(Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Popular Music) Owen Coggins - Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal-Bloomsbury Academic (2018)

Mysticism, Ritual and Religion
in Drone Metal
Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Popular Music
Series editor: Christopher Partridge
Religion’s relationship to popular music has ranged from opposition to ‘the

Devil’s music’ to an embracing of modern styles and subcultures in order to
communicate its ideas and defend its values. Similarly, from jazz to reggae,
gospel to heavy metal, and bhangra to qawwali, there are few genres of con-
temporary popular music that have not dealt with ideas and themes related to
religion, spiritual and the paranormal. Whether we think of Satanism or Sufism,
the liberal use of drugs or disciplined abstinence, the history of the quest for
transcendence within popular music and its subcultures raises important issues
for anyone interested in contemporary religion, culture and society. Bloomsbury
Studies in Religion and Popular Music is a multi-disciplinary series that aims to
contribute to a comprehensive understanding of these issues and the relation-
ships between religion and popular music.
Christian Metal, Marcus Moberg

Mortality and Music, Christopher Partridge
Religion in Hip Hop, edited by Monica R. Miller, Anthony B. Pinn and Bernard
‘Bun B’ Freeman
Sacred and Secular Musics, Virinda Kalra
Mysticism, Ritual and Religion
in Drone Metal
Owen Coggins
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
1 Mysticism and Metal Music 1

2 To Be Experienced, Not Understood: Empirical Mysticisms in
Trance, Dub and Drone 15
3 Beyond Heaviness: Listener Experience in a Translocal and
Marginal Genre 53
4 Pilgrimages to Elsewhere: Languages of Ineffability, Otherness and
Ambiguity 83
5 Amplifier Worship: Materiality and Mysticism in Heavy Sound 115
6 Methods to Cross the Abyss: Ritual, Violence and Noise 137
7 Conclusion: Drone Metal Mysticism 171
Notes 181
References 183
Index 205
Figures
1.1 Flyer image used in recruiting research participants, displaying

extreme metal visual aesthetic. Photo and design by the author 7
5.1 Promotional image used by SunnO))) before their 2017
performance at the Barbican Centre, London. Reproduced with
kind permission of SunnO))) 120
5.2 Bismuth bass player Tanya Byrne’s Orange and Matamp amplifier
heads. Reproduced with kind permission of Tanya Byrne 122
5.3 Poster design for 2015 Ommadon & Bismuth UK tour combining
amp and monolith by Ross D. McKendrick/RDM Visuals.
Reproduced with kind permission of Ross D. McKendrick 124
5.4 Examples of characteristic drone metal band logo styles.
Reproduced with kind permission of Ommadon, Black Boned
Angel, Bong and SunnO))) 133
newgenprepdf
Acknowledgements
First, thanks go to all the participants in this research, particularly those who
gave their time and personal insights to this project. This includes everyone who
completed surveys, whose words I read online, who hung out with me at drone
metal shows and music festivals, whose music I enjoyed and endured, and par-
ticularly those who agreed to be interviewed. Thank you for sharing with me
your experiences and reports of musical experience, which were frequently bril-
liant, funny, absurd and profound.
Much gratitude is due to Paul-François Tremlett, Byron Dueck and Graham
Harvey, whose wise and generous guidance made this project possible, and to all
those who have offered their comments on this research as it developed.
Finally, thank you to my family, especially my partner Caitlin, who has been
endlessly supportive and who I love very much. Her proofreading work was also
invaluable.
This book is dedicated to my parents, to whom I owe so much.
1
Mysticism and Metal Music
Introduction
On a Thursday evening at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, a crowd of around

three hundred people fall silent at the heavily amplified sound of a recorded Arabic
prayer that is broadcast to Muslim pilgrims as they approach Mecca. Two men in
different parts of the crowd join in with the prayer, having learnt each syllable by
sound from repeatedly listening to a recording which includes the same prayer.
After about a minute, a heavy solo bass guitar line enters, rumbling through a
sequence which falls upon an extended note that is emphasized by the downbeat.
That same riff cycles three more times, before snare roll and cymbal are added,
inviting heads to nod while chests vibrate with the bass. Several minutes in, the
first line of lyrics is introduced; the cryptic phrase ‘Walk Melchizedek shrine des-
cender’ is recited and then left to reverberate over further repetitions. Around
thirty minutes later, people stand without talking, many with eyes closed and
heads bowed, listening to a high-pitched vocal wail over the top of a recording of
a chanted Sanskrit mantra. Another half hour into the drone metal performance,
another monotonously repeated bass note holds sonic tension through a period of
comparative quiet, until the bass player intones the single word ‘Lazarus’. A final
five-minute explosion of heavily distorted bass riffs and clattering drums then
erupts over raised hands, bobbing heads, and bodies absorbed in slow, repetitive,
vibrating noise. Before dispersing or getting a final drink while the bar is still open,
several attendees crowd round a table at the back of the room to buy vinyl records
adorned with artwork displaying angels, a Byzantine icon of John the Baptist and
names or phrases such as God Is Good, Pilgrimage and Conference of the Birds (the
latter a classical Persian Sufi allegory). Others pick up black T-shirts, similar to
many other black heavy metal band shirts worn by attendees, these ones embla-
zoned with a single word, the name of the band that has just performed – Om.
2 Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal
In a survey which elicited reflections on this performance, a Muslim attendee

reported that hearing the recording of the Arabic prayer at the concert reminded
him of his own pilgrimage to Mecca, and that the winding, repetitive bass riffs
and chanting vocals of Om’s music evoked the desert landscapes of Islamic
countries in which he had spent time (O84, Survey, 2013).1 In a subsequent
ethnographic interview, he described a particular connection between Om’s
sound and the ruined city of Petra in Jordan. For him they both evoked spiritual
thoughts and a sense of mystery and ancientness, which ‘simply is what it is and
you can interpret how you want’ (O84, Interview, 2013).2 A Christian attendee
at an Om concert on the previous evening in Birmingham was reminded of the
atmosphere he had experienced at prayer meetings. He was, however, also care-
ful to distinguish this from his experiences of the Holy Spirit:
Seeing Om live you get the same kind of atmosphere as what you get with a
church or religious service. [But] really strong experiences that you have that
you would say are definitely from God would be qualitatively different. (O69,
Interview, 2013)
Another Om listener in Germany who attended a concert on the same tour

described how Om’s constant level of sonic intensity was meditative and calm-
ing, also mentioning connections with yoga, mantras and Gregorian chant as
well as ideas of travel. Intrigued by her own response to the music, and witness-
ing other people appearing to be entranced at the show, she described herself as
not religious but interested in the spirituality in drone metal music. This occa-
sioned recollection of being fascinated as a child at people’s behaviour at a church
service (O21, Interview, 2014). As reviewers of Om’s 2012 album Advaitic Songs
put it, drone metal can be ‘pan-global mystical music for the heavy-metal demo-
graphic’ (Powell 2012), ‘interfaith heaviness’ (Dronelove 2012), or ‘as close to a
religious experience as anyone will get within the extreme music community’
(Hemy 2012). Drone metal music pushes the limits of heavy metal’s sonic con-
ventions, tests the endurance of listeners and invites descriptions which employ
a vocabulary of religious experience, ritual and mysticism. In examining sound,
symbols and description in and around musical experience, this book traces the
production of this mystical discourse in drone metal culture.
Drone metal’s mystical sound and discourse
Drone metal is a marginal and largely underground subgenre of heavy metal

music, first emerging in the early 1990s and having developed significantly since
Mysticism and Metal Music 3
the end of that decade. This history is discussed in detail in Chapters 2 and 3, in
which it is suggested that the combination of extremeness in sound and the scat-
tered marginal translocality of musicians produced a loose and contingent genre
formation which emphasized the experiences of listeners. Drone metal music is
characterized sonically by extremes of repetition, extension, lowness, slowness,
amplification and distortion within but radically pushing the boundaries and
conventions of the wider heavy metal tradition. A variety of different sounds,
musical structures, instrumentation and thematic elements appear in lyrics,
titles, artwork and surrounding imagery, and there is significant diversity in
drone metal sound. Listeners hear similarities in dirge-like repetition, perceived
slowness (in tempo or musical development), overwhelming volume, amplifica-
tion and distortion, and extension radically beyond popular music conventions.
Sounds, symbols, images and vocabulary associated with a range of religious,
ritual, spiritual and mystical practices and concepts are frequently incorporated
into performances and recordings by Om and other drone metal musicians, and
are prevalent in listeners’ communication about this music.
The musical culture of drone metal incorporates practices, experiences and
uses of language understood by diverse audiences to be related to religion, spir-
ituality or mysticism. In this book I present the results of five years of ethno-
graphic research –from 2012 to 2017 –exploring the language of mysticism,
spirituality and religious experience in drone metal music culture. In existing
academic literature, drone metal has been occasionally discussed, sometimes in
relation to reception and usually comprising anecdotal reports of concerts by
the band SunnO))), where ritual or transcendence are often mentioned (Lucas
2013, Partridge 2014). The extremeness of drone metal music (again, most
often regarding SunnO))) specifically) has been noted for its demands on the
listener (N. Scott 2014), its relation to contemporary popular culture (Morton
2013, Shvarts 2014) or in connection with certain currents in contemporary
abstract art (Ishmael 2014). Even the wider doom metal scene (of which drone
metal is a part or an extension) has received little scholarly attention in its own
right, despite being one of three (Bogue 2007) or four (Kahn-Harris 2007) main
strands of extreme metal. Important contributions have, however, been made
recently regarding drone metal and closely related music by Aliza Shvarts (2014),
Laura Wright (2015a, 2015b), and Niall Scott and Tom O’Boyle (2015). Given
that drone metal music has so far received very little scholarly attention, this
book contributes a comprehensive introduction to an important, influential and
unusual form of music at the extreme edges of heavy metal and experimental
music cultures. My approach to mysticism as a tradition of productive reception
of texts (including reviews, sound recordings, performances, discussion and

conversation) outlines an empirically and theoretically grounded understanding
of mysticism, as will be introduced and tested in Chapter 2 and further devel-
oped throughout the book. This analysis thereby also provides an alternative to
dominant ways of understanding religious experience in popular culture and
asserts the importance of difference and ambiguity in listeners’ treatments of
mysticism. Bringing together insights and analysis drawn from different meth-
odological approaches, the book shows how the interrelated material culture,
sonic structures, artwork, performance practices, audience responses, commu-
nications and textual layers of reception each contribute to the construction and
sustenance of mystical discourse, experience and practice in drone metal.
Fieldwork and mixed methods
Ethnographic methods have been used in several studies to examine other inter-
sections between religion and metal. Religion is understood as inspiration or
foil for lyrics or musicians’ ideologies (Cordero 2009, Baddeley 2010, Granholm
2011), as a normative framework of public morality (Wallach 2008, Hecker 2012)
or as a more or less stable social institution within or against which metal music
situates itself (Moberg 2009). Less often has religion in metal been addressed as
a communicative resource, offering potential vocabularies or ways of speaking
for listeners as well as musicians. Studies that have attempted to account for
such productive uses of religious symbols have surveyed different positions on
metal’s potential influence on religiosity (Hjelm 2015) or used textual Biblical
criticism to understand explicitly anti-Christian bands as engaged in practicing
theological exegesis (Naylor Davis 2015). In this book, by preparing an empir-
ically grounded methodology for studying mysticism in popular music culture,
I make space for a reading of religious symbols and ideas as used by listeners,
ethnographically examining these uses in context within a wider extreme metal
milieu.
A central aspect of this ethnographic methodology was participant observa-
tion fieldwork at concerts and music festivals featuring drone metal and closely
related music, such as other kinds of drone, noise and experimental music,
or other styles of extreme metal. Between September 2012 and April 2017,
I attended more than a hundred musical events, normally including different
sets by several musicians or bands. These included eighteen music festivals
and a number of special performances. Most were in the United Kingdom, but
important events such as the Roadburn Festival and two concerts by the band
SunnO))) took place in Netherlands and Belgium. Around half of the events
I attended were in London, and I travelled to several events in Nottingham,
Bristol, Birmingham and Leeds. No drone metal ‘scene’ has developed in any
city in the United Kingdom or elsewhere, so attending shows in different cities
allowed observation of drone metal events in different contexts and with dif-
ferent audiences, generally on the margins of local extreme and experimental
music scenes.
Sites for fieldwork ranged from rock and metal venues of various sizes to more
formal concert halls such as the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican Centre in
London. Nonstandard music venues included the Hyde Park Picturehouse cin-
ema in Leeds, the crypt of St John the Baptist church in Bristol, the church of
St John at Hackney in London and the Modern Art Oxford gallery. Attendance
ranged from below ten to more than two thousand audience members. Events
ranged from headline concerts of the highest profile drone metal bands, to large
metal festivals that featured drone metal performances, to one-off experimen-
tal shows, to small pub gigs with one less well-known drone metal band on a
varied bill with other black metal or doom metal bands. This covered the vari-
ety of drone metal events that took place in the United Kingdom and nearby
countries during the research period. Where possible for important artists,
I attended multiple shows, seeing Bong, Earth, SunnO))), Ommadon, Bismuth,
Om, Sleep, Aluk Todolo, Monarch and Gravetemple several times. I also consid-
ered as fieldwork my attendance at performances of music related to elements of
drone metal. These included experimental music, minimalist orchestral music,
Indian classical music, black metal, noise, psychedelic rock and funeral doom
metal. This music was performed at the same or similar events as drone metal,
had overlapping audiences, or was a stated influence or point of comparison
for drone metal listeners and musicians. Music festivals I attended included
Desertfest in London (in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017), Roadburn Festival in
Tilburg, Netherlands (in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017), Temples Fest in Bristol
(in 2015) as well as several other smaller events. Such attendance was supported
by a longer history of participation in these musical cultures. Long-term com-
mitment to music is particularly valued in metal, and so discursive appeals to
this history (talking about concerts attended years ago) and material signifiers
of participation (wearing recognizably old music T-shirts) are ways in which
my ordinary appearance, past involvement in music and modes of conversation
were resources for discussion, and were signifiers of some subcultural capital
(see Thornton 1996).
Ethnographic participant observation was focused on listeners’ responses to
musical sounds and to other people’s behaviour, as well as on my own engage-
ment with sound, with other audience members and with the general context
of each event. This included attention to the bodily comportments, move-
ments, facial expressions, conversations with and overheard remarks of indi-
viduals. At the same time, I was listening to sound: the music being performed,
but also recorded music played over the PA between performances, ambient
noise, conversation or interruptions from sound sources external to perfor-
mances. I reflected on my own responses and observed connections between
audience behaviour and sound. One particularly clear example occurred dur-
ing a SunnO))) performance: vocalist Attila Csihar emitted a shriek of cack-
ling laughter, at which point one audience member immediately ran out of the
performance space, evidently disturbed by that specific sound. I also observed
more gradual responses to lengthy drone sounds, or to particular styles of rep-
etition, timbre or drone. These responses could be observed in individuals or
collectively. Certain audience members moved less throughout a performance,
their limbs sagging slowly before eventually sitting down, or a crowd gradually
thinned out over a three-hour set. At a Gravetemple performance, rows of seated
audience members gradually uncrossed their arms and legs over the course of
the set. Writing notes also produced certain kinds of reflection, during perfor-
mances, between sets or on my journey home. I talked with attendees, conver-
sations often instigated by myself or others after noticing T-shirts or patches
signifying a mutual interest in drone metal bands. Merchandise stalls and the
behaviour around them were interesting sites to observe intersections of musi-
cal values, material culture, embodied subcultural practice and the exchange of
money as a metric of value.
Music festivals were particularly rich sites for ethnographic fieldwork. They
featured a large range of performances, often including exclusive shows and
larger audiences. Festivals provided extensive opportunities for conversation
due to longer overall duration (up to four days), and a generally convivial festival
atmosphere conducive to spontaneous, good-natured discussion of music and
other topics with fellow attendees. These ‘festive’ aspects bring to mind Bakhtin’s
idea of the carnivalesque, where rules and hierarchies are suspended (Bakhtin
1968). Metal’s marginal status, and even doom metal’s somewhat marginal sta-
tus within metal, were overturned, with visible and performed commitment to
doom and drone metal being highly valued and respected within the festival’s
environs. Separation between musicians and audience, still evident at many con-
certs, was lessened, as revered musicians hung out in the crowd, with this ten-
dency remarked upon by many Roadburn attendees. This contributed to what
Victor Turner has described as liminal communitas, a shared sense of removal
from the ordinary world (Turner 1969). Time was also reconfigured around
music: asked what time it was, an attendee replied ‘It’s forty minutes to [headline
band] Loop’ rather than ‘9.00 pm’.
Keen to consider attendees’ responses to live events, I constructed short
online surveys, asking about demographics, ownership of recordings, merchan-
dise purchases and at least one qualitative question leaving room for a full para-
graph response: ‘Describe your experience of the [band] performance’. The final
question requested contact details, if respondents were happy for me to contact
them. For several concerts, I posted links to the online survey on social media
pages set up to promote and inform about the events, and I distributed paper
flyers at venues.
These two methods were congruent with normal ways of sharing informa-
tion relating to underground music (such as upcoming gigs), especially given
Figure 1.1 Flyer image used in recruiting research participants, displaying extreme
metal visual aesthetic. The image incorporates characteristic elements of extreme
metal’s visual aesthetic, such as black-letter text, monochrome high-contrast design and
ambiguous religious symbolism. The hall behind the church pictured is used for concerts
at the Roadburn festival in Tilburg, Netherlands. Photo and design by the author.
that the flyer was designed with the visual aesthetic of extreme metal culture in
mind. So, while the research project was unusual, the modes and sites of com-
munication were familiar to participants. The twin purpose of the surveys was
to elicit descriptions of drone metal or related performances and to make con-
tact with potential interviewees. I identified the most relevant accessible events
from April to December 2013, featuring Gravetemple, Ufomammut, Nazoranai,
Dylan Carlson, Bong, Tim Hecker, Om and SunnO))). Due to the unpredictabil-
ity of events taking place within the research period and the marginality of drone
metal, some of these were not drone metal but related music (Ufomammut are
a psychedelic doom metal band, Nazoranai might be described as avant-garde
improvisation and Tim Hecker creates heavy electronic ambient drone). In total,
I collected 430 responses from nine surveys relating to these eight performances
or tours (I created separate surveys for two large SunnO))) performances).
Seventy-four interviews were then conducted with survey respondents who left
contact information. Spoken interviews generally lasted between forty and sev-
enty minutes, and were recorded and then transcribed with the permission of
the interviewee. Written interviews took place either via ‘live’ online chat via
social media or in email exchanges. In-person interviewees chose the venues,
usually cafes or pubs. Interviews were semi-structured, normally starting with
a request for interviewees to describe their experience of an event, and I often
prepared questions which would prompt interviewees to elaborate on their prior
survey responses. If interviewees mentioned terms connected to ritual, mysti-
cism, religion or spirituality, I would ask for further explanation and elabora-
tion. If, as happened only occasionally, no mention was made of such topics after
approximately thirty minutes, I would ask what the interviewee thought about
how terms and concepts derived from religion were used by others in relation
to drone metal.
Due to the translocal nature of drone metal, the internet was an especially
important site for participation in the subcultural work of discussing, categoriz-
ing and assessing music. I collected online information, such as professional and
amateur reviews, as well as promotional materials for concerts and recordings
published by artists, PR representatives and record labels. I also read thousands
of comments in discussion threads on drone metal music postings on the web-
site YouTube, and viewed forum discussions on metal sites. I normally did not
post messages myself, since consent would be difficult to establish (see Hagen
2014), though I did participate as many others do, by reading discussions, fol-
lowing links and perhaps mentioning information or ideas in later conversa-
tions. I compiled reviews and other commentary about recordings released and
concerts occurring during the research period and for older recordings and
events acknowledged as canonical or influential. Discursive analysis of these
texts about music focused on particular repeated terms such as ‘mystical’, ‘spir-
itual experience’, ‘transcendent’, ‘meditative’, ‘ritual’ and ‘indescribable’ and their
uses. These terms are highly contested within the academic study of religion and
are often used ambivalently or vaguely elsewhere, so it was vital to approach
such utterances with attention to their linguistic, social and music-related con-
texts in order to appreciate particular meanings for the speakers and writers
taking part in that discourse.
A further element of fieldwork involved contributing music journalism about
drone metal and related music to the website Echoes & Dust (echoesanddust.
com). Knowing the site from compiling reviews, when they advertised that they
were seeking new review writers I volunteered, echoing in part Keith Kahn-
Harris’s methodology for his 2007 study of extreme metal, which involved
working at the metal magazine Terrorizer. As well as marking another form
of participation in drone metal culture, writing for the site provided access to
music, to discussion among staff writers and to promotional information sent
out by musicians or PR representatives accompanying review copies of record-
ings. These one-page texts (‘one-sheets’) contain details such as track names,
titles, personnel and brief but usually enthusiastic praise for the music. One-
sheets influence public discourse about music, with certain ideas used in reviews
traceable back to these promotional texts that most people reading reviews
would not have seen. One example of such influence emerged when a musician
complained online that reviewers couldn’t get the track titles correct, though
these reviewers were actually following the one-sheet in which the tracks were
mislabeled. Another musician in a press interview gently mocked reviewers for
describing a recording in highly imaginative terms appealing to sunrise epiph-
anies and ghosts of legendary musicians. However (and perhaps unbeknown
to the musician) these reviews had clearly been influenced by those exact ideas
having been distributed on the one-sheet as a prompt for reviewers. I later pro-
duced some of my own one-sheets as part of my involvement as a trustee with
Oaken Palace, a record label focusing on drone rather than drone metal specif-
ically. This, in addition, afforded further possibilities to learn about aspects of
music cultures such as the manufacturing of vinyl records and cassettes, promo-
tion and distribution of recordings.
Due to the methods of collecting information about drone metal, it is not
possible to claim that the sample population of survey respondents and inter-
viewees is demographically representative of a total drone metal listening
population. There appeared to be a similar overall demographic in terms of age,

gender and ethnicity in my interviews as I observed at drone metal and related
music concerts in general, but this observation remains anecdotal and is not
supported by a systematic approach to demographics and representation. One
striking aspect about survey respondents, interviewees and people I spoke to
at fieldwork events was the generally high level of formal academic qualifica-
tions. While my experience and expectation was in line with Brown’s observa-
tion that metal audiences are increasingly middle class (Brown 2014: 47), the
proportion of drone metal listeners I spoke to who had at least several years of
postgraduate education, was high. This impression could have been exagger-
ated because researchers might be more likely to agree to participate in research,
with one survey respondent stating this explicitly. In online drone metal dis-
course, there is little reliable demographic information due to the anonymity of
internet users. Considering the translocal and marginal nature of drone metal
culture and practice, an overview of drone metal listener demographics would
be particularly difficult to ascertain. While this study can make no claim to have
surveyed a representative sample of drone metal audiences, it can instead claim
some objectivity at the level of discourse, having closely analysed a wide range
of communications about drone metal that take place in separate but mutually
influential spheres of discourse.
Many of the practices, modes of communication and discursive strategies
observed in drone metal culture overlap with or are familiar in other extreme
music subgenres. Drone metal’s marginal status, even within doom metal,
means that many gigs I attended featured one drone band on a bill of four or five
other bands, and it was unusual to have a line-up which featured more than one
drone metal band. As previously mentioned, no drone metal scene exists in one
city that could compare with, for example, Gothenburg or Tampa Bay, places
where death metal scenes due to proximity and access to the same venues and
studios produce music with a strongly distinctive sound (Brown 2015a: 269). By
contrast, drone metal subsists through occasional events at the edges of a more
general extreme metal milieu. The extremity of drone metal’s minimalist but
overwhelming expanses of sound creates a challenge for description, yet also can
occasion powerful experiences which prompt responses to that challenge. This is
evident in my own field notes, reviews, and academic writing, as it is in conver-
sations, commentary and other communications of fellow listeners. This project,
rather than seeking to discover or finalize authoritative versions of events, takes
its place in a continuous construction of discourse, circulating around and influ-
encing the sonic practices of participants resonating in drone metal.
Overview of the book
Drone metal is a somewhat obscure music genre, situated on the fringes of under-
ground heavy metal music culture and experimental sound. It has so far received
little scholarly attention, yet I argue that examining the musical culture of drone
metal in depth can offer useful insights about how religion is used, discussed,
contested, practised and experienced in contemporary popular music culture.
Chapter 2 reviews discussions of religion and mysticism in scholarship on heavy
metal and other forms of popular music, identifying shortcomings regarding
the coherence and consistency of terminology related to religious experience.
Related issues are identified in an assessment of scholarship on mysticism within
the study of religions. These involve the overstated separation of text and experi-
ence, and the positing of a universal experience behind cultural difference.
Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau in particular, the chapter proposes
an alternative understanding of mysticism as a tradition of reception and pro-
duction of mystical discourse. This approach avoids or resolves some theoretical,
epistemological and ethical problems prevalent in other work on mysticism and
religion in popular culture. Further, it allows an empirical treatment of mysti-
cism that is observable in the ways that participants make use of symbols and
language. I explore examples of how mysticism might be empirically examined
in this way by contrasting drone metal with dub reggae and psychedelic trance,
two longer-established forms of music which have each attracted reports and
descriptions which relate to religious experience and mysticism.
The marginality and translocality of drone metal, I will suggest in Chapter 3,
have particular bearing on how subjective responses to or experiences of musi-
cal engagement become a constitutive aspect of how genre is understood for
this music. This chapter discusses the early history and later development of the
genre culture of drone metal from the early formation connections and conven-
tions in relation to heavy metal. Jokes, criticism and comparisons that highlight
difference are then considered as important aspects of genre discourse around
drone metal. In Chapter 4, I note the descriptions of imaginative spaces, times
and states of bodily consciousness evoked by the music. The chapter identifies in
communications about drone metal a dialectic of distant otherness and embod-
ied presence in the vibrating body and in shifting, ambiguously structured
language choices. This relation, I suggest, allows participants to listen to drone
metal as if it is ritual, as if it is religious, as if it is pilgrimage, as if it is mystical.
Ambiguous spaces are created in which listeners may explore such concepts and
responses without committing to fixed dogma or definition.
Chapter 5 turns to the importance of amplification and distortion in drone

metal, and its connection to a concern with materiality. This ranges from the
bodily experience of extremely loud, low and sustained vibration to the tac-
tile and haptic qualities of physical music media and other objects. Distortion
occurs when a signal is amplified beyond the capacity of the medium or channel
to transmit it, and thus the fuzzy, noisy or sludgy timbres of drone metal are
sonic signifiers of excess, where materials and equipment are sounding the lim-
its of their own capabilities of transmission. This presentation of drone metal’s
amplified and distorted materiality thereby returns to discussion of mystical
discourse, which is characterized by excessive and contorted uses of language.
The visual signifiers of drone metal and the language used by listeners to speak
about the music are also amplified and distorted in attempts to exceed the limits
of what can be said.
This extreme music produces extreme effects in the bodies and consciousness
of listeners, and in Chapter 6 I explore aspects of such extreme responses, inves-
tigating the connections between mysticism, ritual, noise and modalities of vio-
lence in cultures of drone metal listening. For private listening, ritual often refers
to listeners’ personal development of their own contexts and practices for listen-
ing to vinyl records. By contrast, in relation to concerts, ritual often describes
elements of performance that listeners attend to and even participate in, but do
not fully understand and feel somehow distanced from. Across these contrasting
interpretations of ritual in the different spheres of musical culture, I identify a
relation between difference and sameness which reproduces the combination of
imagined elsewheres and consciousness of here described in Chapter 3. Another
feature widely cited in reports about the evocation of ritual and mysticism in
drone metal is violence, in shifting conceptions and representations of pain,
hurt, hardship, endurance or suffering. This I discuss in relation to theories of
noise and sacrifice, observing connections in the relationships of language, body
and excess in both mysticism and torture. Much of the power of drone metal
appears to emerge from a staged encounter with radical difference. In private
listening this is instantiated by performing certain separations and preparations
of time, space and the body, and at live performances it is provided by the shock
of alterity in volume and the opaque gestures and sounds of the performers. This
confrontation with extreme otherness is a source for the emergence of mystical
discourse as well as for a sense of ritually constructed power in ambiguity cre-
ated in violent separation from ordinary life. In a phrase that appeared repeat-
edly during fieldwork, drone metal is to be experienced and not understood.
After reflecting on the scope of the study and some potential avenues for
future investigation, Chapter 7 concludes the book with a review of how these
themes together present a comprehensive analysis of the participatory sonic,
symbolic and discursive tradition of drone metal mysticism. Mystical discourse
is practised by listeners in the comparison and contrast with other forms of pop-
ular music often understood in relation to religious experience and mysticism.
It appears in the marginal and translocal formulation of genre discourse which
draws in listeners’ own strange and powerful subjective engagements, and their
uses of language which attempts to exceed itself, and it provides a site for the tra-
versal of imaginative elsewhere, where ambiguous space is made and maintained
for the exploration of religiosity in otherness. Mysticism and ritual are explored
in the intense focus on amplification and distortion that forms a meditation on
the materiality of sound and symbol, as well as in the relations between violence
and noise that are evoked in drone metal’s staging of engagement with radical
otherness. In these operations on metal music’s codes and conventions, in the
distortions of language surrounding the music, in this empirical approach to the
construction of discourse around musical practices, drone metal resonates as a
mystical tradition.
2
To Be Experienced, Not
Understood: Empirical Mysticisms
in Trance, Dub and Drone
Introduction
This chapter examines how religion, specifically religious experience and mys-
ticism, have been understood in relation to popular music cultures. Scholarly
approaches to religiosity will be considered in three areas of popular music, each of
which have attracted attention for their connection with or discourses around reli-
gion, religious experience and mysticism. These are dub reggae, psychedelic trance
and heavy metal, the latter including various subgenres but with a specific focus on
drone metal. I will first set out frameworks that have been employed in attempt-
ing to understand religion and popular music. These commonly have included
sociological conceptions of the sacred, functionalist views concerned with ritual,
thematic responses which trace ideas such as apocalypse, and institutional perspec-
tives which consider popular music in the context of existing religious structures
and agendas such as, for example, evangelization strategies and youth outreach.
I suggest that interpretations of religion and popular music cultures have
tended to conflate mysticism with ‘religious experience’. When participants
in music cultures use vocabulary related to religion, religious experience and
mysticism, and when some traditional religious institutions are conspicuously
rejected by participants in the musical cultures under discussion, this kind of
approach may be understandable. However, theories of mysticism based on reli-
gious experience often lack explanatory power and are epistemologically and
ethically problematic. In several examples of popular music scholarship, reports
of apparent ‘religious experiences’ are gathered from participants at raves or
gigs, then compared with classical reports designated as authentically mystical
or religious by influential scholars such as William James (1982) and Aldous

Huxley (1945, 1956). Similarities are noted, and the case is closed: popular
music can occasion religious experiences. However, as I discuss, more recent
work on mysticism has identified serious ethical and epistemological issues
in the conceptualization of religious experience in twentieth-century religious
studies scholarship. Problems arise from the uncritical acceptance of a concep-
tion of experience that is based on implicit assumptions about apparently uni-
versal and essential qualities of subjectivity. These ideas about experience are,
however, through those very assumptions, exclusionary and partial, favouring a
particular hegemonic construction of subjectivity based on a Western episteme.
I outline some challenges to these assumptions about religious experience that
have been made by scholars of religion.
In response, I detail how the work of Michel de Certeau and others can assist
in forming a critical perspective with which to empirically examine and under-
stand mysticism in religion and in popular music cultures. This approach no
longer relies upon the problematic positing of universal unitive experience
before language and culture. Instead, I argue, mysticism is better understood
when analysis turns to the ongoing social and embodied uses of, creations of,
responses to and communications about texts. These activities themselves con-
stitute an ongoing reflexive tradition of inextricable texts and experiences. This
chapter, then, attempts not only to highlight shortcomings in treatments of mys-
ticism, but also to construct a plausible theoretical and empirical methodology
for studying mysticism in popular music culture. Mysticism is considered not as
inaccessible experience but instead as reflexive, critical and participatory ways of
communicating. In Certeau’s terms, mysticism is practised in manners of speak-
ing, in ways of operating on symbolic codes, in transformative readings of an
inherited tradition. Theorists of mysticism often appeal to music as analogy or
metaphor for the powerful effects of mystical language. I suggest that in fact
popular music cultures provide excellent examples of mystical traditions in this
sense. Popular music mysticism can be heard in ongoing, creative chains of com-
munication, interpretation and response to an existing tradition of intertextual
practice and performance. Dissolving a traditional and unhelpful dichotomy in
scholarly approaches to mysticism, musical sounds can be heard as simultan-
eously ‘text’ and ‘experience’.
This chapter summarizes key developments in scholarship in mysticism in
the study of religion since the beginning of the twentieth century, outlining
the problems as well as a response, via Certeau’s work, which provides a more
productive empirical framework for understanding mysticism. Then, the broad
To Be Experienced, Not Understood 17
tendency in studies of religion and popular music to focus centrally on ‘religious

experience’ is identified, with the same problems emerging from this emphasis.
The following two sections give more detailed examples of popular music cul-
tures which have engaged with religiosity in a sustained way, pointing out how
shortcomings in the literature on trance music and dub can be related to ideas
about religious experience. It is demonstrated in each section how a conception
of mysticism as intertextual practice would provide a more empirically, epis-
temologically and ethically grounded alternative. A detailed examination then
follows of how scholarship has treated mysticism and religion in the broad metal
music genre culture, and this survey will further emphasize the benefits of the
theoretical and methodological approach I propose.
Mysticism in religious studies
In understanding mysticism, religious experience, spirituality and ritual in

popular music cultures, it will be necessary to turn to the tradition of schol-
arship on mysticism within the study of religion. I will outline the history of
relevant approaches to mysticism and religious experience through the twenti-
eth century, highlighting shortcomings in how this subject has been understood
before going on to address their appearance in studies of religion and popular
music. Significant problematic issues in studying mysticism, which I hope to
avoid, include an implicit and essentialist universalism, an overreliance on the
category of ‘experience’, and a conceptual division between text and experience.
William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1982), first published
in 1902, is among the most influential texts in the academic study of mysticism.
James sets out his theory of religion as springing from individual but universal
psychological states of consciousness or experiences, around which texts, laws,
practices, rituals and modes of religious and social organization later crystal-
lize. According to James, these accretions are bound by the specificity of lan-
guage and culture, thus straying further from the foundation of unmediated
experience and becoming institutionalized and debased as a result (W. James
1982: 31). In her book Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of
Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, originally published in 1911, Evelyn Underhill
retained a similar focus on the ‘essential religious experience of man’ as the cen-
tre of Christianity and of religion itself (Underhill 1930: vii), even while critical
of James at times (Underhill 1930: 81). Also from a predominantly Christian
perspective and influenced by the psychological focus on experience was Rudolf
Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy (1958), first published in German in 1917. Like
James, Otto argued that ‘numinous’ experience, by definition beyond rationality
and language, should be considered as the fount of all religion. While mention-
ing other traditions and sources, each writer drew predominantly on Christian
sources and paradigms in framing religious concepts.
Several decades later, Aldous Huxley was particularly influential in extend-
ing and popularizing the theory that religion is founded in individual mystical
experience, with a more explicit emphasis on the universality of this concept
amid the plurality of religious traditions (perhaps since he was less personally
invested in Christian faith). Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945) gave the
name ‘perennialism’ to this approach, drawing together a vast array of fragmen-
tary quotations from diverse sources. Shankara, John of the Cross, St Bernard,
Eckhart, Lao Tzu, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Upanishads and Dionysius
the Areopagite can all be found in one fourteen-page chapter which also
includes references to Descartes, Sufis and research into psychokinesis (Huxley
1945: 21–35). This kind of generalizing citation was further disseminated in
later anthologies and treasuries of mystical knowledge or wisdom (Victor
Gollancz’s 1950 A Year of Grace being an early example), which dispensed with
the erudite but dense exegeses favoured by Huxley, leaving the quoted frag-
ments to imply universal essentialism simply by their collected juxtaposition.
Huxley later suggested that the supposedly perennial religious experience could
be accessed through psychoactive substances such as mescaline and the newly
synthesized LSD (1954). He went on to posit a psycho-pharmacological basis
for such experiences in the religious use of ascetic practices and psychoactive
substances, careful to suggest that these conditions may occasion rather than
cause religious experience (1956). These still provocative claims instigated a
response from Robert Charles Zaehner, who attempted to ridicule Huxley’s
claims by taking mescaline himself in order to not have a religious experience,
and seeking to create (or reinstate) a hierarchy of mysticism with ‘nature mys-
ticism’ downgraded and his own Roman Catholicism placed at the apex (1957).
Despite their disagreements, both authors (and many others) attempted to fit
diverse traditions, contexts and practices into their own universalizing epi-
stemic frameworks, whether Catholic or more broadly pantheist, and they
equally unquestioningly retained essentialist assumptions about psychological
experience and subjectivity.
While discussions continued about hierarchies and types of mysticism, a gen-
eral consensus emerged around a number of characteristics common to these
experiences which were apparently (or axiomatically) common to all forms of
religion. James introduced ‘four marks’ of mystical experience: ineffability (or

indescribability), noetic quality (providing knowledge), transiency and passivity
(W. James 1982: 380). Later scholars agreed that mystical experience was inex-
pressible, treating mystical texts as attempts, all doomed to failure, to describe
the indescribable essence common to all of these experiences. A link was sub-
tly made between mystical experience beyond the framework of language and
religion beyond the frameworks of rationality (and, by extension, beyond criti-
cism based in that rationality). This strategy can be traced at least as far back
as Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1799 defence of religion against its ‘cultured
despisers’ (Schleiermacher 1996; see also Proudfoot 2012: 120–1). A combina-
tion of the second and third of James’s marks was also generally supported, with
transient mystical experience judged truly religious if it led to knowledge or
other kinds of lasting transformation (this is attested in W. James 1982: 371–4,
Underhill 1930: 413, Huxley 1945: 297, Zaehner 1957: 106, for example).
A number of problematic issues arise in studies of mysticism, many of which
can be traced to assumptions about experience. Unmoored from the specifics of
a religious tradition, place and language, ahistorical positionings of mysticism
may drift towards apologies for the supremacy of one or other position over
‘inferior rivals’ (King 1999: 97), such as Catholicism for Zaehner, or a concep-
tion of modern rationality itself for Huxley. Lack of attention to local speci-
ficity also tends to reinforce gendered discrimination which ignores women’s
struggles for recognition of their expression and authority over their own bod-
ies (Hollywood 2001, Jantzen 1989, 1994). On this note, rock critics’ ideas of
transcendence in popular music have been similarly criticized for a tendency
to ‘ignore how music is understood differently at different moments in his-
tory and by people of different races, genders, classes, and generations (among
others)’ (Kruse 2002:137). According to several scholars working in the later
decades of the twentieth century, many of the problematic epistemological,
ethical and political issues surrounding mysticism relate to the conception of
experience upon which much scholarship has relied. The specific qualities of
this posited mystical experience have been debated, notably in collections of
essays edited by Steven T. Katz (1978b, 1983, 1992). Katz, explicitly opposing
perennialism, argued for greater contextualization of mystical reports, holding
that cultural and linguistic backgrounds were not merely accidental constraints
on a mystical writer’s expression but played an active role in constituting any
experience (Katz 1978a: 22). Bernard McGinn and Grace Jantzen, both work-
ing on Christian mysticism, have noted their own misgivings about the focus
on experience, observing that many works regarded as canonically mystical do
not appear to be at all concerned with experience, instead emphasizing prayer

or praxis (McGinn 1994: 180, Jantzen 1995: 6). As Robert Sharf has noted,
while the opponents in constructivist–perennialist debates (including Katz)
differ over the extent to which they consider experience to be conditioned by
culture, both sides rely unquestioningly on the same view of experience (Sharf
1995: 229). In a critique of the concept of experience, Joan Scott suggests that
the term’s use may be too ingrained to abandon, instead calling for usage with
greater awareness of the potential problems inherent in implying universal
notions of subjectivity that remove the possibility of any politicized contextual-
ization (J. Scott 1991: 797).
When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individ-
ual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it)
becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about
the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as dif-
ferent in the first place, about how one’s vision is structured –about language (or
discourse) and history –are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes
evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference
is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who
see and act in the world. (J. Scott 1991: 777)
Not only does Scott address the potential for marginalization of particular con-
structions and expressions of subjectivity, she also points to the strange dead end
of analysis in such views. ‘Evidence for the fact of difference’ as she puts it, in
studies of mysticism (including in popular music) often lead to simple assertions
of the presence of religious experience in or behind a particular text, discourse,
practice or culture. Such reports are then treated as an end of analysis rather
than a departure point for exploring the discursive, participatory constitution
and maintenance of conceptions of mystical practice and subjectivity.
Experience in this context has also been criticized within the study of reli-
gion. Stephen Crites in 1971 observed the ‘narrative quality of experience’ as
a counterpoint to the supposedly independent or pure instants of conscious-
ness imagined by other scholars in the study of religion (Crites 1971). Michel
de Certeau cites this idea in his development of a theory of mysticism based
not on experience (though not denying experience) but instead on modes and
practices of communication (Certeau 1992a: 180). Certeau strongly challenges
perennialist ideas, cautioning that his own project is not chasing ‘any par-
ticular “experience” ’ (Certeau 1995: 445) nor ready-made definition (Certeau
1986: 82). Certeau suggests, in a characteristically provocative question rather
than a definite statement, more radical understandings of the relation of text,

experience, mysticism and subjectivity: ‘One may legitimately ask whether the
psychological person, far from expressing itself in the personal pronoun, is
not rather “an effect of utterance” ’ (Certeau 1986: 96). Certeau avoids assump-
tions of universal subjectivity and associated problematic connotations through
portraying experience and text as interrelated and inextricable. This approach
allows empirical study of the intricacies of how texts and practices are enacted
and understood, while also addressing how they are embedded in and might
affect social and political realities for participants.
Approaches based on assumptions about universal experience can also tend
towards orientalism and exoticism, where the ‘mystic East’ is imagined to hide
an apparent pre-rational, sensual experience lost to ‘the West’ but available
for rediscovery by the Western scholar of mysticism (Said 1994, King 1999).
Similar assumptions may even support nationalist, neo-colonialist, racist or
fascist political and cultural projects. If essential truth is posited to be found
in experience, this allows it to be claimed as the province of certain individ-
uals or groups who thereby claim privileged access to the purest version of this
truth and consequently consider themselves empowered and even obliged to
impose this ‘truth’ upon others. Association with fascism is a criticism which
has been levelled at scholars involved in the study of mysticism, such as Mircea
Eliade in light of his support for right-wing nationalist groups in Romania
(Wasserstrom 1999: 129, 184), and, more overtly, Julius Evola, who explicitly
and aggressively asserted connections between mysticism and an apocalyptic
fascism (Evola 1995, see also Goodricke-Clarke 2001: 4, 80). Richard King
usefully summarizes the extent to which universalizing essentialism and
unexamined over-reliance on ‘experience’ can lead in extremely problematic
directions:
Mysticism at once becomes decontextualized (and thus amenable to simplistic

comparative analysis), elitist (since only certain people can experience it), anti-
social (since it is inaccessible to the public realm –to the rest of society), other-
worldly (since it is about cultivating private experiences and not engaging with
the world), and domesticated (since it is concerned primarily with the cultiva-
tion of inner states of tranquillity and the alleviation of anxiety). (King 1999: 26)
If it is to avoid reproducing such difficulties, an approach to mysticism in popu-

lar music culture must be founded neither on under-theorized conceptions of
experience nor on appeals to an unfounded universality. This has epistemologi-
cal implications, since this universal essence is not available to empirical study,
and ethical implications since this approach allows an exoticist view of differ-
ence to serve epistemic elitism.
A theoretical framework for popular music mysticism
In forming a way of approaching mysticism in drone metal (and in other popu-

lar music cultures) which might avoid the shortcomings of the essentialism
described, the relation between experience and texts should not be treated as a
relation between pure knowledge and failure to accurately report it. Instead, this
relation should be treated as a practice of engagement, where mysticism involves
intertextual experience of texts, where ‘experience’ and ‘text’ are considered not
as two incommensurable categories but as inextricable aspects of mysticism as
practice.
Useful in constructing such an approach is the profoundly ethical and
rigorously historiographical, practical and epistemological work of Michel de
Certeau, which considers both the creative uses of popular culture texts by audi-
ences, and the symbolic practices of mystical discourse. Certeau’s The Practice of
Everyday Life (1984) problematizes strict divisions between the production and
consumption of popular culture, and between reading and writing. The book
has often been regarded as a secular work, concerned with everyday topics and
ordinary people and therefore separate from Certeau’s other work on religious
history. This division, however, is artificial, with all of Certeau’s work presenting
an ethical treatment of method and sources, a focus on wandering and marginal
figures, and deep engagement with reading and writing as interdependent prac-
tices relating to faith and spirituality. The Practice of Everyday Life itself contains
passages unequivocally concerned with religiosity: one of the book’s five sec-
tions, for instance, is titled ‘Ways of Believing’, concerning both political and
religious faith (Certeau 1984: 177–99).
A key project of The Practice of Everyday Life is to highlight that ‘one cannot
maintain the division separating the readable text (a book, image, etc.) from the
act of reading’ (Certeau 1984: 170). Certeau wishes to focus on ‘another pro-
duction, called “consumption” ’ (1984: xiii). The emphasis is on ‘another’, since
reading is a kind of production that is practised differently to the institutional
placement, claims to authority and strategies of citation that constitute writing as
production. Preferred readings, which are more about preferred readers and pre-
ferred places from which to write or read than about privileged access to truth or
reality, are rejected as ideology (Certeau 1997b: 144; see also Certeau 1984: 171).
For Certeau, each reader in encountering texts ‘combines their fragments and
creates something un-known in the space organized by their capacity for allow-
ing an indefinite plurality of meanings’ (Certeau 1984: 169). Readers in different
contexts use the imposed language of texts in their own ways and for their own
purposes (Certeau, 1997a: 84). This description of reading as poaching has been
one of Certeau’s more influential ideas, though it is not without controversy.
Ben Highmore and Ian Buchanan both report that the idea has led to a certain
unquestioning valorization of, for example, shopping malls and wearing jeans
as subversive practices in some areas of cultural studies (Highmore 2006: 12,
Buchanan 2000: 99). It is likely that they are referring to John Fiske’s analysis in
Understanding Popular Culture (1989b) and Reading the Popular (1989a), which
do render such practices somewhat idealistically as resistant (Fiske 1989a: 8,
213), though Fiske does at least attempt to treat Certeau’s ideas with some degree
of complexity (1989a: 135–6). More than a detachable and applicable concept
of reading as poaching, of great potential use in this study of popular culture
texts and their uses is Certeau’s destabilizing of the relation between reading
and writing, or consumption and production. This undermining of divisions
can be discerned in mystical texts and scholarship about mysticism (including
Certeau’s own writing), and in the creative work of ‘another production, called
consumption’ (Certeau 1984: xii) that is done by popular music listeners with
the received texts of their tradition.
With this work on reading, writing and popular culture in mind, we can turn to
Certeau’s contribution to the study of mysticism. Throughout his career, in writ-
ings on everyday language, culture and history as well as religion, Certeau returns
to operations performed on language that he calls ‘manners of speaking’, which
turn language, push it to its limits, and make it show what it cannot say (Certeau
1986: 80–100, 1992a: 113, 2000b: 181). His most extended treatment is in the two
volumes of The Mystic Fable (1992a, 2015), which analyse the modes of language
used in mystical texts and of the historical development of the term mystique in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Certeau investigates the ways of using lan-
guage in the writings he studies, tracing the itineraries of their transcription, dis-
semination and reception in subsequent writings. He examines how the linguistic
operations within the texts function in terms of the mystics’ relations to social and
religious institutions in the context of wider epistemological shifts and, in addition,
notes how a number of these processes and practices of language recur in some
modern practices, particularly psychoanalysis but also painting and poetry.
According to Certeau, mystic writers are always caught between institu-
tional authority and an inherited language. For the medieval Christian mystics,
these are the church and theology, both of which bear on the production of a
mystic’s expressions. They are, however, marked as unsatisfactory or corrupted
in their promise of foundational meaning (a context-based relation which res-
onates with the purported relationship in mystical scholarship between pure
experience and inadequate text). Thus the mystics write from a place ‘different
but not distant’ (Certeau 1992a: 8) from their tradition, deliberately aligning
themselves with already corrupt orders in order to bear witness to a decay in
the authority of scriptural language. The reflexively contradictory uses of lan-
guage by mystics perform a breakage in that language in order to demonstrate
its limits and failures. The smallest units of this mystically treated, paradoxi-
cal language are oxymoronic phrases such as ‘silent music’ and ‘cruel repose’
(Certeau 1992a: 143–4). These means of communicative expression, in spite of
signification, incorporate a language of the body (Certeau 1995: 445) as well as
a focus on the body of language itself, in the physical materiality of both writ-
ten and spoken signs. These mystically turned signs no longer point towards
signified referents but instead bear witness to their own opaque physicality. The
mystical use of language, for Certeau, constitutes a ‘beautiful but illegible hand-
writing’ (Certeau 1992a: 70) that draws attention to its own failure to signify,
and in so doing, ‘says’ something despite itself about its own symbolic code,
foundation and limits.
The hermeneutic impulse to decipher such hidden meanings is, according
to Certeau, provoked but also evaded by the mystics’ idiosyncratic and para-
doxical employments of diverse fragments of language. For Certeau, mystic
texts, such as Hieronymous Bosch’s c. 1500 painting The Garden of Earthly
Delights, promise an esoteric meaning through their strange signs, yet the
only secret is their fragmentary strangeness, a brokenness which produc-
tively fails to designate a unified, stable meaning. This esotericism attracts
accusations of heresy from those who try to discern what is being signified
(1992a: 92). Tied to a specific and fundamentally shifting social situation,
these mystics marked a ‘sunset’ of an epistemological order founded in the
church and the Word, their texts a ‘historical figure of a loss’ (1992a: 13–14).
Mystics for Certeau were therefore no sages of an eternal, essential, perennial
transcendental reality but were witnesses instead of changing social, politi-
cal and religious conditions, marking their response in their unconventional
uses of the tradition and language in which they were unstably situated. The
procedures and manners of speaking through which the mystics marked
this change, however, return in other contexts, and Certeau traces this re-
emergence in other places. In twentieth-century poetry and psychoanalysis,
Certeau observes a related turn to opaque signs, a language of the body, and
a straining of symbols to the point of excess where they are forced, in their
failure, to show what they cannot tell. Mystical manners of speaking resurface
elsewhere.
Other scholars of mysticism, many drawing on Certeau, have also attempted
to work on mysticism in a way that attends to the textual operations through
which mysticism is constructed and conveyed. Even Huxley, primarily associ-
ated with a perennialist view reliant on psychological understandings of experi-
ence, makes room for a mysticism rooted in engagement with texts:
At its most magical, the purified language of literature can evoke experiences
comparable to the pre-mystical or fully mystical apocalypses of pure receptivity
on the non-verbal level. (Huxley 1963: 34)
Don Cupitt too has suggested locating mystical experience in the experience of
writing, rather than assuming separation between the moments of experience
and of writing. For Cupitt, ‘mysticism is a kind of writing’ (1998: 10), and there
is ‘no such thing as “experience” outside of and prior to language’ (1998: 74).
However, Cupitt does not describe exactly what kinds of writing are mystical,
and lapses into reliance upon ideas about authorial intention in trying to dis-
cern which writers are apparently ‘in it for real’ (1998: 79). Approaching mys-
ticism with an attention to how subjectivities are constituted in reading as well
as writing, Michael Sells does engage with the specific linguistic forms used in
mystical texts: paradoxes, impossible questions, performative contradictions,
metaphors stretched to breaking point, and the ‘saying away’ of apophatic nega-
tive language. These performative uses of language contribute to a ‘meaning
event’, which for Sells is ‘a secret or mystery that the reader continually uncovers
in the act of reading’ (1994: 216), and which ‘keeps the mind in incessant activ-
ity, never allowing it a fixed referent’ (1994: 30). Jeffrey Kripal similarly notes the
uses of myth, rhetoric, apologetic, and polemic in mystical writing, in contrast to
uses of language which ostensibly transmit information more straightforwardly.
Kripal also places his own writing about mysticism within a mystical tradition,
stating that ‘I no longer want to study mystical literature. I now want to write it’
(2007: 15). In a later book drawing links between Kabbalah and fantastic tales of
superheroes in marginal popular literature, Kripal adds that reality ‘comes to be
in the space between the properly trained reader and the revealed texts. Reading
is mysticism’ (Kripal 2011: 9, italics in original).
Following Certeau and this current in mystical scholarship, then, we can
approach religiosity in popular music through a theory and method which
recognizes mysticism in intertwined reading and writing, listening and speak-

