I’m very happy to be working with Michael O’Rourke again as well as Daniel Lukes and Radical Matters Editions Label on another Black Metal Theory Symposium being held in Dublin on Friday March 20th. It is titled Coloring the Black and will be live-streamed by RMEDL and can also be watched via youtube:
Info and schedule is as follows:
Organized by Daniel Lukes (USA) and Michael O’Rourke (IRE)
Dublin, Friday 20 March 2015 (venue GalleryX)
Coloring the Black will be a one-day symposium on Black Metal Theory to be held in Dublin on Friday 20th March, 2015. It will be the latest in a very successful series of events which have focused on black metal music, contemporary theory, philosophy, art, aesthetics, and music. The symposium has three primary aims: firstly, to challenge the potentially ponderous and serious nature of black metal theory, secondly, to question the black/white binary which dominates theorizing about black metal music and aesthetics, and thirdly, to foreground diverse, marginal, and intersectional black metal voices, readings, and practices.
It is our sense that Black Metal Theory runs the risk of taking itself far too seriously with the unfortunate result of taking the fun out of talking and thinking about black metal. More worryingly, it may end up establishing a KVLT BMT which would police or limit the potentialities of Black Metal Theory. In response to this we wish to open up the more comedic, playful, camp, ludic, carnivalesque dimension of black metal and black metal theory. In so doing, we set out to “pink” black metal by questioning its more nihilistic impulses (“blackening” and more “blackening”) in favour of more affirmative approaches and utilizations of BMT.
In “pinking” black metal/theory (and we are thinking here of critical and ironic BM-related gestures such as The Soft Pink Truth, Pinkish Black, Zweizz, Deafheaven, not to mention the influence of My Bloody Valentine and “pink noise” on shoegaze, post, or “hipster” black metal) we also hope to queer it by decentering the cisheteronormative and patriarchal underpinnings of both the black metal music and philosophy scenes. We wish to further BMT from a range of feminist, LGBTQ, and intersectional perspectives, including disability studies, crip theory, animal studies, and cute studies. Our interest in a more rainbow approach to black metal would also seek to consider and destabilize the racial normativities of black metal musical and theoretical traditions.
Our second sense is that there has been an almost exclusive attention to black or to black and white (in readings of corpsepaint, or noise for example) which has the effect of instantiating a binary which even a focus on “green” black metal has done little to disturb. In our coloring of the black we wish to open up Black Metal Theory to a broader spectrum beyond the black, a more prismatic and multicoloured BMT. Inspired by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s recent collection of essays Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (which includes essays by two contributors to black metal theoretical discourse in Ben Woodard and Timothy Morton) we hope to widen out the color spectrum of BMT to red, blue, pink, orange, green, gold, brown, violet, ultraviolet, grey and others.
Coloring the Black will bring theorists, philosophers, artists, musicians, and aestheticians together to have a black metal party.
Participants: Andy Curtis-Brignell, Vincent Como, Laina Dawes, Caoimhe Doyle, Drew Daniel, Daniel Lukes, Jonathan Mayhew, David Murphy, Darragh Ó Conchobhair, Ian O’Rourke, Michael O’Rourke, Stanimir Panayatov, Christophe Szpajdel, Dara Waldron.
12.00-12.20 Daniel Lukes + Michael O’Rourke, “Introduction”
12.20-12.30 Jonathan Mayhew, “Blink”
12.30-12.50 Dara Waldron, “Model Environments and Reality for Itself: Russell and Rivers’ A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness (2013)”
12.50-13.10 Christophe Szpajdel, “Title tbc”
13.10-13.30 Q + A
13.30.14.30 LUNCH
14.30-14.50 David Murphy, “The Aggressive Ludic Welcome of the Serbian Black Metal Scene”
14.50-15.10 Laina Dawes, “Listening to Difficult Music: Navigating Racial Identity Within the Black Metal Scene”
15.10-15.30 Vincent Como, “Devotion Has a Price”
15.30-15.50 Ian O’Rourke “’Black Was Never My Colour’”
15.50-16.10 Q + A
16.10-16.30 BREAK
16.30-16.50 Daniel Lukes, “Pink Black Metal”
16.50-17.10 Michael O’Rourke, “Pink, Punk, Pussy”
17.10-17.30 Stanimir Panayatov, “Sad Rainbows”
17.30-17.40 Drew Daniel, “Putting the Fag Back in Sarcofago”
17.40-18.00 Q + A
18.00-18.30 BREAK
18.30-18.50 Caoimhe Doyle, “Omphaloskepsis”
18.50-19.10 Andy Curtis-Brignell, “Safe Spaces/Unsafe Sounds: Black Metal’s Political Arms Race”
19.10-19.30 Q + A
19.30-20.00 Darragh Ó Conchobhair interview with Daniel Lukes + Michael O’Rourke
Vincent Como: 1x12 Drawing Subscription 