A new laptop means - at last - access to all of my materials, which furthermore means giant updates.
I'm seriously itching to work on this; be on the lookout for more albums/demos added to the older sections, not to mention photos where available. Also, I'll be posting brand new, classic transcriptions along with - you guessed it - accompanying photos and "files".
As a teaser, I'll say this: I'm pretty sure that I was in the middle of working on an old, out-of-the-way piece on Bulldozer when the laptop went to Hell (Heaven?). Beyond that, in the last year I've been listening to a lot of old, crusty stuff like Mutilated (France), Protector (Germany), Merciless (Sweden), Poison (Germany), and Imperator (Poland); maybe not all strictly black metal, but I think they all deserve mentions because A) they were all hugely influential on many of our favorites, and; B) they're all seriously fucking awesome. I plan to give them all the full treatment - if you know what I mean - as well as devote plenty of space to the canonical classics.
It's good to be back.
Æon
Blackened Relics: glorifying black metal's dark past
Showing posts with label rantings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rantings. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Friday, July 5, 2013
This Will Always Be Happening
I'm fully dedicated to this little blog. However, I'm a busy man: I have multiple jobs, one of which involves running my own business with my wife. Add to that a "career"-y day job, said wife, and a band, and I barely have time to shit.
This blog is the first baby step of the realization of a long dream of mine, and I won't put it to rest quietly. Instead, the way it's going to work as exactly as it's been doing: I'll post a whole bunch of stuff when I have the occasional large block of free time. Between those large blocks of free time, new material will be sporadic.
Also, my laptop which has all of my material on it is temporarily kaput, so until I can get it fixed, my hands are pretty tied as to what exactly I can do.
Still, this will continue, and I thoroughly appreciate and sincerely thank all of you who keep coming around and looking at this stuff. I can see that kind of thing in my stats, you know.
AEon
This blog is the first baby step of the realization of a long dream of mine, and I won't put it to rest quietly. Instead, the way it's going to work as exactly as it's been doing: I'll post a whole bunch of stuff when I have the occasional large block of free time. Between those large blocks of free time, new material will be sporadic.
Also, my laptop which has all of my material on it is temporarily kaput, so until I can get it fixed, my hands are pretty tied as to what exactly I can do.
Still, this will continue, and I thoroughly appreciate and sincerely thank all of you who keep coming around and looking at this stuff. I can see that kind of thing in my stats, you know.
AEon
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Nominal
The name has been changed to more accurately reflect what this project is about. Besides, I'd come to find "Black Metal Documents" smacking of drabness, and Blackened Relics has a much nicer (and much more METAL) ring to it. The URL has been changed as well to reflect this, and is now http://blackenedrelics.blogspot.com. I'm also attempting to jazz up the place graphically, so things may look a bit silly from time to time. Bear with me: I'm not remotely well-versed in HTML.
AEon
AEon
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Isolate
This is still happening. Yes, I've posted nothing in a year, but real life happens. Ten, twelve, thirteen years ago (I'm now 27, 28 in July) this blog would have been my sole activity, but these days, whether I like it or not, I'm grown: I'm married, I have a 'career,' and I run a side-business with my wife which increasingly takes up more and more of my time. Still, music - above all heavy metal, above all black metal - is yet my greatest passion, just as it was nearly 16 years ago when I heard Emperor for the very first time.
I won't let this project die. The state of black metal, at least that state by which it's increasingly coming to be known, concerns me. The other day, I ran into a gentleman in the audience of a show that my wife and I produced, and he discovered that I was partial to black/death/etc. metal. He was young - barely college-aged - and proceeded to very excitedly tell me about all of the black metal he'd been listening to: Alcest, Amesoeurs, Wolves in the Throne Room, Liturgy, that ilk. I asked him about Emperor, and he said, "I don't really know much about them, only that they're old." I asked him about Darkthrone, Mayhem, and Bathory, and he said "I don't know: I've never heard of any of them."
Some months later, I ran into another gentleman at another show, again one that my wife and I had produced, who had sewn a Burzum - Hvis lyset tar oss patch onto the arm of a zip-up hoodie (sp?). I asked him about it, and he responded verbatim, "What can I say? I have bad taste." I raised an eyebrow and smirked, then inquired about his other patch, as I didn't recognize the logo. "Wolves in the Throne Room," he answered, at which I hesitated before responding, "Of course: I should have known." I abruptly excused myself.
There is a word that I hesitate to use for these two fellas, one based largely on their attitudes, but those of you who are old enough to know better and present enough to have been paying attention know what it is. These bands (excluding Burzum, of course), their fans, and the general trend of which they seem to be a part will die out soon enough, and you'll never find any of them, or any groups resembling them, featured here. I'll never use the terms "atmospheric," "depressive/suicidal," or "post-" to describe some mythological subset of black metal that the generation of listeners discovering this music - our music - of late have been applying in a (vain) attempt to refashion it more suitably in their own image. Those of us who love honest-to-goodness black metal - unadulterated, untainted, unholy - won't let it die or be replaced or reappropriated.
The flame still burns.