ing (in musical as well as verbal senses). Music, in fact, as a temporally shifting
bodily encounter with patterns of sound, provides an excellent counterexample
to the conceptual divisions between text and experience that obtain in much
writing on mysticism. Significantly, music has often been used as a rhetori-
cal trope to indicate elements of language which exceed or escape significa-
tion or rational communication. The perennially influential William James,
for instance, uses the twin metaphors of musical listener and lover in order to
explain the incompetence of language in communicating mystical feeling (W.
James 1982: 380). Evelyn Underhill relates ‘suggestive and allusive’ uses of lan-
guage to music (Underhill 1980: 408), and Sigmund Freud used music as a fig-
ure for the impenetrability of mysticism (Freud quoted in Certeau 1992b: 12).
Certeau too links musicality to ineffability (1992a: 17, 70), to a subversion of the
‘the triumphs of reason’ (1988: 183), and to mystical secrets within and beyond
language (1986: 99). In these instances, where music sporadically surfaces in
religious scholarship as an ambivalent marker for mysticism in language, is sug-
gested a way of studying mysticism in popular music as a tradition of practicing
and engaging with texts. Rather than retreating into circular suppositions about
experiences inaccessible to communication, and instead of ‘positing, behind the
documents, the presence of a what-ever, an ineffability that could be twisted to
any end’ (Certeau 1986: 82), a theory of mysticism based on practices of lan-
guage instead invites empirical investigation into participants’ engagements with
drone metal and their productions of discourse in the music culture. These prac-
tices of language respond to and in turn frame engagements with sound. This
methodological approach, attending carefully to symbolic practices and their
contexts, can connect how certain forms of popular music are heard as mysti-
cal traditions about, within and at the margins of their respective traditions,
and which display mystical modes of operating on symbolic traditions of musi-
cal sound and talking about musical sound. In the remainder of this chapter,
I will examine the ways in which religiosity, spirituality and mysticism have been
understood in metal, and describe a methodology which takes into account the
challenges outlined in studying mysticism. In preparation for this, I will demon-
strate a general tendency for studies of religiosity in popular music cultures to
reproduce the ‘religious experience’ paradigm with its deficiencies intact, before
presenting two examples in detail. Using the examples of dub reggae and psy-
chedelic trance, I will show how mysticism can be better approached empirically
as traditions of intertextual practice in these two popular music cultures.
Religion and popular music: Tending towards

religious experience
Academic studies of religiosity in popular music cultures related to rock and

metal music have been prominently concerned with ‘cults,’ New Religious
Movements and Satanism, whether addressed in the modes of reactionary moral
panic, celebrations of resistance or sociological treatments of youth, fashion and
culture. A commonly taken approach to religion and popular music has been
to thematically analyse broad religious themes in popular music productions.
These include, for example, apocalyptic themes in popular music, as treated
in books or collections such as Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in
American Popular Music (Janssen and Whitelock 2009), Anthems of Apocalypse
(Partridge 2012) and the idiosyncratic, experimental Drone and Apocalypse
(Demers 2015). Another frequent emphasis is on how particular kinds of ‘reli-
gious’ popular music relate to religious institutions, often focusing on contesta-
tions surrounding Christian popular music (e.g. Moberg 2015, Abraham 2015,
Howard 1996). Alternatively, studies taking a more sociological perspective
have attended to the formation and maintenance of a constructed Durkheimian
sacred (Partridge 2014, see also Durkheim 1995). In studies of popular music
cultures that are centred outside Europe and North America, or that are not
predominantly derived from rock music, religiosity has more often been under-
stood in relation to how individual, social and political identities are formed and
sustained (as in, for example, Diehl 2002 and Kalra 2015).
Underlying many approaches to religion in popular music are conceptions
of religious experience in the tradition of William James (1982). Such studies
(e.g. Sylvan 2002, Till 2010, 2012) understand religion as emerging from indi-
vidual psychological experiences. Apparent reports of such experiences are
easily discovered in popular music cultures often constructed in opposition to
religious institutions. When, in turn, quasi-religious institutions and practices
are identified in popular music cultures, they are offered as proof for the the-
ories of essential religious experience as the foundation of religion. Such ana-
lyses then claim to have accounted for these apparently religious forms, practices
and institutions in popular music cultures. They also support the unexamined
assumptions that, firstly, religious experience is the foundation of religion, and
consequently, that religious experience is a legitimate yet inaccessible category
on which scholarship in the study of religion may rest. An example can be found
in Simon Reynolds’s description of the noisy 1980s indie rock music of bands
such as My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain, whose extreme
use of noisy distortion remain an influence in drone metal. Reynolds equates
moments of pagan mysticism with the listening experiences of rock fans, and
relates the development of doctrinal religions to the institutions of rock criticism
(1990: 12–13). While recognizing the appeal and power of the language of reli-
gious experience for music listeners, Reynolds accepts assumptions about how
organized religion develops from individual mystical experience. The analogy
does, however, present interesting suggestions about the ongoing work done by
critics and listeners, of constructing frameworks for musical experience while at
the same time placing in tension the institutionalizing tendencies of discourse
(constructing lists and canons, for example) and revelatory listening (where bliss
and noise are transcendent ruptures in symbolic codes).
Several studies of religion and popular music have also been concerned
with showing that aspects of participation in music cultures can properly be
described as religious according to established definitions and frameworks.
These, again, frequently rely on William James’s definition of mystical experi-
ence through four ‘marks’, and his claim that religious institutions, practices and
rituals all emerge from individual experiences (W. James, 1982: 380). Rupert
Till, for example, collects reports from Electronic Dance Music adherents,
summarizing their compelling statements with a brief and seemingly definitive
statement that ‘these are mystical experiences of transcendence and rapture’
(Till 2010: 144). Similarly, Robin Sylvan opens his book on popular music and
religion with descriptions from different genres which ‘read like classic descrip-
tions of religious experiences of a profound, life-changing nature’ (Sylvan
2002: 1–2). Keen to identify a truly religious essence which can then be dis-
covered in popular musical traditions (Sylvan 2002: 216), this kind of approach
risks missing important details which differentiate specific engagements with
religiosity in particular contexts. For example, Sylvan discusses instances of lis-
tening that ‘even metalheads have identified as religious’ (2002: 166). However,
the quote which he uses to prove this claim in fact seems to convey a more
interesting ambiguity: ‘It is like a religious experience, I imagine it’s just like
some people say that they’re finding God’ (Metal listener quoted in Sylvan
2002: 166). Rather than take this as proof of connection to a generalized reli-
gious experience, I suggest an approach which instead reads carefully the lan-
guage and imagery listeners use. In cases such as those presented by Sylvan, for
example, I would wish to acknowledge the importance of ambivalent distan-
cing relations (‘It is like . . .’), uncertainty and speculation (‘I imagine it’s just
like . . .’), and the intersecting social understandings and expectations about the
participatory construction of ideas about religion (‘some people say . . .’). An

approach which begins rather than ends with reports which refer to mysticism,
religiosity and spirituality, I argue, is a more methodologically and epistemo-
logically responsible as well as a more interesting and rewarding approach to
investigating mystical discourse in popular music.
Beyond these approaches which suggest that new religious formations are
founded on experiences simply understood as ‘religious’, the terminology of reli-
gious experience and mysticism is used in extremely varied ways. This vagueness
is often compounded by apparent assumptions that the words ‘mysticism’, ‘mys-
tical’ and ‘mystic’ have common sense meanings which are widely understood,
despite the notorious ambiguity in how such terms are used (McGinn 1991: 11).
The countercultural music of the 1960s in the United Kingdom and United
States, for example, is frequently described in terms of mysticism by scholars
seemingly associated with a search for transcendence in music, intoxication,
sexual liberation and exotic spirituality (Helb 2014: 146, Pillsbury 2006: 116).
Where the terminology of mysticism is used to identify and critique appeals
to orientalist exoticism in popular music, the same ambiguous gesturing can
creep in through imprecision. Writing more broadly about the use of ‘elements
of Indian music’ in 1960s Western pop music, Gerry Farrell similarly notes that
such appropriations employed ‘a reified romantic evocation of the mysterious
East, a mystical appendage to mass consumerism’ (1999: 78). Later on, how-
ever, he appears to reproduce exactly that kind of essentialism in describing, for
example, a photograph of Rabindranath Tagore showing ‘the piercing eyes of a
mystic’ (Farrell 1999: 156), and reporting that for Indian musicians practice and
perfection were ‘elevated to almost mystical proportions’ (Farrell 1999: 190).
Even critics who identify the problematic issues of orientalism and reification,
then, may lapse into unreflexive or inadequately theorized uses of terminology
relating to mysticism.
A more empirically and epistemologically sound means of approaching ideas
about mysticism in popular music must therefore be employed in order to avoid
reducing diverse and complex reports, practices and modes of communication
to simplistic, essentialist, ahistorical yet outdated tropes. The vague and unthe-
orized uses of terms relating to mysticism, and the tendency to treat religious
experience as an essential, universal foundation for comparison, are directly
or indirectly rooted in studies of mysticism which have since been subject to
serious criticism in relation to exactly these issues. In the following section,
I examine literature on dub and psytrance, indicating both the inadequacies of
approaches which rest upon problematic conceptions of religious experience,
and the advantages of the proposed methodology for understanding mysticism

in intertextual practice.
Dub and trance have both existed for more than a decade longer than drone
metal; they emerge from different social, historical and cultural contexts and
they each involve different sounds and associated practices. Nevertheless, they
share with each other and with drone metal certain tendencies, interests, themes
and characteristics, manifested in different ways. Each of these music cultures
involves ecstatic intoxication, uses of religious sound and symbolism, evoca-
tions of translocal exoticism and even orientalism, interest in amplification and
intense bodily experience of sound and participant discourses which relate to
mysticism and ritual. Dub and psytrance have both attracted academic attention
in relation to ideas about religious experience and mysticism, though in gen-
eral scholars have taken different approaches in dealing with the two subgenres.
I will describe the relevant features of each genre culture, assess how studies have
accounted for and understood mysticism and religious experience in each, and
show how the approach outlined earlier in this chapter can provide an effective
framework with which to empirically examine mysticism in popular music.
Empirical mysticisms I: Trance
Psychedelic trance, or psytrance, is a form of electronic dance music developed

in Goa, India, since the 1980s, which has spread worldwide. Musically, psytrance
generally consists of synthesized melodies progressing through uplifting chord
structures over repetitive 4/4 beats, and frequently features live or, more com-
monly, sampled vocals and short, repeated spoken word clips from sources such
as films or counterculture texts. Trance DJs skilfully mix recordings into one
another, creating long, shifting but seamless sets with a continual beat which
keeps dancers moving through raves commonly lasting all night. There is a pro-
nounced emphasis on a psychedelic religious imaginary, evident in the names
of performers, albums, tracks and rave events, in the sampled sounds and vocal
clips, in the décor of event spaces and promotional materials such as flyers, and
in participants’ communication about the genre culture. Communal dancing
and altered consciousness are overtly ritualized, influenced by ideas about mod-
ern (or futuristic) forms of archaic, orientalist, or ‘tribal’ spirituality.
The origin of psychedelic trance music culture among Western hippies in
southern India accounts for a strong emphasis on idealized uses of Hindu/
Buddhist imagery, though elements from other religious traditions (especially

those understood as pagan or ‘shamanic’) are also drawn into the bricolage
of spiritual references. Together, these uses of symbols, sounds and snippets
of texts together help to express and codify the ritualized meanings, prac-
tices and functions of participation in the psytrance rave. In Robin Sylvan’s
words, psytrance raves ‘draw from a variety of different religious influences,
from Hindu to Native American, Mayan to shamanic, neopagan to Christian,
and combine them all together in a hodgepodge hybrid’ (2005: 12). Rupert
Till notes a related range of terms from Reiki, healing and massage in con-
versations at such events, ‘often surrounded with spiritual imagery and
paraphernalia referencing Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu or vaguely “Eastern” spir-
ituality, mixed up in a New Age melting pot’ (2011: 146). Found throughout
the psytrance culture, these uses are, as Graham St John notes, consistently
‘expressive of a religiosity that is at variance to or complicates institutional
religion’ (2006: 3).
Broad tendencies in research on psytrance have been to consider religion in
primarily functional, discursive or institutional ways (see St John 2006 for a use-
ful overview of studies up to that date), and this literature has frequently focused
on constructions of religious, spiritual or ritual experiences. This kind of experi-
ence is configured in scholarly work as a kind of transreligious religiosity, as can
be observed in Victoria Bizzell’s consideration of psytrance pioneer Goa Gil’s
perspectives:
When asked to describe his concept of the ritual party experience, Gil explicitly
places it within a continuum of ancient tribal practices and primeval commu-
nities: imagined communities that share a global connectivity but not a defined
sense of place and historicity, acting as they must as nebulous transnational
models for a consciously created global neo-tribal identity. The initiated become
members of a tribe, not a spiritual sect. (Bizzell 2008: 286)
Timothy Taylor observed the rhetoric of spirituality where musical events and
productions ‘invoke semireligious language’ such as ascension, pilgrimage and
ritual (Taylor 2001: 176–7). In his early study, Taylor noted a lack of adequate
theorization of religion in academic accounts of psytrance (2001: 178). However,
while subsequent studies have engaged with the study of religion, they have
often used outdated ideas about universal experience, a unity underpinning all
religions and a return to imagined ‘tribal’ ways as response to disenchantment.
These concepts have been adopted directly, sometimes without any critical ana-
lysis, from the descriptions and self-understandings of participants in psytrance.
Across different writings, Sylvan’s research ‘focuses squarely on the powerful

experiential states’ (2002: 80) of psytrance participants. This emphasis not only
reduces differences in religion to arbitrary fluctuations in how experience is con-
textualized, but is expanded to cover all culture:
The human encounter with the numinous, the religious experience, forms the
basis for subsequent developments that lead to the organized external forms
that we call religion. Implicit in this perspective is the notion that religion, in
a broader and more fundamental sense, is the underlying substratum for all
cultural activity and serves as the foundation for culture in general. (Sylvan
2005: 11–12)
Meanwhile, Graham St John (2012) consistently and uncritically reproduces

language used within the psytrance scene about quests for religious experi-
ence, without interrogating the concept or its implications. As outlined earlier,
there are clear epistemological and ethical challenges in this kind of approach: it
imagines an underlying sameness in a category of undifferentiated ‘experience’
underlying all cultural differences and erasing differing constructions of sub-
jectivity. Further, assumptions about mystical or religious experience inherited
from earlier essentialist studies seem to mark an end to further inquiry, treating
participants’ appeals to religious language not as a point of departure for inves-
tigating discourse, context, interpretation and practice, but as a final explan-
ation. Till, for example, swiftly opens and then closes his investigation at the
same point:
The most conclusive pieces of evidence of spirituality and religion within EDMC
[electronic dance music cultures] are the innumerable accounts of transcendent
experiences described by clubbers themselves . . . They recount, again and again,
individual mystical experiences of transcendence and rapture. (Till 2011: 151)
Sylvan goes little further, reflecting on tendencies within psytrance discourse

to denigrate institutional religion, but suggesting that this is due to the lack of
availability of the universal ‘experience’ in such religious contexts (2005: 12–13),
appearing to reproduce without critical assessment the claims of participants.
Arun Saldanha’s attention to politics of ethnicity and the exclusion of Indians
by white ravers at psytrance locations in Goa is a welcome corrective to some
scholars’ overenthusiastic endorsement of the utopian discourse within the
scene. Saldanha, however, also extends assumptions about religious experience
drawn from James, Huxley and Eliade which have been shown to be problematic
(Saldanha 2007: 79).
The majority of the contributors to an edited volume titled Rave Culture and
Religion (St John 2004a) explicitly state their understanding of religion as based
in experience (St John 2004b: 2, Rietveld 2004: 47, Gauthier 2004: 65, Olaveson
2004: 85; Tramacchi 2004: 125, Fatone 2004: 203, D’Andrea 2004: 246). This
focus on experience endures through frequent appeals in the collection to the
work of Victor Turner and Emile Durkheim, whose respective anthropological
theories of ritual and sociological theories of collective effervescence each spe-
cifically contrast with what people ‘in their solitude’ consider to be religious
(Durkheim 1995: 1–44). The inadequacies of a focus on experience can be
avoided by instead understanding mysticism in ways of using, practising and
operating on texts and symbolic traditions. Psytrance attaches mystical, ritual
or spiritual value to a sense of liminality and marginality, a discourse of challen-
ging or renewing certain forms of religiosity, bodily engagement with sounds in
community, evocations of elsewhere and wandering traversal, and the reshap-
ing of textual experiences of recorded music. But rather than purporting to
imagine and categorize the interior states of consciousness of psytrance ravers,
these elements can be better understood through empirically examining peo-
ple’s practices and communications, as contributions and responses to a collect-
ively created and sustained tradition of mysticism in a popular music culture.
In their ethnographic study of ‘conscious partying’ at Synergy psytrance events
in London, Giles Beck and Gordon Lynch observe different activities and prac-
tices relating to religion (2009). Discussing the emphasis on ‘experience’ in the
work of Sylvan and others, they acknowledge that special kinds of physiological
experience seem to be afforded by a complex of dancing, music, intoxication
and other aspects of social ritual. In their concluding remarks, Beck and Lynch
suggest that further research might ask what precise combinations and interrela-
tions of factors might occasion or heighten such engagements, while assessing
the relation of discourse to experience. Hinting at a starting point for the kind of
methodology I propose, they speculate that
discourses of oneness, energy, and immediatism within the conscious party-

ing scene provide an interpretative framework that enables people to narrate
and make sense of these kinds of physiological experiences. (Beck and Lynch
2009: 353)
For François Gauthier, ‘rave brews up mythologies of an “elsewhere” ’

(2004: 71), an aspect Anthony D’Andrea calls the ‘nomadic spirituality’ of
psytrance (2006: 72), Till understands in terms of a homeless self (2011: 155),
and for St John it is ‘an initiation without telos, an experience of being-in-transit’
(2015: 253). Rather than merely identifying this continual wandering charac-

ter as simply part of an ‘experience’ which is the end of analysis, it is possible
instead to investigate further how mysticism and religious experience are con-
structed in the uses of sound recordings, symbols, fragments of other texts,
references to other spiritual, religious and mystical practices and so on. In
Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten’s view, the psychedelic quality of the music
and the musical culture which is linked to ecstatic intoxication emerges from
‘sounds that are recognized as originating in the “not here” ’ (Van Straaten
2012: 71). The thoughtful analysis of Botond Vitos considers the construction
of psytrance events and the dance floor practices of participants, identifying
them as attempts
at experiencing the immensity of Otherness out “there”, without transferring it

“here” (without integrating it into the Self, thus dissolving or understanding it).
Therefore its very goal is being as ambiguous and “spaced out” as possible. (Vitos
2009: 138)
Mysticism can be investigated in the ways that bodies engage transforma-

tively with texts and symbolic systems, understood broadly to include such
things as sound recordings, musical structures and conventions, socially
encoded ways of moving, and communications about music. In the previous
two quotes, an important element in the symbolic, musical and interpretative
discourse of psytrance is identified: an ambivalent, shifting yet sustained rela-
tionship between ‘elsewheres’ and ‘here.’ In approaches founded on ‘experience’
as an explanation, this can simply be defined as the standing outside oneself of
ecstasy: ‘Dancing is the primary activity that opens the doorway to these power-
ful experiential states’ (Sylvan 2005: 79), where individual rituals may facilitate
these experiences, but experiential states are treated as a final explanation of
religiosity in psytrance (Sylvan 2005: 76). Gauthier recognizes the importance
of rupture and excess, understanding these concepts as affording religious expe-
rience (Gauthier 2004: 80). However, if we instead inquire into the practices,
sources and choices involved in sampling, the individual and social modes of
movement on and around the dance floor and different ways of using, engaging
with and interpreting texts or symbolic codes, it is possible to further identify
how these intersecting practices each play roles in the construction of mysticism.
Graham St John states that ‘Psytrance productions are stamped all over with
a library of sound-bytes [sic] citing cultural outlaws, freak folk-heroes and cog-
nitive libertarians’ (2012: 441). It is not only important that psytrance culture
references such marginal and transgressive figures, but also that they are cited
in fragmentary, repeated sound clips which are themselves redeployed and
reused elements of other narratives. This is a construction of a musical and
textual tradition of mysticism which may include reports of religious experi-
ence as well as operations on a symbolic code. In this line, Morgan Gerard’s
chapter is a rare study which attends to the specific ways in which DJs respond
to crowds responding to the music. DJs perform manipulations on the existing
texts of dance music records, with the specific operations on the recordings (fil-
tering, looping, equalizing and mixing) used to construct and sustain the audi-
ence’s ongoing engagement with the patterned sound that is a central part of
the ritual context in which spiritual experience is discussed (Gerard 2004: 175).
This mystical manner of working on, altering or playing with the codes of dance
music and its surrounding practices is also well described by Botond Vitos. As
the following quotes attest, here mysticism can be found in participation in a
collectively constructed practice where DJs (themselves participants and listen-
ers, audiences of texts) transform existing texts of a tradition for a specific pur-
pose. Dancing listeners transform their reception of such transformed musical
texts into further intertextual, communally experienced texts of their bodily
movements and, later, in conversation and interpretation. This interactive play
between text and experience occurs primarily in the music, which
undergoes constant transformations during the performance, influenced by the

interaction between DJ and audience. At many parties, tracks are significantly
altered by special effects and mixing techniques, and subordinated to the flow of
the mix, which is not predetermined but reliant upon the public’s responses. The
public in this way is indeed incorporated into the music . . . primarily through a
flux of interactions within the environment of the party. (Vitos 2015: 134)
Quality darkpsy music [a specific kind of psytrance] involves the organic evo-
lution and breakdown of distorted and interwoven sound layers of high com-
plexity . . . The main preoccupation of this genre seems to be the continuous
transgression of its own perverted boundaries, both musically and semanti-
cally: the distortion, reversal, speeding up and destruction of rhythms and lay-
ers, the use of both menacing and nonsensical sound patterns, the continuous
oscillation between horror and humor creates its characteristically demented
atmosphere. (Vitos 2009: 137)
Discussing the related music and contexts of Acid House, Antonio Melechi sum-
marizes how, in apprehension, transformation and creation within the dancing
body, the experienced texts or textual experiences of an inherited tradition are

received and made new:
Acid House music is based on the absence of an originary subject, the ‘soul’
of pop music, as the presence of a founding voice is sacrificed into a digitally
complex wall of reconstituted sound . . . the collapse of the traditional field of
spectacle and expression in pop, where the ‘user’ sought self-expression through
dance. Acid house celebrates the death of this scene of dance [based on spectacle
and performance], for it is now the materiality of the musical signifier which
forms the new space of oblivion, as the dancer implodes and disappears into a
technological dreamscape of sound. (Melechi 1993: 34)
In a similar way, psytrance continually explores the transgression of boundaries

within a musical textual culture. Operations on texts within that code involve the
repetitive deployment and meditative exploration of fragments from other tra-
ditions which evoke related bodily engagements. Speed, rhythm, layering, rever-
sal and distortion are experimented with, in feedback combination of listening
bodies and creative work with musical texts. These practices together construct
a site for a continuous inquiry into the production, not only of experiential states
reported to be mystical, but also of a tradition which can be empirically under-
stood as mystical according to a treatment of its operations.
Empirical mysticisms II: Dub
This method for enquiry into religious experience can also be shown to be
valuable in relation to another form of popular music which is often associ-
ated with mysticism. Dub is a form of Jamaican popular music intimately
connected to reggae, literally a deconstructive and experimental flipside
to more traditionally structured and narratively based roots reggae songs.
Dub versions, on B-sides of popular songs released on seven-inch, 45rpm
singles were rearranged, altered treatments of hit songs, a tradition which
was to become incredibly influential across global popular music. Dub first
emerged after a crowd at a sound system dance in 1967 responded unexpect-
edly enthusiastically to a DJ playing a copy of the new Paragons track ‘On the
Beach’, which had been mistakenly pressed before the vocals had been added.
Developing from this serendipitous beginning, dub emphasized bass and
rhythm. Vocals were often totally removed, or snippets of words and phrases
retained and subjected to disorienting echo and reverb effects, sometimes
with other odd sounds also added. The effect of this combination of prac-
tices, applied in different ways to create many different versions of any track,
were spacious, trippy, heavy and open-ended iterations bearing an ambiva-
lent, ghostly relation to the ‘original’. Understood as simultaneously a process
and a genre (Sullivan 2014: 2), dub appears as a tradition concurrent with,
mutually influenced by and influencing, but also somehow set apart from reg-
gae music and its transitions from rocksteady, to roots reggae, to dancehall
and beyond. As part of a ‘sound clash’ culture of open air dances featuring
various creative and participatory uses of recorded music in a live social set-
ting, musicians and singers remain important. Producers such as King Tubby
and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry also became prominent in the musical culture of dub,
using their studio equipment to refashion the materials of existing songs and
produce new sounds for the dance parties.
Most studies of dub pay close attention to the historical, cultural and pol-
itical background and implications of dub and reggae as postcolonial musics
of what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic (1993). These ways of telling
the history of dub emphasize history in dates, key protagonists and landmark
recordings, perhaps as a result of the massive influence of dub on popular music
of the twentieth century as well as the underappreciation of that legacy. This
overall approach, which treats audiences more historically than ethnographic-
ally, rarely mentions religious experience. There are, however, frequent observa-
tions that dub is mystical. Mystical is the second word in Paul Sullivan’s book
on dub, where the music is introduced as ‘ethereal, mystical, conceptual, fluid,
avant-garde, raw, unstable . . .’ (2014: 7). Mystical is the term used in contrast
to evangelical religion by Kwame Dawes to account for unease in US audiences
about reggae, suggesting that mysticism is linked to ‘the foreign and strange’
(Dawes 2002: 61), while also an undefined characteristic of reggae’s entire aes-
thetic (Dawes 1999). For Michael Veal, dub has ‘partial roots in the mystical
aspects of Rastafari’ (2007: 241), with this mysticism even transmitted to other
forms of music. Jaz Coleman of UK postpunk band Killing Joke, speaking of
dub’s influence on postpunk, says ‘that’s where the mystical began’ (Coleman
quoted in Sullivan 2014: 76).
Unsurprisingly, given the context of the vast and varied ways in which ‘mysti-
cism’ has been portrayed and understood, this term is rarely defined or explained.
The religious spirituality of Rastafari is mentioned, often as a reference point
for understanding the politics of diasporic cultural memory, again without a
great deal of attention to the religiosity of the tradition’s fascinating ritual and
textual practices or how they relate to musical sound. Christopher Partridge,

by contrast, has connected the echo, reverb, sonic space, bass and the physi-
cal impact of sound in dub to mysticism and the concept of dread (Partridge
2014: 234). Partridge identifies the relational quality of mysticism as a current
within yet apart from a broader tradition: ‘If much roots reggae is fundamentally
religious music, dub should perhaps be understood as its mystical counterpart’
(Partridge 2010: 88). This description of dub (situated ambiguously between
analogy and identification) in relation to the religion in/of reggae is echoed by
other authors. For Sullivan, dub is reggae’s ‘significant other’ (2014: 13), while
for Louis Chude-Sokei it is the ‘dark side of reggae’ (2011: 76). This marginal
yet influential positioning within a wider tradition can, as Partridge suggests,
be usefully understood in terms of mysticism. As with psytrance, this mysti-
cism can be investigated in the ways that texts are transformed, practised and
reinterpreted. Mysticism in dub, then, can be conceived as an ongoing discursive
sonic meditation on the fundamental rhythm and bass elements of the reggae
tradition and its postcolonial, translocal, cultural and religious implications.
Dub, like liberation theology within Roman Catholicism (Partridge 2010: 31),
is marginal to its tradition precisely because it closely and intensely investigates
the foundations of that tradition, therefore simultaneously appearing as ultra-
orthodox and heretical (Certeau 1992a: 12–26).
This ambivalent relation to both foundations and outer limits is powerfully
expressed in dub’s association with ghosts. The most famous example of this
is Burning Spear’s classic roots album titled Marcus Garvey (1975), about the
prophetic Jamaican Africanist, and the dub version of the album which is titled
Garvey’s Ghost (1976). Many scholars have noted the connection with the near-
homonym ‘duppy’, a term for ghost in Jamaican parlance (Partridge 2010: 76,
Veal 2007: 212, Sullivan 2014: 7). Some have even extended this to identify dub
as a conceptual attempt to communicate between the realms of living and dead
in a context of violence both historical (Tracy 2005: 36) and ongoing (Chude-
Sokei 2011: 76). Also of note, connecting sound and wider cultural resonances
are the implications of ‘dub’ as double (Sullivan 2014: 7), and the echo as ghostly
(Chude-Sokei 2011: 76). James Tracy notes each of these evocations, reading
dub as a mystical tradition which includes a representation of the relation (with
sustained ambiguity) between bodies, memories and the spiritual, made pos-
sible in the tentative and materially grounded conditions of mediation:
Dub’s aesthetic rearticulates and inscribes the utterances of the dead, its aural
structure representative of an invocation of forms from the spiritual realm that,
like a radio receiver’s reception of a distant and tentative signal, is forever inter-
mittent and fleeting. (Tracy 2005: 36)
The particular relation between sound, echo and suffering bodies in cultural
memory is a reverberation that extends back through four hundred years of
the transatlantic slave trade and its postcolonial repercussions. Repetition,
bass and echo are profoundly important ways of memorializing and reframing
the impacts of this history on bodies, and providing resources for enduring its
ongoing legacy. Echo in dub ‘can be used as a tool to transport listeners to the
past’ (Sullivan 2014: 9), while the temporal distinction between the 1970s and
the centuries of slavery is collapsed in cyclical repetition and identification with
cultural memory (Dawes 2002: 66). For Philip Maysles, this memory and know-
ledge are embodied and expressively channelled in movement in response to
musical encodings:
The sound of dub evinces the pain felt by the “sufferah,” invigorating the listener
and inspiring physical movements and postures that exude a knowledge of self,
a self guided by a “spiritual” force that “oversees” the dominant symbolic order, a
physicality resonant with the music’s threatening presence and internal dynam-
ics. (Maysles 2002: 92)
One way in which this ghostliness is invoked is through the unfinished, spacious,
open-endedness of dub tracks. Dub is a ‘labyrinth, where there are false sign-
posts and “mercurial” trails that can lead to the future, the past . . . or to nowhere
at all’ (Sullivan 2014: 7), and dub implies incompletion (Hegarty 2007: 69). This
incompletion, though, prompts ongoing participation, ‘an unfinished musical
product, waiting to become the support of an interpretation –for a record or in
the dance hall’ (Vendryes 2015: 17). In this view, dub is completed by the crowd
responding by supplying the vocals (Sullivan 2014: 28) or with their dancing
bodies (Maysles 2002: 96). As with psytrance, there are live, layered circuits of
interconnected musical and social feedback. For example, the deejay ‘toasting’
or ‘chatting’ on the microphone transmits their response to or commentary on
both the recording and the crowd’s response (Sullivan 2014: 28). While dub may
evoke ghosts and collective memory, then, it remains a tradition that exists in
deeply embodied, practised, participatory transmission. And while most studies
have treated a history of producers and studios rather than in collective audience
responses as key individuals and sites for the production of dub experience, they
do often note the importance of feedback from crowds. Anecdotes of powerful
experiences are reported, expressed in a bodily reaction and in terms related to
religion. This example is from Kevin Martin, a dub musician who, interestingly,
has also been associated with drone metal, in supporting the band Om at con-
certs with King Midas Sound, and collaborating with Dylan Carlson of Earth
(The Bug vs Earth 2014, 2017):
I feel scarred for life by my first experience with sound systems [where there
was] no stage show, no audience participation other than almost a complete
homage or faith in the sound, and a total absorption in the frequencies. (Kevin
Martin quoted in Sullivan 2014: 145–6)
Dub, as we have seen, is frequently and ambiguously described as mystical.

The term may simply point to Rastafari as a religion considered to be non-
traditional or unconventional, or it may be implied to have a common sense
meaning that is itself mysterious or unstated, or, more usefully, it is employed
to indicate a particular kind of relation to a wider tradition. As with psytrance,
mysticism can instead be understood as ways of working with and manipu-
lating a tradition of texts and experiences, inextricably bound in social rela-
tionships. It then becomes possible to identify and empirically examine the
interlinked sonic practices and audience responses that constitute mysticism in
popular music. The playing of physical recordings is, for Sullivan, a vital aspect
of dub’s power (2014: 9–10), while amplification technology and its effects are
prioritized and highly valued (Sullivan 2014: 62). This intense concern with
mediation can be seen in the visual iconography of dub, where record sleeves
frequently display recording equipment, the dub engineer at the controls and
reels of tape that are manipulated in dub creation (Veal 2007: 260). Mysticism
can be identified and studied in the strategies which make up dub’s intertextual
experimentation, at the foundations and in the margins of reggae music’s cul-
ture and tradition. The key characteristic processes of dub are listed by Michael
Veal: a creative and unconventional use of equipment, strategies of fragmen-
tation and rupture, a focus on the sound of emotions rather than meaning in
lyrical narratives, juxtapositions and multiplications of generations of texts,
practices of collage which unpredictably refer to other elements of the tradition,
a talkover style which can be understood as idiosyncratic exegesis on particular
phrases and creative and unconventional operations on instruments and studio
equipment (Veal 2007: 64–76). If, for Certeau, the characteristic practices of
mystical writers were an emphasis on paradox, rupture, repetition, a language
of the body, a turning of the materials of communication to focus on bodily
engagement with signs, then dub’s practices too can be read and heard as a trad-
ition of mystical operations, meditating on the foundations of reggae sound.
Religion and metal music
I will outline this theoretical and empirical approach to mysticism in more detail
as it relates to drone metal mysticism, though first it will be relevant to exam-
ine how religiosity in metal has hitherto been understood. Religious themes
have always been present in heavy metal music culture, from its mythical origin
point in Black Sabbath’s song ‘Black Sabbath’, the opening track to the album
Black Sabbath (1970). Featuring in the first minute a thunderstorm, a church
bell, a metallic industrial guitar noise, then a downtuned guitar riff, the track
concisely portrays the historical stages of what R. Murray Schafer describes as
the sacred noise, the loudest sound in an environment rendering power aud-
ible: ‘Thus thunder, the original vox dei and Sacred Noise, migrated first to the
cathedral, then to the factory and the rock band’ (Schafer 1977: 179). Satan is
evoked in Tony Iommi’s tritone guitar riff, in Ozzy Osbourne’s shrieked lyrics
about encountering the Devil, and in the inverted crucifix design of the inner
gatefold sleeve of many editions of the LP. Themes of ritual, religious experi-
ence and spiritual practices can be traced through the music that influenced
heavy metal, from the amplified and distorted music of the 1960s counterculture
which displayed a preoccupation with transcendent, esoteric and exotic spiritu-
ality, further back to African American blues and its sonic dialectic of sacred
and profane.
Academic literature has examined metal music’s engagement with reli-
gion in a number of ways. Arguably the most prominent intersection of metal
and religion is a contested and at times hostile relationship with Christianity.
Contradictory expressions of this relationship have featured in metal since
(again) Black Sabbath, whose lyrics often express a conservative, even Roman
Catholic morality (such as in ‘After Forever’, from Master of Reality, 1971),
even while the band were seen as satanic by an inflammatory tabloid media.
Representatives of conservative forms of Christianity have provided pretexts
for moral panics and other forms of censure around metal. This has been
explored in the United States where conversion to born-again Christianity has
in some cases become a mark of reassimilation for previously controversial
metal stars (Klypchak 2011: 45, 48), and in France, where a metal festival was
opposed on moral and religious grounds by Catholic organizations (Guibert
and Sklower 2011). Christianity within metal music culture has often been
understood in terms of a straightforward opposition between anti-Christian
and Christian metal, two sides which nevertheless share styles, symbols and
to an extent, audiences. Studies which have taken this approach have exam-
ined the possibilities for evangelization through metal in worship services
using metal music (Glanzer 2003), or have compared the symbolic and lyr-
ical practices of ‘secular’ and Christian bands to show how religious bands
can express their faith within metal conventions (Luhr 2005, Jousmäki 2011).
Christine James has provided a variation on this kind of analysis, juxtaposing
the extreme and gory imagery of Cannibal Corpse and Gwar concerts with
Christian fundamentalist ‘Hell House’ performances designed to strengthen
conservative religious convictions. James finds, however, that similarities in
style have contrasting effects: the metal shows generally forward an inclusive
ethic while the Hell House performance is designed to differentiate the faithful
from society (C. A. James 2010).
This literature is useful in understanding what Marcus Moberg has called
the ‘double controversy’ of Christian metal, which causes consternation in both
Christian and mainstream metal circles (Moberg 2011). Such studies have, how-
ever, tended to imply that ‘Christian’ and ‘non-Christian’ (or even ‘secular’)
metal are entirely discrete categories. Some musicians and audience members
may understand the distinction as such, but reproducing this division in schol-
arship does limit the potential for understanding how other metal fans might
conceive of religion and spirituality in less polarized and more personally con-
structed ways. Studies focusing on Christian metal have sometimes too simplis-
tically implied that metal that is not Christian is monolithically atheist, secular
and anti-Christian, when in fact a wide range of positions on religion and spir-
ituality are represented in wider metal culture. In addition, though it is clear that
Christian metal provides a fascinating site in which to investigate religious ideas,
practices and negotiations in metal, Christian metal is over-represented in metal
studies relative to its global impact in metal music.
Marcus Moberg has studied Christian metal in extensive detail, his research
including ethnographic work, interviews with musicians and analysis of mate-
rials relating to the production of Christian metal in Finnish (2009, 2015),
transnational (2010) and online contexts (2008). Moberg’s approach is more a
study of Christian Evangelicalism in popular culture than it is research about
popular music, but his work provides a thorough overview, particularly with
regard to conflicting ideologies within such circles about how metal music can
be Christian. In the 2105 book Christian Metal, which summarizes and extends
previous work, Moberg traces how the conservative Christian right and its
fellow moral panic enthusiasts spread the idea that metal music was in itself
dangerous, threatening and antithetical to Christianity. This idea prompted
contestation by proponents of Christian metal, who instead held that metal

(and any musical genre or sound) were spiritually neutral. Christian metal
could therefore be created by Christians simply by adding Christian lyrics
and ‘intention’ to metal sounds (Moberg 2015). As in other work dealing with
Christianity and metal, however, the book tends to construct ‘secular’ metal
as a monolithic other to Christian metal, which may obstruct understandings
of how metal musicians and listeners who are not Christian use and interpret
the Biblical and eschatological Christian imagery that is found abundantly
in metal. Christian bands may well use biblical references on album sleeves
‘in order to underline that their lyrics strive to convey a “Christian” message’
(Moberg 2012b: 66). However, non-Christian bands also use such imagery, as
is recognized by Moberg (2015: 14). Charlotte Naylor Davis has shown how,
for example, a militantly anti-Christian and blasphemous band Marduk named
their album Rom 5:12 (2008) after the Bible verse in Romans, and are engaged
in critical biblical exegesis (Naylor Davis 2015). Clearly then, the specific con-
texts for and differences between these uses needs further investigation, beyond
circular assumptions that Christian bands use Christian symbols in a Christian
fashion, while non-Christian bands use similar materials in non-Christian
ways. Much work on Christian metal also neglects to consider the effects of
musical sound, and this unreflexively reproduces an ideology present in much
Christian contemporary music: that lyrical content and the intentions of the
musicians are what matters in determining and defining religiosity in music.
Moberg, for example, quickly dispenses with sound in the early stages of the
first chapter of his book: ‘The musical dimension of Christian metal is identical
to that of secular metal and will thus not be explored any further here’ (Moberg
2015: 41). This unfortunately removes the possibility of analysing how sounds
are used, practised or interpreted in much more complex ways than merely as
vehicles for verbal statements, as Robert Walser and others have recommended
(Walser 1993: 26).
As has been shown in relation to Christianity in the United States and in
France (Klypchak 2011, Guibert and Sklower 2011), religion has been under-
stood as a normative moral and political background against which metal
musicians and fans struggle as they construct communities and identities. This
has been the predominant approach to investigating metal and Islam in Tunisia
(Barone 2015), Turkey (Hecker 2010, 2012), Syria (Magout 2010) and across
North Africa and the Middle East (LeVine 2009). There is very little work that
has investigated intersections of metal and Islam in countries without Muslim
majorities, or uses in metal of materials associated with Islam. Stefano Barone
does, though, discuss Tunisian bands’ negotiation of orientalist tropes as cli-

chés which may nevertheless help them market their music abroad (Barone
2015: 189–90). By contrast, Judaism has more often been discussed in terms
of identity than sociopolitical or moral norms, for example in Kahn-Harris’s
discussion of the treatment of Jewishness in metal scenes, especially in black
metal where fringes of anti-Semitism are present (Kahn-Harris 2011). Metal in
a predominantly Hindu context has been mentioned by Greene in Nepal, where
anti-Hindu lyrics and symbols have taken the place of anti-Christian tropes
prominent in Western metal, for example in the upturned trident of Shiva tak-
ing the place of an inverted crucifix (Greene 2011: 116, 125). In Darianathan’s
work on the ‘Vedic metal’ of the band Rudra, Hinduism is a cultural and reli-
gious background for third-generation South Indian musicians in Singapore
(Darianathan 2011: 174), who see themselves ‘as part of a tradition of musi-
cians who embrace early forms of spirituality’ akin to Led Zeppelin’s interest in
pre-Christian paganism (Darianathan 2011: 176). Treatments of metal in rela-
tion to Islam, Judaism and Hinduism, then, have tended to understand ques-
tions of religion as pertaining to large-scale, internally consistent traditions
that are widely recognized and understood, whether as resources or repressive
frameworks with or against which metal identities and values are contested or
constructed.
Other scholars have examined the nuances of various interpretations of
Satanism (Dyrendal 2008, Baddeley 2010), esotericism and occultism (Granholm
2015) and their subsequent development towards paganism, especially in black
metal (Hagen 2011, Granholm 2011). Some continue the simplistic dualism
between anti-Christian and Christian proponents, as in James Cordero’s focus
on the ‘anti-Christian aesthetic within the black metal and impious death metal
scenes’ (Cordero 2009: i). Though Cordero does make some steps towards
understanding the varieties of Satanism, these are all subsumed into what
he calls ‘popular Satanism’, constructed largely in opposition to mainstream
Christianity (Cordero 2009: ii). More nuanced and pluralist views of Satanism
appear in a book by Gavin Baddeley, himself a member of the Church of Satan
(Baddeley 2010), while Asbjørn Dyrendal notes the diversity in perspectives and
the low levels of institutional affiliation and doctrinal orthodoxy among pro-
fessed Satanists (Dyrendal 2008: 72). Dyrendal (2008), Granholm (2011) and
Hagen (2011) all view the circulation of satanic, esoteric and pagan meanings
in metal as part of a broader cultic milieu or occulture, after Colin Campbell’s
(2002) and Christopher Partridge’s (2005) work on those respective concepts.
Rather than representing total world views to be adopted or proselytized as
coherent wholes, religious ideas relating to paganism, Satanism, non-Western

spiritualities and to esoteric areas of Christianity including apocalyptic imagery
(Till 2012) are all used, employed and understood in varied and individualistic
configurations, with differing levels of engagement. While some authors have
attempted to ‘rescue’ metal from Satanism by declaring it anti-Christian but not
satanic after all (Weinstein 2000: 262, Walser 1993: 143, Faulkner 2009), the
aforementioned literature has established the diversity and complexity of under-
standings of Satanism and esotericism that inform much use of religious iconog-
raphy in metal. This literature has generally followed the tradition in studies of
popular music, of attempting to understand the meanings of music by focusing
on musical texts (generally in the form of songs, tracks, recordings or even just
lyrics), with musicians as sole creators of this meaning, rather than exploring the
social contexts, uses, audiences, responses, participatory discourses and cultures
of religiosity in the reception of popular music.
Mysticism and religious experience in metal
In addressing mysticism, academic literature on metal has tended to follow

similar lines to the problematically essentialist, untheoretical or vague uses
of the term in studies of other popular music forms and in earlier religious
studies scholarship. The notoriously contested term is often implied to have
a straightforward, common sense meaning, as in Walser’s chapter subtitled
‘Mysticism, Horror and Postmodern Politics’ (1993: 137). Walser fails to
explain what he means by the term, beyond vague references to ‘the occult’ in
ambiguous quotation marks (1993: 151), while his description of Iron Maiden
as mystical seems to be due to their lyrical references to mythology and the
devil (1993: 151–8). If, as Donna Gaines states, ‘satan, the occult, and pop
mysticism have been a part of rock and roll from the beginning’ (1998: 187),
then it is also true that poorly delineated definitions of mysticism and confla-
tion with various other aspects of religiosity have been a feature of scholarship
on metal and other popular music cultures for just as long. Implicit or vague
conceptions of mysticism also feature in studies that engage with metal audi-
ences. In Natalie Purcell’s surveys, death metal fans were invited to tick boxes
as to whether they ‘agreed with’ metaphysical concepts including ‘mysticism,
deism, rationalism or Cartesianism, existentialism, skepticism, and chaos the-
ory’ (Purcell 2003: 122), in an otherwise excellent study which does not dis-
cuss what it might mean to ‘agree with’ mysticism. In Susan Fast’s survey, Led
Zeppelin fans used the term in describing what appealed to them, with Fast
then implying synonymy with mythology or mystery (Fast 2001: 50–2), again
with little attempt to contextualize uses of the term. For other writers, the mys-
tical is associated with sources of empowerment in metal (Christe 2003: 290,
Moore 2009: 148, Olson 2011: 146), while Christopher Partridge describes a
drone metal performance by SunnO))) as ‘mystical’, employing scare quotes to
underline the controversial nature of the word (2014: 69). Mystical experience,
specifically, appears infrequently in scholarship on metal, though it has been
discussed in relation to black metal, with an implicitly universalist conception
of ‘experience’ (Olson 2008: 37).
Some considerations of mysticism, in relation to black metal specifically,
avoid focusing on special kinds of experience, and instead attend to particu-
lar ways of engaging with texts and symbolic structures such as language and
music. In Steven Shakespeare’s phrase, mysticism is understood as ‘the ruin
and fulfilment of language’ (Shakespeare 2012: 10). Discussions of mysticism
in writings from ‘Black Metal Theory’ symposia and articles tend towards an
impenetrable and self-consciously mystical style, as can be seen in the col-
lections Hideous Gnosis and Mors Mystica (Masciandro 2010, Connole and
Masciandaro 2015a), and a book, Bergmetal, on mountains, mysticism and
metal by the pseudonymous Saheb and Abaris (2014). In the latter book, drone
metal by Sleep, Earth, SunnO))) and Om is discussed in relation to mysti-
cism (Saheb and Abaris 2014: 33–5), via an idiosyncratic development of an
idea of drone metal as ‘mountain of silence’ as suggested in an earlier article
by this author (Coggins 2013). The writings included in the Mors Mystica col-
lection (Connole and Masciandaro 2015a) make oblique references to Aldous
Huxley, William James and Georges Bataille (e.g. C. Blake 2015: 159, Harris
2015: 81, Connole and Masciandaro 2015b: 8–11, respectively), but do not pro-
vide coherent frameworks for understanding mysticism. Instead, the dense and
esoteric exegeses of particular black metal recordings (and often lyrics rather
than sound) can be read as examples of self-consciously mystically influenced
writings on metal.
Underscoring the potential problems with mysticism as conceptualized in
experience, and indicating the level of caution necessary when dealing with mys-
ticism in cultural contexts, some connections do exist at the fringes of extreme
metal between mysticism and fascism. While the usage of both terms may be
characteristically vague, it is not accidental that ‘mysticism’ appears most fre-
quently in academic descriptions of those fringe elements of extreme metal cul-
tures in which white supremacy, misogyny and homophobia circulate. Extreme
metal can produce and disseminate an ‘ideological and sometimes even mys-
tical bricolage’ of concepts relating to fascism (Lebourg and Sistach 2012: 28),
particularly the ‘mystically powerful music’ of black metal (Christe 2003: 290).
The Polish black metal scene is apparently noted for a ‘proliferation of National
Socialist ideologies’ amid a ‘grimmer, more mystical take’ on the genre (Birk
2012: 26). Black metal sometimes ‘combines hyper-transgression with mystical
religious ideas that offer participants a method for transcending the mundane,
escaping modernity and the creation of highly empowering identities’, some of
which may tend towards fascism (Olson 2011: 146), while a ‘natural, neotra-
ditional, and mystical rhetoric’ can ‘allow neo-Nazi elements to be cloaked’
(Hagen 2011: 195). Scholars have unearthed potential associations between fas-
cist ideology and the use of religious symbols in black metal, either in ideas
and aesthetics (Hagen 2011, Olson 2011), or through the ways that esoteric
fascism is disseminated (Goodricke-Clarke 2001: 205, Gardell 2003: 285–307).
It is perhaps the case that far-right metal is as over-represented in scholarship
as Christian metal in contrast to its influence in global metal scenes, but it is
undoubtedly important to address these marginal strands of the wider metal
culture in which mysticism and extremity are again entwined. As suggested ear-
lier, implicit assumptions about experience as an implied universal and transcul-
tural category can provide grounding for ideas about privileged access to such
states, potentially legitimating prejudice against and assumed supremacy over
others. In order to avoid such associations and implications, it is necessary to
employ a theoretical framework which attends closely to the particular contexts,
practices and utterances that surround the use of signs, symbols and sounds
associated with religious traditions and mysticism.
Overall then, studies on religion in popular music cultures including metal
display some shortcomings in their treatments of mysticism and religious expe-
rience. The terms mystical, mystic and mysticism are used without theoretical
grounding, and notions of religious experience are uncritically essentialist and
reliant on outdated scholarship on religions. Assumptions about religion and
religiosity are often limited to monolithic understandings of ‘world religions’
or Christianity, and perspectives about religious and/or musical meaning are
limited by assuming that they are carried solely in lyrics or simply determined
by authorial intent. An account of drone metal mysticism should, by contrast, be
grounded in empirical investigation of the ways that participants in drone metal
culture practise particular kinds of operations on the codes of heavy metal, and
in an exploration of the specific thematic and rhetorical paths taken in discourse
surrounding religiosity, ritual and spirituality around the music.
Conclusion: Trance, dub and drone metal mysticisms
The methodological framework outlined in this chapter cautions against the

