What are you listening to at the moment?

Visual arts, music, poetry and other forms of art.
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Wyrmfang
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Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by Wyrmfang »

Talking about classical and modern black metal, it was for a long time an impossibility for me that the classical bands could do today anything interesting (the interesting new things have come from new bands). However, either I have changed or the situation has changed. For example, Mayhem´s Daemon is very good and Dark Funeral´s Where the Shadows Forever Reign is almost their best one (still I slightly prefer Vobiscum Satanas).
obnoxion
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Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by obnoxion »

Wyrmfang wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:43 pm Talking about classical and modern black metal, it was for a long time an impossibility for me that the classical bands could do today anything interesting (the interesting new things have come from new bands). However, either I have changed or the situation has changed. For example, Mayhem´s Daemon is very good and Dark Funeral´s Where the Shadows Forever Reign is almost their best one (still I slightly prefer Vobiscum Satanas).
It might be the objective truth. However, and I've mentioned this often, I was quite suddenly put off metal music after the year 2000 - largely because I was so fed up with the black metal life style. So I can ride on nostalgia now and then, and enjoy those songs that I used to enjoy. But I just don't respond to new metal music. No matter what it's merits are, it doesn't touch me. And it is strange, because it was a huge part of my life since I first heard WASP when I was four years old (it might actually be my first clear memory from my childhood, so heavy metal sort of woke me up to consciousness...)
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
Angolmois

Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by Angolmois »

Nefastos wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:41 pm I have always been reluctant to think black metal artists as some kind of heroes, and avoided focusing on knowledge on their personal statements and masks they adopt to hide their personal fragility (which is the human lot that no one escapes).
There was certainly a time in my youth when some (black metal) artists etc. were placed on a pedestal. Nowadays, I have for many years thought that the music and art needs to be almost without exception - and I can't really name an exception to be precise - separated from their mortal personalities and all the glamour that surrounds them. I can't really say the truth about Michael Jackson - what he was in his personal life - but one can still appreciate the art he has made, and the same goes for any artist that I know of. Some of them I know to be inflated egoists and sheer fucktards - Glenn Danzig, for example - but I still enjoy the art they've made. I understand very well if one doesn't want to know anything about the artist behind the art, that kind of anonymity has a two-fold face.

Nefastos wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:41 pm What interests me is their black art, and Anthems does not strike me as a very good depiction of the way of how I personally consider the Lucifer's fall, an extremely important story to me as a Luciferian Satanist.
For me the intervowen red thread in the lyrics depict quite well many sides of the Luciferian quest, and Wanderer is almost a perfect ending to this perennial searching.
Angolmois

Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by Angolmois »

Speaking of Michael Jackson, this song and video are superb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_D3VFfhvs4
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Smaragd
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Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by Smaragd »

Nefastos wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 1:33 pm
"Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk"

Coincidentally, I too was just yesterday listening to this album. Now I am a great admirer of the pompous & grand style, and have more than a fair share of delusions of grandeur, but I cannot but to smile when the empyreal music goes wild while the singer recites in awe:
Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk wrote: O Nightspirit
I am one with thee
I am... the eternal power!!
I am... THE EMPEROR!!!!

Ha! Eventhough I like the album quite alot, I can't but join the smile when you put it like this. For some reason I've thought the Emperor character to be a fantastical depiction of a shadowy avatar/"incarnation" of Satan soaring in the dark woods and influencing packs of wolves and further incarnating in the "Black Wizards". Looking at the Emperor as such an archetypal form, any amount of hubris is just natural (or rather overly emphasized and coloured) depiction for the "foolish mortals" of the power a mortal can not wield straightout without failing miserably. Ofcourse this sort of fantasy interpretation takes quite large metaphysical shortcuts.
"Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets”, Numbers 11:29 as echoed by William Blake
Angolmois

Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by Angolmois »

Smaragd wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 6:12 pmLooking at the Emperor as such an archetypal form, any amount of hubris is just natural (or rather overly emphasized and coloured) depiction for the "foolish mortals" of the power a mortal can not wield straightout without failing miserably.
This is also how I have seen the Emperor.

