Dronevolk

Here is the trailer for the very nice Dronevolk documentary, about the Belgian Drone and Free Folk scene. Amongst others, it features artists such as Silvester Anfang, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, and Ignatz. The film, by photographer Jef Mertens, contains live footage, exclusive recording sessions and interviews.

Silvester Anfang - Kosmies Slachtafval

The notorious Malleus Maleficarum was a something of a handbook for witch hunters, written by inquisitors Sprenger and Institoris. The book, which you can find in it's entirety here, consists of three parts: the first examines theological issues raised by the existence of witchcraft, the second examines the the erotic and magical practices of witches as well as the possession of witches by Devils, and the third and final part describes the proper practical and legal methods for the detection and repression of witchcraft. Though the style of the book is academic (combining legal and theological discourse) the content speaks of an macabre obsession with female eroticism. Page upon page details the copulation of witches with incubi and succubi, copulation which takes place in a rural background: fields, forest, villages. The book is the product of , misogynous urbanoid mass hysteria, of the fear of city-dwellers of the country-dwelling female ‘other’.

Belgian band Silvester Anfang's album "Kosmies Slachtafval" proudly manifests the most terrible fears of these witch hunters. Just take a look at the art work: a black-haired, barely dressed, sickly-looking girl licking a human skull, the Flemish flag in the background - a proud-looking goat with large curled horns in a hilly rural area - a conservatively-dressed young women gazing lovingly on a baby goat - a drawing of a witches' sabbath, three sorcerous hags huddled around a boiling kettle and a fourth riding a goat through the skies ... And the song titles can only confirm the inquisitor's fears: "Mijn vader was een wolf en mijn moeder was een hoer" ("My father was a wolf and my mother was a whore") and "Konfituur voor de satansjeugd" ("Marmelade for the Satanic youth").

Silvester Anfang's "Kosmies Slachtafval" is yet another excellent release from the dependable Aurora Borealis.

The name of the band, "Silvester Anfang", is related to one of the more unlikely episodes in Black Metal history. "Silvester Anfang" is the title of the percussion intro on Mayhem's 1987 mini-album "Deathcrush". The intro is played - of all people - by Tangerine Dream and Kluster member Conrad Schnitzler. It was recorded at the request of Mayhem's front man Øystein Aarseth (perhaps better known under his nom de plume Euronymous). Aarseth was a fan of German electronic music; but Schnitzler had no idea what kind of music Euronymous made. Here is Conrad Schnitzler's account of this strange intersection of very different music styles (link). Mayhem still use the clattering percussion track to open their concerts (link).

The name of the band can be regarded as emblematic for the band's artistic program: a witch's broth of blackened Krautrock with bleak and unnerving ambient synthesizer. But there's even more to Silvester Anfang than that: the music comes across as a Black Metal take on free-form drone-folkies Pelt, as if Pelt had been raised on a steady diet of Burzum, Mayhem, Immortal and Gorgoroth instead of on John Fahey and Americana. It comes as no surprise that Silvester Anfang and Pelt mainman Jack Rose have put out a split 7" on Aim records. "Kosmies Slachtafval" ("Cosmic Offal") is dark and droning, with fingerpicked guitar work and moody, murky drones, the crepescular synths taking the role played by ragas in Pelt's music. Silvester Anfang call their own music "Funeral Folk" - an amalgam of "Funeral Doom" and "Free Folk"?

All in all, I highly recommend "Kosmies Slachtafval". Here are two YouTube videos of Silvester Anfang at play.

Three From Belgium (pt. 4)

A cold and uncaring television producer, his psychologically disturbed and pregnant wife and their autistic son have moved to a small village in the Belgian rural Ardennes region, in the hope that the peace and quiet of rural life will have a beneficent effect on the boy's autism. But there is little peace to be had: the degenerate and superstitious villagers have no sense of privacy and intrude continually upon the family life, the fundamentalist catholic priest berates the couple for their lack of faith, toads and other unclean animals worm their way into the household, and one night their pet baby goat is beheaded, it's head nailed to the wooden door of their farmstead! The wife's dreams become stranger and stranger as slowly the mythical, shamanic powers of the Ardennes landscape are revealed...

Belgian comic artist and Ardennes native Didier Comes' classic 1983 graphic novel "La Belette" ("The Weasel") is a haunting tale in which city dwellers must confront and overcome their urbanoid fear of country people and enter a supernatural world of witchcraft and wiccan deities. Influenced by Belgian magical-realist novelists such as Michel De Ghelderode en Jean Ray (the author of Malpertuis), and narrated with a cinematic sense of beauty, the story Didier Comes tells is still gripping 24 (!) years after it was first published. Visually, the graphic novel is a treat: it is drawn in an magnificent chiaroscuro black and white that I utterly love. Didier Comes' oeuvre comes with the highest recommendations.

"La Belette" points towards aspects of urbanoia, the city-dweller’s fear of the country-dwelling ‘other’, that Carol Clover missed out in her classic study of horror film, 'Man, women and chain saws'. The study focuses on American slasher flicks of the 1980s, and that focus has consequences for her analysis of urbanoia: aspects of that fear that are irrelevant to the concerns of that particular genre are overlooked. I'm referring to themes of superstition, witchcraft, sorcery and mythology, themes that are apparently more 'at home' in Old World than in American urbanoia.

Like Belgian Black Metal band Lugubrum, Didier Comes appropriates the fears of urbanoia, harnessing the 'mystery' and 'wildness' projected onto rural areas by urban culture. Where Lugubrum uses the power of the scatological (Clover: "They do not observe the civilized rules of hygiene or personal habit..."), Didier Comes avails himself of the mystical powers which suburban wiccan witches and their urban academic predecessors have ascribed to country dwellers. To the magic of the Ardennes, Comes fuses another magic, the magic of primitivism.