erasure of differences between the specific contextual groundings of forms of
culture that can be understood as mystical. It does, nevertheless, allow compara-
tive analysis of past and contemporary mystical traditions. Such comparisons
may examine how such reportedly mystical forms relate to the wider traditions
in which they are situated and to which they critically respond. Studies can trace
the ways that mystical forms use and remake the symbolic codes and systems
which they inherit, inhabit and transform. They can investigate how diverse but
collected audiences respond in turn to those operations on and within the trad-
ition. In the concluding part of this chapter, I will compare the three musical cul-
tures of psytrance, dub and drone metal in relation to the themes of the chapters
to follow: first, translocality and marginality in the constitution of genre, then
ineffability, pilgrimage and ‘elsewheres’, then amplification and sonic materiality
and finally ritual, violence and noise. I suggest not only that the three forms of
music and their surrounding cultures share a concern with these themes, but
also that such themes can be understood as constituent elements in how these
popular music cultures may be understood as mystical. The texts and experi-
ences of each respective tradition are considered, interpreted and worked upon
in an ongoing discursive practice that excavates its own history while skirting
the margins of what can be said and understood through such practice, working
on its own limits and thereby gesturing beyond them.
Dub, trance and drone metal are all marginal and ambiguously bounded forms
of popular music within respective broader traditions or overarching genres, and
each emerges from and is profoundly concerned with translocality. The twin
tradition of reggae and dub articulates a complex history of musical influence
which parallels social, political, physical and imagined movements. This trans-
locality traces connections between Jamaica and Africa (often interchangeably
referenced as Ethiopia) in the nyabinghi drums of Rastafarian groundation cer-
emonies, and to which an imagined spiritual return is sought. Also expressed is
a movement between Jamaica and the United Kingdom, where black Caribbean
communities made their home and brought with them Jamaican sounds, with the
popularity of reggae in the United Kingdom then providing resources that fuelled
development of the music on both sides of the Atlantic. Another translocal con-
nection that fed reggae and dub was between Jamaica and the United States, at
first in the 1960s with servicemen and overseas workers aiding the circulation of
soul and rhythm and blues seven-inch records, feeding the sound system culture
until a disruption of this flow prompted much greater reliance on home-grown
musicians who developed their own style. Later, Jamaican musical practices such
as the retreatment of recordings and creative MCing styles influenced hip-hop in
the United States. While each of these relationships of translocality influence the
sound, themes and characteristic practices of both reggae and dub, it is the con-
cept of Ethiopia which most overtly influences the spiritual or religious aspects
of the dub reggae imaginary. It is also the most distant relationship in terms of
concrete movements of music and people in the twentieth century. As Michael
Veal suggests, though, the decades when dub emerged were a key moment for
interconnectivity in Black Atlantic culture, as news, images and representa-
tions of Africa could be more freely received in Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s
than at any point in the previous four centuries (2007: 199). In a different way,
psytrance is also defined by translocality, with the alternative genre name ‘Goa
trance’ expressing a relation with a place of ‘otherness’. The white Western hip-
pies who began the musical tradition were self-consciously ‘elsewhere’ when they
were in southern India, and when ‘psytrance’ is consumed in other locations, this
otherness is doubled by subtly referring back to Goa and then in turn elsewhere
from there. This translocal relation evokes aspects of the spiritual discourse and
symbolism in psytrance, with a heavy emphasis on Buddhist and Hindu imagery
that is foreign and exotic to white Western audiences. The marginal translocality
of psytrance, dub and drone metal cultures influence the ways in which spiritual-
ity and mysticism are portrayed, enacted and understood, as in different ways
a foundational spirituality of bodily musical engagement evokes an encounter
between self and otherness. In dub this is played out in identification with but
dislocation from African heritage, in sound that evokes the ghosts of cultural
memory, and in active readings of the Bible that seek to distinguish between
Afrocentric religious truth and elements considered to be colonial insertions. In
psytrance there is a claiming of spiritual otherness as reconnection with archaic
or exotic forms of ritual and religious life, imagined as more authentic than an
inherited institutional Christianity. In drone metal, as will be further explored in
Chapter 4, shifting rhetorics of pilgrimage through distant times, places and cul-
tures are instantiated in the impact of extreme sound on the body. An imaginal
traversal of ‘elsewheres’ is founded in the intimate ‘here’ of bodily response to the
excesses of overwhelming noise. As Joanna Demers notes,
In drones, dub techno, and noise, the use of stasis and noise runs counter to
habitual expectations for how elements of musical syntax interact with one
another. These elements last too long and are too loud, and they disrupt the
sense that music functions as a language, by calling attention to the physical
aspects that music usually asks us to ignore. (Demers 2010: 91)
This dialectic or staging of encounter between self and other, with its focus on
margins, journeying and traversal of landscapes of alterity, relates to statements
of ineffability about music, where exile or escape from language is emphasized.
Experience is described is indescribable, marking the especially uncertain status
of language in relation to powerful musical bodily conscious engagement. In a
way, a suspicion of language can stand for a wider unease about and perceived
distance from structures of rational organization, hierarchy and institutional
meaning, including those of religion. Similarly, here the practice, and perhaps
more importantly the rhetoric, of ecstatic intoxication is a mode for expressing a
state of ‘standing outside’ oneself or outside ‘normal’ structures of the everyday.
Here there is another combination of the near and far, the embodied and the
ecstatic. In musical experience grounded in the body, a distance from language
and other aspects of the everyday is expressed or reported, with a vocabulary of
spirituality or mysticism often attached to this status.
Each of the three musical cultures is rooted in the mediation of powerful
sounds in the vibrating body, and in events which emphasize the materiality
of sonic mediation itself. Though amplification is important in all rock music
and many other areas of popular music, drone metal is the first form of rock
or metal, or perhaps of any kind of popular music, in which amplifiers are the
primary instrument, more important than the electric guitar. In both psytrance
and dub, where DJs play recordings in a ‘live’ setting, speakers are at the centre
of sonic, musical and symbolic attention, as shown in album covers and visual
imagery for both cultures. The imagery of amplification speaks not of musi-
cal meanings, lyrics, or sonic structures so much as of bodily experience of
heavy bass sound that can both penetrate, envelope and even extend the listen-
ing body, producing or affording responses in that body which are reformed
into further practices of communication. In both the dub sound system and
the trance rave, records, considered individually or in a collection, are instru-
ments manipulated by a DJ or ‘selector’ in response to the sonic social body of
a dancefloor crowd, with those recordings altered, mixed, matched and joined
up in a trance set, or interrupted and restarted, toasted and chanted over by
the DJ in dub. In drone metal, the mediation of sound text experience appears
instead in the fascination with amplification as amplification. This emphasis on
amplification, mediation and materiality of sound in each mystical tradition of
popular music also extends to considerations of ritual. This is most explicit in

the discourses of psytrance ravers, many of whom report consciously organ-
ized attempts to create a ritual structure and feeling. While ritual is mentioned
less often in the context of dub, frequent additions to dub sound are the tradi-
tional nyabinghi drums, used in and thereby signifying Rastafarian rituals. In
drone metal too, attending concerts and listening to vinyl records in different
ways attract terminology of ritual. These three vastly different forms of popular
music present and evoke translocal marginality, elsewhere–here relations, pil-
grimage and traversal, amplification of amplification and ritual. These empiri-
cally observable elements of popular music cultures make it possible to read or
hear them as mystical modes of practice in which the foundations of each tra-
dition are examined and interrogated by participants testing their parameters
and limits in manipulating the material of their codes. The following chapters
will examine in more extended ethnographic detail the construction of drone
metal’s mystical tradition.
3
Beyond Heaviness: Listener Experience

in a Translocal and Marginal Genre
Introduction
Genre is always a matter of ongoing contestation and negotiation of boundaries,

a drawing of lines which include and exclude, among networks of values and
connections to other discourses (Frith 1996: 88). The boundary markers and bor-
derlines of genre are perhaps particularly contested in metal (Weinstein 2000: 14,
Walser 1993: 6–7), often related to questions of origin (Brown 2015b). As Keith
Kahn-Harris has noted, ‘genre is both a set of musical events and the social pro-
cesses and communities that constitute those events’ (Kahn-Harris 2007: 12).
Such processes include journalism and criticism (Thornton 1996: 160) and con-
sumer decisions (Demers 2010: 136), in what Keith Negus calls ‘genre cultures’
(Negus 1999: 29). Fabian Holt, describing genre cultures as ‘the overall identity
of the cultural formations in which genre is constituted’ (2007: 29), suggests that
scholars have tended to overly favour structure and object over practice and
experience in examining popular music genres (2007: 9). In this chapter I will
introduce and examine the genre culture of drone metal, exploring the early his-
tory of drone metal recordings (or rather, recordings that would later come to
be known as the earliest drone metal recordings), and the development into a
loosely constituted genre, one that came to especially value live concerts. In treat-
ing how drone metal is discursively constructed as a name for a kind of music,
I note the connections and conventions established by musicians, recordings and
listeners’ reception and communications about those musicians and recordings.
The chapter also identifies other important sites and modes of communication in
which ideas about genre are shaped, such as in jokes and memes, in comparison
with other metal styles, and in self-consciously excessive, hyperbolic uses of lan-
guage. In approaching how questions of genre and mysticism intersect, I present
examples of how the term ‘drone’ and its variants are used. In these, I note how
musical, social and scenic characteristics relate to the foregrounding in drone
metal’s genre discourse of subjective qualities of response, often understood as
‘listener experience’. Finally, I explore how the extremity of sound together with
the translocal and marginal basis of the genre culture leads to drone metal listen-
ing being conceptualized as indescribable in language, and suggest how this con-
nects with a discourse of religiosity, mysticism, ritual and transcendence.
Drone metal is a marginal, translocal and extreme form of popular music,
and these three characteristics are mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive. This
is despite the dispersed but internationally connected milieu fulfilling many
conditions and generalizations for scene formation that Wallach and Levine
have identified (2011). These include the existence of sites from which to access
nonlocal artefacts (in drone metal’s case, mostly online), institutions such as
labels and festivals, amateurs who spend time and energy on scenic practices,
a concern with the limits and boundaries of the scene, multigenerational par-
ticipation, and important relations with other metal scenes (Wallach and Levine
2011, see also Varas-Díaz et al. 2015). Drone metal has never had a local scene.
Many extreme metal subgenres that have been widely, even globally distributed
and consumed, and have subsequently been practised and produced in diverse
locations, were formed and developed in particular cities or regions and retain
symbolic associations with that geographical locale: glam metal in Los Angeles;
and then (partly in response) thrash metal in the San Francisco Bay Area;
death metal scenes in Gothenburg and around Tampa Bay, Florida; black metal
in Norway and later in Brittany and the Pacific Northwest. These local scenes
have all generated multiple bands, each with close stylistic and interpersonal
connections, and even generating names (however contested) for their scenes,
often based on geographical terms. Through communal activities dependent
on proximity, such as regularly playing live together, watching live shows, or
congregating at important sites such as record shops or bars, participants in a
local scene can work collectively to determine styles and values surrounding
music and its production. These connections and conventions are influenced by
particular conditions in that location (structures of financial support for artists,
available venues and technology for performance, practise and recording, chan-
nels of distribution and promotion, a local audience, even weather) together
with the actions of those creating a scene (musicians and listeners reacting to
other scenes and styles with perceived good and bad qualities, driving musical
innovation and creative use of available resources). Drone metal, by contrast,
was at first connected by recordings made by geographically disparate bands
Beyond Heaviness 55
rather than live performances. In contrast to other scenes which began to attract
wider attention after local development, drone metal was from the beginning a
primarily translocal form of extreme metal. While many of the influential bands
that will be discussed in this chapter are from the United States –Earth, Sleep,
Om, SunnO))) –at no stage did this constitute a local scene.
This translocality is both an effect and cause of drone metal’s marginality,
as can be seen in the scenic institutions pertaining to drone metal. There are
important, influential and successful drone metal record labels, music stores,
websites, venues and music festivals. Most of these, however, including the lar-
gest and most internationally recognized, do not survive on promoting, selling,
presenting, distributing or discussing solely drone metal, instead dealing in a
wider range of underground heavy or experimental music. There are some small
record labels, websites and blogs primarily oriented to drone metal and very
closely related music (for example, dark ambient or extreme doom metal). Any
of the scenic institutions that are important to drone metal and are large enough
to be well known and internationally successful, also include other forms of
music that are less marginal. All institutions that are exclusively concerned
with drone metal are themselves marginal in relation to wider extreme metal
scenes. By contrast, scenic institutions pertaining to other extreme metal genres
are able to sustain themselves through association with a particular subgenre,
such as doom (Rise Above records, the Doom over London festival, for example)
or black metal (such as, record labels Northern Silence, Drakkar Productions,
Eisenton distribution).
Even for many keen drone metal listeners, drone metal forms only a fringe or
occasional part of their listening habits and concert attendance due to the scarcity
of events and the specific and sometimes extraordinary nature of drone metal lis-
tening experiences. Marginality and extremity are expressions of a perceived dis-
tance from other forms of music, and therefore distance from the language that
can appropriately be used to describe those other music. The abstract, extended
and overwhelming character of the music is not only considered to be outside
the bounds of language that is normally applied to musical experience, but it
is reported also to produce strange, unusual and extraordinary states of mind
and body. In this way, listener experience becomes emphasized in the discourse
of genre which might otherwise be more focused on more objective sonic fea-
tures. Following Holt’s reflection that listener experience has been neglected in
theorizing popular music genre (2007: 9), I present drone metal as a genre in
which experience is foregrounded. The term ‘metal’ is a site for constant negotia-
tion about each recording or concert’s relation with the wider historical umbrella
genre. Meanwhile, I show that listeners use the term ‘drone’ not only as a technical
sonic descriptor, but also in discussing a wider group of specific musical features,
as well as to indicate a particular kind of unusual bodily engagement with sound.
I examine how the word ‘drone’ is used to describe a range of qualities of music
which emphasize the sonic and also the experiential. Then, I establish that the
insistence on ineffability and indescribability prompts the development of a pool
of shared symbolic resources that listeners recognize and draw upon to describe
their listening practices, and that many of these terms and references are ambiva-
lently related to religion. Such terminology tends to be used in ways which are
separated from established institutional meanings and practices, instead pointing
at ideas of religiosity in which mysterious ambiguity is determinedly retained.
Beginnings of genre
Musicians (in many musical worlds beyond metal) seek to avoid what they see as
reductive categorization of their artistic expression. Dylan Carlson, for example,
displays wariness of genres: ‘By the time there’s a genre tag attached, I’m long gone.
I’m doing something else’ (Carlson in Within the Drone, 2006). Genre labels are
often associated with the perceived taint of marketing structures, for noise music
(Novak 2013: 121) and for black metal (Stosuy 2012: 49), to cite two styles that
have influenced drone metal. Many listeners, too, state their rejection of genre
terms, which are conceived as restrictive labels and discrete boxes that limit the
creativity of musicians and, by extension, their own music taste. More established
forms of extreme metal become recognizable subgenres through coalescence of
identifying characteristics, and yet still may feature extended contestations over
genre naming, with the attribution of the term ‘black metal’, for example, appear-
ing especially to provoke disagreements. In drone metal, the uncertainty over
genre terms is exacerbated by its marginality. Jonathan Piper categorizes Earth,
Sleep and SunnO))) as drone doom bands (Piper 2013: 67), and thus a subset
of doom metal; SunnO))) have conversely been aligned with the harsh noise of
Merzbow (Thacker 2014: 192), or have been implicitly situated as black metal
(Ishmael 2014: 140). While such categorizations may be frequently put into
question, genre nevertheless remains a widespread and functional part of dis-
course about music. Even if preliminary and imprecise, however, genre terms are
important coordinates in initially orienting discourse on the reception of music.
Any popular music genre will have antecedent influences (Lou Reed’s 1975
Metal Machine Music, La Monte Young and Eliane Radigue’s compositional
Beyond Heaviness 57
experiments with longform drones, for example), and beginnings or origins are
retrospectively chosen and debated rather than objectively observed. The scat-
tering of extreme bands that later became known as performing drone metal
coalesced around a number of influential recordings made in the 1990s, which
were situated by their sound and surrounding symbolic practices in relation to
an older metal tradition. Connections and conventions between recordings set
a loose but distinctive template, enabling later bands to be understood as con-
tinuing in the same tradition. At first, due to their marginal underground sta-
tus, before any tenuous subgenre identity had developed, recordings were more
important than live performances (Carlson in Within the Drone, 2006). The band
Earth’s 1993 album 2: Special Low Frequency Version (commonly known as Earth
2) is widely cited by listeners and musicians as the first and most influential drone
metal album. Earth were formed in 1989, and the band had released a similar-
sounding EP in 1991 titled Extra-Capsular Extraction, but Earth 2 is considered
the originary landmark. The album contains three extended tracks of layered,
distorted guitars and very slow riff cycles, involving little else but multitracked,
downtuned distortion. The cover art features a photograph of a landscape domi-
nated by a vast blue sky and a tiny line of grass, a tent and a horse, visually
expressing an expansive, minimalist but overwhelming atmosphere, matching
similar qualities in the sound. The back cover displays a number of quotes, as
if from reviews but without indication of sources. The quite formal enthusiasm
and the oddly medical language of these unattributed quotes suggest that they
were intended satirically, perhaps referencing the dental textbook imagery used
in the packaging of the earlier EP. The quotes do, however, foreshadow a range of
influential themes in drone metal discourse, and are therefore worth reproduc-
ing in full (with original punctuation and capitalization retained):
. . . found it difficult to think of the things that disturb me . . . Afterwards, every-

thing seemed right with the world.
A new, yet seemingly ancient kind of experience . . . very unusual!!
. . . A PHYSICAL PRESENCE IN THE ROOM . . . I CAN ALMOST TOUCH
THE SOUNDS.
When I got up, I could swear I was a few inches off the ground!
Forget drugs and alcohol . . . I am now very, very mellow!
I feel alert yet very calm . . . Wonderful after a hard day.
MY TENSION HEADACHES HAVE DISAPPEARED!
Always had trouble relaxing . . . after auditioning Earth 2, had an incredibly
deep sleep. (Earth 1993)
Two 1996 albums each featuring a single massive track of monotonous feed-
back, repetition and guitar noise extended Earth’s template. Californian band
Sleep had previously made previous doom metal albums extremely close in style
to Black Sabbath, most notably Sleep’s Holy Mountain (1992a). They radically
extended this scope in producing an epic hour-long hymn to marijuana in grad-
ually evolving slow riffs and lyrics about pilgrimage. Due to record company
difficulties, this recording emerged in several versions titled either Jerusalem
(1996, 1998a, 1998b) or Dopesmoker (2003, 2012). Meanwhile Boris, from
Tokyo, released the album Absolutego (1996), which opens with more than ten
minutes of building feedback, amplifier fuzz and slow bass rumble, then trudges
through slow, noisy and repetitive riffs for the majority of its sixty-five-minute
length before dissolving back into noisy, sludgy distortion. These uncompromis-
ing recordings contrasted starkly with trends in heavy music at that time. While
initially seen as an energetic reaction against the perceived bloated narcissism of
1980s glam metal, the punk style and attitude of grunge was gradually diluted in
the wake of massive commercial success. ‘New metal’ or ‘nu metal’ in the mid-
1990s turned towards rhythmic and vocal influences from hip-hop, and was
perceived by many as a less complex and inferior form of metal (Mehling 2015).
From the mid-1980s to late 1980s onwards, extreme metal forms such as thrash
and death metal were marked by a steady acceleration, Slayer’s 1986 record Reign
in Blood setting a lasting benchmark in extreme speed and aggression. Second-
wave black metal, especially in Norway, saw the growing influence of frenetic,
lo-fi sound and misanthropic imagery. Death metal and black metal dominated
extreme metal in the later 1990s, though it remained an underground phenom-
ena, sustained by networks of dedicated fans (Christe 2003: 239–47, 270–3).
Black Sabbath had already showcased many songs with low, slow grooves,
especially on Master of Reality (1971), as guitarist Tony Iommi had developed
the style by ‘downtuning’ his guitar, loosening the strings to make them easier to
play after a factory accident had injured the tips of his fingers. He found that the
lower tuning gave an ominous, doomy sound that fitted well with their gloomy
lyrics. The faster speeds of most other extreme subgenres in the 1980s meant
that a new subgenre name, ‘doom metal’, came to describe bands that continued
to play in this style, such as Witchfinder General and Pentagram. Bands such
as St Vitus, Cathedral, Trouble and Candlemass continued to play doom metal
with clean vocals, though towards the mid-1990s this style became known as
classic doom, as new forms of slow and downtuned metal emerged. Skepticism,
Funeral, Thergothon and others further dragged tempi and added yet more
sludgy distortion and much lower growling vocals, prompting the emergence
Beyond Heaviness 59
of the subgenre label ‘funeral doom’ (connected to the band called Funeral, as
well as suggesting a general association with sombre atmospheres). British band
Electric Wizard were among the most enduringly successful of the later doom
bands in employing sludgy distortion and downtuned grooves, in combination
with a lurid aesthetic of drugs, horror films and occult atmospheres.
Amid these developments in heavy music, early drone metal bands Earth,
Sleep and Boris remained marginal throughout most of the 1990s. Earth were
based in Seattle during the explosion in the popularity of grunge from that area,
and founder member Dylan Carlson was close friends with Kurt Cobain of
Nirvana, who even sang on an early Earth track, ‘Divine and Bright’, recorded
in 1990 (Earth 2010). Yet despite this connection with one of the most famous
rock musicians in the world at the time, and Earth signing to the Sub Pop label
which was strongly associated with the vastly popular grunge scene, Earth were
not considered part of that genre. Carlson notes that Sub Pop didn’t know how to
label them (Carlson in Within the Drone, 2006). Sleep similarly found that their
drone doom metal record Dopesmoker/Jerusalem was met with incredulity from
their record label, in part because the label felt they could not market it accord-
ing to existing genre expectations. Boris’s debut album, released on their own
label, was similarly far removed in sound from the hardcore scene with which
the band members had been associated.
Since the late 1990s, many more drone metal bands have emerged, influenced
by the early recordings of Earth, Sleep and Boris. Among the most notable of
these are Om, a band initially emerging from Sleep’s demise, and SunnO))), who
have become by far the best-known and most commercially successful drone
metal band, also spawning various other projects featuring overlapping person-
nel (Gravetemple, Burial Chamber Trio, Penntemple, and Nazoranai to name
just a few). Other bands have used drone structures, tones and timbres while
drawing on other sonic influences related more or less distantly to heavy metal
such as progressive rock, noise music, jazz, and the kosmische music of the
German underground (otherwise known as krautrock).
Forging connections and conventions,

situating drone as metal
While extreme, unusual and marking significant departures from existing metal
and hard rock genres, early drone metal recordings acknowledged their influ-
ences from the history of metal, and from Black Sabbath in particular. At the
same time, bands also drew deliberate links to similar-sounding contemporary

musicians and thus began to develop the sonic, formal and symbolic conven-
tions of an emerging subgenre. Sleep had already highlighted their adherence
to Black Sabbath’s style in covering their songs ‘Lord of this World’ (Sleep
1991) and ‘Snowblind’ (Sleep 1992b), and copying the title and sleeve design of
Sabbath’s Volume 4 (1972) with their Volume 2 (1991). Their album Sleep’s Holy
Mountain (1992a) was a close study of Sabbath’s sound. Julian Cope added an
imagined and exaggerated religious slant to this homage, describing the band’s
Dopesmoker as
inhabiting a world in which the first four Black Sabbath LPs –BLACK SABBATH,
PARANOID, MASTER OF REALITY and VOLUME 4 –had become sacred tes-
taments on which to base their entire belief system. (Cope 2004)
Earth are so called because that was the original name used by Black Sabbath,
as well as for a sense of weighty foundations (Carlson in Richardson 2008). In a
photograph on the back cover of Earth 2, Dylan Carlson wears a shirt displaying
the logo of death metal band Morbid Angel, identifying him as a metal fan and
further asserting a visual association with extreme metal. This he later described
as an important as a signal to metal fans that they might be interested in the
album’s contents, given the potential for expectations to be misleading given
that it was released on a label known for grunge (Carlson in Bächer 2017). By
including a cover of ‘Peace in Mississippi’ by Jimi Hendrix (1975) on later album
Pentastar: In the Style of Demons (1996), Earth also paid tribute to the influential
pioneer of amplified distortion and feedback. Original Earth bassist Joe Preston
later joined the Melvins, who also experimented with a slower, sludgier sound,
especially on Lysol (1992). Boris, in turn, were named after a slow, repetitive
Melvins track (Melvins 1991), and on their own first album Absolutego (1996)
also featured the same subtitle ‘Special Low Frequency Version’ that Earth had
used on Earth 2. Dylan Carlson reportedly responded to Absolutego by describ-
ing it approvingly as ‘the sound of slugs fucking’, a phrase since taken up and
repeated elsewhere by drone metal listeners (e.g. DroneMuzak, 2013). Later,
SunnO))) named themselves after their preferred amplifier manufacturer (Sunn
Amps from Portland, Oregon) as well as making an association between ‘sun’
and the band Earth. They also recorded a song named ‘Dylan Carlson’ after the
Earth guitarist (on Grimmrobe Demos 2000a), collaborated with Boris (SunnO)))
& Boris 2006), and recorded highly abstract cover versions of heavy tracks
by Melvins, Metallica and black metal band Immortal on the albums ØØVoid
(2000b), 3: Flight of the Behemoth (2002) and Black One (2005). A later one-off
Beyond Heaviness 61
recording was made by musicians from SunnO))) and doom bands Cathedral
and Electric Wizard, who named their short-lived group Teeth of Lions Rule
the Divine (2002) after a song from Earth 2. The involvement in many projects
of individuals such as producer Randall Dunn (who has worked with SunnO))),
Boris and Earth among others) and Stuart Dahlquist (who formed drone metal
group ASVA and has also played in SunnO))) and Burning Witch) meant
that further connections between groups were made through personnel. Om,
SunnO))), Boris, Earth and others collaborated or performed together, cement-
ing links between the bands and suggesting an emergent genre grouping. As well
as sharing similar sound profiles, these symbolic, associative and personal links
between each group helped to establish codes constituting drone metal as a sub-
genre. The use of images, titles and sounds associated with Black Sabbath and
other metal groups meanwhile situated them within heavy metal. Throughout
the evolution of the drone metal subgenre, sonic, verbal and visual references
have frequently been made to mystical traditions, esoteric religious language
and spiritual practices, forming another generic convention that ties together
bands and recordings and talk about them. These range from Earth’s repeated
mentions of angels in song and album titles, to Om’s recitations of religious texts
and sounds amid bass-heavy sonic cycles, to SunnO)))’s ritualized live shows
shrouded in smoke and robes, to Bong’s intonations of the names of fictional
deities.
Listeners in constructing genre
Listeners also participate in the construction of genre. Repeating, reapplying

and reinforcing symbolic markers of genre all continue the work of drawing
and strengthening connections between different musicians, recordings and
listening experiences. For example, this occurs when listeners repeat phrases
identified with particular bands or recordings, sing along with recordings or
live shows, performatively embody iconic or significant phrases or gestures,
or type out such lines in comment threads on metal articles or YouTube post-
ings. Through this kind of practice, listeners perform their recognition of the
appropriateness or ‘fit’ of a particular musical experience with a pre-existing
understanding of a genre, itself constituted in the practices and discourse of
listeners and musicians. Just as musicians repeating phrases such as ‘Special
Low Frequency Version’ formed links between bands at the level of produc-
tion, listeners also make connections across the genre, by quoting lines from or
making reference to one band, album track or performance, while discussing

another. Thus the phrase ‘Maximum Volume Yields Maximum Results’, printed
in SunnO))) record sleeves and thereby closely associated with that band, is
used in survey responses, interviews and online discourse to talk not only about
SunnO))) but also about other bands. The practice in online communications of
using repeated brackets, especially after ‘o’ characters, to connote heavy amplifi-
cation and drone metal sound, is also widely used beyond references to the band
SunnO))) or the amplifier manufacturer Sunn (the source of the logo). Examples
include the username DRO)))NE on an online forum (ForeverDoomed 2015),
and the typing of O)))))M in comments attached to a YouTube clip of an Om
track (Om –Advaitic Songs Full Album 2012). In interviews and other con-
versations, listeners drew comparisons between and categorizations around
musicians, recordings or particular performances that were similar; group-
ings according to similarity are the foundations of genre categories, along with
adjudication about appropriate levels of similarity and therefore differentiation
and the drawing of boundaries. In addition to sonic, aesthetic and performa-
tive similarities, listeners discussed their assessment of music according to feel-
ings, emotional and physical responses, and internal states. These elements of
musical experience were widely considered to be legitimate and reasonable ways
to group music together, although often such groupings were understood to be
valid for a particular listener and not necessarily for others.
Jokes in genre discourse
The discursive work of constructing genre continues in the use of hyperbolic lan-
guage, jokes and memes. Telling jokes and sharing satirical images and phrases
can serve as important practices in which the recognition, reinforcement or
redrawing of boundaries takes place. Understanding jokes relies on familiar-
ity with conventions that are in the joke being subverted or exaggerated, and
can thus mark differences between insiders and outsiders. The success or failure
of jokes may also be a measure of limits, marking how far a particular trope,
sound or practice can be extended before it ceases to be considered authentic
and becomes subject to ridicule. It should, however, be noted that is character-
istic of metal culture that music that is taken very seriously can without contra-
diction be simultaneously considered with a humorous sense of the ridiculous.
Whether shared by mocking outsiders, or more commonly, by self-deprecating
insiders poking fun at their own listening habits as well as at musicians and other
Beyond Heaviness 63
listeners, such jokes encode important elements of genre conventions. Humour

can reveal, in exaggerated form, the elements crucial to a particular culture or
milieu or mode of cultural production.
Among the most common jokes about drone metal relate to time and slow-
ness, amplifiers or household appliances, especially fridges. One which I have
heard and told in different situations is ‘I was fifteen minutes late for a drone
metal show, but luckily I only missed the first note’, a variation of an older joke
about the extremely fast and abrupt subgenre of grindcore, where the latecomer
misses the first three bands. The joke highlights the slowness of musical devel-
opment, and subtly emphasizes a distinction between drone metal notes which
are to be experienced in slowly unfolding affective vibrations, and notes in
other forms of music which are to be comprehended in relation to other notes
together constituting musical structures. The Twitter account ‘Between Sunn
Chords’ purports to reveal ‘what [SunnO))) guitarist] Stephen O’Malley does
between playing chords’, including playing board games, taking his robe to the
dry cleaners and moving to Arkansas (Btwnsunnchords 2015). This kind of
humour highlights the extreme slowness that tellers and hearers of such jokes
will recognize from their experience of the music. The suggestion that SunnO)))
sound like household appliances, especially refrigerators, is common, shared in
conversation and online memes such as the words ‘SunnO))) jukebox’ scribbled
onto the front of an ordinary fridge. Similar humour is used by a YouTube user
who uploaded a ‘fan’ cover version of a SunnO))) track, which is a video and
sound recording of an electric fan (Orthodox Caveman (SunnO))) Cover) 2010).
These comments might perhaps signal ridicule through incomprehension of the
musical style or, more likely, affectionate understanding of the strange and, to
others, incomprehensible conventions of the genre (since people who dislike
drone metal would be unlikely to invest significant effort into this kind of cre-
ative play on the genre’s conventions).
Specifically pertaining to the labelling of genre, jokes are sometimes made
using ‘tagging’ functions on online music sites such as Bandcamp.com and Last.
fm, which host a large amount of music and user-generated information about
music. At these sites, listeners attach genre ‘tags’ to particular musicians, with
tags weighted to frequency of tags. On Last.fm in 2012, for the band SunnO)))
‘drone’, ‘doom’, ‘metal’, ‘experimental’, ‘ambient’ and ‘avant-garde’ are frequently
tagged, and the same terms are combined in other tags (such as ‘drone doom
metal’) showing that these are widely understood as ways of describing that
band’s music. Other tags seem to be used as jokes: ‘fridgecore’, ‘fridge’, and
‘refrigeratorcore’ are three variations on the joke that SunnO)))’s monotonous
noise sounds like amplified refrigerators. While these and others may be meant
satirically or humorously, in practice they function like any other tag. Clicking
on the ‘fridgecore’ tag leads to a page collecting other artists so tagged, such as
Earth and Boris, who are in turn also tagged ‘drone’, ‘drone doom’, ‘drone metal’
and so on. Joke tags poking fun at genre (whether used affectionately or depre-
catingly by avid listeners, or scornfully by detractors) therefore still contribute
to the constitution of genre in marking commonalities and grouping music and
musicians together.
Questioning metal status as genre work
Despite the overt references made by musicians and listeners to Black Sabbath and
other metal bands, the metal status of drone metal is sometimes questioned by
listeners and reviewers. The experimental group Melvins were a strong influence
on drone metal, and were themselves difficult to categorize but had strong links
to hardcore in a context where hardcore was often defined as punk and not metal
despite sonically incorporating aspects of both (Waksman 2009: 12–14). Some
bands have made quite stark stylistic changes, with leading drone metal bands
Om and Earth each having recorded several albums with far less distortion than
customarily is used in metal. Boris have gradually left behind the vast expanses
of distortion on their earliest recordings to experiment with and often subvert
rock conventions in other ways. Earth, starting with 2005’s Hex; or Printing in
the Infernal Method, for several years explored an emphasis on reverb rather than
distortion, though with the sonic structures and playing style otherwise similar to
their earlier, more distorted recordings. The question of whether these bands are
metal, or whether drone music can be metal, has continued to a point where this
ambiguity is a characteristic element of discourse around the music.
Album reviewers, for example, wonder whether to include the band Om in
their understanding of metal, but with a sense of paradoxical affirmation and
denial of genre categories:
It’s hard to look at Om as a ‘metal’ band at all, at least not in the simplest sense,
although their approach seems to be pursuing the Sabbathian ethos much more
intricately and determinedly than most of their contemporaries. (Burnett 2012)
Om cannot be classified into just one group. are they doom? are they stoner? are
they metal? are they melodic death metal? are they folk metal? I will answer yes
to all of the above, while at the same time saying no. (Bruner 2013)
Beyond Heaviness 65
Similar productive contradictions appear in uses of other terms crucial to dis-

cussions of metal, as in the following quotes from reviews of Om and Bong
recordings. The appropriateness of the word ‘riff ’ in each case is placed under
question while simultaneously and paradoxically affirmed:
Gentle noodling rides atop endless fuzzed riffs (if you can call one chord a riff).
Imperceptible shifts in tone arrive –the riff gets heavier. (McGibbon 2014)
Bass, drums and Al Cisneros’ intonated vocals now blend with hypnotic cello,
glossolalic tabla and Vedic chant to make something it feels almost blasphemic
to describe simply as ‘riffs’. These tracks are fragmentary facets of the true ur-
music. (Zero Tolerance quoted in CircuitSweet 2013)
A lengthy discussion ensued on a YouTube posting (Om –Advaitic Songs

(Full Album) 2012) of Om’s 2012 album Advaitic Songs, after one commenter
complained that there was not one ‘moment of metal’ in the whole recording.
The commenter then went on to link this apparent problem to other aspects
they clearly saw as a kind of infiltration of metal by ‘hipsters’ and ‘Christians’.
Most of those who responded took issue with this comment, though for different
reasons. Some attempted to correct the poster, by assessing Om as belonging to
particular metal subgenres such as sludge, doom or drone metal, or by award-
ing them metal status due to association with the (apparently unambiguously
metal) band Sleep. One commenter argued that the band used to be metal but
were not now, while another said they were still metal but might not be if they
continued their current trajectory. Others argued that metal was broad enough
to encompass this recording, and some others challenged the need for genre cat-
egories at all. Still others argued for retaining genre categories as a starting point
for musical exploration, in which case labelling Om as metal was appropriate
to encourage potential metal listeners who may like it, regardless of whether it
‘was’ in fact metal. This range of often strongly expressed opinions suggests that
the question of metal is an important one for listeners, through which they can
claim and perform their adherence to values and related identities. Final adjudi-
cations on metal status are in my opinion not possible, desirable or particularly
interesting. Instead, I consider the complexity, articulacy and strength of feel-
ing that are displayed in such conversations as evidence which in fact positions
drone metal as a metal subgenre, but one that is marginal.
While listeners often retain ambiguity or ambivalence when discussing
metal, comparisons with other more established categories of music were
more consistent. Several listeners strongly distanced drone metal from ‘New
Age’ music, despite both styles sharing some sonic qualities such as lengthy
ambient passages, unmetered sections, continuous sound, slow develop-
ment, use of field recordings and, not least, use of various sound sources
understood as sacred, such as chanting or Indian instrumentation (Zrzavy
1990). An online article noting these connections starts by discussing Om’s
Advaitic Songs, and suggests that New Age music and doom metal share aims
of transcendence in contrast to the focus on the self in punk, rock, pop and
hip-hop. The uncertainty with which this comparison might be received by
metal audiences is, however, acknowledged in the title, describing similarity
with New Age music as doom metal’s ‘dirty soothing secret’ (Berlatsky 2012).
Conversely, drone metal musicians and listeners more favourably associate
their music with minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley
and Steve Reich who, again, combine drones with evocations of spiritual alter-
ity (Schwartz 1996). This may be due to a higher level of perceived cultural
value attributed to a genre understood as ‘classical’ music, reprising in a differ-
ent era the kinds of legitimating links which 1980s metal guitarists and their
listeners sought to make with composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Vivaldi
(Walser 1993: 57–107).
Comparing drone metal with Slayer
Another example of a contestation of metal status, which nevertheless suggests

drone relates to metal in an important and extreme way, is the repeated com-
parison that listeners make between drone metal and Slayer. A YouTube user
posted a sound clip with a famous Slayer track drastically slowed down, together
with an image that added the ‘O)))’ design associated with SunnO))), and by
extension drone metal, to Slayer’s jagged name logo (Slayer –Angel of Death –
800% Slower!!! 2010). Commenters referenced SunnO))) and drone metal, while
also suggesting that it sounded like hell or the voice of Satan. Radical differences
in speed between SunnO))) and Slayer are noted, but at the same time a com-
monality in metal timbres is recognized. By talking about how drone bands are
completely different from Slayer’s fast-paced aggressive thrash, both are placed
implicitly within a paradigm of comparing forms of extreme metal. The thrash
band is mentioned surprisingly frequently in discussing drone metal and what
drone metal is not. The contrast between Slayer and drone metal is introduced
not only to contrast fast extreme metal and slow extreme metal, however, but
also to draw a distinction between extreme metal for which there is an adequate
Beyond Heaviness 67
language, and extreme metal for which description is difficult or even reportedly
impossible.
Instead of attacking you like Slayer does with a very fast-paced drumbeat,
[Bong’s music] slows you down and it makes your head wander off. . . . Because
you can describe Slayer . . . But then it comes to [Bong’s] music and it’s getting
hard to describe, because the innate feeling is about feeling it and listening to
that boringness. (B25, Interview, 2013)
In comparison to Slayer, that’s very straightforward in a way, I mean if you’ve heard

one song you kind of know what it’s all about, whilst this [Om’s music] is more . . .
it’s mystical in a way, and different in a way if you maybe think about what metal
people listen to otherwise, um, and then . . . I don’t know, just . . . I don’t know.
I can’t really put into words what I’m thinking! [laughs]. (O15, Interview, 2014)
Regarding the question of metal, responses to a survey about an electronic

drone musician were revealing. Attendees of a Tim Hecker concert were asked
if they listened to heavy metal, and several responded with statements like ‘Not
much beyond bands like Sleep, SunnO))), Boris and Earth, really’ (H1, Survey,
2013). In such responses, drone metal was positioned in ambivalent relation to
metal, with some Tim Hecker listeners engaged with drone metal but uninter-
ested in other forms of heavy metal. Similarities were drawn between musicians
across broader genre lines, such as ‘Sunn O))) are to metal what Tim Hecker is
to electronica’ (H22, Survey, 2013), placing the musicians both within and apart
from their respective genres, while also drawing a link between them that was
and was not an aspect of genre.
Electronic dub musician Kevin Martin, who recently collaborated with Dylan
Carlson as The Bug vs Earth (2014, 2017) was invited by a website to pick his
favourite heavy music, and the list, featuring Earth, Om, Boris and SunnO))),
was titled ‘Metal, Not Metal’ (VinylFactory 2014). For Olivia Lucas, drone metal
is ‘metal about metal’ (2013), and Aliza Shvarts notes a related assessment of
SunnO)))’s status among metal listeners:
Among some of the longer haired people I know, a question circulates that is
both endless and imperative: is it metal? . . . At what could either be construed
as the esoteric fringes or innovative core of the genre, this question constitutes
metal’s very substance, posed by the music itself. (2014: 203)
Again, without wishing to pronounce final judgement or forward any suppos-

edly fixed definitions of metal, the longevity and intensity of debates on whether
bands or recordings ‘are’ metal indicates the presence and ongoing importance
of boundary work about the parameters of metal. In addition, the paradoxical

and contradictory forms presented in discussions of metal in drone metal indi-
cate the extremity of the music, echoing aspects of mystical discourse testing the
edges of language, as well as locating drone metal’s sonic explorations simultane-
ously at both the margins and foundations.
Ineffability and estrangement from language
These issues surrounding genre in drone metal relating to marginality, extremity

and comparison are closely connected to difficulties with language. In discuss-
ing the music, participants often avoid, subvert or overtly disavow genre terms.
Interviewees often did this by naming a tentative genre, then immediately retreat-
ing from it, insisting on ambiguity or difference: ‘This meditation type of music,
or whatever you call it’ in one interview discussion of Bong (B25, Interview,
2013). In other cases, the specific naming of genre was avoided by talking about
‘this kind of music’ or ‘bands in this genre’ without actually saying the name of a
genre: I listen to a lot of stuff in the same kind of loose genre . . . I listen to a lot of
bands that are the same kind (E14, Interview, 2014). These ways of talking appeal
to the social nature and usage of genre terminology. Phrases like ‘or whatever you
call it’ recognize and call attention to the dialogic negotiations of what names
‘we’ give to ‘it’. Talking about ‘this kind of music’ is a statement which places both
interlocutors in the same frame of reference and assumes discursive competence,
again showing recognition that construction of categories takes place in commu-
nication between people who are interested or invested in the music. Similarly,
listeners posit a kind of transgeneric genre, drawing together music which for
them shares a certain quality or feel, but which they perceive has been assigned
different genres, presumably by other audiences such as critics:
A lot of music that I listen to comes from supposedly different genres [but] still
shares this element, that takes its time, that allows the good parts to repeat for a
while. (O34, Interview, 2013)
These claims implicitly recognize the communicative usefulness of grouping

music together, but reflect or suggest an estrangement from application of genre
by others. It is implied that those who define music into ‘supposedly differ-
ent genres’ do not recognize or value the same things that the listener hears or
feels as similar and important. These statements are also markers of translocal
Beyond Heaviness 69
marginality, where listeners feel distant from perceived mainstream audiences

and their understandings of genre terms.
The challenge of how to name and draw boundaries around a group of
sounds that is loosely connected and whose audience is fragmented and dis-
persed is closely related to the challenge of reported indescribability, of how to
name sounds which are unusual or difficult to talk about in language that works
for other music. The two problems of sound defying both description and genre
affiliation sometimes appear side by side:
[Drone metal musician Horseback] incorporates Drone into some sort of Doom
Metal/Sludge whatever you want to call it with a black metal voice (I can’t
describe it, but that really give an idea of the vocals), you really have to check
this record. (Edgar 2011)
Difficulties with genre terminology are a specific instance of the issue of

ineffability reported by listeners about drone metal. An emphasis on listener
experience is accompanied by an apparently profound (and, in certain respects,
paradoxical) ambivalence about language in description: ‘We can’t describe this
experience: it is loud, dark, violent, meditative, powerful’ (SK9, Survey, 2013).
Reports about listening to drone metal, whether or not elicited by the researcher,
frequently begin with such denials of the possibility of description. In fact, the
use of the colon to punctuate the quoted sentence even implies, paradoxically,
that the latter clause explains the first, that it is indescribable precisely because
it warrants the following descriptive adjectives. Accepting only the first part of
the phrase would lapse into dividing text and experience as in the problem-
atic approaches to mysticism discussed in Chapter 2. Equally, ignoring the first
part and taking the second as straightforwardly descriptive misses the important
fact that these adjectives have been problematized and undermined in advance.
Analysis needs to take seriously the whole phrase, and others like it, in which
the description and the statement about the status of description are both joined
and separated.
In response to survey or interview questions, and in fieldwork conversations,
it was extremely common for drone metal listeners to state that it was hard or
impossible to communicate about the experience in words. Struggles with lan-
guage are not unique to drone metal, but it is significant that these disclaimers
were forcefully and frequently made about drone metal and were not regarded as
so important when talking about other kinds of music or other aspects of every-
day life. As David Burrows writes,
The point isn’t simply that music slips through the net of language –for what,
after all, does not, to one degree or another? –but there can be few gaps between
an experience and its representation wider than the one between music and its
analyses and descriptions. (Burrows 1990: 92)
Drone metal listeners frequently extended this idea to suggest that the gap
between experience and representation in language was for drone metal wider
than for any other form of music they had encountered. Drone metal as music to
be experienced rather than understood is often implicitly set against other music
that may be perceived as more structurally complex yet less affectively profound.
Listeners hold that classical music or thrash metal can be approached and under-
stood through musical narratives, semantics and sequences, and therefore can
be more easily related to and explicated in language. Drone metal, by contrast, in
its relentless repetition and noise, resists musical structuring and, by extension,
resists language as an analogue of that structure.
The same ineffability disclaimers occur in writing on drone metal, where
reviewers make special efforts to mark drone metal as ineffable. In theory,
all music reviews might legitimately begin with such waivers, though this is
uncommon. By their very existence, drone metal reviews perform the paradox
of ineffability by continuing to describe drone metal after stating the impossi-
bility of that task. The opening lines from three different reviews of Bong’s 2014
Roadburn performance begin with such questioning of language:
Oh, how to explain Bong? (Von Der Ohlsen 2014)
How shall I describe the transcendent experience Bong is? (Keefy 2014)
It is really hard to describe what it is about BONG that I really love. (Scott
D. 2014)
A review of Bong’s album Mana-Yood-Sushai (2012) begins with a more detailed

statement associating language with thinking and expressing the absence of both:
Writing about drone in many ways defeats the object, it undermines the genre’s
primary purpose which is to send the listener into a trance-like state, devoid of
thought. (McKibbin 2012)
In written interviews, listeners use available punctuation or ‘scare quotes’ in

order to undermine or cordon off aspects of their own language use, offering
intriguingly layered responses. After receiving the survey response ‘We can’t
describe this experience: it is loud, dark, violent, meditative, powerful’ (SK9,
Survey, 2013) about a SunnO))) concert, I asked the same respondent in a writ-
ten interview why the experience could not be described. He replied:
Beyond Heaviness 71
Because, it is more deepfull than another style. I can’t say ‘the sound is beautiful’
(well, it is but not in a common definition) or ‘I wanted to shake my head’. (SK9,
Interview, 2014)
Another survey respondent similarly undermined their own language use:
Words can’t describe. Words shouldn’t be able to describe. ‘Full on third eye
massage’? (N29, Survey, 2013)
In this description, the possibility of description is not only denied, but is even
placed under another prohibition. But a description is nevertheless tentatively
put forward, with the double precaution of being quarantined by a question
mark and quotation marks.
So why is drone metal apparently so indescribable, and why is it then
described? As Spivak writes of the sign under erasure ‘(Since the word is inaccur-
ate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible)’ (Spivak 1997: xiv).
Description is always inaccurate for something that is so extraordinary and so
important for certain listeners, but description is felt to be necessary precisely
because of that extraordinariness and importance. Listeners feel compelled to
discuss interpretations of their experience with others whose own descriptions
may chime with their own in finding this kind of music and experience extra-
ordinary and profound. The social communication that is implicitly mobilized
in a discussion of ineffability is shown by the frequency with which people dis-
cuss indescribability by reporting other people’s difficulties in describing drone
metal, or in describing how hard they have found the task of describing drone
metal to others.
Even though I really love doom metal and all of its sub-genres, reviewing an
album in this genre is always pretty hard for me, and especially in the more spe-
cific sub-genres of doom. But Boris’ first full-length album [Absolutego] was just
too good to leave it there without reviewing it. . . . This droning doom/noise type
of music is really hard to describe, so I’ll try as best as I can. (KayTeeBee 2005)
Now let me just say this, I will do my best to describe their set. I feel that it is lit-
erally humanly impossible to describe what [a Sleep concert] was like. I told a
co-worker about the show and all I could say was, ‘It was like meeting God . . . and
everything you’ve ever wanted coming true.’ Now that may seem like an exagger-
ation, but just ask anyone who’s witnessed this band . . . Anyway, back to the show.
(Doom 2011)
In these reviews, description in spite of ineffability is undertaken as part of a

social praxis, as describing for others because of the importance and value of the
music. The difficulty of describing an extraordinary listening experience, and at

the same time the social impulse to share such responses, show the balance of
tensions which produce ongoing genre discourse.
Hyperbole and self-conscious excess
Another way in which the stability of language is placed into question is in self-
consciously hyperbolic, overly superlative, cryptic, humorous, or otherwise
excessive description. Exaggerated imagery, strange and confusing phrases are
all used to signal the uncertain status of language. Yet it is important not to dis-
miss the particular words used in a certain utterance just because it is obviously
exaggerated or humorous, remembering to ask, with Foucault, ‘How is it that
one particular statement appeared rather than another?’ (2002: 27). Surveys in
particular gave rise to short, cryptic statements of description:
Like rusty needles of time would be taken from my eyes. (B48, Survey, 2013)
Like travelling through middle ages wearing capes. (O117, Survey, 2013)
IT WAS SIMILAR TO DEATH. (G26, Survey, 2013)
Listening to Mana-Yood-Sushai makes me wish I was a tree. (B13, Survey, 2013)
The first two apparent comparisons stretch the format of their own state-
ments, since the experiences with which they are comparing drone metal per-
formances are impossible. Not only are they impossible, but they introduce
strange slippages, both involving time. ‘Needles of time’ is incomprehensible
but provocative given the widely reported importance of changed time per-
ception in drone metal experience, and the phrase is further complicated by
the removal image as well as an odd grammatical tense. ‘Travelling through
Medieval times’ suggests both spatial and temporal movement, with a further
entertaining absurdity about capes. Another impossible comparison, death,
is made in self-consciously portentous capitals, and a listener wishing they
were a tree also employs an image which is deliberately difficult to imagine.
Comparisons to both being dead and being a tree, though, have subtle impli-
cations of radically transformed experiences of time and the listening body. As
deliberately impossible or hard-to-understand comparisons, these statements
communicate about the difficulty of conventional description, as well as make
obscure hints about the actual qualities of experience in terms of time and
extremeness.
Beyond Heaviness 73
These kinds of strange descriptions are also often mentioned in terms of

social discourse. The following example not only contains an unusual descrip-
tion of an unusual experience at a Nazoranai concert, but also a report of having
previously described it this way:
Extraordinary! I described it to a non-attending friend as being like being

trapped inside a beautiful, angry jet engine for 80 minutes. (N39, Survey, 2013)
There is a sense of humour in many such descriptions too, a self-awareness

which acknowledges that a sentence might be ridiculous yet still be a legitimate
attempt at expression in the language available. Humour here is another marker
of excess in relation to language, and thus should not be misunderstood as flip-
pancy or lack of sincerity.
The interpretation and reception of Sleep’s Jerusalem/Dopesmoker (1996,
2003) is serious and reverential, while simultaneously jocular, almost derisive.
As one interviewee put it, ‘it takes its not being serious very seriously’ (B25,
Interview, 2013). The lyrical theme of a caravan of stoner priests in hybrid Star
Wars/Old Testament landscapes and language is described as silly, though the
same recording is described by the same listeners as the holy grail of drone metal
and as a sacred text. One review explains that ‘while the storyline may be a little
hokey to some, it’s delivered in such an epic and doom metal laden way, that it’s
undeniably enjoyable’ (Mahalins 2009). Another suggests that, despite the ‘silly
lyrics’, after listening ‘you aren’t laughing at the words and the story they tell, but
getting ready to rid yourself of all worldly possessions to join the procession of
“weedians” on their long journey to Nazareth’ (Spacekase 2008). This sense of
simultaneous ridiculousness and seriousness (where neither is compromised or
mediated by the acknowledgement of the other) is at the root of much humour
in wider metal circles, and is likely a contributing factor to the widespread mis-
understandings of metal and metal humour (as noted in Johnson and Cloonan
2008: 136, Kahn-Harris 2007: 147–50, Moberg: 2015: 18).
It is not insignificant that this humour/seriousness relation occurs in combi-
nation with drug use and religion in Sleep’s Dopesmoker/Jerusalem (1996, 2003).
Stereotypical aspects of experiencing marijuana and other stronger psyche-
delic drugs include laughter and/or reports of spiritually significant profundity.
A link between laughter and spirituality, both in drug experiences and drone
metal reception, could be suggested. If such experiences elicit the language of
profound spirituality because they are felt to be more real than everyday nor-
mality, then laughter is another possible response to this gap, a result of find-
ing social conventions and common assumptions humorous or ridiculous in
the light of transformed consciousness and perception. In drone metal, too,

humour emerges from differences in expectations and conventions, understood
as otherness and excess which is nevertheless real and valid for participants. At
a SunnO))) concert, as the very first amplified bass notes resonated through the
audience, I heard some loud and spontaneous laughter from other members of
the audience. I recognized in the laughter something of my own incredulous
response at the excessive noise, especially since the concert was taking place
at the Royal Festival Hall in London, a venue more commonly associated with
orchestral performances. The tone of the laughter also reminded me of a listener
who had compared drone metal concerts to being on a rollercoaster, since my
own reaction when on rollercoasters tends to be to laugh constantly through-
out –not because I find rollercoasters funny, but because physical laughter (like
the rhetoric of intoxication) is a bodily response to excess.
An ever-more extreme lexicon of metaphors and similes for heaviness is
employed across extreme metal genres but particularly in drone metal, where the
scale of the musical structures is comparatively vast. According to one review, Sleep’s
Dopesmoker (2003) is ‘heavy like a brontosaurus drowning in a tar pit’ (Dropd24
2008). Another describes it as ‘the sound of 1,000 suns exploding, recorded at the
center of the earth. It is BEYOND all previous knowledge of the word HEAVY’ (R.
Scott 2004). Meanwhile Bong’s ‘explorations carry weight beyond common meas-
urement’ according to one album preview (The Obelisk 2015), and Ommadon’s
2014 album V is described as ‘sounding heavier than a dying planet’ (Whelan
2015). These elaborate descriptions of superlative heaviness function in a similar
way to the descriptions of metal and riffs that will be discussed in Chapter 4. They
mark the music with a descriptor (metal, riff, heavy) but then make statements
which set the ‘real’ status of what is being described as being so far beyond that
descriptor as to disqualify or distort it. This is an implicit version of the more expli-
cit ineffability disclaimer where drone metal is described as indescribable, which
functions by operating on the conventional terminology of the discourse.
A further way to highlight the boundaries of language is through unconven-
tional uses of punctuation, such as the symbol O))) as used in different contexts
to signal drone sound. The following examples are titles given to two reviews of
Sleep’s Dopesmoker (2003):
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?!!!?!?!!?!?!!!!11?!?!!?!111?!?! (Caspian 2008)
.................................................. (Vicar 2005)
Excessive ellipses, exclamations and unconventional uses of punctuation per-

form incredulity towards language itself as well as towards the subject matter.
Beyond Heaviness 75
A listener concisely cites a common response to Om’s lyrics, and the ‘meaning’
of drone metal sound in general:
I have no idea what they’re talking about but it sounds incredible. D. (Comment

on YouTube video, Om –Advaitic Songs (Full Album) 2012)
Just as drone metal is described as sound to be experienced rather than under-

stood, many of the different modes of discourse which surround it are placehold-
ers or signals about language and its status more than messages or descriptions
conveyed straightforwardly through language.
Drone, droning, droney, droned
Just as there is some contestation about appropriate uses of the term ‘metal,’ the
word ‘drone’ is also used in differing ways. On a blog about drone music, the
following comment was posted, evidently in response to what the commenter
perceived to be a misunderstanding of genre and terminology:
What people think drone metal is:
-take progression
-hold the chords and only play each one on the first beat
-slow it down a bit
-drop tuning
What drone metal actually is:
-metal with fucking drones in it. (DroneMuzak 2014)
However, instead of setting out with a technical definition and then measur-
ing examples against that framework, I have tried to understand what listeners
and musicians mean when they use the term ‘drone’, by analysing closely the
contexts in which the word is used across different areas of discourse. Usage
and context of the term ‘drone’ during interviews or in online communications
showed the kinds of sounds and the kinds of sonic experiences that are under-
stood by listeners as related to the concept of drone. Sometimes the word drone
came up quickly:
OC: Why did you decide to go to the Gravetemple show at Roadburn

