The Blackened Affect: Affect and Production in Black Metal

Saario, Antti ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2912-1354 (2018) The Blackened Affect: Affect and Production in Black Metal. In: Crosstown Traffic: Popular Music Theory and Practice, 3-5 September 2018, University of Huddersfield, UK.

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Abstract / Summary

The conference paper discusses record and affect production, and their blackened dynamic in Black Metal.

This exploration is framed through questions and considerations on the production processes and the musical-affective intent of Black Metal; the numerous paradoxes and oppositions, at play in Black Metals’ ‘creation’; and notions of space-time (immersion/entrapment) in Black Metal production and listener experience.

Questions of affect and production: What is Black Metal affect and how it is produced? What is the role of production in Black Metal? What value does ‘production value’ hold in the blackened economy of Black Metal? How can we understand and experience the ouroborean feedback of the manifestations of Black Metal affect and record production?

The seeming, and ‘sounding’, paradoxes and oppositional forces (‘tensegrity’) at play within Black Metal’s diversity of forms, value economies, modus operandi and manifestations, are considered the beating black heart of ‘creation’ (‘destruction’) in Black Metal. Notions of nihilism (active/passive) are used to dissect this dynamic in relation to affect and record production.

Black Metal’s production intent seeks to operate across (and ‘activate’) emotions, feelings, affects and intensities, with the desire to induce negative, hateful, and often ‘passive’ states in the listener. The author seeks to understand this dynamic through the artist and producer’s approach to, and the listener’s experience of, space-time in Black Metal. Space in Black Metal record production, is listened to as a compositional and a mix element, and as key sonic perspective for the discussion of Black Metal’s timbres, dynamics, structures and sonic affects.

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