Musicologist Juliet Forshaw interviews 2012 Artist-in-Residence Hunter Hunt-Hendrix in anticipation of the final performance of his residency. Following his controversial chapbook "Transcendental Black Metal", he presents selections from his ever-in-progress libretto for the opera “OIOION” November 13, 2012.
Juliet Forshaw: One reviewer called your music “black metal by way of the conservatory.” So I wanted to ask you about the way in which you’ve combined black metal and experimental classical music styles such as minimalism, electronic music and to a lesser extent spectralism. What are you taking from each of those traditions?
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: Well, I don’t know if it really is black metal by way of the conservatory, though I have studied music some, and I’m very interested in medieval music, Romantic music, minimalism and the European avant-garde. But it isn’t serious music—it is metal, or at least experimental rock. I don’t write compositions; I write songs. The music isn’t virtuosic and technical the way that serious music is. The connection is more that I’m interested in the concepts about sound that structure minimalism, for example in Branca, and various Euro avant-garde composers, Xenakis and so on, and some of the extra-musical concepts that structure Romantic music. Especially Wagner’s ideas —the total work of art and also the hope to make a work of art that’s more than a work of art. This ideal, this hope to make something that really matters in some kind of ethical way rather than just sort of finding a slot in the canon.
JF: Wagner described the operatic music of his time as “music for tired businessmen and their wives.” He wanted to do something that was more mystical and spiritual.
HH: Yeah. Create a sort of modern myth, a sort of redemptive monument. And I don’t think I’ve succeeded in doing that. I don’t think Liturgy is that, but I wish I had done that.
JF: Are you still trying?
HH: Yeah, and maybe I still will. But if not, it’s okay. Nietzsche said somewhere that the best artists are the ones who are disappointed to be merely artists. The paradigm of that is Scriabin and his idea of Mysterium, the multimedia piece of music and light that would trigger the apocalypse.
JF: And of course the apocalypse didn’t happen.
HH: Well, he mysteriously died before he got a chance to complete it. Though there’s Nemtin who tried to complete the piece from Scriabin’s sketches. I have a recording of it. It sounds okay. But his sketches weren’t very developed, so it was mostly composed by this other guy. And it wasn’t staged by the Danube or wherever it was supposed to be. As for minimalism, I draw influence from the various minimalisms in a pretty simplistic way. I compose at times thinking either in a cell or pattern-oriented or alternately a spectrum or sound-oriented way. Even though we have chord changes and harmonic progressions, I think the constant droning flux is a big factor, as well as gradual change.
JF: The drone and the repeating patterns link up nicely with black metal because black metal is already about very repetitive riffs and there’s some droning in it. So maybe that’s a natural fit.
HH: Yeah, and it’s playing music with a rhythm that’s so fast that it becomes indiscernible to the ear or at least to the body because of the constant stream of sound. Your muscles can’t move fast enough to really bounce up and down.
JF: And yet people still manage to mosh to your music.
HH: Only sometimes. It’s funny, we just played the Pitchfork music festival and I did an interview before we played where I talked about how no one ever moshes at our shows. It never happens because it’s too chaotic and people just kind of stand there gaping. That was before our performance. And then we performed, and it happened to be pouring rain that day, and I think that somehow pushed people over the edge. They were moshing like crazy and slinging mud at each other. There are pictures of it and it looks like when Nine Inch Nails played Woodstock.
JF: Once mud becomes part of the equation everything moves to a whole different level.
HH: Yeah, sort of like Dionysian frenzy. Otherwise, the rain would have really kind of ruined the performance. Rain is usually a bad thing. You either withdraw and hide somewhere or you’re just like, well fuck it, it’s raining and I’m soaked, I’m going to go crazy. So anyway, it was a video interview and they chose to splice my words saying that no one moshes during our shows with all this footage of this, like, riot going on during the show.
JF: You mentioned ethics before. The title of your latest album, Aesthethica, implies a connection between aesthetics and ethics. How do you see those two things as related in your work?