[2013]?
G23: . . . the Sunn O))) gig in 2011 was an earth-crushing experience. The whole
013(venue) building was jiggled by the massive drone sound of Sunn
O))) . . . After 60 min. my girlfriend leaved the show with these words: ‘I
have to go out, otherwise my skull is droned away!’ For this reason I had to
attend this Gravetemple show. I want this experience again.
OC: What were your expectations of the Gravetemple performance?
G23: My expectations of the Gravetemple performance were to see a loud,
heavy drone show that reduces your bones into the right spot. (G23,
Interview, 2013)
As well as the particular band being designated as a drone band, other qualities
are associated with the term: loud, heavy, mass and intense physical experience.
In interviews, I would often ask for further explanation of some terms which
arose in listeners’ descriptions, which sometimes then prompted talk about
genre and musical experience. Here are two examples in which claims arose
relating to drone and genre:
OC: You said it [the Nazoranai concert] was kind of cathartic. What made it
cathartic?
N36: I like listening to different types of music, but with drone form of
music, I really love the length of the music. It allows you, it gives you
that possibility to get lost in the song. And it kind of creates the perfect
environment for a trance, in a way, and yeah, really . . . [you can get] sort
of lost in those very long sounds. (N36, Interview, 2013)
OC: You said that it was sort of taking the listener on a sonic journey. Can
you explain a bit more what you mean by that?
N17: I always found droning quality music takes me on a journey, anyway. It’s
because it’s that uninterrupted aspect of it. They’re not like segmented
songs, they might start off quite mellow and slow, and just build up and
really take their time building up. (N17, Interview, 2013)
Using a similar strategy, I might pick up on a phrase that an interviewee had

used to describe an important experiential aspect of music, and ask whether that
feeling could be found elsewhere:
OC: [You mentioned] ‘being engulfed by the music . . .’ Is that something that
happens with other kinds of music, or other concerts that you’ve been to?
O34: . . . A lot of the music I listen to has these drone elements, if we were to
define it as . . . this repetition, slow repetition of certain parts. And I’d
say that that’s sort of where I really become engulfed, where the music
has time, time to . . . basically has time to allow me to be engulfed by
it. I mean, when the musical experience isn’t like stressed out, when it’s
allowed to take its own time, basically. (O34, Interview, 2013)
Beyond Heaviness 77
Asking people about how they got into ‘this kind of music’ often elicited state-
ments about drone and associated characteristics, as well as showing how
technologies of mediation and exploration shape the constitution of generic
categories:
OC: After you’d listened to [2009 SunnO))) album] Monoliths & Dimensions
and you’d suddenly ‘got it’, did that open the door to listening to other
kinds of music?
G30: Yeah, yeah. After I listened to that, I started googling what drone is,
and that kinda stuff, so automatically you go back in the discography,
and you listen to all the records. Another interesting thing is I play
the didjeridoo, and I played the didjeridoo from ninth grade until
I finished high school, and I’ve never thought of it but I was into drone
before I knew drone or what drone was. Because that continuing,
reverberating tone, of didjeridoo or bass or guitar, or whatever it may
be, was something that really attracted me. (G30, Interview, 2013)
In this way, without dictating or asking for definitions, I was able to com-
pile a network of terms, concepts and comparisons frequently mentioned in
relation to drone. The meaning of drone for listeners includes drones in the
technical sense of sustained notes at a constant pitch, but also signifies vari-
ous other sonic aspects such as slowness in tempo or development, repetition,
loudness, limited tonal range or monotony, downtuning, lowness, bass, distor-
tion, unsegmented continuity, extension and length. Closely focusing on how
listeners used the term, and how they valued musical experiences revealed
that ‘drone’ was used to describe subjective experience as well as sound. For
example, drone and derivative terms appeared to signify intense physical
experience, catharsis, transcendence, mysticism, ritual, therapy, journeys and
pilgrimages. These terms were used in exactly the same ways as the descriptors
that were apparently more objectively sound-related, suggesting that for lis-
teners, it was neither easy nor desirable to separate the sonic and experiential
qualities of drone metal.
Listener experience in genre discourse
As a way of inquiring about how listeners understood relations between musi-

cians, without addressing directly the sometimes vexed question of genre, I asked
listeners what they considered to be similar to the specific concert or musician
initially discussed. I received a large number of reports that Earth concerts

were similar to Om concerts, and Bong recordings produced similar responses
to SunnO))) recordings and so on. This confirmed my own understanding of
these groups as involved in the same kind of music, and listeners less frequently
suggested other musicians or specific recordings. Some people responded with
carefully explained similarities to other types of music, such as Bitches Brew by
Miles Davis (1970) or Pink Floyd albums, mentioning either long tracks such as
‘Echoes’ in the album Meddle (1971), or the segued continuity of recordings like
Dark Side of the Moon (1973).
In interviews, comparisons were sometimes drawn between drone metal,
other kinds of music with droning repetition and beyond music to encounters
with sound not normally considered to be musical:
E10: I suppose it’s only recently, sort of in the past three or four years that I’ve
discovered the genre that’s called maybe drone metal, or drone, as it were.
Although there are some who’d argue that drone is the musical technique,
it’s not a genre. But maybe it’s something that resonates with things I’ve
heard before. Like, you know, the blues singer and guitarist Fred McDowell,
who plays bottleneck style. He just has that steady drone on the bass string,
that he would keep going, you know, even if it doesn’t follow the harmonic
pattern of the song, so, it was sometimes, that deep drone there. And I don’t
know, perhaps something like Terry Riley, [or] Poppy Nogood and the
Phantom Band, [they] just sound like things are being repeated.
OC: It’s always interesting, you can hear references or similarities popping up
in the most unexpected of places sometimes.
E10: Yeah, that’s right. Or even maybe sometimes when I’m on the train, or
I find myself drifting off and listening to the air conditioning, or things
like that. (E10, Interview, 2013)
In the following excerpt from a different interview, a listener linked the experi-
ence of a SunnO))) concert to a seemingly disconcerting feeling which had
powerful and unusual effects:
SK13: I felt like I reached the absence of consciousness I expected from

the show.
OC: Can you describe a bit more what you mean by ‘absence of
consciousness’ and also how that happened?
SK13: I guess it’s what people who do drugs are looking for too, it’s just the
ultimate relaxing experience, shutting down your brain, trying to think
about nothing to reach pure bliss.
Beyond Heaviness 79
OC: Did you get this experience anywhere else (other music, other
experiences)?
SK13: [after describing two musical performances] I used to work in a
supermarket that had a very noisy ventilation system. By noisy I mean
it was big ventilators that produced loud low frequencies and the music
was always at a very low volume so when very few people were around,
I always used to feel a bit numb.
OC: That’s interesting about the ventilator, still relating to low droning
sounds. How did it affect what you were doing?
SK13: My job was to fill up the racks in the store. In this particular ‘sonic case’,
it used to take me a whole afternoon to do things that would have taken
me no more than a couple of hours with loud supermarket music and
lots of people buzzing around.
OC: That’s really strange! Did anyone else notice that effect?
SK13: No, it was just affecting me. (SK13, Interview, 2013)
In the survey question about what was similar to the performance under discus-
sion, I deliberately avoided specifying that I was asking what music was similar.
While many responses named other bands or other kinds of music, I received
a number of striking responses that situated drone metal in relation to non-
musical experiences:
OC: What other experiences (musical or other) are comparable or similar in

any way?
SK20: Sauna. Very good marihuana:). (SK20, Survey, 2013)
SX7: Sex, rollercoaster, horror movie. Haha I don’t know. (SX7, Survey, 2013)
O12: Meditating, contemplating, drifting away, taking psychedelics, smoking
weed, sleeping. (O12, Survey, 2013)
SK34: A big fat chili with lots of red peppers and hot sauce. (SK34,
Survey, 2013)
SX9: I guess extreme forces of nature. (SX9, Survey, 2013)
These reports underscore three aspects of drone metal in relation to language.

First, that part of the rhetoric of discussing drone metal situates it as unusual.
Second, that listeners are casting around quite widely for appropriate compari-
sons in language and experience. And third, that listening experience (alongside
more specifically sonic qualities) contributes strongly to audience understand-
ings of similarity and therefore genre. In the concluding section of this chapter,
I demonstrate how these factors in combination invite particular uses of reli-
gious language into drone metal’s genre discourse.
Conclusion: Experience, ineffability and religion

in drone metal’s genre discourse
Translocality, marginality, extremity and abstraction in drone metal’s sound and

genre culture prompt a tendency towards greater inclusion of listener experience
in the discursive construction, negotiation and maintenance of genre. Humour,
outlandish hyperbole, disclaimers about ineffability and a rhetoric of intoxica-
tion all mark responses to music which exceeds what is considered to be ordin-
ary description. The language of transcendence, meditation, trance, spirituality,
mysticism, ritual and religion also appears in combination with these tropes.
Amid this range of ambivalently employed terminology derived from religion,
it is the orientation towards experience that foregrounds ideas about mysticism,
resonating with the emphasis on experience in scholarly discourses concerning
mysticism, discourses which in turn have influenced popular understandings of
mysticism.
Questions and paradoxes surrounding ineffability, experience, and the role
of language in mysticism will be familiar from the history of studies on mys-
ticism discussed in the previous chapter, especially regarding the positing of
inaccessible individual psychological states from which essentialist claims are
often extrapolated. Scholars of mysticism have long discussed a further para-
dox of ineffability, where even describing something as indescribable is already
a description (see, for example, W. James 1984: 380, Katz 1978a, Sells 1994,
Harmless 2007: 244). I understand such disclaimers as prefatory metalinguistic
statements about the language that is about to be used. Disclaimers of ineffabil-
ity ask for readers to be aware that the writer has questioned or undermined
in advance, but not cancelled out, the language they are about to employ. As
Certeau writes, ‘ “the ineffable” is therefore not so much an object of discourse as
a marker of the status of language’ (Certeau 1995: 443). Ineffability also produces
discourse, in that language is in a way provoked by that which reportedly lies
outside it. The key issue is that the reporting of something apparently beyond
the scope of language takes place in language. Ineffability is therefore at issue
not outside language, but at its boundaries. Experience that is so important that
it eludes easy categorization in words urges listeners to attempt description, and
language is in a way freed by being marked as faulty from the outset. In another
way, discourse is not only instigated but also perpetuated by this movement. As
Sells writes of apophatic language (negative statements that approach mystical
description through a series of denials),
Beyond Heaviness 81
Any saying (even a negative saying) demands a correcting proposition, an unsay-

ing. But that correcting proposition which unsays the previous proposition is in
itself a ‘saying’ that must be ‘unsaid’ in turn. It is in the tension between the two
propositions that the discourse becomes meaningful. That tension is moment-
ary. It must be continually re-earned by ever new linguistic acts of unsaying.
(Sells 1994: 3)
Thus ineffability disclaimers, while putting into question any language that fol-
lows them, also encourage language to follow them, evoking and eliciting fur-
ther descriptions, also already undermined before their emergence.
In drone metal genre discourse then, ineffability is linked to mystical dis-
course. The radical and extraordinary character of the music means that, for
many listeners, conventional language does not apply. Extraordinary ways of
using language are sought, and these uses often connote religion, whether in
explicitly appealing to concepts or practices associated with religion, or in using
ways of speaking that have been historically associated with marginal traditions
of mysticism in religion. Instability of naming and difficulty in description are
often juxtaposed with language of the mystical and transcendent:
Doom, Sludge, Stoner, Drone, whatever you want to call it, is meditation music,
a form of chant or kirtan as powerful as any mantra. (Wood 2013)
It’s hard to explain, because it’s such a mystical, whatever you want to call it,
experience. (G30, Interview, 2013)
This is one way to understand the prevalent religious vocabulary surround-

ing drone metal, as appears in this irreverent YouTube exchange about Om
and genre:
What genre is this?
Hindu ancient hardcore.
Christ metal?
Hinducore.
Islamodrone.
No, I think it’s Buddhastoner. (Comments by different users, Om – Advaitic
Songs (Full Album) 2012)
Kennet Granholm suggests that some ways of discussing genre might include
religious or spiritual ideology, in suggesting both that occultism might serve
as a bridge between genres, and in suggesting that the term ‘black metal’ be
understood ‘as the identifier for an authentic inner occult core and conviction
rather than a purely musical genre’ (Granholm 2015: 27–8). Similarly, Christian

metal has been posited as a genre term (Wang 2015: 220) or, by contrast, not as a
genre term but as a descriptor applicable across genres (Moberg 2015: 40). While
contested (as genre terms will always tend to be), religious connotations in these
cases and in drone metal are used to articulate and assert a commonality in
listening experiences and practices, forming the basis for genre labels. Listeners
often recognize similarity between music that prompts similar experiences for
them, and with language used by other listeners that resonates with their own
experiences. In this language, used in strange and ambiguous ways to speak of
strangeness and ambiguity, listeners frequently trace references to the subject
matter and characteristic practices of mysticism between text and experience.
4
Pilgrimages to Elsewhere: Languages
of Ineffability, Otherness and Ambiguity
Introduction
Looking at the ways people talk about drone and doom metal, it’s really
interesting how often listeners refer to strange other places, foreign countries,
distant eras, holy mountains, inner landscapes, lost deserts, the far future,
outer space . . . But at Roadburn people don’t talk so much about anywhere
else, because elsewhere is here. (Review of Roadburn Festival, Coggins 2015b)
They [the mystic authors] are like statues erected to mark the boundaries
of an ‘elsewhere’ that is not remote, a place they both produce and guard.
(Certeau 1992a: 2)
Drone metal is often reported to simultaneously evoke an imaginative ‘elsewhere’

while enhancing bodily consciousness of ‘here’. This aspect of drone metal dis-
course is the theme of this chapter, as is suggested in quoted paragraph above, the
concluding sentences of a review of the Roadburn Festival that I wrote for the music
website Echoes & Dust. This part of the review clearly resonated with others, as the
organizer of the festival quoted this section in full when reposting the review on
social media, and a research participant who had attended previous editions of the
festival, but was not able to attend in 2015, commented that he was moved to tears.
This chapter builds on the earlier description of drone metal’s marginal
translocality in examining prevalent ways in which participants talk about their
responses to the music; on the discussion of ‘ineffability disclaimers’ introduced
in the previous chapter in which I interpreted claims about the ineffability of
drone metal to be rhetorical markers which place the status of language into
question. This prefatory undermining of the reliability of language makes space
for strange, unusual, creative and even bizarre uses of language that nevertheless
function practically in the discourses of reception. A listener’s particular and

distinctive employment of language, for example, may not be considered to per-
fectly and finally describe drone metal, but it may resonate with other listeners’
experiences of drone metal, and also with their own experiences of struggling
with description. Similar reports of indescribability have been understood as a
characteristic, even defining, feature of mystical discourse in religious traditions
(W. James 1982: 380, see also Sells 1994).
Closely connected to the reported characteristic of ineffability is the ten-
dency to describe drone metal in terms of ‘elsewheres’. Listening to drone
metal’s immersive, monotonous, overwhelming and sometimes arduous sound
evokes reports of other places, times or states of bodily consciousness marked
by extraordinariness and alterity. Descriptions travel to holy mountains, vast
and empty deserts, pilgrimages, ancient temples and archaic ways of life, the dis-
tant past, the distant future, distant lands or distant galaxies, intoxicated states
of bodily consciousness, and even sleep and sickness. These appeals to varied
forms of otherness become connected through the expression and circulation
of theories (with varying levels of sophistication and supporting information)
about drone music and its relation to archaic forms of social organization and
shamanic, ritual or healing practices. These ideas extend even to associating the
music with creation myths, where drone is theorized as anterior and fundamen-
tal to all music. Drone imagined as eternal music allows another kind of alter-
ation in the perception of time, where listening to drone metal affords a kind
of access to and participation in an imagined prehistoric and ancient but also
contemporary and future mode of being.
Drone metal listening is frequently presented not only as evoking other places,
times or states, but also specifically as involving traversal or movement across
imaginative landscapes. I explore the relation between drone metal’s rhetoric,
which is perpetually departing somewhere else, and the reports of a profound
physical consciousness in heavy vibrations. Despite being reportedly resistant
to understanding or description, this embodied state of awareness is described
in terms of ‘here and now’ and a heightened sense of/in one’s body. Discussing
home listening, concerts and festivals as sites in which drone metal’s imaginary
‘elsewheres’ and heightened awareness of ‘heres’ overlap, I point to common
instances where this significant aspect of drone metal discourse is phrased in
vocabulary relating to religious practice. A religious inflection to themes of tra-
versal, experience and alterity combine in the heavily emphasized trope of pil-
grimage, represented in artworks, titles, reviews and conversations. A sense of
ambiguity is retained regarding any religious purpose or framework attached to
Pilgrimages to Elsewhere 85
such imaginative evocations of pilgrimage, though this vagueness does not dis-
sipate the association with religiosity.
Descriptions continually wander across different figurations of otherness,
rather than settling or residing in any fixed, particular imagined realm. Deserts
are crossed and holy mountains are scaled in speaking of drone metal. But also,
in the space of short paragraphs, deserts become mountains, mountains become
ancient temples, ruins become distant planets and so on. A kind of pilgrimage is
embarked upon between, as well as within, elsewheres. I examine communica-
tion around drone metal in order to demonstrate how related departures are also
performed at the level of grammatical choices by listeners communicating about
drone metal. Just as listeners describe moving between imaginary elsewheres,
so too their language shifts across different modes, registers and ways of talking
about elsewheres. For example, in a short album review, the grammatical form
in which the relation is described might shift between discussing drone metal
listening as pilgrimage, as like a pilgrimage, as music for imagined pilgrims, or
as the soundtrack to a pilgrimage.
Given the parallel movements between imagined spaces of otherness at the
levels of both conceptual content and rhetorical choice, I consider the idea of ‘lis-
tening as if ’ religious, where conceptual ambiguity is sustained. This ‘listening as
if ’ religious allows listeners the freedom to explore ideas and experiences related
to religiosity while escaping commitment to any dogma or institutions, or even
to stable and definitive statements or propositions about the music. Hyperbole
and humour also place the status of language into question, as words are delib-
erately exaggerated beyond ‘normal’ uses. Imaginary, comparative, metaphorical
and iconic modes of discourse lapse into one another, with the shifting rhetorical
modes mirroring the shifting elsewheres of content and imagination. Rhetoric
is also often disassociated from practice. For example, religious language is
used (often positively) by some avowedly nonreligious listeners, and a vocabu-
lary connected to drugs is sometimes used by listeners who have never taken
drugs. From these ways of talking, I suggest that in the ‘listening-as-if ’ mode, an
ambiguous separation is posited between description and referent. Concerts can
be interpreted ‘as if ’ they were rituals, urban noise can be heard ‘as if ’ it is drone
metal, and drone metal can be experienced ‘as if ’ it were religious. In each rela-
tion, a connection is maintained while the specific nature of that connection is
kept ambiguous, providing an open-ended space for contemplative exploration.
In different ways, in all these prevalent features of drone metal discourse,
I note a tendency to question the foundations of language (or other modes of sig-
nification such as sound and image), to purposely distort, stretch or undermine
‘ordinary’ or common sense usage. These ways of speaking are gestures and
shifts towards elsewheres at the level of utterance or linguistic performance. Yet,
rather than secret codes which offer a path towards hidden messages, I suggest
that these operations on language hide nothing but the fact that they hide noth-
ing, except what they present in plain sight. They are phrases formed in distorted
language that, by failing to describe drone metal, communicate something
about the status of language in relation to the experience of sound. As Michel de
Certeau writes of the famous Hieronymous Bosch painting,
the secret of The Garden [of Earthly Delights] is to make you believe that it pos-
sesses some sayable secret –or rather to promise one secret (meanings hidden
from the understanding) in place of another (the enjoyment given to the eye).
(Certeau 1992a: 52, italics in original)
In drone metal, estrangement from language produces a place which is vague

and indeterminate, in part due to that self-perceived or attempted exile from
the structures of language. Ambiguity here is both recognition of power and
source of power, as a space where profound effects or experiences are possible.
The mystical power of ambiguity resists reduction to language, tests its edges,
and offers productive possibilities in that escape while remaining an undeni-
able fact of bodily vibration. Echoing Certeau’s description of Bosch, one inter-
viewee described drone metal as ‘a sound that just is. There’s no dynamics, there’s
no . . . hidden messages. It’s not phenomenological, it just is. It just is’ (SX2,
Interview, 2014).
Other times
Talk about listening frequently depicts ancientness, as if drone metal trans-

ported the listener to imagined ancient cultures or prehistoric eras. Versions of
this archaism appear in imagery that suggests lengthy passages of time, such as
ruined temples or the movement of tectonic plates. Less common, but still in
evidence, are phrases about the far future, again with emphasis on estrangement
from the present. Changed perceptions of time frequently arise in descriptions
of drone metal. Listeners report experiencing expanded timescales, time stop-
ping, disappearing or being destroyed, or combinations of these modes:
The whole thing [a SunnO))) concert] sounded like it was one or two or three
songs maximum, but like, stretched out over the time of a century. (SK22,
Interview, 2014)
[In listening to Sleep’s Jerusalem] Time evaporates. Time is to the listener what
colour is to the man who has been blind from birth. It is not a fact; there is no
instance of it in his experience. (Blindaz 2012)
Setting descriptions of listening in distant past epochs allow listeners to assert

difference from a perceived normative ordinariness in their everyday working
and social lives, as well as from ‘ordinary’ kinds of music and popular culture:
OC: What is it about the sound that makes it sound ‘ancient’ [as you
described]?
B25: . . . I think that if the core business of this music is the meditation, the
dreaming off, you know getting to another state of things with sound,
then Bong has a specific flavour. (B25, Interview, 2013)
For this listener, ancientness has religious connotations related to meditation

and dreaming, which are in turn also alterations of consciousness, understood
explicitly as access to a sense of otherness. Changes in perception of scale, time
and space, are nevertheless related to changes in perception of the everyday. In a
press interview, Tanya Byrne of the band Bismuth discusses the relation between
altered conceptions of time and everyday concerns:
There are two main themes that seem to creep into our lyrics. One is of a more
personal nature, a way of dealing with what happens in life. The other is about
the vastness of the universe, how our existence is really nothing measured on
the scale of space time. I study planetary science and the scale and scope of
geological time is breath-taking. It makes my worries seem insignificant. . . .
For years it [the element Bismuth] was thought to be stable but it’s actually now
known to be radioactive, with a half-life a billion times the age of the universe.
We thought that fact suited our sound, as we play so slowly. (Byrne in Merchants
of Air 2015)
These various differences in time all share a sense of drastic remoteness from
other aspects of experiencing life. The scales and evocations of distant time can
also shift between different modes, further enhancing the sense of alterity and
dislocation from the ordinary:
Their ceremonial aspect seems very primal and matches in that way with the
sound they produce. The whole thing looks and sounds like a universal growl,
lasting for billions of years. (SK22, Survey, 2013)
The descriptors ‘ceremonial’ and ‘primal’ suggest a connection to past times

and cultures, while the hyperbolic description of ‘billions of years’ describes (in
present tense) an excessive experience of time as well as a connection to dis-

tant eras. Later, the same interviewee appealed to primal essences and returning
to previous times connected with ‘aboriginals’ and ‘tribal shamans’, drugs, and
bodily techniques of trance:
OC: What was important about [the concert] being so exhausting?

SK22: Well because if I look at the SunnO))) thing they have a very primal essence
to their music. And I think they like to return to a time when there were
shamans and all that, and experimented with mind-expanding substances
and all that. Trying to recreate those experiences by using certain
techniques with their own bodies. And I think, most likely, one of those
experiences was, like, exhaustion. The aboriginals did it and I’m certain a
lot of other tribal shamans did it as well. And I think this is a recreation
of those experiences by utterly exhausting the mind, and just, clearing,
clearing all obstacles in the mind, to come to a one-pointed trance. Then
use that trance to work towards a certain goal. (SK22, Interview, 2014)
A significant feature in this and other ambiguous evocations of premodern

social groups is that musicians are understood as involved in a revival or exten-
sion of practices that are not only ancient, but also implicitly universal across
different cultures. These archaic techniques are imagined as currently hidden or
lost to the modern world but, via drone metal and perhaps other routes, are still
available for rediscovery and contemporary reuse:
Drone is, kind of, like eternal music. In the way that it stops time. It tends to stop
time because of all the repetitive aspects of it. . . . It’s such a wall of sound that
you’re forced to abandon notions of space and time, and I guess that’s meditative
in and of itself. (SX2, Interview, 2014)
A connection with ancientness, other cultures and altered consciousness is felt

through drone metal, and therefore the experience evoked is understood as unre-
stricted to distant times and cultures but as eternal, universal and transtemporal.
Other spaces
As discussed in Chapter 3, many music scenes, including metal subgenres, draw

important values and resources from translocal connections. However, in these
ways of ‘gesturing elsewhere’ (Baulch 2003: 205), the communal focus of partici-
pants tends to be on particular elsewheres such as forested, mountainous Nordic
landscapes for black metal produced around the world, even when such con-
nections are more imaginary than material. The evocations of alterity in drone
metal’s scattered translocal discursive community could also be described as ges-
turing elsewhere. But rather than appealing to a specific other place, elsewheres
in drone metal discourse are generalized, imagined as anywhere that is ‘other’,
without definite connection to a specific place or time. Listeners are ‘transported
to another place, another time; an archaic time among the sandy dunes and the
incense fumes, in which all humanity began’ (Heka 2012).
One Earth track title (which itself is taken from Cormac McCarthy’s 1985
novel Blood Meridian (2011), a tale of endless journeying) suggests that drone
metal transports listeners to a ‘Land of Some Other Order’ (a track title from
Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method, Earth 2005). There is little distinction
between imaginative portrayals of global otherness and appeals to more self-
consciously fictional and mythical narratives. Actual places are fictionalized,
and fictional narratives are treated as serious representations or analogies for
experience (even when described in humorous terms). Other fantastic journeys
in literary universes are invoked, both as imaginary universes understood as
congruent with the experience of drone metal, and as texts which are considered
to be especially appropriate for reading while listening to drone metal. Frank
Herbert’s novel Dune (1981), which incorporates deserts, space and substances
with narcotic/spiritual significance, fits well with many conspicuous themes in
drone metal discourse and was mentioned by several listeners. H. P. Lovecraft’s
weird ancient gods breaking through the boundaries of the world (Lovecraft
2000a, 2000b, 2000c) appear in all heavy metal subgenres, and occur frequently
in drone metal albums and reviews, including in discussion of music which
makes no explicit reference to those fictional worlds. One survey respondent
stated about Om: ‘I’ve often used their music while studying the Bible and other
texts and it can sometimes really fit into the whole frame of mind of devotional
study’ (O94, Survey, 2013). The choice of verb ‘use’ rather than listen is signifi-
cant in expressing a function and effect of drone metal listening in relation to
an active engagement with religious texts or other texts which evoke imagined
alterity. In each connection, whether religious or fantastical, the crucial elem-
ent is radical strangeness. As one reviewer notes without naming any particular
location, drone metal is ‘music from another country’ (Fantano in Om – Advaitic
Songs Album Review 2012).
The kinds of landscapes that emerge can be understood in terms of their
distance from the urban or suburban: mountains, deserts, oceans and forests
are all conceptually and often geographically distant from the environments
in which most people listen to drone metal. The important common ele-
ment is a perceived distance from an ostensibly ‘normal’, modern, urban
context. India, Africa (and Ethiopia and Egypt, if particular African coun-
tries are named), Tibet, ‘Arabia’ and the Middle East (described with these
phrases, rather than particular country names) are most often mentioned,
places which for many listeners imply ancientness, particularly in a Western
European, orientalist, postcolonial imagination. That these are imaginative
fictions rather than historical comparisons is emphasized by the prevalence of
visions, hallucinations and dreams in descriptions of places. Frequently, the
exotic nature of these locations is stressed, occasionally approaching some-
what racist stereotyping:
Opener [of Om’s album Advaitic Songs] ‘Addis’ cites Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian
capital and the primitive, sparse instrumentation give you a better impression of
the city than any po-faced, two-dimensional guide book ever could. As bongo
drums and a drawn out, mournful cello weave among a sultry female vocal in an
unidentifiable language, one can almost feel the searing African heat, the slow
grind of daily life and the splendid isolation our imaginary wanderer must feel.
(Viney 2012)
Here, the lone figure representing ‘us’ (‘our imaginary wanderer’) is reminis-
cent of anthropological narratives of contact with exotic peoples and their
apparently intriguing but dangerous practices. As with the signalling of ancient
time through traces in the present, the other spaces and peoples are sometimes
described with a narrative of encounter, with drone metal transporting listeners
from ‘here’ to ‘there’, or from ‘us’ to ‘them’ (see Coggins 2014: 38–9 for an ana-
lysis of this example specifically).
Meeting with cultural alterity in the music is another way that drone metal
offers access to imagined ancientness, if fleetingly and with a sense of mystery
and opacity retained. Reviews of drone metal concerts and recordings often
feature references to such practices as Tibetan chanting, African drumming,
trance music rituals, ‘Aboriginal music’, and numerous mentions of generically
described tribes, primitives, and indigenous or ancient peoples. These kinds of
references evoke a spatio-temporal otherness, constructed as premodern and
representing access to certain ways of life or practices. Often assumed to be con-
nected to religiosity, ritual or spirituality, these imagined traditional ways of life
are presumed to offer an enchantment which is lacking in urban modernity, but
which may be suggested or potentially restored in drone metal. While Bong and
Om use instruments developed in or associated with India, these are frequently
arbitrarily attributed to other geographical origins linked by an apparent indis-

criminate exoticism. Languages are misidentified or, as in the quote above,
implied to be categorically unidentifiable. Any monotonous, low vocals are
interchangeably equated with religious chanting by Tibetan, Gregorian, Hindu
or Byzantine monks, or by druids and shamans from unspecified locations and
eras. The names of India, Africa and Tibet are often used as mere indexes of
exotic otherness rather than as historically informed references to particular
sonic or spiritual traditions. Descriptors shift easily from specific to generalized
otherness: in one review ‘the Indian instrumentation used by Bong is other-
worldly in texture and depth’ (Cherylprime 2012), for example, while a survey
respondent suggested of Om that:
Maybe they’re just playing with the stereotypical mysteriousness of ‘other’ reli-
gions. (O93, Survey, 2013)
The interchangeability of exotic others demonstrates that assumptions of

transcultural, essential and universal foundation lie behind such descriptions
and influence listeners’ perception and experience of drone metal.
Some listeners did have more extensive personal experience of the places
which they connected to the drone metal imaginary. One listener spoke of the
‘desertscapes’ common in reviews of Om’s Advaitic Songs (2012) reminding him
of actual experiences in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. He described the ruins
at Petra as being particularly resonant with drone metal experience, as ‘a scene,
that’s been there for thousands of years or hundreds of years, and will exist for
thousands or hundreds of years once you’re gone’ (O84, Interview, 2013). In the
evocation of elsewheres, even when connected to individuals’ own experiences,
then, a further sense of distance, mystery and otherness is asserted in drawing
comparison with drone metal. One survey respondent, unimpressed by an Om
concert in Istanbul, pinpointed the ironies of the presentation and reception of
appropriated exoticisms:
To me, as someone from the lands that they’d taken the theme from, it just
doesn’t look interesting at all. (O126, Survey, 2014)
Among the general elsewheres, similar kinds of locations or landscapes

are frequently mentioned. Deserts, mountains, oceans and also other plan-
ets (which are often in turn described in terms of deserts, mountains and
oceans) feature strongly, again united by their distance from urban settings
in which the majority of drone metal listening usually takes place. A lack
of human inhabitation is the norm for artwork and imagined themes, with
landscapes often completely empty or featuring a solitary individual in vast

space. Earth’s Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method (2005) sleeve features
images of Monument Valley’s vast rocky outcrops in the United States, and the
album cover of Primitive & Deadly (2014) is an altered photograph of a rocky
landscape with luminous colours and three moons evident in the sky, situat-
ing it as another world while perhaps also referencing Arik Roper’s design for
Dopesmoker (2012), which also features multiple moons above a desertscape.
These albums are described by listeners with reference to these imagined
landscapes, and so are other albums which make no such visual or verbal ref-
erences. Rather than merely reproducing visual tropes from album covers, the
connections between sound and description in terms of landscapes of otherness
is a mutually influencing feedback loop. Sounds which evoke vast open spaces
are then accompanied by artwork which seems fitting because it reflects such
scenes, in turn reinforcing the connections for listeners between those kinds of
sounds and those kinds of imagined places. References such as these make sense
to their audiences, resonating with their own experiences, and so are more likely
to gain a certain currency or communicative validity, such that they will become
accepted and understood conventions of discourse surrounding the music, thus
further informing future reception and interpretation. Ommadon’s 2014 album
V features track titles ‘I’ and ‘II,’ and a black-on-black cover displaying just the
title and band name. Despite this minimalist presentation, however, the record
still attracts descriptions and reviews which relate spatial/planetary metaphors
to altered states of consciousness:
[In Ommadon’s album V] everything gets celestial, feeling as if it’s floating off
and into orbit, and the music becomes sleep inducing in the best possible way.
That doesn’t mean it dulls you. Rather, it intoxicates, sort of like how your mind
feels after a few strong beers. (Krasman 2014)
References to mountains and geological processes are connected to sonic

aspects of Earth’s music: ‘a glacially slow pace’ (Schalek 2014), ‘seismic drum-
ming’ (Oliver 2014), ‘a tempo equivalent to that of a recently set adrift iceberg’
(Lord 2014), ‘seismic tonal terror’ and ‘jagged and tectonic riffs’ (Dick 2014), and:
[Dylan Carlson’s guitar sound is] not only big but also topographically rich; you
could study the curves and crags of his sound as if you were reading a three-
dimensional map of the Cascade Range. (Currin 2014)
[Om drummer Emil Amos’s] ride cymbal peals like church bells and his toms
roll like the mountain ridges of East Jerusalem. (Graham 2012)
Drone metal evokes other spaces defined by their otherness, and it evokes spa-
ciousness and scales of apprehending space that are understood as beyond the nor-
mal, just as it conjures other times as well as other ways of comprehending time.
Other states
Spatial and temporal elsewheres are often combined or complemented with

other modes of alterity, as will already be clear from many examples so far in
this chapter. These other states of bodily consciousness include sleep, visions,
dreams, sickness, hallucinations and drugs, as well as imaginatively excessive
narratives relating to the body. Literary fiction and other imaginative and fan-
tastic arts are also important avenues to elsewhere. These references to self-
consciously invented worlds of otherness also reprise the same kinds of themes
that have already been discussed such as mysterious and powerful deities and
journeys across mythical deserts or mountains. Some reports are doubly oth-
ered, such as descriptions of hallucinatory visions that are themselves located in
fictional literature.
The phrase ‘altered states of consciousness’ is not always ideal, since it may
imply an overly stable, fixed and normative conception of ‘ordinary’ conscious-
ness. I retain the phrase here, however, because it usefully groups together a
number of states which are discussed in talking about drone metal, which listen-
ers specifically mark as extraordinary in opposition to perceived ordinariness.
In this context, sickness and sleep may be understood as extraordinary, even
though not at all uncommon, due to their sometimes strange effects on body
and consciousness, while hallucinations and drug experiences may have similar
results.
In a state of semi-consciousness, its [Om album Advaitic Songs] sacred cadence

causing spiritual arousal, its silken refrain moaning in my ears, the smell of illu-
sory incense lapping at my nose as I lie writhing in bed, resenting the meditative
rhythms for being loud enough to keep me from sleep yet hypnotic enough to
prevent my awakening. (Graham 2012)
Description of sleep often leads on to other kinds of dreams and visions, through
which the imaginative elsewheres previously described (mountains, deserts,
ancient times, etc.) can be visited. Trance and meditation are often mentioned in
this respect too, sometimes by experienced practitioners, though more often by
those who draw upon a vocabulary of meditation despite little familiarity with
such practices themselves. This consciousness of the body reveals something of a

contrast between, on the one hand, the language of description which constantly
gestures elsewhere and, on the other, reports of a heightened consciousness of a
bodily here and now, vibrating in one particular place.
At several concerts, and occasionally listening to recordings (if not other-
wise engaged with writing or other tasks), I found that I would sometimes
inadvertently begin to visualize landscapes consonant with the conventions of
drone metal elsewheres described here (often in large scale, featuring mountain-
ous landscapes and ruins). This seemed a particularly strong feature of drone
metal and other drone concerts, as long, extended and fairly constant pieces
without jarring changes allowed this kind of mental activity to slowly develop.
In addition, the volume and darkness of live performances precluded many
forms of verbal and visual communication or other distractions. In fact, dur-
ing some performances which featured images projected onto a screen behind
the performers, I found it slightly disappointing because the provided images
felt imposed and an obstacle to more spontaneous or personal mental imagery.
Several other listeners, in conversations, interviews and in published reviews,
have stated a similar preference for darkness and imaginary visuals over screens,
photographs, animation or film. At times, such changing internal visions would
relate to particular artworks associated with the musician I was watching as
a departure point. In other cases I would remember listeners’ descriptions of
experience in similar visionary terminology, and related imagery might appear.
While playing a lengthy Ommadon track during a seminar, I was reminded of
the striking phrase from a survey about Bong: ‘Listening to [album] Mana-Yood-
Sushai makes me want to be a tree’ (B13, Survey, 2013), as the room overlooked
a park with several large trees just outside the window. Listening in this public
yet introspective setting, the appearance of trees and the memory of the survey
respondent’s strange description prompted me to imagine being a tree (or to try
and imagine what imagining being a tree would be like) within the experience
of the music. This was a way of attempting to understand that listener’s response,
but also an experiment in my own listening which was led by unexpectedly con-
necting aspects of the listening situation with a remembered comment from
talk about drone metal. A related influence through body language was also evi-
dent at concerts, where seeing other audience members make movements or
gestures along with the music enhanced the intensity of my own bodily and
conscious engagement with the sound, in some cases inciting myself or others
to move similarly. Other participants mentioned instances where their experi-
ences of music were influenced by visible signs of others’ reception. An attendee
at a Bong concert was intrigued by another listener breathing in time with the
music, mentioning that this observation had added to his own experience, draw-
ing him into the music and making him conscious of his own breathing and its
relation to the sound. This influence could conversely work to disengage listen-
ers from sound too, and concert attendees expressed irritation when inattentive
audiences disrupted their own absorption in music. While this is common in
many forms of music, it was again stated to me by several listeners that other
people’s conversations were particularly distracting when they were wishing
to concentrate on drone metal shows. This integration of musical experience
with a consciousness of others’ reception demonstrates the extent to which the
language and gestures of response form a social and communicative context in
which listening experience is produced.
Illness can give rise to altered consciousness in listening as well as being used
as a metaphorical figure to describe the experience produced in drone metal
listening. Occasionally, sickness is spoken of as somehow contributing to the
experience of live performances, or as analogous to it in some way. Concert
attendees who happened to be affected by illness while at gigs or festivals
described a heightened sensitivity to the extreme sound, and while this was not
always described as enjoyable, neither is drone metal experience in general.
The first ten minutes or so [of the Gravetemple performance] I was still standing,
when everything started to give up. I’ve smoked way worse things and done way
more terrible things to my body, so when I realized my legs were shaking and
I felt like I was about to piss my pants. Mad at myself, because I didn’t feel I was
that fucked up yet, I sat down and started to feel nauseous. So I did my thing,
respiration and meditation, and didn’t throw up. . . . The whole thing was brutal
and terrible and the most resonant (harhar) experience I’ve had at Roadburn. It
took forever to finish . . . I had been taking pain medication for days (nothing
strong, but taxing), couldn’t sleep (tooth aches, travel preparation), and spent
many hours of cumbersome travel. I was at my lowest and had no expectations.
(G13, Survey, 2013)
Somewhat similar was my own experience of seeing Sleep perform at the very
end of the 2015 Desertfest in London, as I had been feeling feverish and unwell
for the three days of the festival. Knowing that it was my first and possibly only
chance to see Sleep perform live, I struggled through the day and even fell asleep
during the prior (very loud) band Ufomammut. Sickness for me added a sense
of urgency to the anticipation of the performance (wanting to see the band, but
also wanting to have seen the band so I could go home). Though far from ideal
or pleasant, the heat of the crowd in addition to the fever produced a strange
sense of simultaneous intensity and detachment, particularly when the band

opened their set with twenty-five minutes of Dopesmoker (2003) and the densely
packed crowd started energetically flailing and pushing.
Extending the theme of sickness, drone metal listening produces descriptions
of extreme bodily effects. Actual or imaginatively exaggerated damage to the
body is reported in concert reviews, and elaborately hyperbolic tales are told of
listening to recordings causing physical pain and bodily destruction. From the
context and the prevalence of these enthusiastic and lurid descriptions of meta-
phorical violence against the listening self, readers are expected to understand
the convention that extremity of response is coded as approval, indicating the
power of the music:
If you ever, genuinely, wanted to be drowned in sound a SunnO))) gig would do

it. You could feel your lungs fill with waves. Feel the aqueous humor form into
ripples. Feel the blood ripple. Feel your body liquefy. (Doran 2009)
WARNING –WILL INDUCE BOWEL EVACUATION
I decide to give this [Sleep album Dopesmoker] a try and it absolutely

