Black metal | part 2

  There seems to be nothing unique here, because forest walks, addressing the corresponding deities - all this is typical of the world scene, but the authors of some groups say, for example, that the Siberian forest is special, it is part of their local identity. My task is to understand these features and find out how musicians and artists work with them.

Devilgroth - Forgotten

- And what kind of authenticity can we talk about in this case? Is there a feeling that under the usual Scandinavian genre clichés created by Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, etc., just some Russian imagery is simply fitted, and the names use words like "pestilence" or "goblin"?

- Clichés shape the genre, so that feeling is completely normal. Another question is how musicians use and reinterpret these clichés. For example, Kittelsen's illustrations cannot be confused with those of Bilibin, although a parallel can be drawn between these artists: they lived at about the same time, illustrated folk tales, and popularized folklore. The artistic language of Ivan Bilibin is close, for example, to the language of Alphonse Mucha, the Arts and Crafts movement and other European artists working in the Art Nouveau style - then many turned to folk subjects, crafts, were fond of history, but at the same time were interested in oriental art (for example fashionable at that time Japanese) and did not give up their own ambitions. The style developed by Bilibin became part of the national identity. Kittelsen's work can be found on covers, for example, Burzum and Carpathian Forest, while Bilibin was inspired by the creators of the cover of MARA EP by the ZIMA group and the Second to Sun merch.

"WINTER" - "MARA"

I'm interested in how people determine the country of origin from the album cover. Recently I saw the following comment under the post with the new release of the St. Petersburg project Gigrøma: “Looking at the cover, I immediately thought it was a Russian project. It looks like some kind of national style in the design is emerging, which is great. " It is clear that the point is in the Orthodox cross, but it's great that this topic is raised in principle.

During interviews, I always ask musicians and listeners to name the most Russian, in their opinion, black metal cover. So far, the album cover "Songs of Death" by the Pskov post-black band "Put" is in the lead.

The most Russian black metal cover according to many

- Is it possible in black metal to have real regionalism (apart from registration), even if the Norwegians of the second wave were more inspired by Tolkien than by national culture?

- Everything is complicated with the national culture, because some of the traditions that we consider "primordial" were actually created artificially and appeared relatively recently. I remember a video with an analysis of modern Russian folk metal: according to a musicologist from the Russian Academy of Music Musically, only 3 groups of the Gnesins from the top 10 according to the channel's subscribers have at least some relation to Russian folk music.

(In this video with the analysis of Russian folk metal, the reaction of the audience is also interesting: a large part of the folk metal community reacts aggressively to constructive criticism, and traditional Russian music is spoken of as something far from the topic and completely optional. Bulat Khalilova.) That is, in order not to look strange, you first need to carry out a full-fledged research work, and then very carefully reconstruct and stylize. Of course, this also applies to images and typography: for example, Old Slavonic fonts (stylizations like statutes, semi-unust, cursive, ligature and their transitional forms) are associated with the emergence of Christianity in Russia, and then the question arises as to how appropriate it is to use them for album design dedicated to the myths of Slavic paganism.

"Sivy Yar" - "Towards Twilight"

Good work with regionality meets. A typical example is the Polish project "Father" (today there are two projects, but in this context it does not matter), which relies on the traditions of its region: the border region of Podlaskie, the northeastern region of Poland, where Orthodoxy predominates. Local rituals, landscapes and writing have become part of their recognizable image. It seems to me that this approach will work in Russia too: from Eastern Siberia alone so much can be pulled out: plots of local myths, rituals, shamanic symbols, etc.