The results are breath-taking.

Three From Belgium (pt. 3)

Belgian Black Metal band "Lugubrum" plays on urbanoia, the city-dweller’s fear of the country-dwelling ‘other’ as described by Carol Clover in her classic study of horror film, 'Man, women and chain saws'.

Keeping their tongue firmly planted in their cheeks, the band purposefully dons the carnival costume of corpse-painted yokels.

The photographs on their website present them as bad-mannered and unhygienic (they're obsessed with excrement; their video for 'De Ware Hond' opens with a dog licking his anus; one of their cd's is called "Bruyne Troon" ("Brown Throne") - a scatalogical title if ever there was one; the lead singer has a long and unkempt beard; and there is something filthy about their fetish for carrots too). They are portrayed lying drunkenly about the home farm, and as stalking through the fields carrying sharp farming implements such as scythes and pitchforks - waiting for a 'final girl' to fall into their unwashed hands, perhaps.

In fact, Lugubrum look like what the Calvaire's peasant villagers would look like if they were younger and skinnier and didn't play the piano but Black Metal.

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Lugubrum started out as a rather typical Darkthrone cult in the mid-1990s, playing a raw sounding, extremely lo-fi Black Metal in the Under A Funeral Moon-era style. However, through the years they evolved their own unique style by adding unusual instruments such as banjo (no instrument signifies 'country bumpkin' better than a banjo!), the saxophone (invented by the Belgian Adolphe Sax), the melodica and even tablas.

I saw them play live on June 28th 2005, opening for Sunn 0))) at Amsterdam's Paradiso venue: chaotic and dense riffing added with utterly insane and cacaphonous saxophone playing yielded a sum I didn't really appreciate at the time, as I wasn't yet fully initiated into the sordid delights of Black Metal. Nonetheless, the impression they made lasts to this very day.

Since that concert, their sense of composition has grown considerably: the most recent album, "De Ware Hond", presents an unusual cross-breed of mid-tempo Black Metal, Post Rock, Prog, and Jazz Fusion. The album is rich in ideas: if this is 'Boersk Black Metal' ("Farmers' Black Metal') it is not an industrialized Agribusiness Black Metal but rather an artisanal Slow Food Black Metal. Rabelais rather than Raskolnikov, Bakhtin before Bataille and Breughel before Bosch, the album is well worth investigating!

To finish this post, here is a short clip of Lugubrum playing live in march 2007 at the K-RAA-K 3 festival.

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Three From Belgium (pt. 2)

Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz 2004 debut film "Calvaire" is a horror film which I can highly recommend.

Set in the rural region of the Belgian Ardennes, a region of extensive forests and rolling hill country, the film explores the class-based fear city people have of the rural poor, a fear which animated horror films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance, Mother's Day and Motel Hell.

In the film, Laurent Lucas plays Marc Stevens, a showman who performs his inauthentic show in homes for the elderly, causing the hearts of nurses (Brigitte Lahaie!) and grannies alike to beat faster. Driving through the Ardennes, he loses his way and his car breaks down, deep in the woods. He finds shelter at an isolated Auberge run by the widower Bartel (Jackie Berroyer). Bartel, once something of an performer himself, is lonely and still grieving over the loss of his wife, and is overjoyed to give some hospitality to a fellow artist. Over-joyed ... and his joy derails completely when Marc Stevens tries to continue his journey to his next venue. And Stevens hasn't even met the equally friendly villagers!



In "Calvaire" the "urbanoid" fear is explored from several distinct angles: from the perspective of a macabre comedy, from the viewpoint of a self-aware but otherwise straight-up horror film, and from that of an extremely violent European art-house film in the style of Gaspard Noé. In a sense, it is the filmic equivalent of a Geertzian "thick description" of the urbanoid fear in horror film: by exploring the urbanoid fear in the context of several different film genres encapsulated in one film, the viewer is enabled to experience different dimensions of "urbanoia" as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

Skirting but never crossing the line between an intelligent, self-referential film and a film that is too smart for it's own good, Calvaire is a powerful experience, with excellent camera-work, beautiful color schemes, strong performances and a warped, absurd sense of humor.

Three From Belgium (pt. 1)

"People from the city are people like us. People from the country (...) are people not like us. (...) In horror, country dwellers are disproportionally represented by adult males with no ascertainable family attachments (...). These men do no discernible work and are commonly shown lying about the home farm in the middle of a workday - usually single, sometimes in groups. (...) The ubiquity of degenerate specimens (...) is the material expression of family wrongness (inbreeding being one obvious form of wrongness). More to the point, country people live beyond the reaches of social law. They do not observe the civilized rules of hygiene or personal habit. If city men are either clean-shaven or wear stylish beards or moustaches, country men sport stubble. Likewise teeth; the country is a world beyond dentistry. The typical country rapist is a toothless or rotten-toothed single man with a four-day growth. (...) As with hygiene, so with manners. Country people snort when they breathe, snore when they sleep, talk with mouths full, drool when they eat. (...) What is threatening about these little incivilities is the larger incivility of which they are the surface symptom. In horror, the man who does not take care of his teeth is obviously a man who can, and by the end of the movie will, plunder, rape, murder, beat his wife and children, commit incest and/or eat human flesh (not to speak of dog- and horse-meat, lizards, and insects), and so on and on."

- Carol J. Clover, "Men, Women And Chainsaws. Gender In The Modern Horror Film".


In her classic analysis of horror films, Clover called this negative web of signification of rural people by city dwellers "urbanoia".

In a short series of posts titled 'Three From Belgium', I'll examine a film and two bands from Belgium which play on the urbanoia Clover describes.