DESTROYED MY BOWELS. I shat myself in its heaviness and awesomeness.
(Gothus 2009)
Her skull was droned away! (G23, Interview, 2013)
Occasionally these imagined extreme bodily effects are extended to a sexualized

register:
It was an hour long full body orgasm; the vibrations made my bones feel fuzzy
(O18, Survey, 2013)
It’s hard to describe exactly how I felt when the clean break, well, broke and an
absolutely massive, MASSIVE beast of a riff just came along and slapped me
around with its epic cock. (Caspian 2008)
A few listeners related drone metal experience to sex, in surveys or written

interviews. Concerts were compared to sex (SX7, Survey, 2013), described as a
‘primal, almost religious . . . almost sexual experience!’ (N65, Survey, 2013), as
‘ecstatic, orgasmic’ (N26, Interview, 2013).
In interviews, descriptions of extreme bodily effects were more likely to be
reports of actual unusual corporeal effects noticed at concerts. These included
having difficulty breathing, noticing different areas of the body vibrating dif-
ferently, or being unable to move or swallow. In one case, a SunnO))) concert
attendee experienced sonic pressure in his chest, and discovered the following
day that his lung had collapsed. SunnO))) in particular are noted for tales of
live sound inducing ‘vomit and other bodily evacuation’ (Necci 2012). At the
band’s performances I observed extreme responses, including people appear-
ing transfixed, collapsing or running away. After the band’s set on the Saturday
night of the 2015 Temples festival, stories circulated among the crowd about
listeners with nosebleeds, people losing consciousness, and dead pigeons fall-
ing into the crowd, having been dislodged from the roof of the warehouse
venue by the vibrations. Volume levels reportedly reached 220 decibels, way
above potentially injurious limits (Bowes 2015: 45). While some stories of this
kind are probably apocryphal or exaggerated, some are certainly true. In any
case, it is significant that they are so readily and enthusiastically retold, again
showing the importance of physical impact in the rhetoric of drone metal
discourse.
Drugs and the language of drug experience feature in evocations of drone
metal elsewheres. Listeners talk about drone metal in a variety of ways that refer
to drug experiences, with some bands or recordings particularly associated with
certain intoxicating substances. Extremely influential in drone metal is Sleep’s
Dopesmoker (2003). The lyrics make unmistakable and repeated references to
marijuana consumption and the packaging for one version includes a picture of
a coconut ‘chalice’ or pipe used for smoking (Sleep 1998a). Al Cisneros, bassist
for Om and Sleep, rarely speaks to concert audiences between songs except for
occasionally exhorting the crowd to smoke weed. Though there are no explicit
mentions in their recordings, the band Bong are also associated with the drug due
to their name (which is also somewhat onomatopoeic). SunnO))) are noted for
their habit of drinking red wine on stage, directly from a bottle passed between
the musicians and accompanied with stylized gestures. Several interviewees
mentioned that they understood this to be somehow sacramental, related some-
how to the consumption of Christian communion wine and/or to blood. Earth’s
recordings up to 1996 are held by many listeners to have been influenced by
Dylan Carlson’s heroin use, with the effects perceived to have contributed to
slow musical structures and long periods of distortion. Following a hiatus of
nearly a decade, Earth’s album Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method (2005)
introduced a new style, similarly slow but characterized by reverb rather than
distortion, which would continue for the next four albums. Journalists (e.g. Beta
2008) and drone metal listeners (G15, Interview, 2013) attributed the change
to Carlson ceasing to use heroin, linking sound to speculation about intoxica-
tion. Listeners also sometimes relate their own drug experiences to drone metal
listening, though there are a range of practices and viewpoints. Several review
writers assume that particular drone metal recordings are intended for those
who use marijuana, report that their own use enhances listening, or recommend
the use of marijuana in conjunction with the music.
Live the experience [of the Bong performance] (combined with my intoxication)
hypnotised me completely. My chin sunk into my chest and the room became
distant. At no point did I wish for the drone to cease. (B29, Survey, 2013)
Even though it [Dopesmoker] is a long song, it will keep you interested IF YOU
ARE IN THE RIGHT STATE OF MIND (e.g. either stoned or extremely mel-
lowed out) because it is what I call a ‘musical trip’, it will take you to many differ-
ent places within your own mind. (Anus 2007)
It would be wise to roll a joint whilst listening to Dopesmoker, because while high,
every time this riff chugs on, it’s more amazing than the last. (Vargtorna 2009)
Other drugs are occasionally mentioned. Alcohol featured in some listeners’

descriptions of ideal listening contexts or reports of concerts. In the pubs, bars and
concert venues where fieldwork was conducted, though, alcohol is an ordinary,
expected and unremarkable aspect of social interaction and concert attendance,
and as such was not often mentioned despite its ubiquity. The most sustained
interview description of alcohol use in private listening was about absinthe, an
unusual and not widely consumed form of alcohol, which can have hallucinatory
effects (G15, Interview, 2013). Thus alcohol only tended to be mentioned in cases
where it was extraordinary, such as with the interviewee’s own absinthe con-
sumption, or with the observations of SunnO)))’s sharing of red wine on stage. In
each of these cases, connections were made with ritual and religion.
Several listeners used language related to drugs when discussing listening
experiences where drugs were not consumed. Drone metal is described as like
drug experiences by people who take those drugs, by people who used to take
those drugs, and by people who have never taken those drugs:
Overheard . . . ‘have you heard them before? Ah they’re amazing, make you feel
toasted even if you’re not . . . really like transcendental feel’. (Fieldnotes, Bong
performance, 14 July 2013)
I have never smoked weed in my life and I think this record [Dopesmoker] rules.
(Collins 2006)
I haven’t had a bowl of ganja in just about thirty years, but I remember the gen-
eral haze and buzz quite well. . . . I would suspect a little herbal enhancement
wouldn’t hurt, but I like it as the straight sober fifty-one-year-old nerd I am.
(Hedegard 2012)
Well, I started the album [Dopesmoker] off sober and ended blazed. Sixty-three-
minute out-of-body experience. I got high off the notes. (Dave 2006)
The appearance of drug-related language in the reports of people who no longer

take drugs, or have never taken drugs, shows that the rhetoric of drug experi-
ence has significance beyond the actual practice of drug-taking in drone metal.
This has been observed in other musical contexts, including psytrance (Sylvan
2002: 165) and in metal moshpits, where extreme music accompanied by vigor-
ous bodily participation music is described as offering a physical high analogous
to narcotic intoxication (Riches 2015: 270). Drugs provide another vocabulary in
which to discuss sensations of otherness. Parallels between descriptions of drug-
induced states and the ways of describing drone metal experience discussed
in this chapter can be seen clearly in colloquial terminology for taking drugs.
Examples such as ‘tripping’, being ‘out of it’ or ‘off your head’ refer to exoticism
and journeying, while getting ‘wasted’ or ‘ruined’ are metaphors which echo the
rhetoric of bodily damage used to speak about drone metal. Further, mentions
of drug states were also frequently connected with the language of ritual, spir-
ituality and mysticism.
Literary and other artistic references made in reviews and in musical prod-
ucts also visit the same kinds of drone metal elsewheres. Bong in particular
make repeated trips to the fantasy worlds of Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft,
and it is significant that they choose stories, fragments and titles from tales
in which characters are involved in dreamlike quests, or where boundaries
between vision and reality are unclear, even within the fictional framework.
Bong’s album Idle Days on the Yann (2013a) is named after a Dunsany story of
the same name telling of a trip along a river visiting fantastic cities. The track
‘Polaris’ from the album Stoner Rock (2014) takes its title and a recited quote
during the song from Lovecraft’s story, also called ‘Polaris’ (2000b), which
tells of a dreamer not knowing which world is real. The story, reprinted in
full in an album cover insert which also features a strange landscape painting
by artist Zdzisław Beksiński (1981), traverses similar thematic elsewheres of
time, landscapes and stars. The fragment selected for inclusion in the track
itself ends with a line combining visions, dreams, strange locations and vast
temporal scale:
I have failed in my duties, and betrayed the marble city of Olathoe. I have proven
false to Atos, my friend and commander. They say there is no land of Lomar,
save in my nocturnal imaginings, that in these realms where the Pole Star shines
high, and red Aldebaran crawls low around the horizon, there has been naught
save ice and snow for thousands of years. (Lovecraft 2000a, as recited in Bong
track ‘Polaris’ [2014] and quoted in album sleeve)
Using art which has a connection to imaginary elsewheres also emphasizes a

kind of fictional as well as imaginary distancing. On the cover of Bong’s Mana-
Yood-Sushai (2012) is a picture of Kanchenjunga, a mountain considered sacred
by some. The image is a cropped section of a painting of the mountain by
Nicholas Roerich,1 an artist whose work often involved visions of the Himalayas
inhabited by otherworldly religious figures. There is a further intertextual link to
H. P. Lovecraft, particularly given the mountain context, since Lovecraft repeat-
edly mentions Roerich’s artworks in describing the fantastic landscape of his
story ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, with which we can assume Bong are also
familiar (Lovecraft 2000a: 16, 25, 44, 57, 59, 136). Listeners spoke of other album
covers and aesthetic choices as starting points for imaginary travels:
The cover [of Bong album Stoner Rock, 2014, artwork by Beksiński, 1981] has
a mysterious Mayan temple on it which seems to be accessible only by walking
through an elephant’s graveyard . . . The second of the two songs echoes the
woooming of the first, continuing to document the death rattle of each of the
elephants from the front cover. A single chord runs on and on and on and on
and on and on and on . . . the bleak stillness of the black beaches from the end
of Get Carter is being interrupted only by that machine endlessly conveying slag
out to sea in the depths of a northern winter. (Fidanza 2014)
It sets you on more of an associative journey. Because the first time I looked
at that Beyond Ancient Space record, and I was just, completely gathered in, by
those few lines of text [from a fantastic Lord Dunsany short story], and I could
paint images in my mind right from the start. (B25, Interview, 2013)
Both literary references and artwork become starting points for similar dream-
like explorations while listening and while describing listening, whether or not
listeners are familiar with the original sources. So while each reference may not
be traced to original sources or intentions, they provide resources or prompts for
listeners’ own explorations of elsewhere.
Elsewheres traversed: Drone metal pilgrimage
A frequent and significant characteristic of these thematic modes of alterity in

drone metal discourse is that elsewheres are not merely imagined but traversed,
journeyed through, or travelled beyond. Through their descriptions of other times,
other places, other states of consciousness, other ways of inhabiting their bod-
ies, other imaginary worlds in literary fiction, art and intoxicated excess, listeners
respond to drone metal in ways that suggest profound journeys of the imaginary.
These journeys are often inflected with ideas about mysticism and ritual, and are
therefore often rendered as pilgrimage. This is a feature of many excerpts from
interviews, conversations, reviews and surveys already quoted in this chapter, where
listeners report ‘dreaming off, getting to another state of things’ (B25, Interview,
2013), spanning centuries, returning to ancient times, being transported to exotic
places, departing on associative journeys and moving through interchangeable and
shifting literary, artistic and imagined worlds in sound. Here I will discuss pilgrim-
age, first in terms of how the theme is introduced and used in recordings, and then
how it is pictured in the language of listeners responding to changed experiences
of time, space and the body. The vocabulary of sacred journeying is selected as an
appropriate (if not perfect) manner of expression from linguistic resources avail-
able to listeners, resources constituted by previous ways of talking about similar
sonic experience and the imagery and language associated with recordings.
The imagery of pilgrimage appears in drone metal albums from early in the
subgenre’s development. Sleep’s Jerusalem/Dopesmoker (1996/2003) was in 1996
already drawing lyrical links between Old Testament–style desert caravans,
outer space, marijuana experience and heavy metal (‘follow the smoke toward
the riff-filled land’). The lyrics even include a subtle reference to Rastafari by
mentioning ‘groundation’, a ritual meeting in that tradition. The use of alter-
nate titles Jerusalem and Dopesmoker for the same piece of music (later used
interchangeably by listeners discussing the music) also suggests a conflation of
pilgrimage destination with drug intoxication. The album covers of the four ver-
sions suggested various kinds of elsewheres. The first displayed a mountain and
desert with a hovering cross image (1998b). The second showed a turbaned fig-
ure bowing down to a fire (1998a), or as one reviewer described it, ‘an old-style
religious picture of an old man grasping for his bong’ (Sam-O))) 2012). The third
portrayed a swordsman riding a four-headed horse, understood in one review
as a Lovecraftian image of ‘Cthulhu on a horse with a snake sword’ (Darkwülf
2012). Finally, the fourth version reprised a similar scene to the first, with a
desert pilgrimage scene also suggesting Frank Herbert’s Dune world (especially
the cover of the 1981 edition). In addition to the lyrical themes, artistic depic-
tions and musical evocations of pilgrimage, the existence of (at least) four ver-
sions of the long song provoke shifts in reference when speaking of each or all.
Neologisms in the chanted lyrics make further conflations, with ‘hasheeshian’
suggesting a connection between religion and hashish, while ‘marijuanaut’
conflates space travel with intoxication. The latter connection is further empha-
sized with a sense of traversal directly connected to listening at the start of recent
performances. When performing in London in 2015, 2016 and 2017, before the
band took to the stage a ‘mission control’ style recording was played over the PA
system, suggesting that the audience were waiting not only for a live drone metal
performance but to be propelled on some interplanetary journey.
Om continued these kinds of references with their albums Pilgrimage (2007)
and Conference of the Birds (2006), the latter named after a Persian Sufi alle-
gory of birds journeying towards God. Track titles ‘Gebel Barkal’ (Gebel Barkal,
Om 2008), ‘Sinai’ (Advaitic Songs, Om 2012) and ‘Annapurna’ (Variations on a
Theme, Om 2005) all refer to specific holy mountains, with ‘On the Mountain
at Dawn’ (Variations on a Theme, Om 2005) evoking a more general image.
Meanwhile sacred places from different traditions are referenced, ranging from
the garden in which Christ prayed before crucifixion in ‘Gethsemane’ (Advaitic
Songs, Om 2012), to places in ancient Egypt in ‘At Giza’ (Conference of the Birds,
Om 2006) and ‘Thebes’ (God Is Good, Om 2009), to sites where funerary rites are
performed beside rivers on ‘Cremation Ghat I & II’ (God Is Good, Om 2009). The
unusual style of Om’s lyrics feature cryptic statements characterized by ambigu-
ously shifting syntax, in a kind of eternal present tense, using many verbs relat-
ing to departure and movement:
The flight to freedom gradient raise the called ascendant.

And reach supreme the coalesced eye into surrender.
Centripetal core of soul sojourn the field vibrates to absolution.
I climb toward the sun to breathe the universal. (Om 2005)
This lyrical style was highlighted by one listener in an interview as overtly and
deliberately ambiguous:
Om lyrics are very very strange to say the least. . . . You don’t always seem to
be able to make out who the subjects to the verbs are, sentences seem incom-
plete, etc. It’s as if they are trying to stage ‘fragmentarity’ linguistically. (O40,
Interview, 2013)
Promotional images of the band SunnO))) further this aesthetic of ambigu-

ous pilgrimage. One, included as a poster in the 2009 album Monoliths &
Dimensions, features four robed and hooded musicians atop the Temple of the
Sun at Teotihuacán in Mexico, possibly a play on the words sun/sunn as sug-
gested by one survey respondent (SK28, Survey, 2013). Another image shows
two similarly attired figures walking in profile with guitars over their shoulders,
and a third displays the band’s amplifiers set up in place of the altar for a per-
formance in Bergen Cathedral. Each image suggests sacred journeys, destina-
tions, dress and practice.
Earth have included similar suggestions of journeys, such as in the photo-
graph of a vast sky above Mongolian plains on Earth 2 (1993), and in the cars that
feature on albums Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions (1995a) and Pentastar: In the
Style of Demons (1996). Most notably, the album Hex; or Printing in the Infernal
Method (2005) features imagery of barns, horses, Monument Valley and other
scenes of the American West, and draws many of its track titles from Cormac
McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian (2011), which itself narrates incessant travels
through wild landscapes.2 Bong based the album Idle Days on the Yann on a
visionary river journey (Bong 2013), while the cover of Bismuth’s split release
with Undersmile (2013) features a solitary wanderer in front of a gargantuan
forest. The band Journey to Ixtlan are named after the Castañeda book which
details a New Age spiritual quest while blurring the boundaries between the
study of tradition and ritual practice itself, and between fiction and research
(1974). Another band name, Across Tundras, also evokes wilderness travels, and
the guitarist of the band, T. G. Olson, recorded another drone metal album based
on the same McCarthy novel that inspired Earth. This was titled Blood Meridian
for Electric Drone Guitar (2012), stretched across four CDs and constituted an
‘epic sound recording [which] follows every massive landscape and every bit
of dirt and grime and every senseless murderous act in the name of Westward
expansion that is found in the actual pages’ (Across Tundras 2013). Examples of
journeys abound in drone metal productions.
Themes relating to journeys often appear in conversation about listening to
drone metal, combining ideas about moving between other places, other rela-
tionships with time and other states of consciousness. Often this traversal is
described with conscious religious overtones as pilgrimage, and in other ways
imaginary journeys are given weighty significance, even if destinations or reli-
gious purposes are unclear:
I always find it [drone metal] does take me on a journey more, because you get
that, the slow long build-up, and then a sort of tumultuous climax to the middle
and end, and then a drift off. So, rather than just segmented songs, you get this . . .
well, I feel like it’s a journey, to me. I mean, as an example, SunnO))), who I’ve
seen before many times, I can be taken on a journey with them. It’s quite static
on stage, so you’re just letting the volume, the sheer volume of the music take
you on a journey. I’ve found myself before now, many times at their concerts,
with eyes closed, just feeling that blast all around me. (N17, Interview, 2013)
The song’s cyclical riffing and recurring intonations invoke the divine search
for transcendent horizons . . . For sixty-three minutes, Dopesmoker explores
vast, mesmeric landscapes. As with any monumental trek, the experience of that
expedition is entirely different for every single participant. (Hayes 2012)
[Om’s] expansive, audible journeys functioned through cyclical bass rhythm and a
voluminous clangor of percussion, maintaining a meditative drone of instrumen-
tation that seemed isolated as in prayer or internalized reflection. (Caldwell 2012)
I felt like I connected in a spiritual way at the [Om] show due to me wanting to
just close my eyes through most of it and imagine being in another world –like
an astral journey as opposed to a physical body journey. (O59, Survey, 2013)
The effects of sound produce descriptions of journeys connected with spir-

ituality. In some cases, listeners drew connection with their own experience of
physical pilgrimage within established religion:
The samples of chanting in the opening track [of the Om performance] are taken
from Muslim pilgrims arriving at Mecca for Hajj/Ummrah; this reminded me
strongly of my own visit to Mecca for Ummrah, which was a powerful experi-
ence, so I was reminded of these feelings during that section. (O84, Survey, 2013)
The arduousness of listening contributes to a sense of trial and traversal of obsta-

cles with potential spiritual benefit. This can occur in completing the audition of
a lengthy and monotonous recording, or in withstanding an abrasively textured
and excessively loud live performance. The difficulty of listening is sometimes
described as a kind of responsibility or necessary commitment, and listeners may
report disappointment at giving up, or not being able to listen to a full album or
performance. This often forms part of a retrospective narrative which has led to
later successful endurance of a whole track or performance, with accompanying
satisfaction or benefits gained. Less often, the lack of ability of others to withstand
the noise is contrasted with one’s own, in a similar manner, to reinforce the import-
ance and gains of lasting through a whole concert. These kinds of statements take
place within the wider circulation of stories of extreme bodily responses. The sense
of achievement is linked to time, in the sense of having endured for the period
dictated by the length of a whole song that is far longer than most metal or popular
music tracks, with a sense that the piece must be listened to in its entirety:
When I put an album on, if I lose concentration halfway through I can switch to
another album. But Bong are one of the very few bands where I have to finish the
album if I started it. . . . I’m not sure what it is, it’s a case of I always want to get
to the conclusion, I feel like I’ve achieved something. I don’t really want to say
that because it makes it seem like I’m not enjoying the music, but, it feels like I’ve
achieved something when I get to the end. (G17, Interview, 2013)
In the following example, commitment in time is indexed in two ways. The

extended length of the particular track is commented upon as requiring com-
mitment, as is the length of time (in years, the interviewee later clarified) it takes
to become trained in appreciating what can be gained from this kind of listening.
OC: Why did it take a long time to like Nadja?

G12: Just listening to it. [2010 Nadja album] Thaumogenesis, it’s sixty-four
minutes long, so it needs a lot of effort. It took a long time to be open to
it, and you need to when it’s long. The length is important for the effort
required. (G12, Interview, 2013)
This sense of arduous trial is understood by listeners as part of the way in which
drone metal listening affords benefits analogous to or indexical with pilgrimage.
This kind of difficulty, which is even described as violence, is also described
in relation to ritual, a feature of discourse that will be more fully explored in
Chapter 6. Ritual and pilgrimage both involve separations from this-worldly
concerns, in the preparations listeners make to set aside time and space for lis-
tening, within the confines of a live performance, and also in the evocations
of other places, times and states that are accessed and traversed. In one inter-
viewee’s terms, ‘the repeating or the slow change of the drone sound leads to this
‘journey’ called experience’ (G23, Interview, 2013).
Regarding otherness as an element of religious experience, Otto’s formulation
of the numinous as something ‘wholly other’ (Otto 1958) may have been criti-
cized in the study of religion (e.g. Smart 1978: 16), but the connection between
mysticism or religion, and experiences of otherness and elsewheres is an idea
that implicitly makes sense to many drone metal listeners:
Played at tectonic plate-moving volumes this [Bong, Stoner Rock] could well
open your third eye, but will completely alienate others. (Mike (i) 2014)
It’s a testament to Om’s ever-increasing scope that their live shows can elicit
such varied physical responses from an audience. Often, it’s appropriate to stand
still, eyes closed, offering oneself unconditionally to the meditative experience.
(McGeady 2013)
In the sustained and repeated references to pilgrimage, traversal of otherness

is emphasized, and a ritual, mystical or spiritual element is evoked in connec-
tion with the oft-stated estrangement of drone metal experience from language.
These combinations retain a sense of strangeness, ambiguity and indetermin-

acy, for example in what the imagined pilgrimages are for or where they are
headed. This vagueness heightens rather than diminishes the power of drone
metal experience, and is an important aspect of listeners’ use of a vocabulary of
mysticism, ritual and pilgrimage.
Shifting and interchangeable registers
Rhetorical appeals to different forms of otherness become interchangeable, with

vocabularies of narcotic, spiritual and musical intoxication, for example, substi-
tuted for each other in turn. The language of psychoactive chemicals is used to
describe music or religion, musical vocabulary is used to talk about spirituality
or narcotics, and phrases derived from religion are used in discussions of sound
and drugs. Talking about music always slides into talking about another form
of affect, and then another, never stabilizing into fixed allegory or comparison
but drifting into evocations of a different mode of experience in another alter-
native vocabulary. Terminologies relating to the sonic, narcotic and spiritual are
shuffled. In the following review description of Om, in the first part of the sen-
tence the band’s music is understood as spiritual, closely connecting sound and
religion yet still associated with drugs. In the second part, this is subtly shifted
so that drugs and sound are more closely intertwined (‘stoner’ metal as an iden-
tifying genre category), yet still connected to Buddhism.
[Om] employ the warped spirituality and connected-to-the-divine feelings asso-

ciated with an especially thick haze of potsmoke, and shackle their ‘stoner’ metal
to a solid Buddhist tilt. (ThyCrossAwaits 2012)
The unstable interchangeability and continuous deferral of these ways of talking

shows an unwillingness on the part of listeners to allow drone metal experience
to be reduced to a particular domain of language and interpretation. The point
here is not that drone metal experience is inadequately expressible in terms of
sound or drugs or spirituality or travel, but rather that descriptions of drone
metal in one idiom always drift towards other ways of talking, thus again pla-
cing the initial trope in question. Between rhetorical tropes, too, drone metal is
always elsewhere.
Just as description switches between the language of pilgrimage, intoxica-
tion and music, so too does the spoken or written representation of the relation
between sonic experience and religious concepts. For example, statements like
‘drone metal is about pilgrimage’, shift to become ‘drone metal is like a pilgrim-
age’, then to ‘drone metal is a pilgrimage’, never settling finally on one established
relation in the form of language employed. Frequently the effects of drugs and
drone metal are conflated as well as combined. Not only are albums described as
being good accompaniments or substitutes for smoking marijuana, but also as
being narcotics themselves, such as the reviewer quoted earlier who ‘got high off
the notes’ (Dave 2006). A similar shift occurs in this review:
It [Om album Advaitic Songs] is a pan-global pilgrimage in forty-four minutes;
it’s a pilgrimage well worth your time. There are certain songs like ‘Sinai’ which
sound very much like the kind of music pilgrims would listen to in a Hindu
temple. (Mateeva 2013)
First Om’s album is a pilgrimage, emphasized by repetition, but then one of the
songs in particular is identified as being like something pilgrims would listen
to, presumably at the end of a pilgrimage if in a religious building. Rhetorically,
then, Advaitic Songs (2012) is pilgrimage and is music for pilgrims, while the-
matically the album is a journey and the end of a journey. Themes of pilgrimage,
drugs or religion in general are each employed in turn as topic, simile, metaphor
and identification. These slippages and shifts suggest that, just as each trope is
interchangeable and unstable, so too is each rhetorical mode. Metaphor, simile,
analogy and comparison are not only employed for various emphases, but run
into each other, obfuscating clear definition of the relation between language
and supposed referent. A productive ambiguity is retained, an indeterminate
quality evoked by listeners which is often (of course vaguely) ascribed spiritual
or mystical features as a way of expressing drone metal’s strange and profound
effects.
One significant aspect of these kinds of language is the persistence of sen-
tences which describe drone metal as (rather than like, or similar to) religious
or hallucinatory experience, ritual, or pilgrimage. This frequent use of metaphor
(drone metal is X) over the less frequently used simile (is like X) is, I suggest,
not only a slightly more audacious and emphatic figure of speech, but also an
indication that description here is not merely metaphorical but iconic. Drone
metal is spoken of in terms of holy mountains, pilgrimages and drugs, because
the experience of drone metal’s musical structures actually shares certain formal
properties with the experience of arduous spiritual journeys and altered states of
consciousness. Listeners, for example, report that
listening to Om is like meditating. They take you on a journey –the monotonous

bassline presenting the pace [of] your footsteps. (O23, Survey, 2013)
There is not merely a comparison between footsteps and bassline, but they are
actually experienced as similar. Likewise, when drone metal is described as a
sacred mountain, it is because the experience shares physical similarities, and
even related spiritual rewards, with arduous climbing that has a religious focus.
This is not to say that the language develops teleologically towards the iconic,
or that describing drone metal listening as pilgrimage, for example, is a bet-
ter or truer representation of what listeners really mean than describing drone
metal listening as like or similar to pilgrimage. These shifts take place unpredict-
ably and quickly, and there are no grounds for suggesting that sentences in the
iconic mode are more stable or final than those constructed as simile, metaphor,
analogy or other comparison. The most sustained certainty in drone metal dis-
course is endless wandering traversal of instability.
While several participants did discuss listening to drone metal in combin-
ation with certain of their own religious practices (listening while reading the
Bible and other Christian books, listening while doing Buddhist meditation, lis-
tening while doing yoga understood as religious practice), listening was more
often compared with recognizable religious elements or practices. Performances
were described as similar in some ways to remembered Orthodox, Catholic or
unspecified religious services, as similar to prayer meetings, similar to medi-
tation or as like a listener’s own Chaos Magick ritual practice. Just as people
who had never taken drugs described drone metal as similar to what they imag-
ined drug intoxication would be like, avowedly nonreligious people spoke about
experiencing drone metal as similar to what they imagined religious experi-
ence might be like. One listener described drone metal as ‘religious music for
nonreligious people’, and this was a common sentiment in reviews, where a
metal audience was assumed to be nonreligious, or at least non-Christian or
non-monotheistically religious.3 This is not to suggest that there is always such
a gap between rhetoric and practice, nor to imply that somehow this gap makes
descriptions somehow dishonest or incomplete, but merely to highlight another
conscious dislocation within drone metal discourse which works to sustain a
potentially powerful ambiguity.
Uniting elsewhere and here
An important aspect of listening experiences, particularly the most affecting,

profound and valued occasions for listeners, is that they are marked by reports
of an unusually heightened consciousness of the body (or perhaps consciousness
in the body). Moments where listeners feel a lucid awareness of the extension,
density and emplacement of their heavily vibrating bodies are later described as
instances of clarity of perception and experience of ‘here and now’. While this
here-and-now consciousness of and in the body may initially appear to be in ten-
sion with the imaginary gestures towards other places, the most important drone
metal experiences tend to be described in terms of alterity and, at the same time,
profound consciousness or awareness that is felt to be more real, valid, compel-
ling or significant than other aspects of life. Ideas similar to this have precedent,
for example in drug experiences that are understood by participants to be ‘altered
states’ that allow access to modes of sensory experience that are felt to be unparal-
leled in their ‘realness’ or significance. This view was influentially expounded in
Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), which drew on Henri Bergson’s
suggestion that individuals could potentially perceive far more information from
the world than in normal states, perception being limited so as to allow human
organisms to fulfil basic life functions (Bergson 1911). Hence drug experiences,
and drone metal experiences described in relation to drugs, could be under-
stood as relating to ‘elsewheres’ in their alteration, and ‘here’ in their expanded
perception and embodied reality. Huxley connected the ideas and experiences
about drugs described in The Doors of Perception (1954) with theories about
religion, ritual and mysticism. These and other ideas about access to religious
experience through drugs are widely prevalent in drone metal discourse, forming
important discursive resources which are used by some drone metal listeners to
understand and explain their responses to listening. To account for the simul-
taneous elsewheres and heres of drone metal language, then, I suggest that the
most profoundly engaging drone metal experiences afford for listeners a kind of
‘elsewhere here’. While this might initially appear as something of a contradiction,
this need not be the case when the elsewheres are understood by listeners to be
more important and valued experiences than other aspects of ordinary life. This
profound valuing or sense of otherwise unavailable awareness also accounts for
the prevalence of religious language surrounding such experience:
You can’t ignore your body when it hurts. I’m not saying that Sunn O)))’s shows
are painful but they definitely make yourself mind your body. You can’t feel
more alive than when you’re feeling your body shaking and your blood pump-
ing through your veins. (SK13, Interview, 2014)
With all of those vibrations, with all of the low resonating things through the
vibrations, through their body, it probably just awakens things, so I think it’s
very useful in many ways. (SK22, Interview, 2014)
While these listeners all made reference to imaginative elsewheres, there are
also suggestions about how drone metal listening allowed a degree of embodied
reflection or awareness otherwise unavailable to them. In each extract, a favour-
able contrast with an implied ordinary life experience or with other music is
emphasized. A metaphor of awakening is used in the second, while the first
includes a statement about the superlative experience of feeling alive when
SunnO)))’s sound makes you ‘mind your body’.
Loud vibrations making one conscious of one’s breathing has been com-
pared by several listeners to the directing of attention to breathing in meditation
practices. My own experience hearing SunnO))) live for the first time involved
a heightened consciousness of my body in heavily vibrating space. I had the
strong impression that while standing in the loud, low droning noise I had a
more accurate perception of the extension, limits and density of my body in
comparison to my own everyday projections of self and body. The thematic else-
wheres described here immediately made sense to me as a way to describe the
feeling, and it also seemed that I was experiencing a consciousness of bodily
reality that was not common in ordinary life but in an important way felt more
real. A related comment connects this to an ambiguous perception of the body
as a source for sound under such conditions:
At these kinds of concerts, especially the ones that are really guitar feedback
driven, slow, low notes, and high volume, a big part of it is definitely the physical
aspect of the sound, the way that I can feel the music vibrating within my ribcage
or within my body. And it seems like, it feels like there’s some sort of threshold
where, once it gets loud enough and low enough it actually feels as though the
music is coming from within me rather than me hearing it from the speakers.
(O34, Interview, 2014)
Drone metal listening facilitates states understood as beneficial, that simultan-

eously afford access to a valued realm of alterity while enhancing consciousness
of here and now grounded in the physical body.
Listening as if
OC: How do you respond to the ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ sounds, images, and
texts in Om’s music?
O20: Ambiguously. (O20, Survey, 2013)
Drawing on the complex deferrals and disavowals of these modes of discourse,

I discuss the subtle but important feature of listener discourse that I will call ‘lis-
tening as if ’. As shown in several examples already presented, listening to drone
metal and smoking marijuana are believed by many to be complementary, yet
just as many say that listening to drone metal for them transports them similarly
without any intake of such intoxicants. Drone metal is reported to be a substitute
or surrogate for marijuana smoking, or is considered to be an alternative route
to a similar state. The shifting of language described earlier naturally includes
this kind of ambiguity, and drone metal experience being reported ‘as if ’ it were
intoxication via drugs is a significant trend in discourse which retains this inde-
terminacy. Similarly, the slippages in language relating to religion and mysticism
include description of drone metal as ritual, as if ritual, and as if similar to ritual.
The many ways that listeners use language to juxtapose or draw together religion
and drone metal, and the indeterminate and kaleidoscopic rotation of themes
and linguistic forms, demonstrates a sustained ambiguity in the relation of reli-
gion and drone metal.
Here I wish to suggest the idea of ‘listening as if ’ in exploring these shifting
descriptions of drone metal as if, as like, as similar to, as related to or as religious
experience. To be clear, describing drone metal as if it is religious is simply one
among many rhetorical strategies in drone metal reception and communica-
tion. The idea of ‘listening as if ’ considers the various and ever-shifting ways of
describing the ambiguous relation between listening and religiosity. The concept
may also refer to relations beyond religiosity, such as drone metal listened to as
if it were a mind-altering chemical, or droning noise in the urban soundscape
listened to as if it were drone metal. Listeners continuously avoid defining drone
metal as unequivocally religious. This allows them greater discursive freedom
and creativity, while also reproducing the evasions of discursively gesturing else-
where. Listening as if religious allows a simultaneous distancing and embrace
of religiosity, ritual and mysticism, which neither asserts nor denies that drone
metal ‘is’ religious:
The melodies sound like and the image of the band looks like religious but I’m
not taking them so seriously as ‘religious’. (O117, Survey, 2013)
Avoiding such fraught questions of identity, listening to drone metal as if reli-

gious relates to the suspension of disbelief in reading novels or watching drama.
This explains the close fit with literary fantasy, for example with Bong’s refer-
ences to Lovecraft or Dunsany. When Bong invokes Lord Dunsany’s literary
deity of deities Mana-Yood-Sushai (Dunsany 2000), it is heard and understood

in much the same way as Om’s esoteric calling upon the gods of Abrahamic
monotheism. These gods are neither fictional nor real but participated in as if
real for the purposes of listening.
Michael Saler has outlined a theory of ‘as if ’ thinking beyond the suspension
of disbelief (Saler 2012). Saler suggests that the literary fantasy worlds inhabited
by readers of Lovecraft and Tolkien (both major influences on a collective heavy
metal imaginary) are a constructed attempt to re-enchant modernity through
joining fantastic imagination with rationality. This rationalizing imagination,
for Saler, is shown in careful attention to detail in such worlds, involving such
supporting elements as convincing and consistent maps, appendixes, histories,
languages and genealogies (more evident in Tolkien than Lovecraft, the latter
repeatedly asserting the importance of describing his monstrous ancient gods
as indescribable). My use of the ‘as if ’ relation shares with Saler’s an appeal to
elsewheres and an imaginative and creative element. However, Saler’s argument
rests upon the extension of systems of rationality into these imagined worlds,
while for drone metal listeners this is far less applicable. Drone metal listen-
ers are neither concerned with rationality in their imagined worlds of listen-
ing practice, nor is it clear what this would mean. In some cases, drone metal
listening is explicitly valued for offering an escape from rational thought, or
from any thought at all. The kind of map-making and development of internal
consistency described by Saler would be counter to the impulses to drifting
transformations and traversals in the drone metal imaginary. For drone metal,
listening as if may relate to enchantment, but ambiguity and pilgrimage beyond
reason are more centrally important characteristics than consistency within
imagined worlds.
Listening as if religious is not based on narrative, but on a broader and looser
set of connotations about what the music does and is for. Thus, listening as if
religious allows a Christian listener, uncomfortable with the close association
between the feeling of the Holy Spirit and the feeling at a drone metal concert,
to separate the two but acknowledge this similarity (O94, Interview, 2013).
Conversely, an atheist listening as if religious at a concert in a church can ‘have
[their] cake and eat it’ by appreciating the evocative, atmospheric and aesthetic
trappings of religiosity and ritual without having to directly engage with a reli-
gion he distrusts (H12, Interview, 2013). Those with less certainty about their
own stance on religion can listen to drone metal as if religious, immersed in ritu-
alized listening and excessive sound without needing to commit to definitions
or a particular position. The reflexivity of this concept is again shown in the
fact that several listeners observed a changed relation to other sounds in their
environments. While drone metal can be listened to as if it is religious (or as if
it is a pilgrimage, or as if it is narcotic intoxication, or as if it is bodily sickness),
so too can machinery or the noises of vehicles be listened to as if they are drone
metal. One listener moved from describing his listening to forms of music with
drones to ‘maybe sometimes when I’m on the train, or I find myself drifting off
and listening to the air conditioning, or things like that’ (E13, Interview, 2013).
Some listeners reported a certain sense of liberation and curiosity, as if they had
uncovered value in listening to urban soundscapes, in sound that was normally
utterly ignored or treated as mere nuisance. The extremity of drone metal music
allows the development of a listening-as-if relation, which can extend ambiguity
about listening to sound beyond drone metal, which can afford encounters with
strangeness in the everyday.
Conclusion: Drone metal discourse as mystic speech
Instead of extrapolating from these linguistic disavowals and refractions a

‘pure’ contentless experience onto which all kinds of theories might be over-
laid, I attempt to draw together analysis of this complex of syntactical, rhetorical
and performative methods of operating on and subverting the language used to
describe drone metal. This language is, at the level of content and at the level of
the construction of utterances, a form of mystic speech as described by Certeau.
I quote Certeau at length here, from a text discussing mystic speech in a dis-
persed and fragmented Christian community. Certeau relates this speech to uto-
pian writing, ‘which has as explicit premise an absence of referent, a non-site’
(Certeau 2000a: 221). In Certeau’s description of Christian mystical utterances,
I hear resonances of the utterances of drone metal participants as presented in
this chapter, evoking and traversing elsewheres:
Taken to its limit, this utterance severs any statement from its meaning; never
posited here or there, this utterance ceaselessly refers to ‘something else’. . . .
A rhetoric corresponds to it: it multiplies statements in order to mask them,
through negation, with the act of saying themselves; it cultivates confession,
autobiography, or testimony; it multiplies figures of style (paradox, oxymoron,
etc.) which aim to ruin discourse from within and thus make it own up to the
ineffability of the subject saying itself. The community exhausts the signs which
it initially gave itself; it devours its own formulations one after the other. The
voracity of utterance: before it no statement holds. (Certeau 2000a: 222)
Multiplication of statements, claims about ineffability, continuous references to

elsewhere, and a language that shifts evasively in paradoxes, hyperbole and other
self-consciously overstressed language. These are markers of mystic speech, and
of the language of drone metal experience. Fractures, resonances and wandering
departures are portrayed in the content of description, and are also practised
and manifested in the particular sentence structures and rhetorical modes in
which listeners find themselves discussing drone metal. Certeau describes this
mystical manner of speaking as presenting ‘unstable metaphors for the inaccess-
ible’ (1992a: 77). For drone metal listeners, language is set wandering between a
vast range of imagined spatial, temporal and bodily conscious elsewheres. The
continually shifting ambiguity of this relation between language and listening is
a space of powerful and profound engagement for listeners. Drone metal listen-
ers mark this importance in repeated, amplified, distorted appeals to a mystical
language of ritual, spirituality and pilgrimage.
5
Amplifier Worship: Materiality
and Mysticism in Heavy Sound
Introduction
This chapter describes the importance of amplification and distortion in drone

metal sound, discourse and practice. In drone metal, the central instrument is not
the electric guitar but the amplifier. This focus on amplification goes beyond other
rock and metal scenes and styles, where the amplifier may represent power but
is always symbolically subordinated to the guitar. The primacy of amplification
and distortion in drone metal turns away from musical content, notes, chords,
structures and virtuosic skill, and instead towards the experience of timbre and
physical vibration of listener’s bodies. The concern of drone metal is distorted
amplification, rather than what is being amplified and distorted. The importance
of an amplified materiality can also be observed in the overwhelming preference
among listeners for vinyl as a music medium, which emphasizes materiality. In
drone metal merchandise and musical products, and in modes of signification
such as typography and logo design, signs are repeated, amplified and distorted.
This symbolic materiality refers back to the primary focus of drone metal, the
intensely physical experience of very loud, very low frequency sounds.
Similar interests appear in forms of music closely related to drone metal.
In noise music, materiality can offer a way to disrupt meaning and create con-
ceptual as well as sonic noise (Toth 2009: 32–3). Similarly in avant-garde elec-
tronica, sonic materiality is investigated and valued (Hegarty 2007: 181), and in
industrial music, distortion is also crucial:
This music forces open the body, exceeding the capacity of flesh to contain
itself. This is also the musical impact of distortion, in which a sound’s amplitude
exceeds its medium’s capacity to contain it. (A. Reed 2013: 291)
In psytrance and dub too, the verbal narratives often assumed to be a focus of
meaning in popular music are downplayed and fractured in favour of a focus on
bodily experience of sound. Dub turns to an absorbing emphasis on the materi-
ality of sound (Henriques 2011: 54), while in electronic dance music
the scarcity of lyrics and textual messages is compensated for by an obsession

with the raw material of the sound and the application of special effects for trig-
gering bodily responses. (Vitos 2015: 131)
In drone metal, the central position of the amplifier over any other musical
equipment, and the extraordinarily physical experience of sound in which ‘air
becomes solid’ (SK11, Survey, 2013), suggest that an especially extreme focus
on materiality of sound is characteristic of drone metal. This concern with
materiality is certainly to some extent a response to a transitional period in
the wider industry and culture where music is becoming increasingly digital,
intangible and even interchangeable. A ‘crisis of abundance’ has been posited
in metal, in part due to these trends (Kahn-Harris 2013), prompting attempts
in black metal (Hagen 2014: 230) and in noise music (Novak 2013: 222–3)
to safeguard exclusivity and authenticity through engagement with physical
sound media.
The emphasis on the material and physical aspects of listening also emerges
in the religious language used by listeners who ritualize physical spaces and
musical objects, and who understand the bodily consciousness of drone metal
vibration in terms of mysticism. This link between amplified materiality and
spirituality has been observed in other popular music cultures that make exten-
sive use of the symbols and rhetoric of ritual and religious experience:
Because of the high amplification and pounding insistence of house music beats,
which are felt in the body as much as heard by the ears, the groove is often com-
pelling to the point of trance induction for the dancers, carrying them beyond
their normal consciousness into a powerful ecstatic state. (Sylvan 2005: 20)
Sheila Whiteley discusses the psychedelic atmosphere of ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi

Hendrix (Hendrix 1967, Whiteley 2000), attributing altered time perception and
a ‘drowning of personal consciousness’ (reported characteristics of mystical as
well as psychedelic states) specifically to the manipulation of repetition, amplifi-
cation and distortion (Whiteley 2000: 243–5). Hendrix’s explorations of extreme
distortion, feedback and experimentation with the physical limits of amplifiers
and guitars are a clear influence on drone metal, as shown most explicitly in
Amplifier Worship 117
Earth’s cover of a Jimi Hendrix track ‘Peace in Mississippi’ (Hendrix 1975) on

the album Pentastar: In the Style of Demons (Earth 1996). Whiteley explains the
creation of distortion through amplification:
The input signal from the guitar is greatly amplified to push the signal level
above the supply voltage. As this is not possible, the signal becomes saturated at
the supply voltage level. (Whiteley 2000: 260)
A connection with mystical uses of language can be heard, therefore, in the

sound of distortion. The capacity of a particular mode of communication is
exceeded, the boundaries of what can be said are shown, and the limits of a
channel of communication are sounded and heard. From another perspective,
the construction of sacred space has also been understood in terms of sonic
experience and practice, again understood through the concept of amplification.
Sacred sites are ‘amplifiers of consciousness’ (Hale 2007: xii), while cathedrals
are sought out for their ability to precipitate bodily sonic vibrations through
sound-amplifying architecture (Bull 2007: 2).
Scholarly treatments of drone metal also frequently mention material or
physical aspects of musical experience as notable characteristics of the music
which produce extreme experience. For Olivia Lucas, ‘feeling Sunn O)))’s
music is not a metaphor –it is an inescapable physical reality’ (2013). The
same band’s performances are described as ‘a deep pressure-filled amplifier
massage penetrating your entire body’ (Ishmael 2014: 138), and, in a slight
echo of paradoxical mystical phrases, as having a ‘simultaneously pared down
and amplified’ structure (Shvarts 2014: 206). This connection between the
desired intense materiality of sonic experience, and the reports and rhetoric
of mysticism, I understand via Certeau’s observations about the opacification
of mystic signs. According to Certeau, in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, medieval Christian mystics turned towards the bodily apprehension
of the materiality of mystic signs, in an era where an institutional framework
was being undermined and was losing its authority. Parallels might be drawn
with digital media causing a paradigm shift in music media and global com-
munications at the time of the emergence of drone metal. This turn towards
the physical embodiment of signs over semantics amid a crisis of signification
produces distinctive mystical styles, modes and tropes. What is of fundamen-
tal importance is indistinguishable from the insignificant, writes Certeau, and
so ‘mystic discourse transforms the detail into myth; it catches hold of it, blows
it out of proportion, multiplies it, divinizes it’ (Certeau 1992a: 10). In another
age, drone metal’s sonic and symbolic discourse practises this mystical ampli-
fication and distortion.
Amps in rock and heavy metal
Amplification has always been crucial to the sound of rock music (Waksman
1999: 14). Electrically amplified solid body guitars first became popular in
the 1930s, and musicians were quick to experiment with the sonic qualities of
feedback and distortion, side-effects of the amplification initially introduced
in order to play for larger audiences in larger spaces (Doyle 2015: 539). Later,
rhythm and blues musicians in the early 1950s played louder than their ampli-
fiers were designed to be played, used old amplifiers with ripped speaker cones,
and then began to deliberately slash the cones once the timbres of distorted
sound became a desirable stylistic area for exploration. In each case, equipment
was pushed ‘past its limits’ (Waksman 1999: 138), players and audiences seeking
the noise of excess. From the late 1960s, amplifiers became a metonym for musi-
cal power, albeit generally subordinated to what Steve Waksman has called the
‘technophallus’ of the electric guitar (Waksman 1999: 188–9).
The association of amplification with power is particularly strong in in heavy
metal, which has consistently explored sonic power (Walser 1993). Describing the
basic necessities for metal, Deena Weinstein lists first amps, then guitars, bass and
drums (Weinstein in Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey 2005). Although distortion
effects began to be controlled more by effects pedals than overdriven amps, ampli-
fiers have still long been valued and fetishized, sometimes in connection with
ideas of masculinity. See, for example, Manowar’s 1984 single ‘All Men Play on Ten’,
the number implying amplifiers turned up to the maximum volume, and with the
sleeve featuring an amplifier-case design which folded out to reveal a poster image
of a Marshall stack amp. The symbolic value of the amplifier, over its purely tech-
nical function, is displayed at large arena concerts for more mainstream kinds of
metal and rock, where the number of amplifiers in use is exaggerated with empty
amp cabinets on stage: ‘As well as functional audio necessity, amplification in rock
became hyper-spectacle’ (Doyle 2015: 543). Audiences might sometimes challenge
this as fakery in the stadium show context, but it would be completely rejected at
the small club shows in which most doom and drone metal takes place: proximity
would reveal any such trickery, and in any case space on stage at such venues is too
limited to waste with props that add nothing to the sound.
Amplification and distortion in drone metal
Doom metal in particular seems to involve a particular concern with amplifica-

tion, perhaps since the slowness of the music directs more attention to distorted
timbres and the nuances of amplified sound. Drone metal can be seen as a yet
more extreme subset of doom, extending beyond any other form of metal in its
extreme focus on amplification. Only in drone metal do amplifiers become the
primary instrument, more important than guitar pedals, effects and even the
electric guitar itself. The shift from the primacy of guitars to amplifiers is sig-
nalled in Earth’s early live album Sunn Amps and Smashed Guitars (1995b). The
title draws on the iconoclastic destruction of guitars, a feature of excessive rock
performance since the late 1960s. The Who, Jimi Hendrix and The Clash were
all noted for smashing guitars, with Hendrix famously setting fire to his guitar
at the 1967 Monterey festival. Imagery of guitar destruction was used to signal
the wild energy and chaotic excitement of performances, particularly in album
covers such as the Clash’s London Calling (1979) and also Hendrix’s Jimi Plays
Monterey (1986). But in the Earth album title, the smashed guitars are literally
and figuratively secondary to the amps. Though the title references amplifiers
manufactured by Sunn, the back cover of the CD shows the guitarists kneeling in
front of Marshall stacks, another fetishized brand of amps. This posture is famil-
iar in the performance of drone metal, noise and some forms of extreme metal
and was employed earlier by Jimi Hendrix. A guitarist facing an amplifier can,
with small movements, manipulate sound produced in the feedback from the
amplifier vibrations moving the strings of the guitar, producing more amplifica-
tion, in turn producing more amplification. But a kneeling position also has an
iconic association, often interpreted as implying supplication, therefore placing
the amplifier in a position of authority or reverence. Extending this, kneeling
has associations with religious, ritual or devotional activities. This connects with
the positioning of amplifiers in the place of altars at some concerts taking place
in churches, as well as the Boris album title Amplifier Worship (1998), situating
amplifiers as material objects of ritual and religious power. As with other phrases
introduced by particular bands, the phrase ‘amplifier worship’ has taken on wider
significance for listeners who use it widely to describe drone metal and their rela-
tionship to it. The amplifier thus takes practical and symbolic place as a centre of
religious comportment and attention, as well as in the listening imaginary.
Even more symbolically committed to amps are SunnO))). The band named
themselves after the now defunct manufacturer Sunn, but went even further
newgenrtpdf
Figure 5.1 Promotional image used by SunnO))) before their 2017 performance at the Barbican Centre, London. The stage set showcases the particular
kinds, combination and placement of amplifiers to be used. Note that instruments (guitar, bass, etc.) are indicated only in words, while amps have detailed
information and visual depiction. Reproduced with kind permission of SunnO))).
by adding O))) from the company logo. The brackets are often interpreted as
connoting thick and heavy waves of vibration, and so the band name can be
interpreted as an amplification of a sign signifying amplification. The back-
line of amplifiers that SunnO))) use at concerts often features in promotional
materials, tour posters and shirts. The band have on occasion even performed
without guitars, such as the ‘Moog Ceremony’ (named after the synthesizer
manufacturer) at the 2006 Domino Festival in Brussels. Some areas of black
metal and doom metal have developed ways of using acoustic instruments and
timbres associated with traditional musics such as neo-folk bands like Blood of
the Black Owl. Groups like Wardruna and Phurpa have gone further, creating
new music based on traditional ritual forms, but appearing to be influenced by
extreme metal and certainly sharing overlapping audiences. Drone metal shows
have taken place without guitars, but a drone metal show without amplifiers is
inconceivable. Certain manufacturers are revered, such as Sunn, Marshall and
Orange. For their album Amplifier Worship (1998), Boris used bright orange-
coloured promotional images of band members with their Orange amplifiers.
Sleep placed a note in the sleeve of their album Sleep’s Holy Mountain (1992a), ‘If
you have Orange amplification for sale contact Sleep through Earache Records’,
and are widely reported to have spent their entire advance from major label
London Records on amps and marijuana, relying on both to create the land-
mark Jerusalem/Dopesmoker (1996/2003). Sleep were famous for playing cus-
tomized special edition ‘Green’ amps made by the Orange company. In a ‘FAQ’
list posted on social media, current drummer Jason Roeder noted that the band
are still asked about these amps often, despite having sold them many years ago
(Roeder 2015). Amplifiers are customized or decorated in distinctive ways, with
Bismuth’s Matamp head personalized with the phrase ‘NOM O)))’. The amp was
made by Matamp, but other manufacturers and by extension the cult of amplifi-
cation in general, is also referenced. The use of the sign O))) has come to signify
heavily amplified drone in general, as well as connoting both the band SunnO)))
and the amplifier manufacturer Sunn.
Much pre-gig conversation surrounds amplifiers, which are often already set
up on stage. Valve amps are thought to give a particularly warm, full tone to
the low end sound, and with several other attendees, I spent most of a set by
the band Pombagira watching the tubes inside a Sunn head amp glowing hotter
as the riffs became louder. At SunnO))) shows, the amplifiers (and everything
else) are shrouded in thick smoke, meaning at times that the only things visible
are the blinking lights on the amps. Often set up in a semicircle, the collec-
tion of amps on stage were described in surveys as Stonehenge (SK24, Survey,
Figure 5.2 Bismuth bass player Tanya Byrne’s Orange and Matamp amplifier heads.
Note the hand-painted font in NOM O))), which reproduces the script used in the
Orange brand logo. Reproduced with kind permission of Tanya Byrne.
2013), as a ‘heksenkring’ or ring of wild mushrooms associated with witches in

Germanic folklore (SK15, Survey, 2013), and as a vision of hell (SX1, Survey,
2013). Expressing similar sentiment to Boris’s album title, UK drone metal
group Urthona describe one of their recordings as ‘elemental amp worship’
(Urthona 2015).
In a poster for a tour by Ommadon and Bismuth (a somewhat rare event, in
featuring two drone metal bands), artist Ross McKendrick made similar links
between drone metal, monuments and extraordinary experience in the image
and an accompanying description of the design. The poster featured a subtle
conflation of monoliths and amplifiers in the depiction of an ancient-looking,
weathered obelisk marked with two circular patches reminiscent of the speaker
cones in amps. Heaviness and materiality of sound connote the heavy material-
ity of monuments, which in turn signify access to ancient time with mysterious
ritual associations.
Of course nothing less than the destruction of ancient monoliths and the com-
plete negation of space-time would be able to amply convey just how crushing
these shows will be. (McKendrick 2015)
Connections between drone metal, stone circles and mysticism are also made
explicit in an online preview piece about the tour.
[Bismuth]’ve been described in the past as ‘like Stonehenge, but music’, which
should tell you all you need to know, but if you’re unfamiliar with Wiltshire’s
most recognizable group of stones, then you should expect something enormous,
vaguely mystical, largely inexplicable, and inconceivably heavy. (Whelan 2015)
At a Stephen O’Malley solo performance, the SunnO))) guitarist stood far to

the side of the stage, as if the amps were the central performers on centre stage.
Support band Kogumaza had set up their own amps and drum kit and played
on the floor, meaning that space on stage was already dominated by the (at that
time silent) amplifiers. The end of a drone metal show too, can sometimes fea-
ture a kind of performed subordination to amplifiers. The closing of a set by
Horse Latitudes at the Roadburn festival is described in my fieldnotes as entirely
focused on amplification:
Last few minutes, a final section with both bassplayers in front of their amps,
Vellu with bass unslung, held neck downwards, Heidi with close hold on back of
bass, exposing strings and pivoting to control feedback. Air thick with vibration,
humming soupy noise which is not heard so much as becomes the solid, thick
atmosphere of the room, in which everyone is trapped in a fluid stasis. (Author’s
Fieldnotes, Horse Latitudes at Roadburn Festival, April 2014)
The two bass guitarists stood facing their amplifiers, which emitted powerful
feedback vibrations. The sound could be felt as if it was a physical presence in
the room with its own dimensions, a band of thick air eight inches deep and
hovering at chest level through the bodies of everyone in the room. For me, at
least, a strong and even unavoidable feeling of communality was produced in
knowing that each person present was subjected to the same almost tangible
vibration. In this way, communality is moved from the more easily observable
social realm to an imagined sociality in mutually felt resonance made possible
through heavy amplification. Julian Henriques has described a similar effect of
Figure 5.3 Poster design for 2015 Ommadon & Bismuth UK tour combining amp and
monolith by Ross D. McKendrick/RDM Visuals. Reproduced with kind permission of
Ross D. McKendrick.
the dub reggae sound system, where heavy bass sound can feel as if it is not only
invading but also extending our bodies, connecting us with the collective vibrat-
ing body of the crowd (2011: xvi). Echoing the mystical ineffability disclaimers
and elsewhere–here relations described in Chapter 4, for Henriques this can dis-
solve binary modes of thinking and feel simultaneously ‘as disembodying as it is
embodying’ (2003: 460–1).
Other aspects of live drone metal supplement this focus on amplifiers with
other ways of amplifying experience. Bong perform in as much darkness as ven-
ues will allow, and some listeners mentioned that they also listened to record-
ings in the dark to maximize focus on the sound. SunnO))) are notorious for
filling venues with dry ice smoke, sometimes starting up the smoke machines
several hours before going on stage. These practices are at once overtly theatri-
cal and austere. By de-emphasizing vision, these practices can make the visual
experience of drone metal unusual, along with redirecting attention to sound.
Of the smoke at a SunnO))) gig, one listener remarked that it ‘sets the mood for
something ritual and spiritual’. Developed in discussion with another audience
member before a SunnO))) show, an interpretation of the smoke at a SunnO)))
concert demonstrates drone metal’s preoccupation with amplification. Smoke
transforms the effect of stage lighting, so that instead of seeing the light sources
around the stage and the brightly lit performers, the audience instead see clouds
of nebulous and shifting greyness, redness or yellowness. The smoke, then, in a
sense amplifies and distorts the stage lights so it seems as if you are not seeing
things lit with coloured lights but instead seeing colour and light in themselves.
This parallels what happens in sound, where the emphasis is not on the particu-
lar sounds played on the instruments on stage but on what sound itself feels like,
in the amplified and distorted vibration of the venue, the air and the bodies of
audience members. This is sound not as a medium for articulating structures
and relations that move through time but as an overwhelming physical experi-
ence which holds bodily consciousness in heavy amplified resonance.
The importance of amplification can also be discerned in drone metal’s jokes,
satire and memes. As discussed in Chapter 3, humour can reveal, in exaggerated
form, the elements crucial to a particular culture or milieu or mode of cultural
production. The now legendary amplifier scene from the widely known and
well-loved spoof documentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is celebrated in metal
culture, and is a common reference point for drone metal. In the film, fictional
metal guitarist Nigel Tufnell boasts of having amplifiers custom made to go up
to eleven rather than ten. This trope of amps set to eleven is often acknowledged
in humorous glorifications of loudness. An image of an amplifier volume knob
turned to the maximum was used as a social media profile photo by Ommadon
guitarist David Tobin, prompting a chorus of approving comments of ‘eleven!’
At the same time, a still from the Spinal Tap scene showing an amp dial set to
eleven dominated the front page of SunnO))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley’s web-
site. Elsewhere, a YouTube user uploaded the famous oversized amplifier scene
from the film Back to the Future (1985), with a new soundtrack made from two
SunnO))) recordings. The new juxtaposition implied that Michael J. Fox’s char-
acter Marty McFly is blown across a room into a bookcase by playing a drone
metal riff through the enormous amp (Back To))) The Future 2014).
In conversation at concerts, and in subsequent interviews, listeners talk about
the importance of amplifiers to the power of the live experience. Amplifiers and
speakers for home stereos are often mentioned in describing listening to record-
ings, especially with reference to turning up volume (or not being able to as much
as one would wish). The most significant difference between concert and home
listening is reported to be the difference in amplification, because home equip-
ment and context do not allow the same physically felt level of volume. As one
listener put it, referencing the slogan associated with SunnO))), ‘MAXIMUM
VOLUME LEADS TO MAXIMUM RESULTS and the neighbours don’t agree’
(SX2, Survey, 2013). Amplifiers also appear in a sort of sonic imaginary:
When I listen to SunnO))) or any of the bands like that, Earth, especially the
early recordings, I always just have this image of myself, stood in front of this
amplifier, with just the wind of noise, great big noise, just blasting me back-
wards. (N17, Interview, 2013)
As mediator of amplified sound, and as the symbolic source of volume and dis-
tortion, amplifiers become the primary object in drone metal culture with prior-
ity over guitars. In the same way that mystical texts problematize signification in
unusual manners of speaking that push language to excess, the repetition, amp-
lification and distortion in drone metal turn to the materiality of the mystic sign.
Relations between digital and physical media
A turn towards materiality can also be observed elsewhere in drone metal.