Æon
I won't let this project die. The state of black metal, at least that state by which it's increasingly coming to be known, concerns me. The other day, I ran into a gentleman in the audience of a show that my wife and I produced, and he discovered that I was partial to black/death/etc. metal. He was young - barely college-aged - and proceeded to very excitedly tell me about all of the black metal he'd been listening to: Alcest, Amesoeurs, Wolves in the Throne Room, Liturgy, that ilk. I asked him about Emperor, and he said, "I don't really know much about them, only that they're old." I asked him about Darkthrone, Mayhem, and Bathory, and he said "I don't know: I've never heard of any of them."
Some months later, I ran into another gentleman at another show, again one that my wife and I had produced, who had sewn a Burzum - Hvis lyset tar oss patch onto the arm of a zip-up hoodie (sp?). I asked him about it, and he responded verbatim, "What can I say? I have bad taste." I raised an eyebrow and smirked, then inquired about his other patch, as I didn't recognize the logo. "Wolves in the Throne Room," he answered, at which I hesitated before responding, "Of course: I should have known." I abruptly excused myself.
There is a word that I hesitate to use for these two fellas, one based largely on their attitudes, but those of you who are old enough to know better and present enough to have been paying attention know what it is. These bands (excluding Burzum, of course), their fans, and the general trend of which they seem to be a part will die out soon enough, and you'll never find any of them, or any groups resembling them, featured here. I'll never use the terms "atmospheric," "depressive/suicidal," or "post-" to describe some mythological subset of black metal that the generation of listeners discovering this music - our music - of late have been applying in a (vain) attempt to refashion it more suitably in their own image. Those of us who love honest-to-goodness black metal - unadulterated, untainted, unholy - won't let it die or be replaced or reappropriated.
The flame still burns.
Æon
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Purpose
This site was originally intended solely as a temporary holding place until a web page was developed; however, I'm now being realistic with myself and owning up to the fact that I have neither the time nor the drive to learn the caliber of code-writing necessary to create a site anywhere close to that one which I initially had in mind. Therefore, this is staying like it is indefinitely.
This core of this site is PDFs that I have created of interviews with black metal bands from the genre's 'classic' period - 1984-1995, as well as corresponding photographs from the era. Some interviews may fall outside of this range, but most will not.
The PDFs themselves are being created from interviews that I have collected over the last fifteen years from hard copies of 'zines or scans thereof, or in a few cases from interviews that were at one time posted as simple text on fan sites, the vast majority of which are now sadly defunct. Most of the photographs that I'll be posting have been collected similarly; some may still be found online - some easily, others only through patient excavation - and others may no longer. Fortunately, however, I have saved nearly everything that I have encountered in regard to black metal's glory days, and after having watched site after site - glorious despite their crudeness and minimalism, hosted by the likes of Angelfire, GeoCities, Xoom, Lycos, Tripod, etc., etc. - bite the dust, I've at last decided to make my own to pay homage to the music that is and that has been my greatest passion for more than half of my life. Besides, I hate to see these artifacts disappear, and I fear that those that haven't yet will only continue to do so.
So, then, this is essentially an archive, and I want to make it especially clear that, unless I say otherwise, none of the interviews here were conducted by me, nor were any of the photographs taken by me: I'm just a fan who wants to make these things available for like-minded people.
The PDFs have been stylized as closely as possible to the original source; I have also taken great pains to maintain the integrity of the original source, such that elements like font styles and any grammatical or orthographical errors have been preserved as closely as possible. Additionally, sources are cited where available.
While I could scan the interviews from the original 'zines (where available) and post those scans here, I probably won't for a few reasons:
1. I've always wanted this project to have a unified look to the extent that one could flip through the interviews as though turning the pages of a compilation book. In fact, I would love to see this become a reality, but I feel it's almost certainly impossible to achieve in a physical, published format because of the potentially nightmarish task of tracking down editors of 'zines published twenty years ago all over the world in order for them to grant permissions of use. Still: throw me a bone and pretend.
2. This is as much nostalgic for me as it is an archive of materials: having been born in 1985, the very year that Bathory's The Return... was released, I initially dove into extreme metal and, more pertinently, black metal with the help of the good ol' internet in 1997 after having initially discovered "the Underground" in a feature on it in an old Guitar World. I touched on this above, but to expand more fully: I miss looking at homemade websites that kinda look like shit but that were obviously created out of love of and enthusiasm for this music. That's what I have ultimately envisioned for Blackened Relics. Think of it, then, as an archive modeled after fansites like they used to make 'em; fansites are, after all, the fanzines of music sites. Let me explain further.
When I discovered black metal, there was no Wikipedia, there was no Encyclopedia Metallum (bless 'em), there was no Lords of Chaos, there was no Google as we know it today. Hell, there wasn't even Napster yet: there was just Alta Vista leading us to ineptly designed fansites and Audiogalaxy. Oh, there was also ANUS, but that was ever only so helpful when you're 12 and trying to read a review that wants you to know that "Intricate subchambers of reaction provide space for iteration of higher level events." Yeah.
