Deafest -- 14,000 Feet

Deafest

Divinity of Mountains (tour poster)

AHAB

OMEGA MASSIF

VALBORG

Bergmetal: Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond

A veritable new orogeny, via gnOme books:



Nab Saheb & Denys X. Arbaris. Bergmetal: Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond. ISBN-13: 978-1494907204 ISBN-10: 1494907208. HWORDE, 2013. 114 pages.

Bergmetal is an exploratory tract on the trisonic intersections of MOUNTAINS, MYSTICISM, and HEAVY METAL. Mixing theoretical reflection and studious redaction into ascending gestures of alpine musical thought, the book proceeds via seven poetic emblems plus commentary addressing works by Bathory, Darkthrone, Sleep, Aluk Todolo, Omega Massif, Schrei aus Stein, and Sapthuran. Opening essays by the authors on the ideals and history of the bergmetal genre provide a logistical starting point and contextual basecamp.

CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: On Bergmetal
I. Enter the Mountain
II. No Way
III. Slumber Killed
IV. Occult Rock
V. Abandoned Mine
VI. Scream of Stone
VII. Never to Descend

“A casual email…a voidal exposure…! In this slim volume, metal, lyrics, and philosophy combine - “with spirit deathless, endless, infinite” – to launch a ferocious assault on the imagination!” – Manabrata Guha, Prize Fellow, Univ. of Bath

“A strange creature I am now, burnt by the sun and yet frozen, clung onto my will to take just another step” — Stormcrow

“Metal! Mysticism! Mountains! Whoever loves one will be interested in this book. Whoever loves two will like it. Whoever loves all three might be in paradise.” – Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College)

“An ascent into the wilderness of alpine aesthetics and heavy metallurgies, with poetry, mysticism, and esoteric philosophy illuminating the peaks and abysses of sublime human experience alongside the indifferent expanse of geological time.” — RH, Schrei aus Stein

*

"The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence; hence we knew that they that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only because of their abnormal height.  Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds.  In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation.  It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things--mountains of madness whose further slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.  That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world" (HPL, At the Mountains of Madness).

Halmos - To Climb the Mount

Eismond

Album information at Honour and Darkness

the tarns are frozen

and the summit is beyond all sight

ascendance through the clouds

the mountain awaits

all i once knew is now lost

all i once had is now gone

my memories are now forgotten

only a mountain of sorrow remains

-- "The Gilded Mountain"

Ancient Remembrances

Battle Dagorath -- Interdimensional Passageway Between Worlds

"The temple of this spirit is the primordial majesty of the peak, the glaciers, the crevasses, and the boundless blue sky. In this context the mountainous peaks and the spiritual peaks converge in one simple and yet powerful reality" (Evola, "The Mountain and Spirituality")

Battle Dagorath

Mountain of Silence

It speaks for itself.

Owen Coggins

Wayfarer - Toward Mountains

Stormcrow - Kingdom of Vertical

Stormcrow Stormcrow on Piz Julier 3380m "In the track 'Kingdom of Vertical', the image of the mountain is almost analyzed in an architectural way, and the power of its phenomena redirects into music with a deafening and unstoppable impetus, until it's clarified that the closeness of this ban to the world of mountains and mountaineering is anything but purely and simply coincidental . . . It's during this journey, and in alpine wanderings, that the Stormcrow soul and music has been forged and shaped, become powerful as hundreds of rockfalls, penetrating as the sinister creak of an ice sheet, melancholic as a horn that resounds calling from the lonely summit, waiting to be replied" (http://www.stormcrow.it/bio/)

Bathory - To Enter Your Mountain

Bathory
Blind fools who see only what they tell you to Open up your eyes you might see it too See there is a lot to see within you too Don't be like the rest and let them take it from you
Dumb fools who say only what they tell you to Speak up and find that there is more truth within you than you knew Somewhere someday you will stand before it too
Trust me there is a never ending mountainside to climb for you too To enter your mountain Go into your mountainside To enter one's mountainside Will take its man
Who enters his mountain With or without sword in hand Who enters his mountainside He will learn Deaf fools who hear only what they tell you to Open up your ears you might hear it too Listen there is a wild storm within you too Burst out use its powers don't be a...
Damn fool how can you follow paths not made by nor for you The only way you will ever need to walk is right there for you Somewhere someday you will stand before it too Trust me there is a never ending mountainside to climb for you too
To enter your mountain Go into your mountainside To enter one's mountainside Will take its man
Who enters his mountain With or without sword in hand Who enters his mountainside He will learn
[He who enter...] He who enters his mountain He who enters his mountain He who enters his mountain He who enters his mountain [He who enters his mountain He who enters his mountain He who enters his mountain Into one's mountainside]
"[T]he high mountain . . . belongs neither to this world nor to the one beyond it" (Ernst Bloch)
"I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, but who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth may some day become the overman's" (Nietzsche)