Another manifestation is listeners’ overwhelming preference for vinyl as a music
medium. This tendency is notable in other forms of popular music recently, but
is particularly pronounced in drone metal. Vinyl is often stated as the best or
ideal way to listen to drone metal, in some cases described as the way the music
is intended or meant to be heard, even for albums released on up to four differ-

ent formats (B7, Interview, 2013; G12, Interview, 2013). The perceived appro-
priateness of vinyl for drone metal is emphasized by rhetorically positioning it
as normative rather than as a personal preference. Setting aside long-running
arguments about perception of fidelity, recording and mastering techniques, and
the mythical ‘warmth’ of analogue sound reproduction (though see Thornton
1996: 64, Hegarty 2007: 183), an important component of vinyl’s value to listen-
ers is the mere fact of its emphasized materiality in a digital era in which music
is increasingly intangible.
As Jonathan Sterne has pointed out, digital information (including sound)
is no less based in the physical world than other media (in silicon chips, LCD
screens and so on). This materiality is, however, often obscured by the tiny
scale and by the ‘black boxes’ of technological artefacts whose functioning is
poorly understood and not engaged with directly by most users (Sterne 2012: 7).
Digitally stored music can of course be played just as loudly as from an analogue
medium and, conversely, many of these representations of analogue material-
ity are exchanged, viewed and communicated about digitally online. However,
if vinyl is widely understood as the way something is meant to be heard, what
is important here is not the fact of materiality but the ideological function of
materiality as a representation of value:
I never buy download only if I can get a physical media (vinyl, CD or cassette).
On the other hand listening on vinyl is a ritual in itself: taking the vinyl from the
sleeve, setting the stylus in the groove, admiring the cover art. That makes me
really concentrate in what I’m doing and what I’m hearing. I’ll have to say vinyl.
Vinyl + download code is the best thing ever! (G23, Interview, 2013)
Digital music is mentioned at the beginning and end of the paragraph, though
not discussed further, showing that while vinyl may attract enthusiastic discus-
sions of ritual and privileged listening contexts, downloads and digital music are
still important in how drone metal is used.
Tactility, weight and material presence are all emphasized in packaging and
promotional descriptions of packaging. The sleeve for the vinyl issue of Menace
Ruine’s album Venus Armata (2015) for instance is described in detail by their
record label as ‘Housed in custom printed Stumptown jackets on heavyweight
kraft stock, with 2 color inserts’ (SIGE Records 2015). Records are often adver-
tised as pressed on 140 or 180 gram vinyl, rather than the industry standard of
115 to 120 gram. According to the manager of one vinyl pressing plant, this extra
heaviness has no effect on the sound quality and is merely a bit more resistant
to warping. Crucially, however, it foregrounds weightiness as an important idea

in relation to sound. Non-playing sides of records by Nadja (2008a, 2008b), by
Nadja and Black Boned Angel (2009) and by Earth (2011, 2012) have designs
etched into the surface, a feature highlighted in promotional materials. The
album Advaitic Songs (2012) was released by Om on two 45rpm twelve-inch
records, though the full album would have fitted on a single LP. The faster spin-
ning of a 45rpm compared to a 33rpm record means that there is in a sense
more material in the sound, as the needle covers more vinyl ‘ground’ per sec-
ond of music when the record spins at the faster rate, thereby improving the
sound quality. Multiple layers of packaging are customary for SunnO))) records,
especially their 2009 release Monoliths & Dimensions, the title of which already
implies heaviness and extension. The album featured printed inner sleeves, a
fold-out poster featuring an image of the robed band members at the Pyramid of
the Sun in Mexico, and a translucent dust-jacket style covering around the gate-
fold vinyl. The cover also displayed a reproduction of a thickly black-painted art-
work by Richard Serra (1999), an artist whose work approaches a sort of sublime
post-industrial heaviness. A listener described playing an unspecified SunnO)))
record as ‘open[ing] up the double gatefold tome, and put[ting] this monolithic
heavy black SunnO)) vinyl on your platter’ (G15, Interview, 2013), and vinyl was
frequently praised for adding a sense of ritual to the process of listening.
As with other forms of underground extreme metal, cassette tapes are some-
times used for drone metal releases, particularly by bands with smaller profiles
and audiences. The release of a retrospective wooden box set of Ommadon’s first
four albums on cassette (Ommadon 2015) indicated the cultivation of material-
ity as value, as the record label Tartarus promoted the release on social media by
posting daily photographs for more than two weeks, each featuring an image of
tools and materials used in the manufacturing process for the packaging, from
dowels, planes and sawdust-covered planks to a bucket of glue. The music con-
tained in this elaborate package had already for some time been available to
download free of charge from the band themselves, suggesting that the elaborate
materiality (and expense) of this special edition physical release was expected
to appeal to audiences. The weight and size of vinyl records has been perceived
by some as a disadvantage, though this materiality is conversely highly valued
by most drone metal listeners. Similarly, the deteriorating sound quality of cas-
settes is occasionally reported as part of the charm of music on tape, since this is
impact on sound is a direct result and index of materiality.
Another example of the co-constitutive relation between digitality and mate-
riality is in concert poster images. Digital versions of the images on social media,
music and event listings websites and band homepages are more likely to be
seen by potential listeners than the limited reach of printed posters around the
venue. This is particularly true where, as is common, the translocality of scenes
means that some listeners may travel considerable distances for concerts. It is
rare for physical posters or flyers for any drone metal event to appear anywhere
other than the gig venue itself, or at most in other nearby music venues or local
music shops. In some cases, physical copies of the posters are displayed for the
first time on the day of the concert, with a few A4 printouts directing attendees
to venues down alleyways (as for the Chameleon venue in Nottingham) or to
rooms underneath pubs (as for the Northumberland Arms in Newcastle). For
larger gigs, screen-printed or otherwise artfully created posters are sometimes
available for purchase at the merchandise table alongside records, CDs and
shirts. Many attendees will have seen digital versions of these images in online
promotion, for example on social media or metal blogs, and so the already famil-
iar images in a sense ‘become’ material at the point they arrive at the concert,
the privileged site for drone metal listening. Listeners might purchase prints at
the merch table, or untack posters from walls when leaving a venue. Both are
crystallizations of materiality around drone metal, valued as tokens of partici-
pation in the live concert site which are then often installed in spaces used for
home listening.
Reissues of now canonical drone metal albums tend to emphasize materiality,
associating heavy packaging and materials with the weightiness of their music
and their now secured place in its received history. Sleep’s Dopesmoker (2012)
album has been reissued by Southern Lord in at least twenty differently coloured
vinyl or picture disc editions, with various different packaging materials and
extras such as T-shirts. Earth 2 (1993) was originally released on a CD or single
LP but rereleased on double vinyl (despite this splitting up one song into two
sides), while the rereleased record The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull (2008)
features a very thick faux leather cover and gatefold sleeve. Inside the record,
Dylan Carlson is noted as playing ‘guitars and amplifiers’, and the elaborate and
ornate fonts provide another more abstract representation of amplified and dis-
torted music-related signs.
Amplification, repetition and distortion in visual aesthetics
Just as amplification and distortion is the primary focus of drone metal sound,
so too the written signifiers of drone metal are often amplified and distorted
in ornate, elaborate ways which heighten visual experience of the sign at the
expense of legibility. The broad class of letterform styles known variously (and
haphazardly) as fraktur, blackletter, gothic or ‘Old English’ are used widely else-
where in popular music, especially in hip-hop. Metal, though, is among the
forms of music most notorious for its obsession with the visual image of the
word in blackletter style. The first Black Sabbath album featured an elaborate font
(1970), and each subsequent album displayed the name of the band and some-
times the album title in a new and distinctive typographic design. The band’s
fifth album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973) used two different fraktur style fonts
for the album title and band name, and for the lettering on the back cover, and
by 1978, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Kiss and AC/DC had all used fraktur font
styles on album covers. Since then, all subgenres of heavy metal have become
known for using different versions of these styles of letters, for which naming
and categorization are debated (Vestergaard 2016: 106–7). The distinctive wavy
purple-and-black text from the cover of Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality (1971),
and the white, orange and black lettering on Vol. 4 (1972) have been widely
copied, particularly by doom metal bands. In their album or T-shirt designs,
doom bands make a double signification, signalling their own band but making
obvious insider reference to (or repetition of) Black Sabbath from a particular
era. Here I use the terms ‘blackletter’ and ‘fraktur’ interchangeably to refer to all
forms of the thick, heavy, pointed letterforms derived from medieval manuscript
handwriting, and used across Europe in the first centuries of printing. Extreme
metal bands from the 1980s sought to represent their extreme sound by using
ever more extreme scripts, to the point where indecipherable vocal techniques
and distorted timbres in extreme metal are visually matched with completely
illegible logos. This development Daniel Van der Velden traces to Mayhem, one
of the most influential black metal bands (2007: 1). Fraktur (literally meaning
‘fractured’) and blackletter typefaces (so named because of the heavy inky visual
effect of the letters on the page) slow down reading for the uninitiated and are
renowned for causing difficulties for legibility as a result of their emphasis on
thick lines and ornamentation over linear clarity (Schalansky 2008: 11). Cristina
Paoli describes blackletter as expressing an ‘impossible integration’ of power
and dynamic movement in the heaviness of strokes and their perfect balance
on sharp points (Paoli 2006: 17). This is the kind of balance between power and
control that Robert Walser identified as fundamental to metal music (1993: 2).
Paoli also suggests that the appeal of blackletter in heavy music is due to its
‘mystic and obscure connotations’, to its marginality as a letterform and to its
suggestions of irrationality and violence (2006: 14), all of which are relevant
to drone metal’s symbolic practice and discourse. In addition, the uniformity

between vertical strokes in each letter gives a repetitive quality that is impor-
tant in the sound of metal’s riffs, even described in terms of rhythm by some
typographers (Noordzij 2005: 41). The widespread adoption of these font styles
in metal, combined with a sonic preference for amplification and distortion,
suggests a broad concern for the materiality of signs across the whole genre.
In addition, a transgressive association with Nazi Germany may be suggested.
This is despite the lengthy controversy between Latin and fraktur font styles in
Germany predating the Nazi era by several decades, and despite the fact that in
January 1941 the party (on blackletter headed notepaper) denounced fraktur
and blackletter styles (Willberg 1998: 48). Nevertheless, for some, the associa-
tion between blackletter and Nazism persists (Paoli 2006: 14), with the ambigu-
ity of what blackletter might signify perhaps providing another way of obscuring
clarity and legibility. As well as being an abstract representation of extremity
which matches and suggests extreme sound, the cryptic sigils of illegible logos
also function effectively as boundary markers between insiders who know and
can ‘read’ by recognition, and outsiders who are unable to decipher them.
Drone metal band logo design sometimes implies a consideration of abstract
representations of materiality. Bands often use blackletter styles that are easy
enough to read while still foregrounding materiality according to metal conven-
tions. Other uses are more idiosyncratic, even if they remain within the broad
stylistic character of fraktur’s combination of solid thickness, embellishment
and often monochrome setting. One of the more difficult band logos to instantly
decipher is that of Bong, a design which continues the angular convention of
extreme metal in turning a word into an image. The logo hints at the trope of the
holy mountain, particularly since it was first introduced on the cover of Mana-
Yood-Sushai (2012) above a painting of sacred mountain Kanchenjunga. One
listener conversely likened the logo on that specific album cover to a UFO hov-
ering over the mountain, providing an interpretation of alterity in another regis-
ter. In each of these cases, while drawing on metal conventions established over
decades, drone metal bands continue a tradition of emphasizing the materiality
of written signs even to the exclusion of legibility, while also visually represent-
ing the distortion and amplification of their sounds.
By contrast, several drone metal band logos feature much cleaner curves and
plain text. After some variations, the most common typographical logo used by
Sleep is a version of the rounded, easily readable font from Black Sabbath’s Vol.
4 (1972). The orange text from that album is replaced with green, repeating the
shift in their famous Orange amplifiers custom made in green. The font used on
foundational drone metal album Earth 2 (1993) is plain, lower case and widely
spaced, though later albums and visual materials tend to use fraktur styles. The
letters in SunnO)))’s reproduction of the amplifier logo are uniform blocks, and
Om albums have always displayed the band name and title in austere script,
though T-shirt logos and other designs have often used blackletter. Some of the
most influential drone metal bands and recordings, then, have used clear and
plain typographic design. However, here there are other ways that materiality
of signifiers is highlighted. Monosyllabic band names like Earth, Bong, Om,
Sunn and Sleep all verbally foreground a certain weighty foundation. In addi-
tion to its basic monumentalism, the name Earth was chosen because it was the
first band name used by Black Sabbath, thereby claiming association with the
earliest origins of the foundational metal band, as well as a form of repetition
in naming. Sleep similarly have repeated aspects of Black Sabbath’s aesthetic,
including album covers, font design, performing cover versions, and arguably
in Sleep’s Holy Mountain (1992a), straightforwardly repeating Sabbath’s musi-
cal style. In addition to the repeating of the amplifier manufacturer logo, the
band name SunnO))) implies a connection with Earth, both connoting celes-
tial bodies of vast gravity. Om and Bong both onomatopoeically suggest the
musical sounds made by the bands, thereby hinting at mystical uses of language
which foreground material engagement with the sound of the sign over seman-
tic meaning. The two names further collapse the signifying relation between
language, sound and experience, while also evoking particular interests of the
band, Eastern spirituality and marijuana respectively. Repeated brackets have
been adopted by listeners, particularly in online discourse, to refer to a power-
ful drone-like experience, including but not limited to SunnO)))’s own music.
In one wry but knowledgeable review of a Nazoranai album, these brackets are
humorously described as ‘the ancient symbol for drone music’ (Robin 2014).
Neither punctuation nor words, these uses further investigate the materials of
communication in unusual ways. As with drone metal’s repeated riffs, ‘the let-
ters’ (or sounds) ‘representing a meaning can be considered in their materiality;
in that case, they cause the meaning to be forgotten or to disappear’ (Certeau
1992a: 144), leaving mystical contemplation of physical objects whose function
as signs has been fractured.
Merchandise and album covers extend this mystical destabilization or obscur-
ing of language. Some versions of the Earth album discussed above display the
album title The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull (2008) in Arik Roper’s ink
drawing of a skull and honeycomb rather than spelled out in words. On album
covers, the band Aluk Todolo, named after an indigenous Indonesian religion,
Figure 5.4 Examples of characteristic drone metal band logo styles. From top: Ommadon
logo, in classic blackletter style, a customary amplification and distortion of lettering
found across heavy metal subgenres since the late 1970s. Black Boned Angel logo,
using more jagged, distorted design departing from standard typography. Bong logo,
an impressionistic distortion of letters, suggesting the form of a holy mountain, or
for one person I spoke to at a gig, a UFO. SunnO))), in clear sans serif font, unusual
for metal bands but constituting a repetition of the logo for the Sunn amplification
company. Reproduced with kind permission of Ommadon, Black Boned Angel, Bong
and SunnO))).
inscribe their name with each letter rotated but, on much of their merchandise,
dispense with the name altogether, featuring only an angled cross symbol (Aluk
Todolo 2007, 2012). Similarly, Horse Latitudes use symbols rather than words
on their record artwork and T-shirts. One Roadburn attendee said he preferred
this kind of ‘secret’ metal shirt to lurid and gory death metal shirts, as he could
wear them to work without anyone noticing or registering that they referred
to his metal listening, unless they too were aware of the underground bands
to whom his clothing esoterically referred. As in other metal genres, T-shirts

are a valued mode of communicative behaviour through which fandom, com-
mitment and knowledge can be performed (Brown 2007). Intricate networks
of meaning are encoded in T-shirts, for example, based on the age of the shirt,
the design connoting a particular album, any tour dates printed on the back
and the relative obscurity of the band displayed. Shirt designs often start con-
versations between strangers at metal venues and elsewhere, and tour dates in
particular display participation in a kind of imagined community of those who
attended any show on that same tour. In addition to these signifying functions,
in drone metal and elsewhere, wearing an image performs and instantiates a
material connection between a symbol associated with music and the listen-
ers body. Tattoos display further commitment to musical cultures, as well as
literally manifesting a deepened connection between metal’s symbolic language
and the listener’s body. It is significant that again fraktur fonts are particularly
common styles in which to ink words upon bodies. Tattoos are more perma-
nent and more visible versions of the already profound interaction between the
incorporation of heavy metal vibrations into the body while listening to and
feeling heavily amplified noise.
The materiality of the mystic sign
The vocabulary of religion, ritual and mysticism in discourse surrounding drone

metal is often accompanied by this emphasis on the materiality of sound.
BASS BASS BASS and BASS. It was loud as fuck, with amps cranked up to 11 on
a scale from 0–10. With the bass going through your body it felt like I was going
to get in a trance. (SK31, Survey, 2013)
I think spiritual/mystical and ceremonial are words to describe the ‘zone’ in

which you’re being transported due to the waves being sent at you, messes with
the mind. (SX4, Survey, 2013)
The slogan included on each SunnO))) record –‘Maximum Volume Yields

Maximum Results’ –is, like the use of repeated brackets, often used in relation
to drone metal beyond SunnO))), testifying to the importance of sheer phys-
ically felt amplified volume. Another phrase, used by Black Boned Angel, also
in an album sleeve, goes further in making the connection with mystical lan-
guage: ‘Transcendence Can Only Be Reached at Maximum Volume’ (printed
inside the sleeve of the album Bliss and Void Inseparable 2006).
Heavy metal has always used language, artwork and lettering associated with
occult religion. Drone metal’s amplifier worship extends this engagement, and
can be understood as a manner of mystic speech. The fascination with ampli-
fication and distortion in drone metal, like mystical writing, transforms detail
into myth, writes on the body with sounds that are to be experienced rather
than understood and pushes a mode of signification to excess. Drone metal is
described as indescribable, but the reception, contemplation and literal embodi-
ment of these material, opaque signs are described, haltingly, in the language of
trance, spirituality and mystical experience.
It’s like a little room, he [SunnO))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley] performed in a

room this big, and he had five amps, and six or seven boxes, 4x12s. And then,
I was telling all my friends, I’ve been to metal concerts before, I know what vol-
ume is, blah blah blah. And at the moment he touched, just touched the string,
it . . . it’s like . . . you can see . . . you can feel the fret movements because of
the volume. You could . . . you could . . . He has this effect where he has three
levels, you have a high, mid and a low, and you can actually hear all three of
them. And when he does the high tones it fucking hurts. I couldn’t hear for like
three days after that, but it was the best experience. Ever. It was just crazy. Your
brain just releases stuff that you’ve never felt, and you just trance out. (G30,
Interview, 2013)
Through amplification of small gestures in live performance, and in the amplifi-

cation of a needle’s path through tiny grooves on a record, detail is transformed
into myth. Heavy vibrations write on the bodies of listeners in unreadable,
indescribable but powerfully experienced messages. In an extreme metal con-
text where signs are already designed to function as opaque passwords or bar-
riers, they are further turned against signification. Sometimes frustrating, even
decried as pretention or posturing, this misdirection is an esoteric way of hiding
secrets in plain sight. While they may appear to indicate occult secrets, the name
Om simply means the sound ‘om’, Bong sounds like ‘bong’, and drone metal
tracks are obsessive interrogations of what could otherwise be insignificant
fragments, magnified into mythic scale. At concerts, amplification and material
engagement with sound converge at a point where listeners speak of the sound
no longer emanating from a separate source, but feeling as though it is coming
from within their own bodies. In home listening, conditions are set to diminish
any distraction or interruption from the outside world, compensating for the
impossibility of reaching the same physical level of volume as at live shows with
the tactility, smell and weight of vinyl and its packaging. This intense connection
with sound is described in terms of detachment, journeying, pilgrimage, ritual,

ecstatic intoxication and imaginary travel, yet this escapist, fantastical imagery
is also allied to reports of a profound consciousness and inhabiting of the body.
Keir Keightley describes something akin to this in his analysis of hi-fi equipment
advertisements of the 1950s, where marketing of technology offered a means of
realising one’s repressed, true self, of momentarily abandoning the sham, pre-
tense and rationality of a compromised age, in favour of authentic emotions and
unbridled experience. (Keightley 1996: 158)
The fetishization of certain amplifier manufacturers and particular ways of

reproducing recorded sound are extensions of this ideological promise, amp-
lified and distorted into further extremes of sonic excess. Drone metal practice
can become a way of listening that can be recognized elsewhere in everyday
experience of contemporary life. An ambivalent response to a shift into a world
of perceived digital immateriality in musical cultures which is often viewed as
a crisis, physical engagement with sound in drone metal is a turn towards the
repetitive, amplified, distorted materiality of mystic signs, an opacification which
highlights a bodily engagement with sound, symbols and signs pushed to excess.
6
Methods to Cross the Abyss: Ritual,

Violence and Noise
Introduction
This extreme music produces extreme effects in the bodily consciousness of lis-
teners. In this chapter, I explore aspects of such extreme responses and the lan-
guage of ritual they prompt from listeners. I present examples of drone metal
discussed in terms of ritual, noting similarities in terminology and differences
in conceptions of ritual regarding different kinds of listening. For private lis-
tening, the term ‘ritual’ is often used by listeners to refer to their own devel-
opment of special personal contexts and practices for heightening the power
and effects of listening to vinyl records. By contrast, when used in reviews and
public discourse, ritual is more commonly attached to particular sonic aspects,
those understood within the genre culture as related to ‘drone’, itself a discur-
sively constructed term with a range of connected meanings. When the word
ritual appears in promotional materials, it is often in implications that a musical
release is a recording of a ritual, or was recorded in circumstances described
as ritualized. In talking about concerts, ritual tends to be used by listeners to
describe elements of performance that they witness and even participate in, but
feel distanced from and may not fully understand. Yet even with this sense of
estrangement, such apparently ritualistic elements are held by many listeners to
be profoundly important aspects of the performance experience.
Across these contrasting interpretations or applications of the term ritual
in the different spheres of musical culture, I identify a relation between differ-
ence and sameness which reproduces the combination of imagined elsewheres
described in Chapter 4. The aspects of drone metal that seem to occasion pro-
found responses from listeners seem to be those which stage an encounter with
unknowable strangeness and mystery. In private listening, this is instantiated by
performing certain separations and preparations of time, space and the body,
such as ensuring no distractions, setting light levels, arranging furniture comfort-
ably and imbibing substances from cups of tea to absinthe. At live performances,
extreme volume and extension produces otherness and radical estrangement
from ordinary life, language and even thought in drone metal designed and
expected to be experienced and also, specifically, not to be understood. These
aspects give rise to understandings of drone metal performance as ritual, made
particularly meaningful as a result of its mystery and strangeness, its resistance to
categorization within established structures for understanding and description.
In the communications of participants, the terminology of ritual indicates a pow-
erful otherness which, despite or even because of its vagueness in definition, is an
important marker of value as witnessed and proclaimed by listeners. Seemingly
crucial in separating such experience from the ordinary, while also grounding
it in the body, is a sense of violence. Listeners repeatedly emphasize the impor-
tance of hurt, pain, violence, aggression or endurance in encounters with drone
metal sound, which is in turn regarded as mystical, ritualistic, transcendental or
spiritual. Drawing on theories of sacrifice and ritual from anthropology and the
philosophy of noise which help account for this connection, I suggest that drone
metal is ritually powerful for listeners because of the ambivalent way in which
sound and music can both represent violence in abstraction and also physically
enact violence on human bodies. Sound and music used as torture produce
reports strikingly similar to descriptions of drone metal in describing desubjec-
tivication, disintegration of the self and ineffable experience beyond language.
Finally, I note scholarly suggestions about the concurrent emergence of mysti-
cism, torture and ritual at periods of social and epistemological crisis.
Vinyl rituals
Listening to drone metal recordings is often described as ritual. The follow-

ing three excerpts are from interviews where I asked listeners to elaborate on
their stated preference for listening to drone metal on vinyl records over CDs
or digital files.
It’s the whole ritual, you know, that you can’t skip tracks, you put the needle on
the record, you need to not fall asleep so you can keep listening to the record.
It’s big, it’s physical [mimes dimensions with hands], like you get something, you
know. (G30, Interview, 2013)
Methods to Cross the Abyss 139
It’s very ritualistic. It goes well with glasses of absinthe, it goes well with medita-
tion. You know, a CD is nice, it’s still a ritual, you know, you get the CD out [of]
the case, you know, light some candles . . . But of course vinyl, you constantly have
to get up and open up the double gatefold tome [mimes opening record sleeve]
and put this monolithic heavy black SunnO)) vinyl on your platter. There’s a
much more focused, ritualistic feeling to it for me. (G15, Interview, 2013)
The records . . . it’s just my way. It’s like a ritual, you hold it in your hands [mimes
holding, weighing the record sleeve]. It appeals to so many senses, you know,
you have the smell of the vinyl, different coloured records and the big covers,
it’s heavy in your hands and you put it on. Also you don’t skip tracks, you put
on the whole side, because you can’t be bothered to stand up to skip a track so
you listen to the whole side. It already gives you a different experience. (G12,
Interview, 2013)
Several features of these excerpts are strikingly similar, with the same elements
also mentioned in many other interviews and in conversations during field-
work. Each starts with immediate statements about ritual, in different forms (it
is a ritual, it’s ritualistic, it’s like a ritual). Further explanations are then given,
which then return to a final emphasis on the special experience or feeling that
vinyl allows for these listeners (getting something, having a more focused feel-
ing, a different experience). Drone metal listeners mentioned material charac-
teristics of vinyl, with emphasis on the physicality, dimensions and heaviness
of LP records. Larger album artwork than CDs, tactile qualities and smell have
been mentioned as part of the appeal of vinyl recordings (Fonarow 2006: 46–8).
Significantly, each of the three interviewees quoted above accompanied their
words by physically miming different actions associated with vinyl records
(holding a record, weighing it, opening a gatefold sleeve, placing a stylus on
record), emphasizing the specific bodily engagements that were part of the lis-
tening ritual. Aspects of vinyl playback were also mentioned in terms of physical
constraints or comportments, including not falling asleep and having to get up
to turn the record over. In other conversations, listeners mentioned taking care
not to damage easily scratched records, arranging the body comfortably, and
even setting aside the physical space needed to store records and a turntable.
Contrasting with indie listeners, who valued the seven-inch single more highly
due to a different ideologies of economy in music (Fonarow 2006: 47), drone
metal listeners often regarded seven-inch records somewhat disdainfully for fea-
turing shorter tracks which therefore do not reward the investment of effort with
experience of sufficiently significant duration.
Listeners spoke of various kinds of deliberate actions around listening that

I understand as preparations and separations through which rituality is con-
structed. Ways of setting up time, space and the listener’s body for listening
were designed to maximize what was described as intensity, focus or other
desired qualities of experience. The aim of listening was very rarely described
as enjoyment or pleasure, perhaps as a way of distinguishing the specialness of
drone metal listening and separating it from other forms of music. Listeners
frequently discussed the need for sufficient time to properly attend to listening,
and described taking steps before listening to ensure that, for example, daily
tasks had been completed and interruptions could be avoided. Listening ses-
sions were commonly measured in terms of vinyl ‘sides’ (generally up to twenty-
two minutes for a 33rpm record), showing the role of the music medium in
defining the parameters of experience. Determining listening time in ‘sides’ of
varying length also reinforces a sense of separation by entering another way of
experiencing time which is determined by the course of the music rather than
by clock time. Many drone metal tracks last for longer than one side, including
landmark and influential tracks that extend beyond an hour in duration, such as
Boris’s Absolutego (1996), Nadja’s Thaumogenesis (2010), and Sleep’s Dopesmoker
(2012), all of which are spread across three sides of vinyl. Stoner Rock (2014) by
Bong and V (2014) by Ommadon are also double vinyl albums, both featuring
just two tracks which each take up two sides of a record. This leads to a certain
tension between the desired length of tracks extending as much as possible, and
the limitations of the media. The dilemma for drone metal listeners is outlined
by Julian Cope in a review of Dopesmoker (2003), which also colloquially alludes
to preparations for listening involving intoxication:
Although the double vinyl artwork is huge, gatefold, magnificent, the CD ver-
sion of Dopesmoker is the best option overall because you can get utterly nar-
nered [sic] once you’ve put it on and not have to get up for almost an hour and
ten. (Cope 2004)
Other physical and spatial preparations and separations were reported in

home listening. Listeners mentioned moving furniture, clearing space and set-
ting up a room in other ways for optimum comfort and concentration. The
physical size of hi-fi equipment and record collections roots vinyl listening in
particular places of the home, and in this way makes the listener arrange them-
selves, their time and space around the fixed aspects of vinyl listening in con-
trast to the portability and flexibility of digital music listening. Some listeners
preferred using headphones, citing a more immersive response as well as the
need to avoid disturbing neighbours or family members, while others preferred

to play over speakers because it was important to them that the music reverber-
ated in space and in their bodies, despite the much lower volumes than could
be experienced at concerts. Low lighting levels were often important, with com-
plete darkness or candlelight often mentioned, and incense used by some to cre-
ate a further sensory engagement. Tobacco, ale, wine, tea, marijuana and even
absinthe were mentioned as being prepared and consumed by different listeners,
further accentuating the prepared specialness by stimulating or transforming
bodily consciousness. All these reported practices are developed by individuals
who recognize and respond to what has worked for them in ritually marking out
the listening occasion as time and space removed from the ordinary. Sometimes
listeners described set patterns of behaviour for listening, such as not talking at
all during listening, closing one’s eyes, and holding, touching, looking at or dis-
playing the album sleeve and artwork (often propped up near the record player).
These preparations again contribute to a practical and ideological separation for
some listeners who distinguish strictly between ritual listening for drone metal
and other ordinary practices of listening that are appropriate for other kinds of
music. The preparations for drone metal listening are linked to the descriptive
elsewheres outlined in earlier chapters. Listeners attend to and alter aspects of
time, space and consciousness of the body in order to listen to music which is
then talked about in terms of altered time, space and bodily consciousness.
Other ways of listening
None of the drone metal listeners I spoke to throughout this research listened
only to drone metal to the exclusion of other types of music. However, many
listeners emphasized that vinyl listening as described above was the best way
to listen to music, and the best music to listen to in such circumstances was
drone metal. It is important to note that not all listeners reported engaging in
this kind of specially framed listening. In addition, descriptions of ideal listening
situations may have been achieved only rarely and could have been influenced
by ideas such as that mentioned earlier about ‘the way the music is meant to be
heard’. Some listeners said they found drone metal useful for certain tasks, espe-
cially long tasks requiring consistent focus, whether this was writing, reading,
programming, editing or other work. Several office-based listeners who worked
on computers mentioned that playing drone metal on headphones was useful
for blocking distraction and aiding concentration, thus effecting another kind of
separation in consciousness. Several listeners who were students or academics

appreciated this aspect of drone metal, particularly noting the consistently slow
development of musical structures as helping them minimize distraction and
focus for long periods. Listeners commented that the absence of, or low empha-
sis on, vocals and lyrics in drone metal meant that it did not disrupt reading or
writing as would music with more prominent lyrics. While occasionally listen-
ing myself without doing anything else (described by some as ‘active listening’),
I shared other listeners’ wishes of having more time to do this. More often, I lis-
tened to drone metal while working, and also found it to be functionally useful
for the same reasons other listeners cited.
Drone metal was also discussed as an accompaniment to travelling, particu-
larly while commuting and during other work travel, either driving, walking or
on public transport. Resonating with the traversals of imaginative elsewheres
and pilgrimages, drone metal listening was used to reclaim or enhance time dur-
ing commuting journeys that was otherwise considered to be boring, wasted or
unusable. Sometimes, by contrast, special travelling occasions such as holidays
were described as having been augmented by particularly chosen recordings.
My own listening followed both of these tendencies, as I selected tracks which
lasted for most of a commuting journey, as well as planning which music would
accompany long road trips. These included playing Sleep’s Dopesmoker (2012)
through the forested highways of New Brunswick in Canada, or listening to
Bong while driving around strange volcanic landscapes in Iceland, both sparsely
populated and remote areas which seemed to fit the conventions of ‘elsewheres’
in drone metal description. Several listeners said that working while listening
to drone metal was absolutely impossible for them, but that other music could
be used. Some also extended this separation of drone metal to listening while
travelling, with several listeners suggesting that listening to drone metal on
headphones while walking around in public might even be dangerous due to its
immersive qualities and intense atmosphere.
Differences were also reported in drone metal listening practices for live
and recorded music. Some listeners only listened to drone metal recordings
and did not attend concerts, while some only listened to live drone metal and
were not interested in listening to recordings as they felt that listening at much
lower volume would completely negate the music’s effect. Many who listened to
both records and concerts agreed that the gap between live and recorded musi-
cal experiences was wider for drone metal than for any other music they lis-
tened to. For listeners in all of these groups, these practices of listening set drone
metal apart from other music. The term ritual was used to describe practices
surrounding listening that were designed to facilitate particular kinds of listen-

ing, which in turn evoked language related to religion. I interviewed a survey
respondent who had mentioned reading the Bible in conjunction with listening
to Om. Identifying as a Christian, he explained:
Sometimes, if you’re reading something that’s quite affecting you emotion-

ally, and then you have something playing in the background which fits that
atmosphere, whatever that might be, it can I suppose heighten the experience.
I suppose it’s a case of me manipulating or trying to manipulate my own . . .
like again, when you go to see them live, you can have those moments when
you do feel that God is, is quite, in the music almost, you know, quite close
and drawing you to himself with the music and through the reading. I suppose
that’s music’s way of being able to bring us into different emotional states. (O94,
Interview, 2013)
While reading the Bible was not often mentioned by drone metal listeners,
the terminology of heightened experience connected to religiosity (however
ambiguously) was widespread. Another interviewee, with a completely dif-
ferent religious identification (or lack thereof), reported the ritual construc-
tion of drone metal listening experience in a similar way. He noted difference
and separation from other music, and a changed relation to body, time and
consciousness:
Um . . . It’s . . . this is going to sound like bullshit, but . . . It’s more than music, it’s
. . . You know, I’m not religious on any level, but it’s . . . you can relax, when you
listen to it, and . . . It’s not like listening to other stuff. It’s a ritual that you . . . It
takes you out of your body, and you think of stuff that you never think of, and
you understand stuff that you never thought of before this. Because you have
that time. (G30, Interview, 2013)
Special, ritualized private listening practices are part of a feedback process. The
power of certain kinds of listening is recognized and so steps are taken by listen-
ers to facilitate those kinds of listening, preparations which further enhance or
optimize the experience. This is not to remove music and sound from the equa-
tion, nor to suggest that these ritualized preparatory actions entirely produce
altered perception, but merely to highlight that both the ritual practices and the
reports of alterity are articulations of recognized features of listening experience
which are heard as specific to drone metal, with ritual preparations and separa-
tions then consciously performed by listeners in order to best facilitate those
valued effects. These practices and resulting engagements are often understood
and described as ambivalently religious, spiritual, sacred or mystical.
Ritual in online discourse
The descriptions and reports concerning ritual in interviews, surveys, field-

work and reviews are produced in an already existing extreme metal dis-
course with its own conventions, expectations and genres of talking about
music. This discourse is partly constituted by use of language and imagery
in musical productions such as album sleeve notes, titles, poster images, lyr-
ics, programme notes at concerts and promotional materials produced by
musicians, record labels, event promoters or other representatives. While
the broad milieu of these uses clearly influences listeners’ discourse, it is
important to note that these uses by ‘producers’ of musical products are also
influenced by listeners’ earlier responses, which themselves emerge into an
existing discourse, which has in turn been partly constituted by listeners’
responses and communications about music and sound. Using the term rit-
ual to describe an upcoming concert has become particularly prevalent in
extreme metal, with bands that play different varieties of metal each describ-
ing live shows as rituals, whether in promotional materials, poster images,
interviews or on-stage welcomes. For example, Canadian doom band Blood
Ceremony shouted ‘Thank you for coming to our ritual tonight!’ between
songs at concerts I attended in Toronto and in Manchester; British extreme
metal band Crypt Lurker describe their shows as ‘benighted rituals’ and fly-
ers and advertisements for the Dutch experimental black metal duo Urfaust
promote their concerts as ‘Rituals of Intoxication’. Scenic institutions also
participate in this usage, sometimes even in their own names, such as Ritual
Productions, a record label representing drone metal band Bong and other
bands with drone or doom elements. The label’s website features menus
titled ‘Rites’ for recordings and ‘Rituals’ listing upcoming live performances.
A drone metal recording by Wraiths features on the label in the centre of the
record the claim that
All sounds on Oriflamme were created –live and under ritual conditions –from

re-structured equipment, location acoustics and human vocals. We pray for
the salvation of those unwitting souls who have helped us on our pilgrimage.
Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do. (Wraiths 2008)
In a theatrically sinister tone characteristic of extreme metal discourses, the

note implies unspecified ritual practices and pilgrimage, and is accompanied
by a paraphrase of a biblical verse. This example, while exaggeratedly myste-
rious in tone, nevertheless shows the connection between sound and special
preparations, deliberately unspecified and ambivalent terminology, and the lan-

guage of ritual, pilgrimage and mysticism.
Ritual in drone metal reviews: Influences

on listening and writing
The ubiquity of the term ritual in extreme metal is noted by one reviewer, who
offers a critical perspective on its use:
What’s the most overused word in metal these last five years? There can be no
doubt: ‘ritual’. Now granted this is usually with regard to live performances. Yet
it’s crept in, over and over, to the descriptions of metal generally. We know why.
It’s to give a frisson of otherness to the very ordinary. Listening to drone kings
Bong’s new two part hypnogasm Stoner Rock though, ‘ritual’ is the first and most
persistent description that comes to mind. (Grey 2014)
Despite the reviewer being critical of overuse, the term ritual is nevertheless
retained (and therefore emphasized as truly appropriate) for Bong’s drone metal.
‘Otherness’ in the writer’s view is clearly something to be valued, signalled pre-
cisely in their concern about inappropriate devaluing of the term. Later in the
review, examples of elsewheres and modes of otherness such as altered time and
altered consciousness are described, making a clear connection between ritual,
the construction of special listening in practical and conceptual separations and
the evocation of elsewheres.
Drones (here meaning the assemblage of sonic and affective qualities
described as droney or drone-like by drone metal listeners, as outlined in
Chapter 3) are mentioned by participants as producing a sense of ritual. In the
press release for Bong’s album Stoner Rock (2014), ritual was evoked in specific
connection with drones:
Sonically speaking, Stoner Rock ventures further into the abyss, Bong are gravi-
tating toward an endless void and with the magnitude of their ritualistic, mes-
meric drones, we have no choice but to follow. (Ritual Productions 2014)
The function of the press release is clearly to influence reviewers to write posi-
tively, and this sentence was quoted verbatim in at least one review (Rose 2014).
Similar ideas appear in many reviews, such as one which described Bong as
‘stoner-doom ritualists’, with the album featuring ‘a dramatic voice like some
kind of ritual incantation’ (Mike (ii) 2014). The same kind of mutual influ-
ence between listener’s practices and the presentation of musical products is
shown in the promotion of Om’s Advaitic Songs (2012). Record label Drag City
posted a sound clip from the album on the YouTube streaming site, accompa-
nied by a photograph of the album cover placed in front of a burning incense
stick and a devotional-style candle in a tall glass jar (OM Advaitic Songs 7.24.12
2012). Demonstrating mutually influencing feedback between production and
reception, the image references the kind of ritual listening described by listen-
ers, while also producing the idea that this is an album that could or should be
treated as such.
The subtitle of one review of Sleep’s Jerusalem (1998a) suggests ritual as prac-
tice which facilitates experience: ‘Powerful Stoner Doom Metal Initiates Listeners
in a Ritual Aiming at a Higher, Richer Plane of Existence’ (Nausika 2012). The
following extract from the review finds aspects of rituality in recorded drone
metal sound, linking drone metal to several religious concepts, together with a
sense of ambivalent distancing.
Although listeners might find this part of the track monotonous, they should
consider the intent behind the repetition: the track simulates a religious ritual
with transcendence as its aim and that’s why it cuts out the way it does –the
musicians have been ‘raptured’ into another higher, richer plane of existence –
and the rest of us can only watch on and envy them. The monotony also serves
to immerse and absorb listeners’ attention so through total immersion we can
also join Sleep on their journey mentally if not physically and experience tran-
scendence in our heads. (Nausika 2012)
In simulating rather than performing or conducting a religious ritual, the spe-

cific relationship to ritual by musicians and listeners is somewhat ambivalent,
despite apparent ‘intent’, as with the sustained ambiguity observed in the evoca-
tion of elsewhere in listener discourse. A distance is described between listeners
and musicians, since listeners witness the transcendence of the musicians. Later,
though, in a shift that is characteristic of drone metal discourse, transcendence
is described as apparently also available to listeners. Reviews of recordings dis-
cuss specific recordings as works by musicians which are also commodities to
be assessed for their inherent value. In reviews, the idea of ritual is generally
employed more in connection with describing sound than for reporting listen-
ing habits and practices. In these texts, it tends to be drone metal sounds rather
than practices which are described as ritualistic. The sounds that are identified
as ritualistic closely match the sounds discursively constructed as ‘drone’. These
sonic qualities (extended tones, slow repetition of riffs, monotonous rhythms,
exotic or distorted timbres, among others) are described in relation to elsewheres
of time, place and bodily consciousness, which in turn are connected by review-
ers to religious or spiritual themes and terminology.
Ritual events: Religion, intimacy and strangeness
Concerts or aspects of performances were described as ritualistic, as rituals or as

like rituals, though in starkly contrasting ways to ritual as understood in private
listening or reviews. At live concerts, ritual usually denoted more spectacular or
extraordinary events or responses. Ritual was not founded in repeated individ-
ual practices, as in private listening, but in the unique spectacle of musicians,
sound, audience and setting combined.
The [Gravetemple] performance was like a ritual, with the chanting, the building
up of tension. (G12, Interview, 2013)
This whole [Gravetemple] gig was like a dark ceremony. I mean Attila Csihar
was standing behind an altar of noise mixing tools and doing his low, weird,
dark voice ‘experiments’ like a high priest. In an addition the drone sound of
Stephan O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi, which were very loud and slow, captured
the listener to a slow journey. (G23, Interview, 2013)
OC: What exactly made it [the SunnO))) performance] feel like a ritual?
SK20: It’s probably just a matter of association. A snare roll might remind you
of the military; an Eastern woodwind might evoke the image of a snake
charmer; drones might remind you of a ritual. Those stereotypical ideas
are embedded in our culture, I believe. Of course, the black robes and
satanic vocals really completed the image. (SK20, Interview, 2014)
The word ritual as used here clearly implies connection with sacredness rather than,
for example, connotations of rote or repeated behaviour. In these comments, evo-
cation of ritual emerges in sound (chanting, tension, noise, a low weird dark voice,
drone sound, loud and slow sound) and is connected to other signifiers of reli-
gion (an altar, high priest and journeys, given the widespread trope of pilgrimage).
Elements of performance practice, gesture and setting were also mentioned when
I asked listeners to elaborate on the terminology they used to describe performances.
There were many things on stage [at the Gravetemple performance] which
I connect with religion or spirituality . . . a thing which looked like a beehive
[a revolving Leslie speaker], reminded me of Japanese Zen Buddhism. And of
course the gong, as symbols of religion. (G12, Interview, 2013)
OC: Can you explain what parts of the [SunnO)))] concert made you think of
ritual, occult, and trance?
SK15: The ritual –occult aspect: there are the more obvious elements as
sharing the wine, the circle setting, the clothing. (SK15, Interview, 2014)
The sharing of red wine by band members was noted as fitting ideas of ritual,
perhaps influenced too by the exaggerated gestures with which the bottle is
passed around, and the connotation of Christian communion ritual and the fur-
ther association with blood.
Sharing the wine as a symbol used in Catholic liturgy, the blood of Christ. I think
it’s rather uncommon for ‘rock artists’ to drink wine when they are performing,
and definitely when they focus that much on it. So you have the feeling it’s sym-
bolic, and the blood of Christ is then the first thing that comes to mind. (SK15,
Interview, 2014)
Difference is asserted from other forms of popular culture, popular music,

rock music or metal music, contributing to a ritual atmosphere. The following
interviewee differentiated SunnO)))’s ritualistic aspects from other drone.
One of the aspects that sets SunnO))) apart from a lot of other drone acts,
that’s the ritualistic aspect. For example, how the guys are dressed, and the ges-
tures and the way the amps are set out on stage. It all sets a mood of, a séance,
or ritualistic session of sorts. Or the worship of drone, or guitars. And even
their motto, ‘Maximum Volume Yields Maximum Results’. Well, what can those
results be, then? It all brings about an idea of a ritual for me I guess. (SX2,
Interview, 2014)
The solo drone metal guitarist Ashtoreth begins performances by burning

sage, patiently wafting it over his guitar and pedals while the smoke and strong
smell expand into the performance space. Practices such as these, as well as hav-
ing lights switched off, wearing robes or following seemingly prescribed bodily
movements, are understood by many listeners to downplay the individual iden-
tities of the musicians in favour of collective experience.
OC: It was pretty much completely dark. Do you think that fitted in with the
sound and the experience?
B7: Oh yeah, most definitely. I think, I don’t think Bong are a visual band,
they don’t kind of rely on, I don’t know, what other bands do! But I think
it does help, to kind of focus on the sound a lot more than, you know,
what’s going on around in the venue. (B7, Interview, 2013)
A function beyond aesthetics in such practices is implied. It is significant for

listeners that there appears to be a ritual purpose, even if or especially when
the purpose is not clear to listeners. Connected with the productive ambiguity
of listening ‘as if ’ the music or the setting were religious, it seems that having a
sense that there is ritual going on is more important than identifying as a par-
ticipant in the ritual, or even having any idea about any meaning, purpose or
context for the apparent ritual. Often listeners assert a ritual quality, assuming
that the musicians understand the ritual and are acting meaningfully according
to set ideas and practices to which the listener does not have access. In these
cases, ritual, even if understood as inaccessible by the listener, is still held to add
importance to the musical experience. Even the previously quoted mention of
established Christian symbolism in the red wine is vague and unspecified (‘you
have the feeling it’s symbolic’). In this way, a sense or atmosphere of ritual can be
experienced without necessary commitment to particular rituals or meanings.
Even while listeners may not feel as if they are participants in ‘the ritual itself ’,
they can participate in a feeling of ritualness, precisely through distance and
ambiguity.
SK34: The performance felt ritualistic in the way that all four musicians were
dressed as monks in front of a monolithic dozen of amplifiers and acting
like it was an actual ritual.
OC: What’s the difference with an actual ritual? (If there is one!)
SK34: It’s hard to describe it in English for me but it felt like the two guitarists
were invoking something with feedback, doing large moves when
strumming the guitars. The vocals also felt like an invocation. Never saw
an ‘actual ritual’ and still have to watch the Häxan film but this is as close
as I can imagine an invocation ritual. (SK34, Interview, 2014)
It is significant that this drone metal listener appeals to Häxan, a 1922 Swedish–
Danish film about witchcraft and paganism, presented as a documentary while
also using dramatized scenes. This ambivalently fictionalized film is a popular
culture resource which, for this listener, is implied to in some way represent
actual rituals, with reference to what he imagines the film to contain. The point
here is not to suggest that this person somehow has mistaken ideas about ritual,
but to underscore the importance of different levels of ambiguity in producing
imaginative power in ideas about ritual.
Ambiguity is widespread and important in understanding the deliberately
indeterminate staging of ritual in drone metal. Another listener described the
gestures of performers in an equivocating way that avoided pinning down the

purpose, meaning or direction of the ritual.
Sometimes they [SunnO)))] strike a chord, and then stand with their head back-
wards, upwards, and wearing the robes, it all gets an idea, at least, with the drone
resonating, it all gets an idea of something . . . higher? Not necessarily saying
a higher power, but something out there, above their heads. Feeling a sort of
connection with . . . Well, maybe only the vibration between the amplifiers,
but . . . All those kinds of gestures are not like ‘ok we’re playing a drone here’,
it’s like meant to be something bigger. At least it points in that direction. (SX2,
Interview, 2014)
The vagueness in this listener’s description is not due to their lack of infor-
mation about the purpose of the ritual that might be available to other more
knowledgeable participants. In fact, such reports of ambiguity and distancing
mystery also came from the most committed and longstanding drone metal
listeners. After having experienced ten or more SunnO))) concerts, some lis-
teners maintained that, first, there was a sense of the band conducting ritual
of some sort, and second, that it was somehow secret or hidden from them,
the listener. Rather, uncertainty and ambivalence are fundamental aspects
of drone metal discourse concerning ritual and religion. The imagined and
rhetorical elsewheres described in Chapter 4 preserved a sense of otherness
through evasive shifts between modes and sites of alterity. Here, similarly,
drone metal rituals are rituals about the mysterious otherness of ritual and
religion in contrast to ordinary experience. For one listener, ‘this is something
so abnormal compared to everyday life that it becomes a ritual of some sort’
(SX10, Survey, 2013).
The following description was part of an approving report about a SunnO)))
concert, which nevertheless included a sense of being distanced from the mean-
ing if not the experience of ritual:
I had the feeling that the band was giving meaning to their music (symbolic
aspect), but that I wasn’t part of their cult (that I couldn’t fully understand
what they were doing, as an outsider). I didn’t share the rituals/symbols. (SK15,
Interview, 2014)
Later on, the same interviewee mentioned that he responded positively to

the band’s use of ritualistic and religious symbolism. In combination with the
‘outsider’ feeling, this suggests that in the consumption of religious trappings
in drone metal, value is found precisely in religiosity that is distanced from
understanding: ‘Being an atheist I do enjoy the richness of religious symbols
(traditional human culture), but in a non-religious context’ (SK15, Survey,