HH: I really believe in this dimension of life that you see Bergson or Deleuze write about, the virtual space which I think is present in a different way as the over-soul in Emerson and Transcendentalism or in Alain Badiou, who is closer to Emerson than people realize. There’s an impersonal stream of life that’s really alive and it’s creative. The true, the good and the beautiful—that stream is where these three reside together in a unity. The beautiful leads to the good and the good leads to the beautiful, which is the true. These are very old ideas, but they continue to be true, even if they are inflected in new ways with each generation. The True is something very different today from what is was for, say, Aristotle.
JF: In connection with what you’re saying about American Transcendentalism and the over-soul and various post-structuralist philosophers, your declaration Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism situates black metal in the context of Romanticism, American Transcendentalism and the philosophical tradition that began with Nietzsche. This was a surprising move to a lot of people because for most of its history metal has been perceived as anti-intellectual. Do you think that changed with black metal?
HH: Yeah, maybe it changed with black metal. It’s always been confusing to me that it’s confusing to other people that I situate black metal in this context, because to me, the connections seem pretty obvious. These are all things I was getting into at around the same time and for the same reasons. So when I think of my personal development of taste and values, it just all goes together. I at first didn’t really think of it as some kind of contrarian, bold move to talk about my music in this context, because it’s really just the context that I found it in. I don’t know how to answer the question of whether metal used to be anti-intellectual.
JF: Maybe it wasn’t, but it was certainly perceived as anti-intellectual by outsiders.
HH: Right, and even by some insiders too, maybe. There are probably more anti-intellectual people in metal scenes than there are in some other kinds of scenes.
JF: With black metal in particular, the perception that outsiders have is that it’s idiotically racist and fascist, and most intellectuals today don’t buy into those things, though there’s been a little bit of philosophical interest in fascism lately. How do you relate to these more unsavory or politically incorrect elements of the tradition?
HH: To go back to the question of the status of black metal vis-à-vis intellectual or anti-intellectual, I think black metal has had a reputation as pseudo-intellectual for a while. The first metal website I discovered into was calledanus.com. Its contributors were always writing a lot about Nietzsche, but the old second-generation Nietzsche, the fascist reading of Nietzsche. And certainly insofar as people use black metal to promote nationalism or racism or homophobia or literal fascism, it hardly needs to be said that I disagree with people who use it in that way. But it’s possible to invoke these same figures, figures like Nietzsche and Wagner and Heidegger—Heidegger as much as Nietzsche—who have been used to justify fascist positions, and extract a different position from them. The Nietzsche that Bataille and Deleuze celebrate is different from the one that Hitler went to go visit. I’m more interested in that one. So, regarding the standard political outlook that dominates black metal, I think it’s possible to instead of being like “Hey I’m in to the music and I’m just going to try to ignore all that ideological bullshit,” I think my attitude is the opposite of that. It’s to really go deeply into the conceptual or political side and really take it seriously and connect it perhaps to something more redemptive and less pseudo-intellectual.
JF: Speaking of the connections between post-structuralist philosophy and black metal, one thing they seem to have in common is the decentering of the human subject. A lot of post-structuralist philosophy suggests that the Cartesian rational, enclosed self is an illusion. Black metal seems similar in that it’s not very interested in the rational human self. It focuses on demonic forces or extreme experiences that are not accessible to human reason. Your music seems to focus on extreme experiences too, particularly in the way you make impressionistic declarations about the universe. It’s not a narrative usually in your songs; it’s not a story; there’s not always a sense of an “I”. And your lyrics explore ecstatic states that are beyond reason. So I was wondering, what do you think is to be gained from decentering or sacrificing the rational self in favor of these other states of consciousness that you’re exploring?
HH: I don’t really think of it that way [laughs]. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from sacrificing the rational self, but I do think there’s something satisfying about transcendence. And there is something to what you’re saying. A really important element for Liturgy is the burst beat.. It’s not the same as the blast beat that you find in black metal, it’s a burst beat, which means it accelerates, decelerates and explodes. Our songs usually have tempo but the tempo itself is a little bit unstable and also the beat is not really connected to the tempo. It is meant to be disruptive in some way. Difficult to absorb in a way that’s also kind of attractive somehow, and it’s supposed to create this state of ultimate surrender. And I think this relates somehow to what you’re talking about. With rock music generally, the one hard and fast rule that governs rock is that there’s a steady beat. That’s something that hasn’t been true for classical music in a long time. But with rock the rule is there, no matter how experimental. Either there’s a steady beat or there’s utter chaos. But I try to maintain a reference to the steady beat but have it burst at the seams. I don’t want the music to collapse into chaos. There’s probably something about reason in there.
