Black metal

  National characteristics of Russian black metal: an interview with Yanina Rapatskaya, an academic researcher of the blackest of all musical genres

Black metal has long left the radical underground and took a place, albeit not in the forefront, but also not in the margins of mass culture. It is quite natural that not only Hollywood studios making films about Mayhem and Burzum began to show interest in him, but also academic researchers, and their attention is attracted not only by the defiant ideology of this genre - there are also more original approaches.

Yanina Rapatskaya teaches digital design at the Higher School of Economics and is engaged in the visual culture of Russian black metal. The Knife talked to her about how deeply Russian black metal is connected with the local context, how its representatives use national images and clichés in their art, and also discussed with her the development of the visual component of this genre in Russia.

- Tell us how you became interested in black metal and why you decided to make it a subject of scientific research?

- I think the first time I heard black metal when I was 13-14 years old I was presented with the disc Impaled Nazarene. Before that I listened mainly to gothic metal and darkwave. IN's music caught my eye (music, because it was a self-made CD-R without lyrics and pictures), although I can't say that since then I have completely switched to black metal, but I have never lost sight of it.

Last year I entered the Graduate School of Art and Design at the Higher School of Economics with a completely different topic - I was going to continue working on another project related to interactive literature within the academic framework. But after the first organizational meeting of graduate students, it became clear that I was tired of the book for 12 years, and if I continue to work on this safe, but completely exhausted topic for me, I will betray my own idea, which I am trying to convey to my students: at least during study, it is worth telling only about what is actually of interest.

At night I wrote to the head of the graduate school that I was changing the subject, and the next day I went to consult with Evgeny Voronovsky, my colleague at the School of Design. I already knew for sure that I would write about the visual in music, but it was necessary to formulate the topic more specifically. Again, we started with safe topics like hand-drawn sound, but then black metal appeared in the conversation, and I fired up this idea, because there really is a hard-codified visual language and a set of images, and the approach to them can vary depending on the subgenre. views of musicians and national culture.

Then I decided on the material: I decided to take up only black metal from Russia, because I have direct access to it - some kind of acquaintances, the opportunity to attend concerts, read interviews and texts in my native language, and I know our culture in general better , than others.

- What does the visual culture of black metal include?

- Design for albums, booklets, posts on social networks, merchandise, zines, music videos, photo shoots, the stage image of musicians and other artifacts considered in a cultural context. Now I am studying themes that are authentic for Russian black metal, visual techniques and various manifestations of local-territorial identity, that is, how local bands try to be authentic and fit into the genre at the same time: corpse paint, spikes, black and white covers, unreadable logos , anti-Christian symbolism (of course, in our country it changes with an amendment to Orthodoxy), nature, pre-Christian imagery, etc., how they rework the works of Russian artists and use national clichés. For example, there are a number of modern bands that play mainly atmospheric black and use forest images to decorate.