vanquished by an affliction whose origination was a horror of the reality of existence. The independent spirit knows that if this affliction is to be thwarted it must be weakened by the power of an obscure creation which is rooted in the values of an ancient age. Its darkness inflames those who can understand its message toward a higher purpose which cannot be conformed to accommodate a corrupt model. Black Metal is the entrance into this affirmation of revolt, devastation, and self-authorization for alienated individuals too impassioned for a hollow existence.

Black Metal is a celebration of the grim reality of death, the darkness that is the essence of hatred for all that is dishonorable and fearful, the destructive energy that governs this world, the absurd forces that defy all logic in their blind willing. Our limited mechanisms are useless against them. Against such power, our weakness is magnified as a species which chooses, despite its natural intelligence, to exist in unenlightened ways. Our demise cannot be blamed on a lack of intelligence, but on a failure to correctly utilize it. As a result, life becomes a meaningless pursuit of functional occupancy. Fear of death has led humanity to hate life to such an extent that all the beauty and possible meaning that can be discovered in this world has been rejected in favor of mechanistic duty. All that is left to do for the rebellious spirit is to withdraw and await the inevitable destruction, as the world we have created for ourselves collapses in on itself, a fitting justification of its own corruption.

Yet, the essence of Black Metal is a thriving lust for life, and to experience what that life can be. Death is nothing to fear, as it is a necessary process of life the condition of which all that lives enters this world. Those who fear death fear Black Metal. This is because they are already dead from killing life in the name of fear. Black Metal’s celebration of death and darkness is also a celebration of ambitious life achieved in the process of overcoming fear through identifying the beauty in all that is mortally feared. It prevails with the inspired approach to life as a journey, an experience beyond its surface presentation. It shows the way for wandering spirits who wish to outgrow their protective defenses and become truly free, as independently governed beings.

In bestial retribution toward the materialism and equality of Western democratic society and the Christian religion, Black Metal spreads its message of rebellious ambition. The upholders of illusion and blind obedience condemn individual self-assurance. They hate nothing more than losing control of a strong-willed individual who sets independent goals and values to be upheld, and who emancipates the spirit from dependence on a system designed to enslave and humiliate. This is the spirit of Black Metal expressed in nihilistic emotion from the depths of inner darkness, adventurously explored in the flame of creation.

To understand Black Metal is to know what it means to descend into utter blackness of mind and soul as a way to arise again in mental, emotional, and spiritual salvation from falsity of blinding light. This requires a belief in individual exemption from social control and religious dogma, and an ability to identify the beauty in chaos which in turn initiates a self-defined course for individual strength and volition. This is the assault from within upon the conformable masses who celebrate a world constructed to disguise their incompetency and enslavement to social imagery, mortal dread, and revulsion for the discomforting reality of indwelling agony. The strong and beautiful of this world know this process, are unafraid of it, and understand that we are at bottom murderous savages with the burden of rational consciousness that curses us to exist in the awareness of inevitable death. Black Metal does not run from death. It faces death with an acceptance of its necessary process and finds its terror beautiful in the understanding that ....only death is real.

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