Metal Music Studies - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2022

The Ujung Berung (Bandung, Indonesia) death metal scene arguably peaked in the years 2009–13. Based on personal interviews and conversations with musicians, we identify four factors adversely affecting the scene at present: (1) decline in community nongkrong/relocation of Serak store at Jalan Cihampelas; (2) those left behind – the disillusionment of the older second-division bands; (3) the new generation’s attitude and perspective and (4) the turn towards religion. We also explore whether Indonesian masculinity is in crisis, because of young Indonesian men’s subordinated place within global capitalism and the threat that capitalism poses to traditional hierarchies. Hypermasculine death metal culture inspires because it is western in origin but not bourgeois – it is a mysterious mix of signs, symbols, sounds and mythologies, which attracts by its very obscurity; it quietly challenges, in its indirect way, the power of Indonesian hegemonic identities such as ‘pious Islamic family-man’ and ‘businessman’.

The field of metal music and culture studies is rapidly growing throughout the world. Efforts to document its history and development have emerged via publications in academic journals and edited books. Although this historical documentation of the emergence of an area of study is valuable, it has been geographically laden towards the Global North, and written by English-speaking scholars there. In this article, we aim to inform and balance that history-telling process through an exploration of contributions made from Spanish-speaking scholarly epicentres in the Global South. In doing so, we propose and implement a strategy that (1) surpasses the limitations of universalist approaches towards history by including contributions from epicentres of research in both the Global North and the Global South, (2) engages in a self-critical examination of the field of metal music studies, and asks scholars to examine why, and understand how, the disconnections between metal scholars in the Global North and the Global South come into existence and (3) recognizes that knowledge is developed through many mechanisms that bypass academic journals, monographs and traditional modes of academic writing. In order to understand how these three tenants are manifested in the Spanish-speaking world we present examples from Spain, Puerto Rico, Argentina, México, Guatemala and Perú. We recommend that future efforts to document the histories (in plural) of this area of study take into consideration scholarly efforts outside the Global North as a way to decolonize metal studies.

Consulting the texts of twentieth-century rhetorician Kenneth Burke, this article maps a particular way that funeral doom metal acts as a tool of social communication. The investigation specifically examines how the music sparks contemplation in its listeners. To better understand this rhetoric, this article highlights the role of nonknowledge, negative space and solemnity to show how this musical rhetoric leads listeners into modes of transcendent thinking. Specifically, this examination gestures to several funeral doom artefacts from early 1990s, including albums from Cathedral, Skepticism and Thergothon. The article concludes by celebrating why ‘mystical’ attitudes can be valuable within social communication – and how funeral doom metal can serve that function.

Remaining true to its origins, the survival-horror video game film adaption, Resident Evil: The Original Motion Picture released in 2002, retains its core foundational game-like qualities. The film is heavily influenced by the video game franchise and it appears as if the audience is treated the same as the player. This is because the viewers are forced to ‘participate’ from fixed camera angles. As expected, the music contained within the moving image also borrows well-established compositional techniques from horror films and survival-horror video games. The music, therefore, serves to provide information to the viewers and acts as an auditory trigger. This type of music is defined as ‘process music’; music that appears to imitate a process of actions. An additional function of the music is to create immersion. The most prominent soundtrack cues from the film, visually and musically (‘synchronically’ matched), hint at overarching medical, artificial and mechanical themes. This immersive link is achieved through the use of the related music genres of industrial metal and nü-metal. The resultant combination of industrial/nü-metal sounds with horror imagery can effectively be termed ‘nü-horror metal’. In this article the genre label of ‘nü’ takes preference over ‘industrial’. The focus of this article will, therefore, demonstrate how the aforementioned medical, artificial and mechanical themes are effectively portrayed and heightened by the use of industrial/nü-metal music and techniques. This article will also highlight when the music serves a process function. This will be approached by appealing to traditional film music analytical tools engaging specifically with the traditional film music theory of ‘synchrony’ and ‘asynchrony’.

Audio heritage is a relatively unexplored area within popular music studies from a technical production perspective. This research raises awareness of the importance and challenges of audio preservation and provides insights into archiving practices of record labels and producers. Based on interviews with German metal music producers, the article examines the conflicting artistic, economic and legal forces in the recording industry that often result in the loss of master tapes and multi-track recordings, thus preventing significant remastering for new consumer media such as high-resolution streaming or remixes valuable to artists and their fans alike. The findings suggest that there is no archiving standard amongst record labels. It is often up to record producers to archive and preserve recorded artefacts, which they do voluntarily and at their own expense, either in the hope of future commercial exploitation or to preserve their work. Whilst established record producers who began in the analogue era seem to be reliable archivists, the modern metal music industry, with its shrinking budgets, semi-professional, digitally home-recorded productions and self-releasing artists, puts the genre’s more recent audio heritage at risk.

Review of: A Blaze in the Northern Sky, Ross Hagen (2020)

New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 152 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-5013-5433-5, p/bk, £16.99