2013). The insertion of a clarifying definition of religious symbols as ‘traditional
human culture’ in a context where SunnO)))’s imagery includes pictures of Aztec
temples, medieval cathedrals and robes, suggests that the kind of religion that
prompts enjoyment or interest is religion connected with spatial and temporal
elsewheres. A conceptual distancing from contemporary urban society and its
epistemological structures is therefore implied. Religion in drone metal, like the
music itself, is to be experienced rather than understood.
The majority of listeners I spoke to described themselves as non-religious or
atheist, but many who did so also discussed being intrigued by aspects of religion.
What tended to interest listeners in religion were elements that they didn’t fully
understand or that were not based on understanding. These aspects of religion
mentioned by listeners, as attendance at church services, meditation, pilgrimage
or ritualized practices were not based on doctrines, beliefs or understanding but
instead on participation, attendance or other practical engagements. For listen-
ers who did state commitment to particular religions, aspects of drone metal
described as ritual and even spiritual or mystical were generally compared with,
but sharply differentiated from, those listeners’ own religious practice. Among
self-described atheist or non-religious listeners, on several occasions discussion
of drone metal elicited mention of attending church services as a child, with the
narrated memories featuring elements of incomprehension, awe and recogni-
tion of the strange effects of religion. This is expressed in the following extract
from an interview, quoted at length for its clear demonstration of how drone
metal is understood to evoke a comparably mysterious but powerful religiosity.
OC: You said that you’re not religious, but the spirituality [in drone metal]
attracts you somehow. Can you talk about what you mean by the religion
and spirituality, and what attracts you about those kind of things?
O21: Well, I have to say I grew up in East Germany, and we were a communist
country. So religion didn’t play a role, in communism, you know. But for
example my grandma, she’s religious, and she took me to church once.
And I remember, like, being a small kid. And I don’t really know what’s
happening at church, I have to say, because I never really, I’m just, I grew
up in a communist country! It’s a bit embarrassing to say that, but I don’t
know why they [do this], and when they pray . . . I don’t know!
OC: It’s all just mysterious?
O21: Well yeah. And I remember they were on their knees, my grandma, and she
was praying, and I was just standing there, I was just a little kid, and I asked
her something, and she didn’t respond, you know! And my grandma
would always respond, you know, usually. So for me it was like a situation,
where something was so strong, like some other force was so strong that
she didn’t talk to me in this situation. And this was weird for me, as a kid,
and you were a bit afraid of your own grandmother, and what is she doing
there? She’s on her knees, and she’s saying stuff! I just wanted to talk to her,
you know, I didn’t know what’s happening. And I remember that this was
a weird experience for me. And it was like an old church, you know, and
a bit mystical . . . What’s attractive for me is when people start to focus on
something that has so much influence that they start acting differently, like
my grandmother, you know. She was just different in this situation, and
I asked myself ‘What can be so strong? That she’s not responding?’ Because
she was just focusing on something else, some other force. And for me
it’s just interesting that people can be influenced in such a strong way by
something, and I was trying to look into all the religions just like a bit and
to see what people, what they get attached to in a way. It’s just what attracts
me is, like religion or spirituality can have such a strong force for people.
OC: So do you think this contributes to the whole atmosphere around the
Om music, that kind of . . .?
O21: Yeah, it’s similar. The people at the Om concert were in a way, my
grandmother back at church, you know, they, they were not listening any
more, they were in this mood, they were moving, in a weird way, and
just getting into this, whatever happened there, you know. And yeah . . .
I think it’s that, you know. (O21, Interview, 2014)
In juxtaposing a drone metal concert with a childhood encounter with the

strangeness of religion, there is both a sense of intimate personal connection
(with childhood, a close family member, a personal experience) and alienating
distance (in confusion, distance from normal experience and the recognition of
mysterious power). The simultaneous intimacy and distancing in descriptions of
ritual are echoed by other interviewees, who described the evocation of other-
ness at drone metal concerts specifically in terms of actual rituals which they
had witnessed in person but from which they were in some way distanced.
It made me think of the Greek Orthodox ritual I once experienced . . . the same
darkish tediousness. (SK30, Survey, 2013)
I was in Jamaica a while, and I stayed with a community of Rastafarians and

there is a moment in which they all reach trance through music, and drumming.
And I think in a way, the repetition of the music, and the very loud sounds,
and the very deep kind of like bodily experience fits into the ritualistic side of
religion in a way, it does put you in the right space to feel that sort of communal
trance . . . It is a way for people to share experience and share a moment, and
in a different way to what is implied by religion. Because it feeds into certain
needs that are elsewhere or otherwise filled in by religion, but [for] people who
are not religious it gives that sort of space or environment. I don’t know. (N36,
Interview, 2013)
OC: Would you describe concerts like SunnO))) in that kind of language, of

mantras and transcendence and meditation? Is that something that you
relate to?
E14: I can relate to the experience. I wouldn’t want to necessarily say ‘it is a
spiritual experience’ because for everyone, the idea of a spiritual experience
is different. But . . . yeah, it is a very strange thing. A few years ago, up in
the Dopo region on the Tibet border, I ended up in basically the oldest
Bon Buddhist monastery that’s still in existence. And we were invited by
the lama who was living there, and he was about to go and do his daily
mantra, would we like to sit and listen. And just as an observer, I was able
to sit there, without really knowing what’s going on, an hour and a half ’s
time had passed. I think, that is quite similar in terms of experience, if you
can get your head into it, as to going into a SunnO))) gig. Definitely for
SunnO))) I think, yeah, a lot of people will have that kind of experience.
(E14, Interview, 2014)
These four encounters with religion that were compared with drone metal con-
certs (the church service remembered from childhood, the Greek Orthodox ser-
vice, the Rastafarian ritual attended as an outsider and the visit to the Tibetan
monastery) were apprehended without comprehension, and this was a source of
their power. Estrangement or distance from meaning is by no means an obstacle
to a powerful engagement with ritual. Drone metal is described as being beyond
language, and this is understood as a marker of its specialness. The sense of rit-
ual is created in private listening by deliberately making space set apart from
ordinary life, and it is most powerfully encountered in live settings when a radi-
cal strangeness is evoked in performance and heavy sound, beyond accessible
meaning but bearing directly on the body.
Meaning and lack of meaning in listeners’

encounter with ritual
Some listeners reflected further on the uses of the term ritual, develop-
ing theories about religion, drone metal sound and contemporary culture.
Sometimes theorists such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Rosa Braidotti, Barbara

Ehrenreich, Gilbert Rouget and the works of Aleister Crowley were named,
while at other times conceptions of ritual were more spontaneously artic-
ulated. Many of the previously discussed tropes and themes identified as
characteristic of drone metal discourse were expressed through ideas about
ritual: a sense of otherness, a separation from other realms of life, an ambig-
uous distancing from religious commitment while displaying a fascination
for religion, a sense of traversal at the level of language, a conceptual oppo-
sition between experience and understanding and a mutually reinforcing
alteration of time, space and bodily consciousness in preparation for drone
metal listening.
One interviewee described himself as a practicing occultist and described in
detail his ritual practices which used ideas from Chaos Magick and incorporated
recording and replaying sound (SK22, Interview, 2014). He described noticing
in SunnO)))’s performance definite indicators that they were conducting an
invocation ritual, though he didn’t know what or whom they were invoking.
The occultist assumed that there were goals and functions to the ritual, and that
something in particular that was being evoked, though he did not know what
these were. Responding to his description of ritual practice involving sound,
intoxication and sleep deprivation, I asked about his own purposes in conduct-
ing invocation rituals:
SK22: It’s getting past the psychic censor, if you will. Like, you have this barrier
and you have to get through it with certain methods to cross the abyss,
like they say [laughs].
OC: So, why is that an important thing to do?
SK22: Well, I think that’s the reason why people do these things, to find out in a
certain way why they’re doing it. And of course to achieve certain goals,
which might be in most cases trance, transcendence, very spiritual [things]
and all that. But everyone has different approaches to all that. You have
very modern forms of occultism and magic, and you have also the very
wiccan traditions and even shamanistic traditions that keep on going. So
there’s a lot of variations in those things. And I think SunnO))) kind of,
still kind of recreates the most primal form of all of those exercises. When
man came to be, that’s how it felt I think! [laughs]. (SK22, Interview, 2014)
These ideas are placed by the listener within an assumed universal framework,
with SunnO)))’s drone metal connected to ‘the most primal form’ of practices
identified with ancient traditions.
While awaiting a Gravetemple performance at Roadburn Festival, I talked

to a fellow attendee about metal clichés and hyperbole. This listener considered
that stereotypical tropes concerning magic, the supernatural, witchcraft were
used in metal culture as a kind of ritual repetition. In his view, the superficial
use of such iconography and language was not designed for in-depth analysis by
audiences, but instead was a kind of deferral of thinking which he considered to
be ritualistic in itself. The idea of ritual in drone metal is often used to connote
the disruption of thinking or an escape from rationality, as ‘music to be expe-
rienced not understood’, with understanding actively subverted or obstructed.
This interpretation fits with the impression that a sense of ritual is strongly felt
in the absence of knowledge or understanding. Another interviewee was less
convinced about the ritual aspects of SunnO)))’s performance, criticizing the
theatricality of the performance. In particular, they were unimpressed by a sec-
tion without guitars, where the focus was more on singer Attila Csihar’s experi-
mental vocals:
OC: You said [in the survey] that you didn’t enjoy the voice part [of the
SunnO))) performance] so much? Did you mean the part when the
guitars left and the vocalist was just doing . . .
SK24: Ah, yeah, that’s true! That’s where it became really really theatrical for
me, and a bit over-the-top. Almost getting to like cabaret or something
like that. Too much trying to do a ritual, or whatever.
OC: And that didn’t work for you?
SK24: Yeah, totally not. Then it becomes a bit ridiculous for me, it becomes too .
. . I don’t know how to express it, man. You know like they have this heavy
metal thing, to the back of it. And heavy metal, they tend to enjoy this
overdressing and overdoing and a lot of symbolics and a lot of gestures, and
da da da . . . And then it just doesn’t work for me. It’s like . . . yeah, you’re a
priest, but I’m not in your church, man! [laughs]. (SK24, Interview, 2014)
Even this critique of ritual, however, acknowledges the prevalent understand-

ing of how drone metal is connected to religious traditions of otherness, where
ritual is something experienced at a distance from one’s own practice and under-
standing. Later, discussing ritual and connotations of religion in drone metal,
the same interviewee expressed scepticism about the overtly mysterious presen-
tation of ritual by SunnO))), mentioning that rituals like baptism and marriage,
if familiar and within one’s own community, can be very boring and ordinary.
By contrast, he felt that the interest in evoking rituals from elsewhere marked a
lack of connection with ordinary ritual and spirituality.
SK24: Things can become very present, you know, when they are absent. So,
I think, I noticed in my surroundings, a lot of people suddenly gaining
interest in rituals, in this kind of stuff, a lot of New Age . . . There’s a lot of
New Age stuff going back nowadays. But, it to me shows more that these
people have a lack of spirituality, and they’re looking for it. But people that
I know, that are completely not really into that kind of thing, they seem to
be much more balanced, and they seem to have that need fulfilled in their
life, somehow. . . . And I think if you will go to a native tribe, it can be very
weird systems. The way they look at the world, and they classify the world,
in totemology, all this kind of shit, it can look really weird. If we take the
position of anthropologist, then we of course see, like, we see some magic
Indian performing some kind of ritual. And it’s magic and it’s new, and it’s .
. . You don’t understand it so you think it’s fascinating. But if you manage to
take the position of the Indian it makes perfect sense, there is nothing weird
happening, it’s not so special. So yeah, there’s a nostalgia, or a charm, or,
I don’t know, I guess a need for this magical charm. (SK24, Interview, 2014)
In discussing the use of low lighting and smoke machines by drone metal per-
formers, one listener highlighted mystery and a representation of indeterminacy.
It’s very kind of ephemeric [sic], and it kind of moves, and can make a different
shape every second. You can represent pretty much anything and kind of represent
maybe a kind of archetypal, ritualistic aspect to it. (H12, Interview, 2013)
As Mary Douglas notes, ‘ambiguous symbols can be used in ritual for the same
ends as they are used in poetry and mythology, to enrich meaning or to call atten-
tion to other levels of existence’ (Douglas 1966: 40). Ambiguous and ambivalent
symbols are used in drone metal, not least in the use of noise (analogous to dirt,
as sound rather than matter out of place). Ambivalence extends to the ways in
which such symbols are described and imagined, even to the point where the
status, meaning and purpose of the ritual itself is ambiguous yet still powerful.
Each utterance employing religious vocabulary draws on the particular sense
and context of that individual’s understanding of those words. Given the translo-
cality and marginality of drone metal as a genre, there is an absence of institutional
frameworks common to all drone metal listeners, through which the meanings of
religious terminology and practices could be comparatively stabilized. Therefore
the meaning of terms such as ritual or mysticism cannot be assumed to be equiv-
alent, it being clear that sometimes listeners use such words in very different
ways. However, there remains a definite commonality in the mere fact that the
same words (ritual, mysticism, transcendence) are used and understood by many
listeners in the same ways of talking in the discourse surrounding the music.
Across this participatory discourse, each way of using the term ritual is generally
understood to contribute to the heightening of experience of drone metal, a goal
which is often considered to be separate from issues of cognition, rationality and
understanding. In assessing the place of ritual and the symbols and language of
religion in drone metal, sound is again the starting point for theorizing religiosity.
Many listeners think about ritual and mysticism in drone metal as emerging from
the reception of certain sonic qualities. While each understanding of ritual is dif-
ferent, the terminology is used in the same broad and shared discourse which
informs how listeners approach and engage with the music. Ideas about ritual in
the function and symbolism of drone metal converge somewhat in this genre cul-
ture, in connection with an imagined ancient, archaic, even universal religiosity
which can be accessed or evoked by drone metal listening.
The imagined ‘universal drone ritual’
Ritual in drone metal is commonly described in relation to societies and groups

from the distant past and exoticized places –in short, imaginary tribes from ‘else-
where’. These themes are discussed as an implicit foundation for universal theories
about drone and ritual, evoked in claims about the value of drone metal listening
amid the perceived shortcomings of the modern world. Listening to drone metal
is held to provide privileged access to experience understood in terms of a kind of
universal elsewhere, which is deeply important to listeners, even if they are not able
to articulate exactly how or why. Among the most prevalent ways in which expla-
nations are tentatively put forward, are versions of what I will call theories about a
‘universal drone ritual’. Various evoked elsewheres are imagined as connected with
drone sound as part of an ancient and universal community of drone ritual prac-
tice, which the contemporary individual can access through drone metal.
The [Gravetemple] performance was like a ritual, with the chanting, the build-
ing up of tension. Like you would imagine an occult ritual where people get into
like a trance, like with African tribes, possession rituals. (G12, Interview, 2013)
To listeners first encountering the band, this repetitive delivery may come across
as boring, but (as usual) Bong somehow make it work towards channeling a
sort of ancient, ancestral type of vibe. In the more tribal-based eras of times
bygone, when you had shamans and other spiritual leaders guiding their villages
towards higher consciousness, music would typically accompany their rituals, at
a steady, monotonous rhythm that, in some way or another, helped them plunge
into their zones. Bong seem to exemplify this idea, and the music of Stoner Rock
certainly ‘takes you places’. (Apothecary 2014)
From African tamtam rituals to pop music festivals nowadays, the common
characteristics of these things is that people collectively experience some kind of
ecstatic or transcendental, cathartic experience. And people equate that, because
I think they’re all alike. I think that most concerts that people really like are mys-
tical, to them, because it’s a ritual. (B25, Interview, 2013)
Listeners connected drone metal listening to ideas about imagined rituals or to

real rituals which they had witnessed without fully understanding, with connec-
tions made to a supposed universal quality underlying all rituals. This implied
universalism clearly echoes the perennialism discussed in Chapter 2 in reli-
gious studies scholarship, and these ideas have certainly influenced popular dis-
course on religious experience and mysticism in music cultures and elsewhere.
A contrast, however, appears in the emphasis on mystery and not knowing in
the reports of drone metal experience, contrasted with the sometimes epistemic
elitism that perennialism tends towards.
A sense of ritual was an important element in the experience of a signifi-
cant or powerful drone metal event, but this ritual sense included, perhaps even
required, a distancing opaque strangeness which frustrated or withheld mean-
ing and understanding.
The violence of drone metal ritual
In creating these ritualistic conditions for unusual or extraordinary experience

and access to the imagined ancient drone tradition, a crucial aspect of drone
metal according to listeners is a kind of violence in noise. Drone metal sound is
described as violent, as torturous, as noise which silences thoughts, as undirected
or abstract aggression, as prompting pain or suffering and as a physical and men-
tal attack on the subject which forcibly removes them from ordinary experience.
Yet this sound described as like violence, or as if violent, or as violence, is held
to occasion rare and profound responses, make listeners feel more in touch with
reality and grounded in their emotions and self-perceptions and more connected
with others in a listening community. These powerful effects are, for many listen-
ers, inextricable from ambivalent conceptions of violence in drone metal sound.
The music resonates with the bodies creating disturbing vibrations that both
terrorize and paralyze the audience. But it’s not a negative feeling at all, in my
opinion, it may push your body to certain limits but it ultimately helps you feel
more alive. (SK34, Survey, 2013)
SK11: It was really, it was testing, it was really . . . near . . . something like hurt. It
was very hard to leave. I think it was very very . . . long [laughs]. Too long,
too long. But I’m sure it’s part of the experience. It need to be too hurt,
I think. Not a huge hurt but something difficult to experience. Yes, I think
these difficulties are part of . . . give birth to something like a community,
you know? You can feel that all the people who are experiencing that
thing, are part of the same community because something happen to
you and all of us. So I think you become something like ‘us’ when you
experience this kind of concert. The sound is very [laughs] too much, too
loud. You almost can’t breathe, you can’t drink at all. I remember I had
a drink, and I can’t drink because the sound and vibration of the sound
make you unable at all to drink, to swallow.
OC: So if it’s a violent test, that hurts, it’s difficult, it’s too long . . . why do
people want this experience?
SK11: It’s a question for me, because I did it twice! So, the first time
I experience all that, but then I go another time! And really, I don’t know.
I have absolutely no idea. Maybe . . . maybe because it’s an experience.
It’s fascinating, and it’s . . . very intense. It’s something you don’t feel or
experience somewhere else. You only live this and experience this at this
concert. (SK11, Interview, 2014)
For several listeners, drone metal is something to return to again and again
even when it has caused physical damage to their bodies. In one remarkable case,
a SunnO))) concert attendee described how his lung collapsed at a gig because
of the pressure, but that it made it an intense experience and he would definitely
seek out shows by that band again. At the Temples festival in 2015, in the crowd
just before SunnO))) were due to perform, a couple described to me how excited
they were to see the band for the second time. In describing the first time they
had seen the band, one enthusiastically reminisced that within three seconds of
the performance starting she had immediately vomited because of the pressure
of the sound. Her partner then described how they ‘had to’ then go and get tat-
toos soon after the performance, showing an O))) design inked on his arm. The
physical response of vomiting, conventionally an indication of sickness, was in
this case valued as proof of a powerful experience, and the immediate transition
to talking about tattoos suggested that the decision for these was motivated by a
wish to commemorate the immense physical impact of the noise at that concert
by getting signs permanently marked on their bodies.
The violence of noise is mentioned in communications about recordings as

well as in discussing concerts. Physical pain and violence against the body is an
important part of the rhetoric in which extraordinary experience is registered.
A review of Sleep’s Dopesmoker (2003), for example, suggests various ways in
which drone metal sound inflicts pain or violence:
[The guitar solos] just crush you into a bloody pulp and then the riffs afterwards
will continue to beat you senseless. You’ll decapitate yourself headbanging to
this. It is indeed quite hypnotic, but at times it’ll just grab you and destroy you.
(Gothus 2009)
A posting by cassette label Tartarus Records, functioning in part as promotion

for an upcoming release, reported: ‘I’m listening to the new Bismuth album and
believe this recording could actually fucking kill you’ (Tartarus 2015). Here vio-
lence is rhetorical or metaphorical, rather than describing actual physical dam-
age to the body. There are, though, connections between the potential damage
inflicted by extreme volumes at concerts with the more figurative, abstract vio-
lence in language used to describe extreme sounds in terms of extension, slow-
ness and other ‘drone’ qualities. Ideas about the painful, violent physical impact
of sound are an important aspect of how the value of live and recorded drone
metal is measured, asserted and communicated.
Drone metal sound can also be an expression or expulsion of violence, where
listeners describe feelings of catharsis, healing and relief from forms of vio-
lence and stress they undergo in contemporary urban life. The following lengthy
extract from a written interview is included as it evocatively communicates dif-
ferent aspects of violence and physical engagement with drone metal that were
mentioned by other listeners, while also connecting with other tropes such as
journeys and extremes of language that have been explored in other chapters.
OC: Describe your experience of the SunnO))) performance.

SK20: The concert was long and difficult to sit through, but absolutely worth it.
The music was extremely loud and heavy (even louder than I expected)
and you could feel your entire body shake. It wasn’t that hard on the ears,
though. Low bass tones seem to be easier on the ear than higher pitched,
squeaking sounds. By the time the concert was over, I was drained. I was
tired and wanted to get out of there as soon as possible –like coming
home from journey (a spiritual one in this case): the trip was great, but
finally coming home feels just as good.
OC: Can you explain more what you mean about a spiritual journey/trip?
SK20: Most music these days sounds extremely chaotic to my ears. Every word
or beat yanks you out of your thoughts, so there isn’t any room to think.
When you’re at a Sunn O))) concert, the constant loudness drowns out
every distracting factor there could possibly be. The venue is almost
pitch black, so visual distractions aren’t there either. This allows you to
‘wander into’ your mind without having to start over with every sensory
impulse. When, for example, certain sounds trigger a memory, you can
relive that memory in its entirety instead of having to get your thoughts
back to your work or the traffic or an exam or . . . When I showed a
video of the gig at De Kreun to my mother, she said she couldn’t listen to
the music for long because it ‘reminded her of everything she had ever
done wrong’. So I think the space it creates for your thoughts to drift into
can be very confronting too. . . . If I had to compare it with something,
It’d be watching a really disturbing, violent, sickening film or piece of art.
OC: Was the concert disturbing? How was it similar to disturbing/sickening
film or art?
SK20: When I watch a violent film, I often feel uncomfortable and even afraid.
Those are not pleasant feelings at all, but I still think they are important.
I find that one should never forget how much sickening, terrible things
are happening in the world every single day. Of course, I stopped
constantly worrying about how depressing the world is a long time
ago, and I recommend everyone to do the same. I have noticed a lot of
really energetic and carefree people don’t want to hear music like Sunn
O))) at all. They all say it’s scary and depressing and so on. So I guess it is
disturbing. Especially to people who like to hide everything unpleasant
away somewhere. (Think of my mother a few questions up). (SK20,
Interview, 2014, emphasis in original written response)
Here the violence of drone metal may be understood as a representation of vio-

lence, as violence made audible and perceptually available, and therefore in part
made more manageable and understandable. This is understood in the listener’s
own words as connected to the spiritual journey evoked by drone metal. Across
drone metal culture and discourse, violent noise is closely linked by listeners
to extraordinary experience, described as indescribable or beyond language, of
vibrations which feel like they are coming from inside listeners’ own bodies.
Such extreme experiences even suggest dissolution of consciousness or a disin-
tegration of subjectivity. This language of catharsis, violent confrontation and
endurance is closely related in the listener’s speech with healing, meditation and
transcendence, as well as with pilgrimage, ritual and mysticism.
Ritualized bodies
The terminology of ritual has been used to understand rock and metal concerts
(Weinstein 2000: 225, Glanzer 2003: 9–10, Fonarow 2006, Riches 2011: 326,
Lucas 2013), and, less frequently, listening to vinyl records (Eisenberg 1987: 43–
4, Partridge 2014: 158–9). Frameworks for understanding ritual often empha-
size the creation of liminal communitas or collective sociality in public concert
settings, and this resonates with the uses of ritual terminology in descriptions
of live drone metal concerts. That approach does not, however, account for the
prevalence of religious symbols and language in drone metal in comparison to
live performances of other related popular music forms, nor for the import-
ance of violence in sound that listeners report in connection with ritual and
mysticism.
Victor Turner’s development of Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite structure is
among the most influential contributions to the theory of ritual. This three-stage
model describes three stages for participants: first leaving a social group, then
undergoing a transformative and sometimes arduous transition in a liminal
phase, and finally re-entering the group having accrued status, experience or
knowledge (Van Gennep 1960, Turner 1969). This process can be applied to dif-
ferent kinds of concerts and especially music festivals. A temporary community
is formed based on the fact of attendance, a collective experience is undergone
and finally attendees return to society, with status or (sub)cultural capital as well
as personally important experiences gained. At drone metal events, audience
members have spoken specifically about being conscious that the loud sound
vibrating through their own body is doing the same to others, instantiating a
temporary but physically manifested vibrating communitas across all bodies in
a particular performance space, even when no other communication is taking
place between attendees shrouded in smoke or darkness. As Mikhail Bakhtin
puts it, in discussing his concept of the carnivalesque, ‘the people become aware
of their sensual, material bodily unity and community’ (Bakhtin 1968: 255).
An important aspect of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque is play with bodily grotes-
querie (Bakhtin 1968: 317). It has been widely noted that extreme music genres
express a fascination with the grotesque and abject body, with this obsession
manifested in album cover art, lyrics and performance practices in different
ways specific to the subgenres of death metal (Phillipov 2012: 138–41), grind-
core (Dee 2009: 62–3), industrial music (A. Reed 2013: 177), and doom metal
(Piper 2013: 37, Shvarts, 2014: 214). In drone metal, however, there is little
mention of vomit, faeces, blood or bodily injury in artwork or lyrics. Instead, the
bodily grotesque emerges in responses to drone metal sound, whether in glee-
ful sharing of legendary tales of defecation, nosebleeds, vomiting and collapsed
lungs at concerts, or in exaggerated rhetoric about the effects of recordings, such
as being decapitated by a Sleep record or killed by a Bismuth album. As was
discussed in Chapter 3 regarding genre, aspects which define drone metal move
from the ‘content’ of music, lyrics and album covers to include aspects of subjec-
tive response. As well as evoking the abject body in language, listeners experi-
ence sound as if it is coming from inside their bodies. Rather than witnessing
the carnivalesque body in the content of musical products, then, audiences par-
ticipate in the experience and discursive construction of a grotesque response to
sound, which marks drone metal’s power to produce a liminal elsewhere within
a listener’s body. Bakhtinian readings of extreme music genres have shown that
this ritualized sense of carnivalesque liminality can offer a therapeutic, if tem-
porary, resistance to alienation, for example in queercore music (DeChaine
1997: 28) and in a ‘cathartic outlet for everyday aggression, and a medium for
experiencing the exhilaration of wide-awake and focused life’ provided by nu-
metal (Halnon 2006: 36). The Bakhtinian carnivalesque in popular culture can
serve to channel as well as resist violence in different registers (Lipsitz 1990: 235–
46). In ‘those violent, dark revolts of being’ (Kristeva 1982: 1) expressed in gro-
tesque bodily responses to drone metal, and in stories shared about them, ‘the
abject is edged with the sublime’ (Kristeva 1982: 11). The extreme, carnivalesque
abjection of the listening body can combine with mystical ways of responding
to an estrangement from language in the impossibility of description. The ter-
minology of ritual, catharsis, mysticism and weird religion is introduced in its
powerful ambiguity to signal this strange resonance of drone metal.
Theorizing violence, noise and ritual
Listener portrayals of drone metal include an implicit conception of violence, in

the testing and transgressing of boundaries in order to produce ritual space, and
in their celebration of intense, potentially damaging physical vibrations. These
ideas about violence are connected to deliberately imprecise and distanced ideas
about ritual, religion and experience, demonstrating that concepts of violence,
ambiguity and noise are central issues in understanding drone metal’s discourses
of ritual and mysticism. No doubt partly influenced by decades of moral panic
and media overreaction about metal and violence, in discussing violence lis-
teners are nevertheless forthright in accepting and discussing the potentially
destructive or damaging force of drone metal concerts on their own hearing.
Recognition of violence also appears in anecdotes about extreme physical
responses to drone metal, in discussing the arduousness and difficulty of listen-
ing to recordings as well as to live performances, and in acknowledgement of
the adverse reactions to drone metal from those with whom they share space.
Here I understand violence broadly to include physical damage, fear of physical
damage, pain, hurt, torture, aversion, aggression as well as responses to sounds
understood as disturbing, sick and dark, or which may even be described as
attacking the listener in some way. These ways of talking move from the defini-
tively physical (empirically observable temporary or permanent damage to bod-
ies) to the more abstract (sound feeling disturbing or threatening, for example).
It may therefore be asked where exactly actual violence becomes metaphorical
violence: whether, for example, a rhetoric of being attacked by sound, within a
discourse where hyperbolic exaggeration is conventional, is actually indicative
of real violence. However, as I will show, these shifting unstable relations and
movements between conceptual registers are inextricable from the idea of vio-
lence in noise.
This connection between violence, noise and religiosity I understand in rela-
tion to the theories about noise and political economy of Jacques Attali (1985),
who extended work on sacrifice by René Girard (1977) and on conceptual noise
by Michel Serres (1975; see also Serres 2007). According to Girard, sacrifice is
the paradigmatic form of ritual, on which all other rituals are based. Sacrifice is
an inevitable part of human societies, which are themselves fundamentally vio-
lent due to the necessary suppression of competitive desires for the same objects
and resources (Girard 1977; see also Hobbes [1651] 1994, Freud 1961, Bloch
1992: 4). Girardian sacrifice operates according to a scapegoat mechanism, a
release for the aggression and tension inherent in every social organization.
Rather than allowing this potential violence to erupt into endless conflict which
would destroy society, it must instead be channelled. The focus of this violence
is directed onto a symbolic scapegoat figure, which is then subjected to ban-
ishment or death. Violence is channelled away from damaging the community.
The scapegoat victim, once departed or dead, becomes a figure of veneration,
having figuratively saved the community from the inherent and unstable vio-
lence. Two senses of the sacred are combined here: something worshipped or
considered special, and something set apart and potentially dangerous. Violence
is a general condition of anti-or pre-social chaos, but there is also violence in
the threat of antisocial chaos erupting. Further, there is a specific act of violence
done to the scapegoat in order to hold at bay the general violence. The concept
of violence appears in a number of different places in this relation, and thus a
powerful ambiguity is fundamental to this mechanism. Michel Serres’s consid-
eration of noise in The Parasite (2007) describes a related conceptual multiva-
lence. Noise is the interruption of a message or signal, whether this is noise in
the sense of informational disruption or noise as unwanted sound. At a higher
level of abstraction, then, noise is new information about the status of a signal.
Noise, in obstructing a signal is also a signal in another register. Serres further
describes noise as the channel through which information passes. This assertion
is supported by information theory, since, despite being commonly understood
as an interruption or obstacle, a certain level of noise is inescapable and even
necessary for the transmission of a signal (Bateson 1972: 375–86). While pre-
dominantly considering noise as an abstract concept relating to information,
Serres does use sonic metaphors and examples, such as the knock at the door
which interrupts conversation but provides new information outside the limits
of that communication.
Jacques Attali, building on the work of Girard and Serres, draws together
the multiple conceptions of both noise and violence in his speculative political
economy of music (1985). Attali, along Girardian lines, suggests that music (as
opposed to noise) is an analogue of social organization (as opposed to violent
chaos). Music, via this analogy, can make modes of social organization audible
to listeners. Therefore music, for Attali, can be both an abstract representation
of social structures and an instrumental tool in political economy. This rela-
tion between music and noise parallels the relation between chaos and society,
and thus involves a figuration of violence. Just as in Girard’s theory, violence
occupies multiple shifting positions. General chaotic violence is heard as antiso-
cial, anti-musical noise, yet music emerges from the channelling violence that is
done to noise in order to constrain chaos into social structure. Similar to Serres’s
conceptions of noise creating or heralding new information, Attali suggests that
what is heard as noise (against music, which models existing social structure)
contains threatening new possibilities for new modes of social organization.
Similar points are made in relation to different senses of noise by Mary
Douglas, dealing with dirt and impurity, and Gregory Bateson, in relation to
information theory.
Disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realised in it, but its
potential for patterning is indefinite. This is why, though we seek to create order,
we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognise that it is destructive to exist-

ing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises both danger and power.
(Douglas 1966: 94)
All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints –is
noise, the only possible source of new patterns. (Bateson 1972: 386, emphasis in
original)
Thus the irruption of noise threatens to do violence to the social order in music,
while the social order in music exists as a result of a ritually violent shaping of
noise. Noise and violence thus occupy multiple places in a shifting logic joining
society, ritual and the sacred.
In many contemporary popular music discourses, the term ‘noise’ is valued
for its associations with confrontation and rebellion. It is often deployed in an
oppositional way, a marker for what Keith Kahn-Harris calls transgressive sub-
cultural capital (Kahn-Harris 2007: 128). This is true in various forms of rock
music with connotations of a rebellious attitude, as well as in the contested
genre known as noise or noise music (as suggested in the title of Paul Hegarty’s
2007 study Noise/Music). The difficulty in categorizing noise as a genre is dis-
cussed by several commentators (Hegarty 2007: 133–5, Novak 2013: 118–9). In
Attalian terms, the reason for this is clear: for noise to be noise, it must repre-
sent the chaotic and dangerous outside of the current social structures, but if
it is consumed and formulated in generic terms it must become domesticated
and defanged. Noise music, and the noise of extreme forms of popular music
such as metal, are also often described in terms of ritualistic, sublime experi-
ences outside language. They emerge from a chaotic, excessive richness con-
taining all possible sounds, eluding or even destroying rational categorization
and interpretation. These ways of evoking and talking about sonic experience
are similar to many of the elements of drone metal discourse discussed in the
previous chapters. The ritual of drone metal listening requires some form of
violence in order to forcibly separate the listener from the everyday and remove
them to the imaginative ‘elsewheres’ that drone metal discourse promises. This
elsewhere is accessed through an overloading of ordinary thinking and a silenc-
ing of rational thought through loud, low, distorted and amplified noise. The
overwhelming consciousness of sound vibrating the body can afford insights,
catharsis or peace of mind when reintegrated into a listener’s ordinary life.
Violence can shift places in how it is represented to or by listeners: the sound
may feel violent, while at the same time feeling like a release from another kind
of violence. It may violently silence and alienate listeners, while appearing to
them to manifest an honest abstract representation of the alienation and con-

straint that they feel in contemporary life. The ritual noise of drone metal may
therefore be understood at once as violence, representation of violence and
deliverance from violence.
Noise and torture at the extremes of music
Suzanne Cusick’s important work on forms of sonic torture used in the ‘War
on Terror’ raises relevant issues about noise, music and violence. Reports that
Cusick has collected from tortured detainees describe alien and imposed sounds
feeling as if they came from inside the body, a sense of their own subjectivity
disintegrating, and traumatic experience beyond language (Cusick and Joseph
2011: 12, Cusick 2013: 279). Though with very different values attached, these
features of description are strikingly similar to descriptions of the most extreme
and powerful responses to drone metal. It is important to stress that listening
to music one does not care for is not the same as the gratuitous and horrific
violence inflicted upon torture victims. As Cusick and Joseph note, it is exactly
this joking conflation which serves to legitimize or deproblematize torture in
the ordinary discourse of those in whose name this torture is perpetrated, but
who would disavow ‘unjust’ or ‘unjustified’ uses of violence (Cusick 2006, Cusick
and Joseph 2011: 18). Jokes made about knowing what torture is like, based on
having to listen to a teenage relative’s music choices for example, drastically
downplay the seriousness of torture violence. They allow a subtle comparison
to emerge: I can stand listening to noise and metal (even if I find it unpleasant),
while these others cannot; therefore I am superior, and this is not really torture
or torture is not really a problem.
Nevertheless, it is significant that the language of torture is used in relation
to drone metal, in particular by listeners who were not listening by their own
choice. A drone metal listener described torturing herself with disturbing music.
My partner, attending with me a Barn Owl concert in London observed that she
would ‘confess to all kinds of crimes to turn that off . . . it was a fishbowl of pain’.
A listener who attended a Nazoranai performance by mistake (holding a ticket
for a different concert at the same venue on a different night) used a metaphor
of torture to describe her confusion and disorientation. As outlined earlier, the
language of violence is frequently employed by drone metal listeners in inter-
preting and discussing the music and their own responses. The language used
by victims of torture bears specific similarities to these uses. Music, especially
metal (Cusick 2006), ceases to be music and becomes unrelenting sound (Cusick
2008b: 4), just ‘sheer sound’ (Cusick 2008a: 3), and a physical force (Cusick
2013: 288). This noise disrupts thought, damages hearing, alters listeners’ sense
of temporality and attacks the body (Cusick 2008a: 4). Victims are unable to
describe their response in language (Cusick 2013: 279), which relates to the feel-
ing of being desubjectified (Cusick 2013: 290). Each of these features is prevalent
in drone metal discourse. Torture victims are even told ‘You are in a place that is
out of this world’, a phrase which Cusick uses as the title of one article (2008b),
and which is reminiscent of drone metal’s evocation of elsewheres.
Industrial music and noise music, genres which are related to and influential
on drone metal, have been interpreted in connection with the experience and
imagery of torture (Kroker, 1993: 110, Novak 2013: 90). It has been argued that
the effects of extreme sound such as this, when chosen by the participant and
encoded in ritual contexts, can have spiritual and healing benefits (Glucklich
2001: 151, Favazza 2011: 200), and reports of such intensely embodied practices
bear close similarities with the tropes of mystical literature (Certeau 1986: 40).
In describing musical torture in relation to a Western ideal of the musical sub-
lime, Cusick suggests that
if we are involuntarily forced to vibrate with such patterns, then we are forced,
at least temporarily, to become creatures of a culture we did not choose. That,
I think, is profoundly violating. (Cusick and Joseph 2011: 13)
In drone metal, by contrast, listeners are voluntarily forced (because, while par-
ticipants choose and even pay to attend, there is still a sense of imposition in
sound entering the body) to vibrate with patterns of extreme sound, and thereby
become ‘creatures of a culture’ that they did choose, but which evokes for them
a radical otherness, at once intimate, strange and potentially mystically cathartic
and healing.
Conclusion: Speculations on mysticism, violence and crisis
In concluding this chapter, I wish to more speculatively note some suggestions

made in a number of different but related areas of scholarship about the con-
nections between ritual, torture, mysticism and crises. The decisions to perform
certain rituals can be markers of crises (Bakhtin 1968: 104), or responses to
social crises (Turner 1969: 10). Alternatively, rituals may be performed in spe-
cific ways at times of crisis (Bloch 1992: 85–98). Torture, similarly, appears at
particular moments of crisis. It is in times of instability and precariousness that

political regimes seek to obscure the insecurity of their foundations by inflicting
the certainty of physical pain on dissenting bodies (Scarry 1985: 27). Certeau
draws initial parallels between mysticism and torture due to their appearance at
periods of social upheaval (1986: 40), comprehensively outlining how sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century mysticism emerged at a period of transition in socio-
political, religious and (consequently) epistemological authority (Certeau 1996,
2000b). Talal Asad has observed the links between ‘judicial torture’ and ‘reli-
gious pain’ in discourses of truth and power (Asad 1993: 83), and Scarry, writing
of torture, locates the reason for this pattern in the undeniable nature of pain:
At particular moments when there is within society a crisis of belief . . . the sheer
material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural
construct the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty’. (Scarry 1985: 14)
Certeau observes that mystic writers, faced with similar crises of belief, also
turn to a language of the body (1992a: 15, 1996: 29, 2000b: 44). They employ
an experimental language, a meditation in physiological terms that is occupied
with the material opacity of signs that refuse the transparency of signified mean-
ings. Girard’s own theory of ritual (1977) hinges upon the threat and attempted
aversion or channelling of chaotic, violent crises, and this is extended by Attali
to include the violence of noise heralding or responding to social transformation
and danger (1985). Music can be implicated in rituals which witness or even pre-
cipitate social upheaval (Tolbert 2007: 156).
With the importance of ritual, violence, noise and mysticism in drone metal
having been demonstrated, these observations prompt the question of whether
drone metal manifests a similar response to crisis. Any speculation on this must
necessarily be tentative and partial due to the disparate and fragmented nature of
drone metal’s audience and the varied divergence of listeners’ reports about how
ritual, violence and mysticism are for them connected in musical experience.
But it is significant that there is, at the level of discourse, at least a kind of con-
sensus that these themes are important aspects of drone metal and are constant
constituent factors in its social meaning. There has, in addition, certainly been
a crisis in the music industry in response to the developing digital economy,
and many aspects of drone metal’s culture and practices must be understood in
close relation to this. Attali suggests that changes taking place in music and the
economies surrounding music can be a herald of shifts in more concrete forms
of organization, due to the ability of sound, noise and music to experimen-
tally represent structures in abstraction (1985). According to this theory, any
upheaval in music and music industries presages wider social crises. A thread of
social criticism, or at least dissatisfaction with alienation, can be found in many
reports of drone metal experience which rely on exactly these ideas of ritual, vio-
lence, mysticism and noise. Drone metal is an extraordinary and extreme form
of sound that offers both critique of and escape from modern society, despite
being situated firmly within urban late capitalism. Drone metal is violence, it is a
representation of violence, and it is the ritual channelling of violence. In elusive
and evasive rhetorical shifts between imaginary elsewheres of arduous pilgrim-
age, in reports of physically manifested vibrations in the amplified and distorted
sonic body, in rituals of intimate strangeness, listeners seek catharsis and escape
from the violence of society in submitting to the extraordinary noise of drone
metal mysticism.
7
Conclusion: Drone Metal Mysticism
Contribution, limitations and further possibilities
The aim of this book has been to comprehensively analyse and account for the
array of references to mysticism, ritual and religion in the discourse, practice
and music of drone metal, while addressing issues arising in the theorization of
such concepts as mysticism and experience in the study of religion and popular
music. It provides the first extended ethnographic study of drone metal, a subject
which had previously only been analysed in a handful of articles (Coggins 2013,
2014, 2015a, 2015c, 2016, Shvarts 2014, Wright 2015b, Scott and O’Boyle 2015).
Conducting a more sustained mixed-methods approach than in these previous
studies enabled a detailed focus on the contexts in which listeners experience
and communicate about drone metal music. Further, the study contributes a
more theoretically coherent understanding of mysticism than the inconsistent
usages and implicit assumptions in much of the study of popular culture and
religion. This approach to mysticism as a tradition of intertextual experience
also, in contrast to many treatments of religious experience, presents a method-
ology grounded in empirical investigation of intersecting and mutually influen-
cing facets of discourse and practice. Close analysis of the content, modes and
contexts of listeners’ descriptions also allows for exploration of the importance
of ambiguity in drone metal’s treatment of religiosity. Rather than understand-
ing uncertainty as merely an area of culture, practice and experience yet to be
colonized by reason, this study instead allows vagueness to be understood as an
important, productive and sustaining resource through which listeners claim
and defend freedom to explore religiosity in spaces of ambiguity.
Regarding the scope of the study, it was neither possible to make any claims
that the sample of research participants with whom I communicated was demo-
graphically representative of the total population of listeners and participants, nor
that the events I attended were definitively characteristic of an abstract essence of

drone metal culture. This was due in part to the translocal and marginal nature
of drone metal events and partly due to the unpredictable sampling methods.
However, the range and diversity of concerts and festivals attended, the numbers
of surveys and interviews conducted, and the large amount of online material col-
lected and analysed allowed each statement to be situated within a wider culture
of discourse surrounding the music, albeit a culture which is dispersed, diverse
and loosely connected. Reponses from survey and interview participants, together
with observation of audiences at many events, suggest that drone metal audiences
are generally similar to other extreme metal audiences in terms of age, ethnicity
and gender. That is, with young white men making up a major proportion but not
nearly as dominant a proportion as is commonly assumed. Future research could
examine more closely such demographic factors in relation to drone metal listen-
ing and the use of religious language, particularly given the fascinating suggestions
made by Shvarts (2014) and Wright (2015a, 2015b) about the unusual and extraor-
dinary effects that drone metal and similar extreme sounds may have on the expe-
rience of gendered bodies. There were other areas of drone metal culture but it
was not possible to fully explore them due to time and other practical constraints.
One such area was the issue mentioned in several interviews (and which I noticed
in myself) of how listening to drone metal and other extreme forms of experi-
mental music featuring long ambient passages or drones could alter a person’s
listening to surrounding noise such as machinery or transport. Jokes about how
SunnO))) sound like refrigerators hinted at transformed listening to the urban
soundscape, and by extension producing a changed consciousness and relation
with that environment. Given the decidedly non-urban, non-modern character
of the elsewheres that appear in talking about listening, this changed attention to
urban drones suggests a possible transformation of the boring background noise
of city life into potentially strange, enriching and even ritualized sonic engage-
ments. Another potential area for future investigation that emerged during the
project is the overlapping discourses of religiosity and therapy, catharsis, heal-
ing and well-being, a particularly interesting conjunction given the emphasis on
ambivalent but potentially positive conceptions of violence in music explored in
Chapter 6. Also considered in that chapter were ideas and theories put forward
by listeners about the relationship between drone and ritual in human cultures
across different historical eras and geographical areas; while beyond the scope of
the present book, and posing methodological challenges, an investigation of drone
and ritual in cross-cultural comparison could be a valuable avenue of research to
pursue. Widely understood as originating in 1993, drone metal has gained more
Conclusion 173
consistent attention only in the last fifteen years, and has only recently attained
markers of status such as sold out concerts at prestigious venues more commonly
associated with classical music, such as the Barbican Centre and Royal Festival
Hall in London. As a relatively new yet significantly extreme and still fragmented
and marginal form of popular music, it will be interesting to trace future devel-
opments in production, reception and discourses of drone metal especially with
respect to elements of mysticism, ritual and religion in practice and in communi-
cation. While it has uncovered possible questions for further research, the book
has, I hope, comprehensively investigated mystical discourse as a constitutive ele-
ment of drone metal’s sound and culture.
Drone metal mysticism
The preceding chapters have described how drone metal can be heard as a mys-
tical tradition constituted in experience, text, communication, conversation,
listening, discussion, performance, recording and embodied physical vibration
with sound. The music is a repetitive, extended meditation on the experience of
sound, as well as of specifically heavy metal sound, amplified and distorted until
it is about nothing but amplification and distortion. It is an intense examina-
tion in metal music sound of what metal music sound is and what it can do to
conscious bodies. For these conscious bodies, across a disparate and dislocated
genre culture that exists at the fringes of extreme metal and experimental music
scenes, drone metal is a space in which ritually constructed, mystically described
elsewheres can be explored within the vibrations imposed upon and coming from
within one’s own body. In interpreting and expressing their engagement with
the embodied sound of drone metal, participants draw on a range of resources
and conventions. Other places, times and states are traversed, amid wandering
deferrals of shifting rhetorics and registers of pilgrimage, intoxication, ritual.
Drone metal as intertextual and experiential practice is an intense interroga-
tion of the tradition of heavy metal in the light of the fragmented resonances
of a history of texts about mysticism and spiritual experience. Complementing
the repeated ecstatic movements towards and beyond otherness in drone metal
discourse is a mystical turn towards bodily engagement with the opaque materi-
ality of signs. Sounds and language are repeated, extended, transposed, distorted
and amplified, obscuring or de-emphasizing musical structures and semantic
meanings. Aural, visual and haptic engagements with the materials of embod-
ied communication are foregrounded even while the ostensible content of such
communications is undermined. Drone metal pushes metal sounds, physi-

cal experience and language to excess in amplification, repetition, endurance,
distortion, monotony, hyperbole, exaggeration, humour and paradox. In these
operations at the margins, the limits of these codes are made audible and in
this way, by implication, transcended. The repeated references to religious lan-
guage, spiritual practices and mystical discourse are markers of recognition and
acknowledgement that a symbolic traversal of elsewheres, a devotional attention
to the material opacity of mystic signifiers, and a radical treatment of violence
in ritual practice can be read also in older mystical traditions as well as in drone
metal culture. This endless wandering in an always unsatisfactory language
around embodied sonic excess is drone metal’s mystical discourse.
Like dub, drone metal explores the sonic foundations of its own musical
tradition, from which it is completely inextricable yet at the same time a mar-
ginal, shadow presence. And like dub and also psytrance, drone metal features
a performance of operations on musical sound which interrogates own limits
and possibilities. In dub, this is a process of removal, cutting and fracturing of
melody and lyrics, and an emphasis on delay, echo and altered spaciousness
through rhythm and bass. In psytrance, it is a seamless weaving of dance tracks
(themselves featuring repeated snippets of voices often speaking of mysticism
and ritual) into sets which draw in dancing bodies. In each, the music is ori-
ented towards bodily engagement with sound. For drone metal, sonic practice
turns towards an exploration of how distorted metal riffs can be amplified to
extremes in every sense, pushing the limits of tempo, perceived speed, bass
power, and bodily and mental endurance. This extremeness invites listeners
to self-consciously test language in description, using excessive, paradoxical,
absurd, exotic or ridiculous language to meet the challenge of speaking about
experiences which they maintain are indescribable. Listeners match the music’s
mystical operations in their own discursive amplifications and distortions of ter-
minology and tradition. In mystical scholarship, studies of religious experience
often reproduce the tropes and types they identify in the writings they study,
thereby undermining the division between ‘mystical texts’ and scholarship
about mysticism. Similarly in drone metal, mystical operations can be heard in
the music itself and in the discursive and interpretive culture around it: drone
metal sound and drone metal culture together constitute a mystical tradition
which speaks about unspeakability, excess and the material basis of our codes
of communication, in textual operations on and between language and music.
The loosely structured translocal and marginal genre of drone metal is con-
stituted and developed in the discourses and practices of an audience that is
Conclusion 175
equally translocal and marginal. Drone metal differs from many other locally
based scenes, in that it lacks particular places which serve as geographical, con-
ceptual and mythical centres strongly associated with historical, musical and
discursive developments. Instead, drone metal exists at the margins of wider
extreme metal and experimental music scenes. In other more locally rooted
scenes, genre rules and boundaries can be created and affirmed through intense
and repeated social interaction in venues, bars and record shops. By contrast,
without any such centres foundationally and consistently associated with the
genre, drone metal’s genre connections and conventions are constructed in frag-
mented and disparate ways, opening up space for genre to be discursively and
communally constituted in part by subjective descriptions of the music’s effect
on the bodily consciousness of listeners. This allows listener experience to take
a more influential place in determining genre, in the extremity of the music, its
reported distance from other kinds of extreme metal and the descriptions of
indescribability; aspects which clearly set conditions which invite the terminol-
ogy of ritual, transcendence and mysticism. The idea of similarity that is the
foundation of genre emerges from individuals having a similar affective, emo-
tional even spiritual response to a recording or performance, rather than from a
highly socialized public assessment and valuation of particular kinds of sounds.
If drone metal is created at the margins, then the language used to describe it
is similarly concerned with margins, boundaries, extremes, excess and trans-
gression. If drone metal is determinedly translocal, the rhetoric of listeners also
traverses different imagined spaces of otherness. Ways of talking about states
of consciousness in intense and overwhelming experiences of sounds become
important sites for discussion of genre and for communication between listeners.
These kinds of experience are described as indescribable, unusual, extraordinary
and highly individual. Listeners draw on communally available and communally
developed areas of vocabulary, which include the ambivalently inherited and
ambiguously employed language of religion, transcendence, spirituality, ritual
and mysticism.
Genres which emerge from particular geographically based scenes continue
to be aesthetically associated with those areas even when they spread beyond
those locations. By contrast, the fragmentation of drone metal’s genre culture,
its continued marginality and its turn towards experience produce a context
in which listening is described with a rhetoric of imaginary ‘elsewheres’. Drone
metal listeners evoke imagined deserts, oceans, forests, mountains, and extrater-
restrial worlds, exotic and orientalist depictions especially of Africa, the Middle
East and India, suggestions of ancient societies, remote tribes of the distant
past or cultures of the far future. These elsewheres in their diversity are united
primarily by their emphasis on distance from the contemporary urban mod-
ern settings in which drone metal is most often consumed, and by the sense
that these interchanging elsewheres are to be travelled through rather than set-
tled in. The traversal of alterity in drone metal experience is represented as a
reenchanted, transcendental or otherwise sacred movement best understood
through the repeated trope of pilgrimage. This movement between and across
spiritually inflected elsewheres is enacted in speech and writing as well as in the
informational content of communication. Listeners describe journeys through
interior landscapes of sacred otherness, and the language in which these wan-
dering movements are articulated also drifts between rhetorical tropes and
across modalities of expression, never rooted in fixed relations between sonic
experience, imagery and concept. As well as avoiding settling on any definite
metaphors, other forms of linguistic instability and excess serve to confer and
communicate this sense of dynamic displacement at the level of linguistic or
symbolic utterance, in hyperbolic exaggeration, bizarre humour, or consciously
paradoxical and incomprehensible phrases. When terminology connoting reli-
gion is used, within each review, comment or discussion, there are similar shifts
in metaphorical framing. Listening is a pilgrimage, is like a pilgrimage, is about
a pilgrimage, or evokes an imaginary pilgrimage. Expressions never settle on
one particular mode of description. This tendency maintains ambiguity about
the precise nature of the relation between drone metal listening and the reli-
gious terminology or concepts evoked by the listener. That there is a connection
between drone metal and religiosity, mysticism or ritual is repeatedly affirmed.
The nature of that relation, however, is evasive, elusive and always evolving, a
constant but ambivalent conjunction. Amid the unstable and evasive vectors of
such descriptions, the most powerful instances of drone metal listening, whether
in recorded or live contexts, are described as a kind of hyper-consciousness of
or grounding in an embodied here and now. While perhaps initially appearing
contradictory, this ‘elsewhere here’ expresses a response to listening in terms
of a removal from a mundane world and a (new or remade) connection with a
physical, corporeal reality considered to be more profound or real, again often
communicated in terminology derived from religion. This kind of mystical
elsewhere here expressed in listener discourse is also manifested in the relation
between drone metal’s translocality and the intense focus on the physical impact
of sound on listeners’ bodies, as well as in embodied engagement with the mate-
rial culture of musical products. Drone metal sound comes from and evokes
somewhere else, an ambiguous distance represented in the shifting relation of
Conclusion 177
listening as if religious, as if ritualistic, as if mystical. At the same time, the effects

of drone metal on listeners, and the practices through which listeners engage
with the music are grounded in personal embodiment, a mystical turn towards
the body and a wandering traversal of margins.
This transformation of bodily consciousness is matched by a mystical turn
towards the materiality of the metal sign, in amplification, distortion, repetition,
extension and meditative slowness. This is a particularly significant emphasis
within a contemporary context of an accelerated digitalization of music, infor-
mation, culture and economy, especially when materiality in musical products
is valued in explicit contrast to digital versions. The importance of materiality in
sound for drone metal practitioners appears throughout the practices, discourse
and aesthetics of the subgenre. The amplification of electric guitars has always
been a crucial part of rock music, but, of all varieties of rock and metal music,
only in drone metal has the amplifier eclipsed the guitar as the fundamentally
important musical instrument technology. Amplification and distortion are
celebrated in the prominence of amplifiers in concert promotion, social media
communication, reviews and conversations. Listeners discussing anticipated
concerts talk about the amplifiers that will be used, and the symbolic impor-
tance of amplifiers in the sonic imagination attracts religious language: amps are
henges, monoliths, heksenkring, markers of hell or sacred objects of ritual wor-
ship. It is amplifiers, rather than guitars or even musicians that are credited with
producing the extraordinary distance from normal life and thereby constitut-
ing ritual practice and experience. The concern with amplification of materiality
extends to analogue music media, with vinyl particularly valued since it necessi-
tates physical interaction. By extension, the importance of materiality can be felt
in the importance of purchasing physical products at live concerts, as material
tokens of participation in a special, even sacred event. For attendees at concerts,
posters and other artefacts previously only seen as images online become mate-
rialized. The importance of distortion and amplification can even be seen in
the typographical practices in drone metal and other extreme metal subgenres,
where band logos and album titles are amplified and distorted in blackletter and
fraktur font styles and cryptic, opaque word-sigils. Or in examples where clarity
in typography is observed, instead a kind of devotional repetition, whether by
Earth and Sleep paying tribute to Black Sabbath by using either their original
name or the fonts they introduced on classic albums, or by SunnO))) venerating
a kind of amplifier by identifying with it. These kinds of symbolic practice fore-
ground sensorial engagement with the materiality of the signifier rather than the
intellectual concept signified. The powerful impact of listening to drone metal
for many listeners arises more from the impact of the physical vibrations of con-
tinuous sound than in the apprehension of musical structures. By playing with
absurdity and excess, the language used to discuss drone metal draws attention
to its own limits and capabilities. In sonic and figurative amplifications, repeti-
tions, extensions and distortions, consciousness is directed towards the material
substance and effect of sound itself, rather than any structures of signification
that might be conveyed through it. The importance of bodily engagement with
drone metal texts is further signalled in the treatment and description of pri-
vate listening and public events as rituals. For home listening, the materiality of
vinyl records, their packaging and the reproduction devices needed to play them
are valourized in explicit opposition to the ubiquity, accessibility and portabil-
ity of digital music. Ritual preparations and separations of time, space and the
body for drone metal listening indicate acknowledgement of particularly intense
engagements with sound, and are designed to facilitate and refine such power-
ful responses. They create a sacralized context in which the ‘elsewhere here’ of
drone metal listening can best be accessed. In reviews and online discussion,
ritual is connected to particular sounds or sonic features, especially continuous
drones, repetitions and monotonous rhythms, which are often in turn associ-
ated with the kinds of imagined other places, times and bodies described above.
Here again, ritual refers to the construction of a particular kind of engagement
with drone metal that is understood as mystical, even if via the distancing move-
ments and shifting ambiguous rhetoric of appeals to exotic otherness. Live per-
formances are also described as rituals, though often with a similar ambivalence.
Audience members may be deeply affected by experiences and speak of them as
personally meaningful, yet still relate a sense of distance, a lack of understanding
or an intuition that meaning is obscured. The ritual in these cases is attended and
participated in but not identified with or understood, perhaps reminding listen-
ers of religious practices with which they have come into contact but found to
be incomprehensible or strange. A childhood visit to church, a type of religious
service that relatives engage in, a ritual from another culture experienced as an
outsider: practices perhaps with some familiar elements, but with unfamiliar or
opaque symbols and goals. Once more, in another register, this ritual resonance
of drone metal is expressed as a profound experience, and it is exactly the opac-
ity and mystery that is considered as fundamental to its power and that invites
the language of mysticism and ritual. Such engagements are communicated in
language drawn from religious traditions, reflecting a combination of the evoca-
tion of elsewhere and a deepened consciousness of here. The translocality and
marginality of drone metal’s production and reception and the radical extremity
Conclusion 179
of the sounds prompt a turn towards listening subjectivity in constituting genre.