Brown Mountain, or, the Ulyssean Failure of Manifest Destiny

Brown Mountain
"Et nunc apparuit illi quidam mons tante altitudinis, quante nunquam in nostro mundo habitabili circunspexit. Ideo ait Ulixes in textu:
quando ci apparve una montagna, bruna per la distantia, et parvem'alta tanto quanto veduta non ave' alcuna.
Que autem terra sit ista quam a longe in plaga meridiana vidit Ulixes non bene sciri potest, quia de illa terra nulla vera ystoria reperitur; tum quia nullus unquam de illis partibus ad nos venit, nec de nobis unquam illuc ivit qui ad nos postea sit reversus. Tamen beatus Ysidorus dicit, XIIIIo libro Eth., quod extra tres partes orbis, Asiam scilicet, Affricam et Europam, quarta pars transocceanum interior est in meridie, que propter solis ardorem incognita nobis est, in cuius finibus anthipodas fabulose inhabitare produntur. Anthipode autem dicuntur homines qui subter nos habitare fabulose finguntur, qui tenent plantas contrarias nostris plantis." (Guido da Pisa (1327-28[?]), Inferno 26.133-135]
"Cinque volte si era illuminato (racceso) ed altrettante (tante) spento (casso) l'emisfero visibile (lo lume... di sotto) della (da la) luna, da quando (poi che) eravamo entrati ('ntrati) nella difficile impresa (ne l'alto passo), quando ci (n[e]) apparve una montagna, scura (bruna) a causa della (per la) distanza, e mi parve (parvemi) così (tanto) alta quanto non ne avevo (avëa) veduta nessuna (alcuna). – L'alto passo (che è anche il viaggio di Dante, il quale però usufruisce dell'ausilio divino: cfr. Inf. II.12; si tenga presente l'occorrenza di passo a Inf. I.26, in rima con basso) sta per giungere all'epilogo. Dopo un viaggio durato cinque lunazioni (l'emisfero inferiore della luna, quello visibile dalla terra, si era per cinque volte racceso e cinque casso: cfr. Aen. II.85), quasi cinque mesi, appare un'altissima montagna (cfr. Purg. III.14-15; IV.40), ancora bruna, cioè indistinta, dai contorni vaghi (cfr. Aen. III.522). È la montagna alla cui sommità si trova il Paradiso Terrestre (essa diverrà dopo l'Avvento la sede del Purgatorio), l'accesso al quale è vietato agli uomini dopo il peccato originale (Gen. 3.24; Purg. I.130-132). Secondo una leggenda di origine araba, in mezzo all'Oceano sorgeva un monte, sede del Paradiso. Ulisse, che con un atto di superbia ha oltrepassato i limiti dall'alto stabiliti, non può proseguire oltre; come subito si vedrà, egli sarà punito dall'intervento divino. ”Il viaggio non si svolge sotto la luce radiante del sole, simbolo della grazia divina, ma all'ombra della luna, simbolo della ragione umana non illuminata dalla grazia“ (A.A. Iannucci, Forma ed evento nella 'Divina Commedia', Roma, Bulzoni, 1984, pp. 163-64). Ulisse – accusa Aiace (cfr. n. 139-142) – compie le sue imprese con la complicità della notte (Metam. XIII.15), non fa nulla alla luce del sole (Ivi XIII.100). La presenza del numero ”cinque“ non è forse casuale, dato che si tratta del numero dei sensi, del mondo terreno. Comunque va notato che il tragitto della nave di Ulisse è lo stesso del lieve legno che trasporta le anime alla spiaggia del Purgatorio: le anime, ovviamente, sono prive di corpo, ma soprattutto contrite e perdonate da Dio." (Nicola Fosca (2003-2006), Inferno 26.130-135)

CRUX

Young and In the Way - I Am Not What I Am

YAITW - I Am Not What I Am

"I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?" (Thoreau, "deep within the hostile ranks of clouds" on Mt. Katahdin)

Falls of Rauros . . . Tol Brandir

Falls of Rauros
"'Behold Tol Brandir!' said Aragorn, pointing south to the tall peak. 'Upon the left stands Amon Lhaw, and upon the right in Amon Hen the Hills of Hearing and of Sight. In the days of the great kings there were high seats upon them, and watch was kept there. But it is said that no foot of man or beast has ever been set upon Tol Brandir. Ere the shade of night falls we shall come to them. I hear the endless voice of Rauros calling' . . . The day came like fire and smoke. Low in the East there were black bars of cloud like the fumes of a great burning. The rising sun lit them from beneath with flames of murky red; but soon it climbed above them into a clearly sky. The summit of Tol Brandir was tipped with gold. Frodo looked out eastward and gazed at the tall island. Its sides sprang sheer out of the running water. High up above the tall cliffs were steep slopes upon which trees climbed, mounting one head above another; and above them again were grey faces of inaccessible rock, crowned by a great spire of stone. Many birds were circling about it, but no sign of living things could be seen" (J.R.R.  Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring).

