From:

Ecology, Estrangement and Enchantment in Black Metal’s Dark Haven

“Paganism, mysticism, occultism and other forms of marginal religiosity are combined with idealised depictions of natural or fantastic landscapes. Yet this music bewitched with ancient nature and tradition relies on electrical instruments, amplification and distortion, as well as electronic recording and playback devices, and it is primarily performed and consumed in urban settings.”

“The oft-favoured “low fidelity” mode of recording resonates aesthetically and etymologically with a lack of faith in hegemonic religious institutions, or a critique of faithlessness in the contemporary world; black metal’s approach to sound, environment and religion is disenchanted with but inextricable from contemporary urban life. While dissonantly evoking enchanted ecologies, black metal becomes itself a strange, secret ritualised environment, one whose boundaries, definitions, values and preferred or imagined audiences are anxiously guarded by some participants, even while such parameters are evidently unstable and uncontrollable.”

Keywords: Paganism, distortion, faith, ritual, religion, environment

From:

Electronic Dance Music Events as Modern-Day Ritual Electronic Dance Music Events as Modern-Day Ritual

“Through the act of dance, EDM participation requires one’s awareness to be in the body, allowing participants to experience “a kind of bodily mysticism, in which mystical union is experienced on physical, somatic, and kinesthetic levels” (Sylvan, 2005, p. 78). Repeated accounts of embodied, unitive experiences stimulated research into the ways in which EDM events exemplify the nontraditional forms of religion emerging in modern day life (Gauthier, 2005; Lynch & Badger, 2006; St John, 2004; Sylvan, 2005; Takahashi & Olaveson, 2003).”

Keywords: Mysticism, body, union, kinesthetic