JF: And maybe also with a stable energy state, like a stable sense of where you are right now. And you’re trying to get beyond that, maybe.
HH: Sure. Rock music, but with volcanoes or something in the songs that burst them open. Now, you ask what is to be gained from that? I don’t really have an answer, because the urge to make music that feels that way and sounds that way—I don’t really have an explanation for it. I just always really wanted to do it, and I find it really satisfying to make it and to play it. I remember before I was doing Liturgy wishing that there was music that did that. Maybe there could be ways to connect it to this peak experience where you relate to the flux. It does that for me, anyway.
JF: Well you’re definitely trying to get the audience in some other state than they’re in in everyday life. I guess that’s the point of metal.
HH: Sure, well that’s Schopenhauer’s conception of music generally too, an experience outside of your ordinary goal-oriented existence. Though I think he had in mind listening to a Bach partita, not such a chaotic experience. Though I think that in the 21st century—you know, Benjamin has talked about how the art of the future will have to do its work with its audience in a state of distraction. There’s just not the time and space for the kind of quiet contemplation that used to be the norm—sitting down and watching someone play a partita on the piano or something like that. Somehow, really intense, bombastic violence is more effective in breaking you out of the trance than something calm.
JF: This idea of transforming people’s states of mind reminds me a lot of mystical thought, though I think that a lot of mystics in the Middle Ages would not have seen mystical potential in this chaotic, loud music. Some of what you say in your declaration reminds me of mystical thought too, for example, when you say that “Transcendental Black Metal is black metal in the mode of sacrifice.” There’s this interest in sacrifice all throughout your music, particularly in Renihilation. So I was wondering about the connection between sacrifice and certain religious notions of mysticism and martyrdom and resurrection. In many myths, a person has to sacrifice a body part such as an eye in order to gain wisdom or die in order to become a god. It seems like sacrifice is part of your approach to this music. So I was wondering if sacrifice is related to this notion of achieving some other state of consciousness—a different state of being or a different approach to the world.
HH: I think that in a way when I use sacrifice in that context I’m thinking about my music in relation to black metal. It’s a sort of betrayal. Sure, maybe there’s a martyrdom aspect to the controversy that surrounded Transcendental Black Metal, which I didn’t entirely expect. But more than that I think of sacrifice as self-overcoming. Deleuze points out that in Nietzsche there are two modes of the will to power. There’s development and there’s ramification. In development, there’s some goal in the distance that you can’t quite articulate, but this organism develops over the course of generations without knowing it in order to reach this goal. But then he says that a goal that has been reached is transcended eo ipso. So you reach this level, you arrive, and the goal is gone because it seemed like an end in itself, but it wasn’t. Then, there’s this second mode of the will to power, which is sacrifice. It’s like, well, now we’re here and there’s a different kind of possibility on the horizon, which involves a betrayal of everything that we were trying to reach in the first place. But it appeared because of unanticipated changes in the organism as it was developing towards the original goal. So when I use the term sacrifice, it relates to that.
JF: What kind of performances do you want to do in the future? You’ve mentioned in the past that you were getting tired of being a rock band and playing rock shows. How do you envision shows in the future?
HH: Playing rock shows isn’t bad, though touring is grueling. Playing in a new music context is nice too, though we get noise complaints. Narrative and ideas are an important aspect of this project, and I’d like to be able to incorporate those dimensions more seamlessly with the music. I’m working towards something more like a multimedia opera.
JF: So like Stockhausen?
HH: Maybe a little bit. The Licht cycle is pretty inspiring. But, well, there’s no point in explaining in advance. I’ve been working on a libretto for a while. It’s just a day at a time. My composition process is to generate all this material and then go back and figure out how it all works together. I plan a lot but I never stick to what the plan was. I just suddenly discover how what I’ve been working on fits together.
Juliet Forshaw is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology at Columbia University.