I miss those days. I remember poring over search results for hours hoping for something useful, or at least something new, about this extraordinary new world of music I'd just stumbled upon from some out of the way fan site with five thousand visitors ever; I remember hearing A Blaze in the Northern Sky or De Mysteriis Dom. Sathanas or The Celtic Winter for the very first time via mp3s with horrible bit rates that only featured the middle two minutes of a song; and I remember waiting for what seemed like years for those very records to come in the mail after having finally found them in some bedroom distro on the other side of the world, because none of them had been reissued yet and CD Now sure didn't carry 'em, never mind a physically-located music/media store.
And you know what? It was awesome. It may seem silly to some of you who don't know what I'm talking about, and it may even seem silly to some of you who do, but for me the manner in which I dove into metal was awesome and ultimately life-altering. I can only imagine how much more awesome discovering this music must have been for a tape-trader five, six, seven years prior, but I digress.
I have been working on this project for years, archiving material, source-checking, and creating stylized word documents and PDFs, and am still nowhere near completion. I may never be. I don't think I want to be. Enjoy.
Regards,
AEon
This core of this site is PDFs that I have created of interviews with black metal bands from the genre's 'classic' period - 1984-1995, as well as corresponding photographs from the era. Some interviews may fall outside of this range, but most will not.
The PDFs themselves are being created from interviews that I have collected over the last fifteen years from hard copies of 'zines or scans thereof, or in a few cases from interviews that were at one time posted as simple text on fan sites, the vast majority of which are now sadly defunct. Most of the photographs that I'll be posting have been collected similarly; some may still be found online - some easily, others only through patient excavation - and others may no longer. Fortunately, however, I have saved nearly everything that I have encountered in regard to black metal's glory days, and after having watched site after site - glorious despite their crudeness and minimalism, hosted by the likes of Angelfire, GeoCities, Xoom, Lycos, Tripod, etc., etc. - bite the dust, I've at last decided to make my own to pay homage to the music that is and that has been my greatest passion for more than half of my life. Besides, I hate to see these artifacts disappear, and I fear that those that haven't yet will only continue to do so.
So, then, this is essentially an archive, and I want to make it especially clear that, unless I say otherwise, none of the interviews here were conducted by me, nor were any of the photographs taken by me: I'm just a fan who wants to make these things available for like-minded people.
The PDFs have been stylized as closely as possible to the original source; I have also taken great pains to maintain the integrity of the original source, such that elements like font styles and any grammatical or orthographical errors have been preserved as closely as possible. Additionally, sources are cited where available.
While I could scan the interviews from the original 'zines (where available) and post those scans here, I probably won't for a few reasons:
1. I've always wanted this project to have a unified look to the extent that one could flip through the interviews as though turning the pages of a compilation book. In fact, I would love to see this become a reality, but I feel it's almost certainly impossible to achieve in a physical, published format because of the potentially nightmarish task of tracking down editors of 'zines published twenty years ago all over the world in order for them to grant permissions of use. Still: throw me a bone and pretend.
2. This is as much nostalgic for me as it is an archive of materials: having been born in 1985, the very year that Bathory's The Return... was released, I initially dove into extreme metal and, more pertinently, black metal with the help of the good ol' internet in 1997 after having initially discovered "the Underground" in a feature on it in an old Guitar World. I touched on this above, but to expand more fully: I miss looking at homemade websites that kinda look like shit but that were obviously created out of love of and enthusiasm for this music. That's what I have ultimately envisioned for Blackened Relics. Think of it, then, as an archive modeled after fansites like they used to make 'em; fansites are, after all, the fanzines of music sites. Let me explain further.
When I discovered black metal, there was no Wikipedia, there was no Encyclopedia Metallum (bless 'em), there was no Lords of Chaos, there was no Google as we know it today. Hell, there wasn't even Napster yet: there was just Alta Vista leading us to ineptly designed fansites and Audiogalaxy. Oh, there was also ANUS, but that was ever only so helpful when you're 12 and trying to read a review that wants you to know that "Intricate subchambers of reaction provide space for iteration of higher level events." Yeah.
I miss those days. I remember poring over search results for hours hoping for something useful, or at least something new, about this extraordinary new world of music I'd just stumbled upon from some out of the way fan site with five thousand visitors ever; I remember hearing A Blaze in the Northern Sky or De Mysteriis Dom. Sathanas or The Celtic Winter for the very first time via mp3s with horrible bit rates that only featured the middle two minutes of a song; and I remember waiting for what seemed like years for those very records to come in the mail after having finally found them in some bedroom distro on the other side of the world, because none of them had been reissued yet and CD Now sure didn't carry 'em, never mind a physically-located music/media store.
And you know what? It was awesome. It may seem silly to some of you who don't know what I'm talking about, and it may even seem silly to some of you who do, but for me the manner in which I dove into metal was awesome and ultimately life-altering. I can only imagine how much more awesome discovering this music must have been for a tape-trader five, six, seven years prior, but I digress.
I have been working on this project for years, archiving material, source-checking, and creating stylized word documents and PDFs, and am still nowhere near completion. I may never be. I don't think I want to be. Enjoy.
Regards,
AEon
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