Towards a New Philosophy of Music

Or, the Four Fundamental Concepts of Transcendental Black Metal

There has never been a philosophy of music or a music theory that is able to encompass sacred music, classical music and rock music all at once. Here I’ll sketch the outline of one, but like any rigorous Marxist I ultimately refer you the fruit of the theory over the theory itself, to Liturgy as the praxis which ultimately grounds and proves the theory.¹

Unlike many rock musicians, I compose music built on new and auto-nominated techniques with philosophical meaning: the Haptic Void, Special Tremolo, General Tremolo and The Burst Beat. While these concepts crystallize into actual techniques for playing guitar and drums, singing, and composing + producing, which then yield songs and performances, each also has world-historical and metaphysical significance. They give a meaning to the phenomenon of resonance in sacred music, the tonal system of classical music, avant-garde atonal composition, anti-intellectual and insurrectionary punk, rock, rap, and metal in their relationships to man’s technological and religious history.

THE HAPTIC VOID

The Haptic Void is a proposed identity between two things: the final cause of world history and the soul’s (including my own) thirst for oblivion-fulfillment. Every feeling, every sensation is haptic. The first few hundred hertz of pitch space are felt in the body as much as they are heard as tone, but even psychoacoustic perception itself, along with vision and taste, are varieties of touch, maybe more nuanced. The use of the ear and sound as the channel for music is relatively trivial and contingent. My drive to listen to and make music has always been a drive for oblivion and unity, for the infinite and infinitesimal; a drive I’ve never really understood, the kind of thing one doesn’t ‘understand’ except through having made what needed to be made. I’ve always partly resented my favorite albums and pieces for leading me part of the way to infinity but then leaving me stranded before arriving there. The sound of Liturgy in its creating, uncreated aspect shines between the cracks of created works like Siamese Dream, Music for 18 Musicians, the Rite of Spring, Jane Doe, Catch 33, the Brahms symphonies, the Bartok quartets, Document #8.

And you can see this phenomenon in the development of styles historically, but in different ways depending on the aeon, depending on the technological revolution underway at the time. For classical music, after Bach laid down the basic rules for modulating between 12 perfectly identical keys, the haptic void pulled style towards ever-increased chromaticism for a few hundred years until the tradition imploded into atonal modernism. This was a musical analogue to industrial production. For rock, the invention was the cluster of the drum kit, the amplified voice, amplified guitars touching. The pull of the haptic void was fundamentally a snare-kick drum beat accelerating from a 120 bpm half note to a 32nd note over the course of 40 years, until it detached from human biorhythms it had synced to and imploded into the burst beat, which is black metal’s modernism. In each case, a cascade of works and rules laid down, another cascade of creation surging through the cracks. Music is better explained by its future than by its past. Beauty calls from the future, the siren song of 93696.

The haptic void calls forth a voice, a unique creative project seeking to get closer to the light than completed projects it has absorbed. But it is also voice in the more literal sense of the term, my own voice, hovering at the threshold between classical song and screaming. It is the mutually deracinating and mutually amplifying war between technology-science-capitalism and idealism-insurrection-communism.

SPECIAL AND GENERAL TREMBLING

Tremolo is performance on a stringed instrument that seeks a blurry zone between the distinct and the continuous (the word means ‘trembling’). On a bowed instrument it involves stuttering the bow strokes, on a plucked instrument like the guitar, it means picking fast enough to almost create the illusion of a bow stroke. These indistinct spheres between form and matter have metaphysical significance, as they are the channels through which solutions to the problems posed by the haptic void can be generated.

Tremolo is the standard technique for black metal guitar (and no other type of rock music besides totalism), because of an inarticulate urge to push metal in a reactionary direction, away from clubs and mosh pits and into occult, classical and ritual territory. Black metal was always the end-of-history of metal, which is why I chose it as a material for my work.

I elevate guitar tremolo technique to the level of special trembling by focusing on the pitch range above the 12th fret, which brings it in line with classical melody range, as well as by constructing phase shifting patterns in the spirit of classical minimalism. These two techniques blur the lines between metal and classical. It’s only recently that I’ve thought to name what I do on guitar , since it’s always felt so intuitive to me - I used to say that all metal guitar tremolo was special trembling, but over time I’ve come to see that the octave shift upwards is extremely important.

Special Trembling and General Trembling have the same relationship as Einstein’s Special and General Relativity. The first is relatively straightforward, the latter is staggeringly complex and creates contractions that are still not solved. The Liturgy of Immortal Life, Renihilation and Aesthethica developed Special Trembling. General Trembling begins with The Ark Work and culminates in 93696.

General trembling abstracts the idea of tremolo further, partly by orchestrating tremolo for pitched percussion instruments and partly through digital skipping effects, and partly through shocking changes in style which create a stuttering glitches in subculture identification

Special trembling is a way of playing guitar, general trembling is a way of arranging and producing music; each is using pitch, tone and melody to make connections and blur distinctions between different silos of musical style in a way that brings heaven down to earth, that has as its limit a glorious cacophony of all styles of music in all genres, all instruments, all techniques and compositional tools, infinitely loud, infinitely detailed, pushing the limits between aesthetics and life, and between human phenomenology and instrumental reason.

THE BURST BEAT

This one is explained pretty well in this video

A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

The key to music is the union between the “freedom to” of the scientific, industrial and democratic revolution of the 1700, the “freedom from” of the countercultural and digital revolution of the 1900 and the “freedom for” of the earliest religious impulse. Music should engage microtonality, equal-temperament tonality, classical and operatic forms, amplification, albums, streaming, merchandise, fandom, art institutions, insurrection, extremely long and short durations, extremely loud and quiet dynamics, steady rhythms, chaotic and accelerating rhythms, meticulous composition, improvisation, DAWs, MIDI, western notation, expertise and virtuosity, primitivism and amateurism. The aim of exhaustive music is to generate and stimulate fully free human beings, more free than human beings have ever been, free even from much of what we wrongly associate with being human because it’s the outward appearance of a layer of skin that the world spirit is ready to shed.

1. The point of philosophy being not to understand the world but to change it