Here is a fine example of good Anti-Christian - or a truly Christic? - spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKafdEM3z5I

Rome is without doubt my favorite bands nowadays.
Angolmois

Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by Angolmois »

And it is your unofficial DJ here again. This is a beautiful luciferian lullaby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UUYjd2rjsE

Scorpions was the first bands I've ever listened. Me and my brother succeeded in completely wearing out the VHS cassette of their world tour when we were kids. Listened and watched it literally every day of the year.
obnoxion
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Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by obnoxion »

Boreas wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 7:01 pm Scorpions was the first bands I've ever listened. Me and my brother succeeded in completely wearing out the VHS cassette of their world tour when we were kids. Listened and watched it literally every day of the year.
We had that VHS too, and watched it about five times per week. Old heavy metal and hard rock is something I grew up listening from dawn till dusk. And I constantly revisit those classics and rarities. I just listend Ozzy Osbourne's "Bark at the Moon" -album. And it was ten times better than I remembered.
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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Nefastos
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Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by Nefastos »

Boreas wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 4:29 pmThere was certainly a time in my youth when some (black metal) artists etc. were placed on a pedestal. [...] Some of them I know to be inflated egoists and sheer fucktards - Glenn Danzig, for example - but I still enjoy the art they've made. I understand very well if one doesn't want to know anything about the artist behind the art, that kind of anonymity has a two-fold face.

This too has been in my mind in the past few days: the challenge of art as something that can be removed from the personal whole of its maker. This is something unique to art – as opposed to philosophy, for example – as we mean it nowadays, or even as it was originally in the mimesis of copying the natural forms. (Artist as a copy-machine is not necessarily a superbly ethical creature, even though he must, somehow, adore the Muses.) I like better the in-between, more medieval idea of Art as something that requires both inner and outer skill. The best example is naturally the alchemist, who must unite the physical side (whether it be the actual chemical elements, or in the inner alchemy, his individual aethers) with the spiritual, seamlessly. But I guess I am still not Platonic enough to condemn artists themselves, even though I agree about the dangerous nature of their work. Potential danger can seldom be done away with, without losing something really valuable.

My own fan years as a teenager went as a fan of A.W. Yrjänä of CMX, because of his astounding hermetic knowledge that made a huge impact on little Johannes thirsty for the occult. I was already twenty when I came to black metal, and thus escaped more easily its weird and paradoxal attitude of sheeplike following of the artists who apparently made art about the exact opposite.

Smaragd wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 6:12 pmLooking at the Emperor as such an archetypal form, any amount of hubris is just natural (or rather overly emphasized and coloured) depiction for the "foolish mortals" of the power a mortal can not wield straightout without failing miserably. Ofcourse this sort of fantasy interpretation takes quite large metaphysical shortcuts.

I will keep this interpretation in mind the next time I listen to the Anthems! Maybe it will unfold differently.

Wyrmfang wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:43 pmDark Funeral´s Where the Shadows Forever Reign is almost their best one (still I slightly prefer Vobiscum Satanas).

Dark Funeral is a good example about the use of dark themes in music that is quite transparent not to mean actual interest in evil or hubris that can be taken seriously in a negative way, in my opinion. I like the most The Secrets of the Black Arts, Vobiscum Satanas coming second, and WtSFR only after those. It would have made me happier about the rise of the religious black metal if it would have been more like depth being dug for this kind of Satanic music, rather than going to the yard and picking up the putrid corpse of "Churchianity" (to use Blavatsky's term) already cast away with the bath-waters of the more classic black metal.


I will move these lengthier discussions under another topic later. [EDIT: Discussion too entangled to do that. I'll just leave them here.]
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
obnoxion
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Re: What are you listening to at the moment?

Post by obnoxion »

Nefastos wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2020 10:39 amDark Funeral
I didn't get Dark Funeral. It is basically the same song over and over again. And this goes especially for the lyrics, which must be among the most impoverished in big league black metal. Just the same words recycled, over and over again. And I actually enjoy most forms of repetition. My friend was fanatical about their song "Open the Gates", so that sort of had a special status. I had the "Secrets of the Black Arts", and I only listened to this one song on it, "My Dark Desires". The rest was generic for me. There is just something I don't get, because people seem to adore that band.
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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