Oubliette

Eidetind by Christopher Radlund

Thence up he flew, and on the Tree of Life, The middle Tree and highest there that grew, Sat like a Cormorant; yet not true Life Thereby regain'd, but sat devising Death To them who liv'd (Milton, Paradise Lost, IV.194-7)
"But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness" (Isaiah 34:11)

Xexyz - Primeval Mountain

Mount Nintendo

The Howling Wind - A Dead Galaxy Mirrored in an Ice Mirage

The Howling Wind "Antarctica’s dynamic ice processes are always working to erode the possibilities of a seemingly stable form of accounting for geographical space. Wråkberg argues, ‘The slow pace of Antarctic exploration as a whole also indicated that there might be more to this than just adjusting field practices developed elsewhere to extreme polar conditions. The grand geographic project of the nineteenth-century Western culture seemed to have struck difficulties of a more profound nature in its encounter with the vast ice mass in the far south’. What this Antarctic excess suggests is that there are entropic forces at work within the making of all maps. The hallucinatory capacity of landscape phenomena, such as the mirage, works to re-inscribe the very notions of geographical fact within these processes of accounting for spaces. As vision sagged under the weight of ‘snow’, this formlessness demanded a new order of knowing and observation, and a new order of knower that could contend with how the landscape was realised through speculation . . . Antarctica constitutes a privileged site for critical thinking about vision and its relationship to the establishment of geographical truths. Wilkes did not know how to map the mirage because his predisposition to novel forms of unknowing precluded that possibility. This did not make the mirage any less ‘real,’ but it did make the possibility of its understanding that much more distant. The mirage, while seemingly illusory, emerges from real conditions and real contradictions within vision. It is illusory only to the extent that it did not fit within the way Wilkes delineated and mapped territory, but it did open up new climates of sight that eventually expanded the visual knowledge of the Antarctic region. The mirage is dialectically linked to our perception of the real, to a geographical form from which we establish normalising strategies. This dialectic suggests that these phantom displacements are not opposed to perception, but an extended quality of the state of perception, of an altered perception specific to place. This suggests that investigating the conditions of unknowing holds potential for geographical thought. As Antarctica provided an awkward terminus to a trajectory of nineteenth-century geography, it also suggested most clearly ‘openings’ to other kinds of geographical knowledges that acknowledge the dialectic relationship of vision to blindness and unknowing." (Kathryn Yusoff, "Climates of Sight Mistaken Visibilities, Mirages and ‘Seeing Beyond’ in Antarctica," in High Places).

Aluk Todolo - Occult Rock

Aluk Todolo "In Tana Toraja, the idea of the to manurun, mythical beings who descended from the heavens on mountain tops and became local rulers, may have been borrowed from the Bugis . . . Toraja tomanurun are always paired with an equally supernatural spouse, a woman who rose out of a river pool" (Roxana Waterson, "The Contested Landscapes of Myth and History in Tana Toraja," in The Poetic Power of Place: Comparative Perspectives on Austronesian Ideas of Locality, ed. James Fox [ANU E Press, 1997]).  

Sapthuran - Astigan Se Beorg

Sapthuran

Astigan Se Beorg (Journey up the Mountain)

He continued his journey
With eyes fixed upon the mountain
Soon he would reach its base
Soon he would ascend its slopes
The winds began to blow
The warm breeze turned to ice
It's bite invigorated his spirit
As he walked onward
The pain turned steeply upward
He struggled to to traverse the incline
The air grew thin
A faint snow began to fall
And he stepped out upon its apex
Looking over the forests below
He stood atop the highest mountain
And, finally, he was alone
Here he learned true peace
And he vowed never to descend

Never to return to the world

"But the third death, by which this Soul died, no one living grasps except the one on the mountain" (Marguerite Porte, Mirror of Simple Souls, Love speaking).

Ulver - Capitel V: Bergtatt - Ind I Fjeldkamrene

Ulver

"I will not speak about the mountain but through the mountain" (Rene Daumal)

Panopticon - Killing the Giants as They Sleep

We wept as we passed through the mountains clothed in July clouds,  under the restraint of power lines, their fury bursting through the summer haze as ethereal music filled the air. Nearly conquered by the mountain, I have found such deep respect for what you destroy. Older than time and cut down by a lesser foe, like thieves in the night mined for coal. Timeless stone buried beneath, unearthing the secret poisons into its belly… You hack at the mountain and scrape away for your simple need what was formed by silent gods on the day the void first burst with sound. Pulsing with life, you don't see its shimmering green. You see the deeps hue of coal, grey smoke and black waters in the stream… Poison the earth, poison the stream, killing the weary giants as they sleep, blackened waters, sand and soot-grinding gears halt serenity. Panopticon, "Killing the Giants as They Sleep," Kentucky (2012)