In communicating about their bodily consciousness in drone metal, listeners
traverse religiously illuminated landscapes of alterity, responding to the repeti-
tive, amplified and distorted meditation on metal sound in their own repeti-
tions, amplifications and distortions of language. They recognize and construct
rituals of mystery and strangeness, incorporating noise which represents and
channels ambiguous, shifting violence as a source of power. In these expres-
sions, continuing a tradition which wanders the margins of language in seeking
to describe reportedly indescribable extremes, listeners participate in the pro-
duction of drone metal mysticism.
Notes
Chapter 1
1 Interview and survey participants are referenced with a letter, number and date,
based on the performance or tour for which they completed a survey and the date
of survey or interview: G stands for those who completed a survey disseminated at
concerts of the band Gravetemple; B for Bong, N for Nazoranai, H for Tim Hecker,
U for Ufomammut, E for Dylan Carlson/Earth, O for Om, SK for a SunnO)))
performance in Kortrijk, SX for a SunnO))) performance at the State-X festival in
The Hague. Citations include an individual number, source (survey or interview),
and year. A fuller account of the methodology, including for surveys and interviews,
is outlined in this chapter.
2 Several quoted sources use nonstandard English, due to English being used as
a nonnative language or because of different linguistic conventions in online
discourse. Given the significance of translocal communication in drone metal, and
the close readings undertaken on some texts, in the majority of cases I have not
altered spelling, grammar and punctuation. Occasionally I have introduced minor
edits to aid clarity.
Chapter 4
1 In reviews and press interviews with the band, it has been stated that the painting
used is Mount of Five Treasures (Roerich 1933), though it is in fact taken from
the similar painting Himalayas. Blue Mountains (Roerich 1939). Both depict
Kanchenjunga, also known as Mount of Five Treasures, as do several other of
Roerich’s artworks.
2 Track titles from the album Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method (2005) can be
found in Blood Meridian (McCarthy 2011). Track one, ‘Mirage’, from page 58; track
two, ‘Land of Some Other Order’, page 49; track six, ‘An Inquest Concerning Teeth’,
page 175; track seven, subtitle ‘the Felon Wind’, page 86; track eight, ‘The Dry
Lake’, page 58; track nine, ‘Tethered to the Polestar’, page 49. The album subtitle is a
quotation from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (2001: 120), taken
from the same illuminated page as the famous lines ‘If the doors of perception were
cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite’, which gave the title to
182 Notes
Huxley’s Doors of Perception (1954), and, in turn, to the rock band The Doors. Some
track titles from Earth’s subsequent album The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull
(2008) are also quotations or paraphrases from Blood Meridian: track one, ‘The
Driver’, from page 71; track four, ‘Engine of Ruin’, page 111; track six, ‘Hung From
the Moon’, from page 117. That album title is from a biblical verse, the answer to
a riddle: ‘Behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion’
(Judges 14:8).
3 However, a proportion of a general metal audience could be expected to profess
Odinist or other pagan beliefs, or nontheistic versions of Satanism. An ideological
division is often maintained between these valorized ‘spiritual’ practices in contrast
to negatively perceived ‘religion’.
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Discography
Aluk Todolo (2007), Descension [LP], UK, Riot Season.

Aluk Todolo (2012), Occult Rock [LP], France, Norma Evangelium Diaboli/The Ajna
Offensive.
Black Boned Angel (2006), Bliss and Void Inseparable [CD], Clayton, 20 Buck Spin.
Black Sabbath (1970), Black Sabbath [LP], UK, Vertigo.
Black Sabbath (1971), Master of Reality [LP], UK, Vertigo.
Black Sabbath (1972), Vol. 4 [LP], UK, Vertigo.
Black Sabbath (1973), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath [LP], UK, WWA Records.
Bismuth/Undersmile (2013), Split [Cassette], Netherlands, Tartarus.
Bong (2012), Mana-Yood-Sushai [LP], UK, Ritual Productions.
Bong (2013), Idle Days on the Yann [LP], UK, Ritual Productions.
Bong (2014), Stoner Rock [LP], UK, Ritual Productions.
Boris (1996), Absolutego [CD], Japan, Fangs Anal Satan.
Boris (1998), Amplifier Worship [CD], Japan, Mangrove.
The Bug vs Earth (2014), Boa/Cold [12”], UK, Ninja Tune.
The Bug vs Earth (2017), Concrete Desert [LP], UK, Ninja Tune.
Burning Spear (1975), Marcus Garvey [LP], UK, Island.
Burning Spear (1976), Garvey’s Ghost [LP], UK, Island.
The Clash (1979), London Calling [LP], UK, CBS.
Miles Davis (1970), Bitches Brew [LP], US, Columbia.
Earth (1991), Extra-Capsular Extraction [CD], US, Sub Pop.
Earth (1993), 2: Special Low Frequency Version [LP], US, Sub Pop.
Earth (1995a), Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions [CD], US, Sub Pop.
Earth (1995b), Sunn Amps and Smashed Guitars Live [CD], UK, Blast First.
Earth (1996), Pentastar: In the Style of Demons [LP], US, Sub Pop.
Earth (2005), Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method [LP], US, Southern Lord.
Earth (2008), The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull [LP], US, Southern Lord.
Earth (2010), A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction [LP], US,
Southern Lord.
Earth (2011), Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I [LP], US, Southern Lord.
Earth (2012), Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II [LP], US, Southern Lord.
Earth (2014), Primitive & Deadly [LP], US, Southern Lord.
Jimi Hendrix (1967), ‘Purple Haze’, Are You Experienced? [LP], US, Reprise.
Jimi Hendrix (1975), ‘Peace in Mississippi’, Crash Landing [LP], UK, Polydor.
Jimi Hendrix (1986), Jimi Plays Monterrey [LP], US, Reprise.
References 203
Manowar (1984), All Men Play on Ten [12”], UK, 10 Records.

Marduk (2008), Rom 5:12 [CD], Sweden, Blooddawn Productions.
Melvins (1991), ‘Boris’, Bullhead [CD], US, Boner Records.
Melvins (1992), Lysol [LP], US, Boner Records/Tupelo Recording Company.
Menace Ruine (2015), Venus Armata [LP], US, SIGE Records.
Nadja (2008a), Radiance of Shadows [LP], Belgium, Conspiracy Records.
Nadja (2008b), Truth Becomes Death [LP], Belgium, Conspiracy Records.
Nadja (2010), Thaumogenesis [LP], US, Important Records.
Nadja and Black Boned Angel (2009), Christ Send Light [LP], UK, Sound Destruction
Records.
Olson, T. G. (2012), Blood Meridian for Electric Drone Guitar [CDr], US, Tanner Olson.
Om (2005), Variations on a Theme [LP], US, Holy Mountain.
Om (2006), Conference of the Birds [LP], US, Holy Mountain.
Om (2007), Pilgrimage [LP], US, Southern Lord.
Om (2008), Gebel Barkal [7”], US, Sub Pop.
Om (2009), God is Good [LP], US, Drag City.
Om (2012), Advaitic Songs [LP], US, Drag City.
Ommadon (2014), V [LP], UK, Dry Cough.
Ommadon (2015), I–V Discography [MC], Netherlands, Tartarus Records and Witches
on Fire Records.
The Paragons (1967), On the Beach/Sweet and Gentle [7”], Jamaica, Treasure Isle.
Pink Floyd (1971), Meddle [LP], UK, Harvest Records.
Pink Floyd (1973), The Dark Side of the Moon [LP], UK, Harvest Records.
Lou Reed (1975), Metal Machine Music [LP], US, RCA Victor.
Slayer (1986), Reign in Blood [LP], US, Def Jam.
Sleep (1991), Vol. 2 [7”], Switzerland, Off the Disk Records.
Sleep (1992a), Sleep’s Holy Mountain [LP], UK, Earache.
Sleep (1992b), ‘Snowblind’ in Various Artists, Masters of Misery –an Earache Tribute to
Black Sabbath [CD], Japan, Toy’s Factory.
Sleep (1996), Jerusalem [MC], UK, London Records.
Sleep (1998a), Jerusalem [CD] UK, Rise Above.
Sleep (1998b), Jerusalem [CD], US, Not on Label.
Sleep (2003), Dopesmoker [LP], US, Tee Pee Records.
Sleep (2012), Dopesmoker [LP], US, Southern Lord.
SunnO))) (2000a), The Grimmrobe Demos [CD], US, Hydra Head Records.
SunnO))) (2000b), ØØ Void [CD], US, Hydra Head Records.
SunnO))) (2002), 3: Flight of the Behemoth [CD], US, Southern Lord.
SunnO))) (2005), Black One [LP], US, Southern Lord.
SunnO))) (2009), Monoliths & Dimensions [LP], US, Southern Lord.
SunnO))) and Boris (2006), Altar [LP], US, Southern Lord.
Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine (2002), Rampton [CD], UK, Rise Above.
Wraiths (2008), Oriflamme [LP], UK, Aurora Borealis.
204 References
Filmography
Back to the Future (1985), [Film] Dir. R. Zemeckis, USA, Universal Pictures.
Häxan (1922), [Film] Dir. B. Christensen, Sweden, A. B. Skandias Filmbyrå.
Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2005), [Film] Dir. S. Dunn. Canada, Seville Pictures.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984), [Film] Dir. R. Reiner. USA, Embassy Pictures.
Within the Drone (2006), [Film] Dir. S. Hunt. USA, Southern Lord.
Artworks
Beksiński, Z. (1981), Untitled/DG-2236 [Oil on hardboard][Online], n.d.

Available online: www.beksinski.dmochowskigallery.net/galeria_karta.
php?artist=52&picture=2236 (accessed 24 September 2015).
Bosch, H. (c. 1500), The Garden of Earthly Delights [Oil on oak panels], Madrid, Museo
del Prado.
Roerich, N. (1933), Mount of Five Treasures (Two Worlds), [Tempera], New York,
Nicholas Roerich Museum, n.d. Available online: www.wikiart.org/en/
nicholas-roerich/mount-of-five-treasures-two-worlds-1933#close (accessed 24
September 2015).
Roerich, N. (1939), Himalayas. Blue Mountains [Tempera], St Petersburg, Russian
Museum, n.d. Available online: www.wikiart.org/en/nicholas-roerich/mount-of-
five-treasures-two-worlds-1933#supersized-artistPaintings-225831 (accessed 24
September 2015).
Serra, R. (1999), Out-of-Round X [Paintstick on paper], New York, Museum of Modern
Art, n.d. Available online: www.moma.org/collection/works/177488?locale=en
(accessed 24 September 2015).
Index
Abraham, Ibrahim 27 art see also recordings for cover art

absinthe see alcohol contemporary 3, 128
AC/DC (band) 130 medieval 24, 86
acid house music 35 Asad, Talal 169
Across Tundras (band) 103 Ashtoreth (musician) 148
Africa 43, 48–9 90–1, 157–8, 175 atheism 42, 112, 150–2
albums see recordings Attali, Jacques 164–70
alcohol 57, 98 audiences see listeners
absinthe 98, 138–9, 141
beer 92, 141 Back to the Future (film) 126
wine 97, 141, 148–9 Baddeley, Gavin 4, 44–5
alienation 163–7, 170 Bakhtin, Mikhail 6, 162–3, 168–9
altered states of consciousness 57, 93–100, Bandcamp.com 63
107–9, 116, 141–5, 174 see also drugs Barbican Centre 5, 120, 173
Aluk Todolo (band) 5, 132–4 Barn Owl (band) 167
ambiguity Barone, Stefano 43
of blackletter 131 bars 2, 54–5, 98, 129, 175
defining mysticism 29 bass guitar 1, 118, 123
in dub 38, 40 bass sound
evocation of elsewhere 83–114 effect on body 1, 12, 50, 74, 79, 109–10,
in genre boundaries 48, 68–70, 82 123–5, 134–5
interpreting religious symbols 4, 7, 56, importance in drone metal 3, 77, 104
108, 110, 143, 176 in dub 36–9, 174
of metal status 64–8 and pilgrimage 108
noise 163–5 on recordings 58
power of 12–13, 86, 171, 179 Bataille, Georges 46
in psytrance 34 Bateson, Gregory 165–6
ritual 149–57, 178 Baulch, Emma 88
as space for exploration 111–14, 146, Beck, Giles 33
149–57, 171 Beksiński, Zladisław (artist) 99–100
amplifiers Belgium 5
central to drone metal 3, 12–13, 50–1, Bergson, Henri 109
119–26, 178 The Bible
in dub 40, 125 Black Sabbath albums described as 60
jokes about 63–4, 125–6 in metal 4, 43
monuments 122–5, 149, 177 Old Testament 73, 101
and mysticism 50–1, 117–18, 125, 135–6 quotes 144, 182 n.2
rock and metal 41, 115–18, 177 in Rastafari 49
stage set 103, 120, 125, 148–50 reading while listening 49, 89, 108, 143
in visual culture 120, 122 Birk, Nathan T. 47
anti-Christian metal see Christianity Birmingham 2, 5
apocalypse 21, 25, 27 Bismuth (band)
206 Index
album artwork 103 altered perception of time 87

album could kill you 160, 163 association with marijuana 97
amps 121–5 contrast with Slayer 67
fieldwork 5 fantastic literature 61, 99–100, 111–12
lyrical themes 87 fieldwork 5, 8
Bizzell, Victoria, 31 indescribability 67, 70, 74
Black Boned Angel (band) 128, 133, 134 instrumentation 90–1
black metal logo 131, 133
genre contested 56, 81–2, 116 long tracks 140
fascism and 44, 46–7 onomatopoeia 132, 135
logos 130 performance practices 125
mysticism 46–7, 81–2 ritual 145
nature aesthetic 88 Boris (band)
Norway 54, 58 Absolutego 58, 71, 140
occultism 81–2 Amplifier Worship 119, 121–2
paganism 44 change in style 64
relation to drone metal 5, 56, 60, 121 early drone metal 59–61
scenic institutions 55 Bosch, Hieronymous see Garden of Earthly
vocal style 69 Delights
Black Metal Theory 46 Braidotti, Rosa 154
Black Sabbath (band) Brown, Andy R. 10, 53, 134
downtuning, doom sound 58–9 Brudenell Social Club (venue) 1–2
influence on drone metal 58–61, 64 Buchanan, Ian
lettering 130–2, 177 Buddhism
origins of metal 41 psytrance 30–1, 49
blackletter see typography drone metal 81, 106, 147
Blake, Charlie 46 monastery 153
Blake, William 181 n.2 practice 108
Bloch, Maurice 164, 168–9 The Bug (musician) 40, 67
Blood Ceremony (band) 144 Bull, Michael 117
Blood Meridian (novel) 89, 103, 181–2 n.2 Burning Spear (band) 38
Blood of the Black Owl (band) 121 Burrows, David 69–70
blues music 41, 49, 78, 118 Byrne, Tanya (musician) 87
bodily consciousness
abject body 96–7, 159, 162–3 Campbell, Colin 44–5
altered states 83–6, 93–9, 104, 110, 141 Canada 142, 144
descriptions of 11, 50, 72 Candlemass (band) 58
dub 30, 39, 116 cannabis see drugs
live performance 6, 12, 50, 74, 115 Cannibal Corpse (band) 42
music coming from the body 110 Carlson, Dylan (musician)
mysticism and 26, 40, 49–50, 117, collaboration with The Bug 40, 67
125, 136 fieldwork 8
psytrance 33, 35–6 genre 56, 59–60
religious experience and 49, 108–9, 143 guitar sound 92
shamanism 88 cassette tapes 9, 40, 127, 128, 160
transformation of 72, 75–6, 84, 88, Castañeda, Carlos 103
93–100, 176–7 catharsis 76–7, 158, 160–3, 166–70, 172
Bogue, Ronald 3 Cathedral (band) 58, 61
Bong (band) 5, 65 Certeau, Michel de
Index 207
criticism of experience 20–1 Csihar, Atilla (musician) 6, 147, 155

ineffability 80, 86 cults 27
language of the body 25, 117–18, 168–9 Cupitt, Don 25
musicality 26 Cusick, Suzanne G. 167–9
mysticism and crisis 117–18, 168–70
mysticism as manner of speaking 11, 16, dancing 1, 30–6, 39–40, 50, 55, 116, 174
22–5, 40, 113–14 D’Andrea, Anthony 33–4
opaque signs 24–5, 117–18, 132, 136 Darianathan, Eugene 44
popular culture 16, 22–3 dark ambient music 55
productive reading 22–3 darkpsy music 35
reception of 23 Davis, Miles (musician) 78
torture 168–70 Dawes, Kwame 37–40
The Chameleon (venue) 129 death 72, 100, 164
Chaos Magick 108, 154 death metal 10, 44–5, 54, 58, 64, 162
Christe, Ian 46–7, 58 DeChaine, D. Robert 163
Christianity Dee, Liam 162
anti-Christian metal 4, 41–5 Demers, Joanna 27, 49–40, 53
Catholicism 18–19, 38–41, 108, 148 demographics 7, 9–10, 171
Christian drone metal listeners 2, 108, desert 2, 83–5, 89–92, 101
112, 143 Desertfest (music festival) 5, 95
Christian metal 41–3, 47, 82 the devil see Satan
Christian popular music 27 Diehl, Keila 27
evangelicalism 15, 37, 42 digital media 116–17, 126–9, 136, 177–8
Greek Orthodox 152–3 distortion
as moral/political framework 43 bands moving away from 64, 97
in metal music 41–2 importance in drone metal 3, 12, 28,
in psytrance 31 119, 174
symbolism 97, 148–9 industrial music 115–16
Chude-Sokei, Louis 38 and mysticism 12–13, 74, 85–6, 114,
church 116–17, 126, 136, 146–7, 173
imagery 7, 117, 151 psychedelic rock 41, 116–18
memories from childhood 151–2, 178 rock and metal 118
performances in 5, 7, 103, 112, 119 sound 1, 57–60, 77
Cisneros, Al (musician) 65, 97 typography 129, 133–6, 177
The Clash (band) 119 distribution, distros 54–5
classical music 5, 66, 70, 173 DJs, DJing 30–6, 39–40, 50–1, 62
Cloonan, Martin 73 doom metal
Cobain, Kurt (musician) 59 abject body 162–3
communism 151–2 amplification 119
compact discs 103, 119, 127, 129, 138–40 development 58–9, 121
Connole, Edia 46 genre discussion 56, 63–5
constructivist theory of mysticism 19–20 overlapping scene with drone metal 5, 8,
Cope, Julian 60, 140 10, 55–6
Cordero, James 4, 44–5 scenic institutions 55, 118
crisis 116, 117, 136–8, 168–70 spirituality 66, 81
Crites, Steven 20 visual culture 130
Crowley, Aleister 154 Douglas, Mary 156, 165–6
crypt, concert in 5 Doyle, Paul 118
Crypt Lurker (band) 144 Drag City (record label) 146
208 Index
dreams 36, 90, 93, 99–100 Earth (band)

Dronemuzak (blog) 60, 75 artwork 57, 92, 103–32
drone sound changing sound 64
discursive construction of 75–7 drone metal originators 57–64
domestic appliances 63–4 fieldwork 5
urban soundscape 78–9, 85, 113 journey themes 89
ritual 145 mentioned in scholarship 46, 56
drone metal metal status 67
compared with dub and psytrance 48–51 name 132, 177
description and language 72–5 2: Special Low Frequency Version 57, 59–
differentiated from other kinds of 61, 103, 129, 132
listening 141–3 echo 36, 38–9
genre 4–10, 53–82 Echoes & Dust (website) 9, 83
history of 2–3, 172–3 Egypt 90–1, 102
ineffability 68–72, 81–5 Ehrenreich, Barbara 154
media 126–30 Eisenberg, Even 162
other places, times, states 86–100 Electric Wizard (band) 59, 61
pilgrimage 100–10 electronic music 8, 28, 67, 115–16
ritual 138–57 Eliade, Mircea 21, 32
violence 158–70 elsewhere 11, 34, 49–50, 83–113, 168, 172
visual culture 130–3 ‘elsewhere-here’ 83, 108–10, 178
drugs see also alcohol enchantment 31, 90, 112, 176
compared to listening 78 essentialism 16–32, 45–7, 80, 91
heroin 97 Ethiopia 48, 90–1
LSD 18 ethnography 3–6, 33, 37, 42, 51, 171
lyrical theme 58, 59 Evola, Julius 21
marijuana 58, 73, 78–9, 97–8, 101, 107, exaggeration see hyperbole
111, 121, 132, 141 exoticism 21–2, 29–30, 41, 90–1, 99–101,
mescaline 18 157, 175 see also orientalism
and mysticism 18, 73–4 experience see also religious experience
rhetoric separate from practice 85, 108 concept in studies of mysticism 15–30
drums criticism of 17, 19–22, 33
African 90 in genre discourse 3, 53–62, 77–82
drone metal 1, 65, 92 extreme metal
Rastafarian nyabinghi 48, 52, 152 drone metal within 67–8, 119
thrash metal 67 milieu 2, 4, 10, 46, 121, 172–3
dub scenes 54–6
bass 36–9, 125, 174 scholarship 4, 9–10, 46
and drone metal 11, 48–51, 174 subgenres 46, 58–9, 63, 144
ghosts 38 extremity
history 30, 36–8 of drone metal 3, 10, 54, 68, 113
mysticism 26, 37, 40 effects on body 12, 49, 95–7, 104, 137–8,
postcoloniality 39 161–4, 167–70
practices 39–40 imagery 42
Dune (novel) 88, 101 language 72–4, 144, 160
Dunn, Randall (record producer) 60 sound 3, 54, 136
Dunsany, Lord 99–100, 111–12
Durkheim, Émile 27, 33 fantastic literature
Dyrendal, Asbjørn 44–5 imagination 93, 99–100, 111–12
Index 209
journeys in 89, 93 Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas 21, 47

and mysticism 25, 89 Granholm, Kennet 4, 44–5, 81–2
Farrell, Gerry 29 Gravetemple (band)
fascism 21, 46–7, 131 fieldwork 5, 8, 75–6
Fast, Susan 45–6 performance 5 6, 75–6, 147–8, 155
Faulkner, Frank 45 ritual 147, 155, 157
Favazza, Armando 168 Greene, Paul D. 44
feedback grindcore, 63, 162–3
imagination and aesthetics 92 grunge 58–9, 60
in private listening rituals 143, 146 Guibert, Gérôme 41, 43
social 36, 39 guitar
sonic 58, 60, 110, 116, 118–19, 123, 149 downtuning 41, 57–9, 77
Fiske, John 23 droning style 78, 92, 110
flyers 7, 144 subordinate to amplifier 50, 115, 119–21,
Fonarow, Wendy 139, 162 126, 129, 177
food 78 Gwar (band) 42
forests 75, 88–93, 103, 142
Foucault, Michel 72 Hagen, Ross 8, 44–5, 47, 116
fraktur see typography Hale, Susan E 117
Freud, Sigmund, 26, 164 hallucination 90, 93, 98, 107
Frith, Simon 53 Halnon, Karen Bettez 163
Funeral (band) 58–9 Harmless, William 80
Harris, James 46
Gaines, Donna 45 Häxan (film) 149
Gardell, Mattias 46 healing 31, 84, 160–1, 168, 161, 172
The Garden of Earthly Delights heaviness 74–5, 96, 123, 127–8
(artwork) 24, 86 heavy metal see metal music
Gauthier, François, 33–6 Hecker, Pierre 4, 43
gender 10, 19, 90, 118, 172 Hecker, Tim (musician) 8, 66–7
genre Hegarty, Paul 39, 115, 127, 166
disavowal 56, 68–72 Helb, Colin 29
formation 3, 11, 56–61 Hendrix, Jimi (musician) 60, 116–17, 119
jokes 62–4 Henriques, Julian 116, 123–5
local scenes 54–5, 175 Herbert, Frank see Dune (novel)
questioning status 53, 64–68 heroin see drugs
social construction 68–82, 174–5 Highmore, Ben 23
subjective response 11–12, 53–62, Hinduism
77–82, 163 listener imagination 81, 91, 107
tags, online 63 and metal 44
Germany 2, 151–2 in psytrance 30–1, 49
ghosts 38–9, 49 hip-hop 49, 58, 66, 130
gigs see performances Hjelm, Titus 4
Gilroy, Paul 37, 49 Hobbes, Thomas 164
Girard, René 164–6, 169–70 Holt, Fabian 53, 55
glam metal 54, 58 horror films 59, 78, 149
Glanzer, Perry 162 Horse Latitudes (band) 123–5, 133
Glucklich, Ariel 168 Horseback (musician) 69
Goa Gil (psytrance DJ), 31 Howard, Jay R. 27
God, gods 2, 28, 71, 89, 102, 112, 143 Huxley, Aldous 16–19, 25, 32, 46, 109
210 Index
hyperbole Kabbalah 25
conventional in metal 155, 164 Kahn-Harris, Keith 3, 9, 44, 46, 53, 73, 166
mysticism and excess 72–5, 87–8, Kalra, Virinder S. 27
114, 176 Katz, Steven T. 19–20, 80
relation to jokes 62, 85 Keightley, Keir 136
Killing Joke (band) 37
Iceland 142 King, Richard 19, 21
incense 89, 93, 141, 146, 148 King Tubby (dub producer) 37
India Kiss (band) 130
imagined by listeners 90–1, 175 Klypchak, Brad 41, 43
Indian classical music 5 Kripal, Jeffrey 25
instrumentation 65, 66, 90–1 Kristeva, Julia 163
and psytrance 30–1, 32, 49 Kroker, Arthur 168
indie, indie rock music 27–8, 139 Kruse, Holly 19
industrial music, 115, 162–3, 168
ineffability 19, 26, 48, 68–72, 80–3, language see also hyperbole
135, 174 fragmented 113–14
injury 58, 96–7, 158–60, 163 ineffability 19, 26, 48, 68–72, 80–3,
Iron Maiden (band) 45, 130 135, 174
Ishmael, Amelia 3, 56, 117 mystical 11, 16, 22–5, 40, 113–14
Islam opaque signs 24–5, 117–18, 132, 136
Arabic language prayer 1–2 paradoxes and oxymorons 24, 65
Hajj pilgrimage 1–2, 103 pushed to limits 12, 53, 62
landscapes 2, 91 shifting modes 111–13
listener imagination 81 use of punctuation 74–5
and metal 43–4 Lebourg, Nicolas 47
moral and political authorities 43–4 Led Zeppelin (band) 44, 45–6
Muslim listeners 2, 104 Leeds 1, 5
LeVine, Mark 43, 54
Janssen, David 27 Lipsitz, George 163
Jamaica 36–8, 48–9, 152 ‘listening-as-if ’ 11, 85–6, 110–14, 149,
James, Christine A. 42 158, 176–7
James, William logos see typography
ineffability 80, 84 London 5, 33, 55, 74, 95, 102, 120, 167, 173
influence in study of popular music 16, Lovecraft, Howard Philips 89,
27–8, 32, 46 99–101, 111–12
influence in study of religion 16–19, 26 Lucas, O. 3, 67, 117, 162
four marks of religious Luhr, Eileen, 42
experience, 18, 28 Lynch, Gordon 33
Jantzen, Grace 19–20 lyrics
Jesus and Mary Chain (band) 27–8 Christian 41, 43–5, 47
Johnson, Bruce 73 cryptic 1, 75, 101
jokes 53, 62–4, 72–4, 85 125–6, geological themes 87
167, 172 low emphasis on 142, 163, 174
Joseph, Brandon 167 religious references 4, 41, 58, 75
journeys see pilgrimage
Jousmäki, Henna 42 McCarthy, Cormac see Blood Meridian
Judaism 25, 44, 85 McDowell, Fred (musician) 78
Judas Priest (band) 130 McGinn, Bernard 19–20, 29
Index 211
McKendrick, Ross D. (artist) 122–5 subgenres and scenes 10, 54–6,

magic 108, 122, 150, 154–5, 156 58–9, 66–8
Magout, Mohammed 43 Middle East 43, 90, 175
Manchester 144 Minimalist music 5, 66
Manowar (band) 118 Moberg, Marcus 27, 42–3, 73, 82
mantras 1–2, 81, 153 Monarch (band) 5
Marduk (band) 43 monuments 121–5, 177
marginality Moore, Ryan 46
of blackletter 130 moral panic 27, 41–3, 163–4
of drone metal 10–13, 47, 54–6, 68–9, Morbid Angel (band) 60
156, 174–9 Morton, Timothy 3
in dub 38, 40 mountains
language of 68–9 holy 83–5, 100, 102
and mysticism 22, 25–6, 48–51, 68, images 92–3, 100–1, 131, 133
80–1, 174–9 imagined sound of 92, 106
in psytrance 33, 35 listener descriptions 88–91, 107–8, 175
marijuana see drugs mysticism and 46
Marshall amplifiers 118, 119, 121 see also Om tracks about 101–2
amplifiers visualising when listening 93–4
Martin, Kevin see The Bug music festivals
Masciandro, Nicola 46 fieldwork 4–8, 83, 97, 172
masculinity see gender ritual spaces 95, 158, 162–3, 168–9
Matamp amplifiers 121, 122 see also amplifiers scenic institutions 41, 54, 55, 84
materiality My Bloody Valentine (band) 27–8
of music media 126–9 mysticism see also Certeau, Michel de
in packaging 128–30 criticism of experience 19–27,
of signs 24, 36, 115, 134–6 33, 113–14
of sound 12, 49–50, 115–16, 126 drone metal as 13, 113–14, 134–6, 171–9
Mayan religion 31, 100 in dub 36–40, 49–51
Mayhem (band) 130 and gender 19
Maysles, Philip 39 intertextual practice 11, 22–6, 34–6, 40,
meditation 48–51, 117–18, 126, 132, 171
compared with listening 79, 93, 105, in metal 45–51
107, 151 mystical scholarship as mysticism 25
in listener description 29, 68, 70, 80, 81, in popular music studies 27–40, 45–5
87–8, 93, 104 in psytrance 29–36, 49–51
while listening 93, 95, 108, 139 references to by listeners 3, 8–9, 61, 67,
Melechi, Antonio, 35–6 81, 123, 152, 158
Melvins (band) 60, 64 symptom of social crisis 117–18
memes 53, 62–3, 125 see also jokes 20th Century study of 11, 15–26
Menace Ruine (band) 127–8 unclear use of term 9, 29, 37, 40, 45–7
Merzbow (musician) 56 and violence 139, 162, 163–70
Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey 118, 204
metal music Nadja (band) 105, 128, 140
drone metal in relation to 56–61, 64–5 Native American religion 31
history and culture of 11, 41, 116, 118– Naylor Davis, Charlotte 4, 43
19, 129–32, 134 Nazis 47, 131
and mysticism 45–7 Nazoranai (band) 8, 59, 73, 76, 132, 167
and religion 4, 28–9, 41–7 Negus, Keith 53
212 Index
Netherlands 5, 7 otherness, sense of 11–13, 34, 74, 84–99,

New Age music 65–6 105, 138, 145, 176
New Age spirituality 31, 103, 156 Otto, Rudolf 17–18, 105
New Religious Movements 27
Newcastle 129 paganism 28, 31, 44–5, 149, 182 n.3
Nietzsche, Friedrich 154 pain 12, 39, 95–6, 109, 138, 158–67
Nirvana (band) 59 Paoli, Cristina 130–1
noise paradoxes see language
in drone metal sound 1, 58, 70, 110, The Paragons (band) 36
123, 126 Partridge, Christopher 3, 27, 38, 44–5,
indescribability 71 46, 162
in metal 41 Pentagram (band) 58
overwhelming, excess 47, 74, 104, perennialism 18–25, 158
118, 179 performances
and religion 41 becomes important in genre
as rupture 28 construction 54
theoretical understandings of 28, 138, compared to religion 108, 151–3
156, 163–7 darkness, smoke 84, 125, 156
urban soundscape 85, 111–13, 172 difference from recordings 70
and violence 12–13, 48, 158–61, 160–70 festival 5, 6, 70, 76, 95, 159
noise music 4, 5, 56 115–16, 119, 166, 168 fieldwork 1–8
Noordzij, Gerrit 131 performance practices 102, 147–50
Northumberland Arms (venue) 129 ritual 12, 144, 147–57, 178
Nottingham 5, 129 Perry, Lee ‘Scratch’ (musician) 37
Novak, David 56, 116, 166, 168 Phillipov, Michelle 162
nu metal 58 Phurpa (band) 121
pilgrimage
Oaken Palace (record label) 9 language use as figure for 84–5
O’Boyle, Tom 3, 171 listening described as 2, 31, 50, 84–5,
occultism 44–5, 59, 81–2, 148, 154, 157 100–6, 176
Olaveson, Tim 33 in lyrics 58, 73
Olson, Benjamin Hedge 46–7 represented in shifting language 108–13
Olson, T. G. (musician) 103 Pillsbury, Glenn T. 29
Om (band) Pink Floyd (band) 78
change in style 64 Piper, Jonathan 56, 162–3
fieldwork 8 Pombagira (band) 121
listening while reading the Bible 89 Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band
metal status 64–6 (band) 78
mountains 101 posters 65, 102, 118, 121–4, 128–9,
onomatopoeia 135 144, 177
performances 1–2, 5, 40 postpunk 37, 58
religious iconography 1–2, 132, 135 prayer 1–2, 20, 102, 104, 108, 144, 151
O’Malley, Stephen (musician) 63, 123, 126, Proudfoot, Wayne 19
135 see also SunnO))), Gravetemple, psytrance 11, 29–36, 116, 174
Nazoranai punk 37, 58, 64, 66
Ommadon (band) 74, 92, 122–8, 133, 140 Purcell, Natalie 45
Orange amplifiers 121, 122, 131 see also
amplifiers racism 21, 32, 46, 90
orientalism 21–2, 29–30, 44, 90, 175 Radigue, Eliane (musician) 56–7
Index 213
Rastafari 37, 40, 48–51, 101, terms and phrases 9, 12, 60–2, 107,
152–3 133–4, 155
raves 30–6, 49–51 visual 129–36, 177
record labels 8–9, 54, 59, 121, 127–8, reverb 36, 38–9, 64, 97
144–6, 160 Reynolds, Simon 27–8
recordings rhythm 35–8, 58, 67, 93, 118, 131, 146,
artwork 1, 40, 41, 50, 57, 91–3, 99–103, 157–8, 174
119, 139–41 Riches, Gabby 99, 162
causing injury 96, 160, 163 Rietveld, Hillegonda C. 33
cover versions 60, 63 Riley, Terry (musician) 66, 78
difference from performances 70 Rise Above (record label) 55
difficulty in listening 104–5, 164 ritual
formats 115, 126–9, 139–41, 178 ambiguity 149–57, 178
and genre formation 37, 48–9, descriptions 8, 12, 77
53–4, 57–61 drone metal 138–57
as intoxicants 98–9, 107 drone sound 145
length 58–9, 92, 103, 104 music festivals 95, 158, 162–3, 168–9
manipulation of 30–7, 39–40, ordinariness 155–6
50–1 performances 12, 144, 147–57, 178
packaging 127, 128 psytrance 30, 31
purchasing 1, 45, 175 recordings 12, 137–42
ritual 12, 137–43 ‘universal drone ritual’ 157–8
samples, sampling 1–2, 34 Ritual Productions (record label) 144, 145
sleeve notes 43, 57, 62, 134, 144 Roadburn (music festival) 5, 7, 70, 75, 83,
uses of 30, 89, 142–3 95, 123–5, 133–4, 155
Reed, Alexander 115, 162 Roeder, Jason (musician) 121
Reed, Lou (musician) 56 Roerich, Nicolas (artist) 100
Reich, Steve (musician) 66 rollercoasters 74, 79
reggae 11, 36–40, 48–51, 125 Roper, Arik (artist) 92, 132
religious experience Rouget, Gilbert 154
criticism of concept 18–22, 32 Royal Festival Hall (venue) 5, 74, 173
in popular music studies 30–6, ruins 2, 46, 85, 86, 91, 94, 99, 121–4
45–8
in study of mysticism 15–30 sacrifice 12, 36, 138, 164–6
religious institutions Saheb, N. and D. X. Abaris 46
distancing from 32, 85, 151–7 Said, Edward 21
emerging from religious experience St John, Graham 31–6
17–18, 27–8 St Vitus (band) 58
rejection of 15, 31 Saldanha, Arun 32
repetition Saler, Michael 112
absorption in 76–7 Sanskrit 1
discussed by listeners 68, 76, 78, 88, 105, Satan 41, 45, 66
146, 152, 157 Satanism 27, 41, 44–5, 147
drone sound 77–8 sauna 78
dub 39–40 scapegoat mechanism 164–6
genre conventions 61–2, 68 Scarry, Elaine 168–70
lyrics 97 scene
mystical language 36 and genre 54–5
psytrance 30–5 lack of local scene in drone metal
sound 3, 39, 58, 70, 174 9–10, 54–6
214 Index
scenic institutions 55 musical development 3, 58, 63, 66, 76–7,

scepticism 45 97, 103, 142, 174
Schafer, R. Murray 41 reading blackletter 130
Schalansky, Judith 130 recordings slowed down 66–7
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 19 repetition and 76, 146–7
Schwartz, K. Robert 66 riffs 57–8, 75
science fiction see fantastic literature tempo 1, 3, 77, 92
Scott, Joan W. 20 Smart, Ninian 1–5
Scott, Niall 3, 171 smoke 61, 101, 106, 121–3, 125, 148,
Sells, Michael 25, 80–1, 84 156, 162
Serra, Richard (artist) 128 sound system in reggae culture 37–40, 50
Serres, Michel, 164–6 Southern Lord (record label) 129
sex 29, 78, 96 space travel 84–8, 89, 91–2, 101–2
Shakespeare, Steven 46 Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty 71
shamans, shamanism 31, 84, 88, 91, Sterne, Jonathan 127
154, 157 Stosuy, Brandon 56
Sharf, Robert 20 Sub Pop (record label) 59
Shvarts, Aliza 3, 67, 117, 162, 171–2 subcultural capital 5, 6, 8, 166
sickness 95, 159 Sullivan, Paul 37–40
SIGE (record label) Sunn amplifiers 60, 62 119, 121 see also
silliness 73 amplifiers
singing see vocals SunnO))) (band)
singing along 1–2, 39, 61 amplifiers 60, 62, 119–21, 126, 132, 177
Sistach, Dominique 47 bracket symbol 62, 66, 74, 121, 132
Skepticism (band) 58 collaborations 60–1
Sklower, Jedediah 43 descriptions in terms of mysticism, ritual
Slayer (band) 58, 66–8 46, 88, 134, 147–51, 153–9
Sleep (band) 55 discussion of performances 5, 70, 75–6,
amplifiers 121 78, 86, 96–7
and Black Sabbath 60, 132, 177 extreme reactions to 6, 74, 96–7,
descriptions of performances 70–1 109–10, 158–60
in genre formation 55, 58–9, 97 jokes 63, 172
logo 131 logo 60–2, 132, 133
mentioned in scholarship 46, 56 mentioned in scholarship 3, 46, 56, 117
metal status 65 metal status 67
recordings 58–9, 73, 140 performance practices 97–8, 121–3,
recording as religious text 73 125, 148
response to recordings 74, 96–7, recordings 60, 62, 77, 102, 128, 138–9
160, 163 robes 61, 148, 150
sleep Sylvan, Robin 27–8, 31–6, 99, 116
altered state 93
compared to listening 57, 79, 84, 94 tags see genre
falling asleep 95, 138–9 Taoism 31
lack of 95, 154 tapes see cassette tapes
sleeve notes see recordings Tartarus (record label) 128
slowness tattoos 134, 159
body movement 6, 147 Taylor, Timothy D. 31
geological associations 86, 87–92 Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine (band) 60–1
jokes about 62–4 temples 84, 85, 86, 151
mental effects of 67, 94, 119 Temples (music festival) 5, 97, 151
Index 215
tempo see slowness Vendryes, Thomas, 39

Thacker, Eugene 56 Vestergaard, Vitus 130
Thergothon (band) 58 vinyl
This Is Spinal Tap (film) 125, 126 materiality of 115, 126–9, 138–41, 177–8
Thornton, Sarah 6, 53, 217 preferred format 12, 115, 177
thrash metal 54, 58, 66, 70 see also Slayer ritual 138–41
Tibet 18, 90–1, 153 violence
Till, Rupert, 27, 28, 31–3, 45 association with blackletter 130
timbre 6, 12, 59, 66, 115, 118–21, 130, 146 in descriptions 12, 96–7, 158–61,
see also distortion 164–70, 178
time perception in dub 38–40
alteration of 143 and mysticism 12–13, 169–71
access to ancient time 57, 84, 86–8, and ritual 158–68
156–8, 177 Vitos, Botond, 34–5, 116
measured by vinyl sides 139 vocals
reconfiguration at music festivals 7 alterations in dub 36–7
Tolbert, Elizabeth 169 black metal style 69
Tolkien, J. R. R. 112 chanting 1–2, 50, 65–6, 81, 90–1, 101,
torture 12, 138, 158–61, 164, 167–70 104, 147, 157
Toth, Csaba 115 clean or growled 58–9
Tracy, James F. 38–9 low emphasis in drone metal 142
Tramacchi, Des 33 religious associations 1–2, 66, 145,
transgression 35–6, 47, 131, 163, 166, 175 147–9, 155
translocality sampled 1–2, 30, 174
of drone metal 10–13, 47, 54–6, 68–9, volume 77, 96–7, 105, 110, 135
156, 174–9
in dub 38, 40 Waksman, Steve 64, 118
in psytrance 33, 35 Wallach, Jeremy 4, 54
‘tribal’ culture 30–6, 88, 90, 156–8, 175 Walser, Robert, 43, 45, 47, 53, 66,
Trouble (band) 58 118, 130
t-shirts 1, 5–6, 60, 121, 129, 130, 133–4 Wang, Yuan 82
Turner, Victor 7, 33, 162, 168 Wardruna (band) 119
typography Weinstein, Deena 45, 53, 118, 162
blackletter, fraktur 115, 129–36, 177 Whiteley, Sheila 116–17
logos 60, 62, 66, 115, 121–2 Whitelock, James 27
The Who (band) 119
Ufomammut (band) 8, 95 Willberg, Hans P. 131
Underhill, Evelyn 17–19, 26 witchcraft 122, 149, 155
Undersmile (band) 103 Witchfinder General (band) 58
‘universal drone ritual’ 157–8 Wraiths (band) 144
universalism 17, 21 Wright, Laura M. 3, 171–2
Urfaust (band) 144
Urthona (band) 122 yoga 2, 108
Young, La Monte (musician) 56, 66
Van der Velden, Daniel 130 YouTube.com 8, 61–5, 66, 75, 81, 126, 146
Van Gennep, Arnold 162
Van Straaten, Eva-Maria Alexandra 34 Zaehner, Robert Charles 18–19
Varas-Díaz, Nelson, et al. 54 Zrzavy, Helfried. C. 66
Veal, Michael E. 37–40, 49

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Mysticism, Ritual and Religion

Series editor: Christopher Partridge

Religion’s relationship to popular music has ranged from opposition to ‘the

Christian Metal, Marcus Moberg

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

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No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data

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Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Popular Music

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Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

1 Mysticism and Metal Music 1

1.1 Flyer image used in recruiting research participants, displaying

Mysticism and Metal Music

On a Thursday evening at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, a crowd of around

In a survey which elicited reflections on this performance, a Muslim attendee

Another Om listener in Germany who attended a concert on the same tour

Drone metal’s mystical sound and discourse

Drone metal is a marginal and largely underground subgenre of heavy metal

of texts (including reviews, sound recordings, performances, discussion and

Fieldwork and mixed methods

population. There appeared to be a similar overall demographic in terms of age,

Chapter 5 turns to the importance of amplification and distortion in drone

or religious by influential scholars such as William James (1982) and Aldous

tendency in studies of religion and popular music to focus centrally on ‘religious

Mysticism in religious studies

In understanding mysticism, religious experience, spirituality and ritual in

religion. James introduced ‘four marks’ of mystical experience: ineffability (or

not appear to be at all concerned with experience, instead emphasizing prayer

than a definite statement, more radical understandings of the relation of text,

Mysticism at once becomes decontextualized (and thus amenable to simplistic

If it is to avoid reproducing such difficulties, an approach to mysticism in popu-

A theoretical framework for popular music mysticism

In forming a way of approaching mysticism in drone metal (and in other popu-

recognizes mysticism in intertwined reading and writing, listening and speak-

Religion and popular music: Tending towards

Academic studies of religiosity in popular music cultures related to rock and

participatory construction of ideas about religion (‘some people say . . .’). An

and the advantages of the proposed methodology for understanding mysticism

Empirical mysticisms I: Trance

Psychedelic trance, or psytrance, is a form of electronic dance music developed

Buddhist imagery, though elements from other religious traditions (especially

Across different writings, Sylvan’s research ‘focuses squarely on the powerful

Meanwhile, Graham St John (2012) consistently and uncritically reproduces

Sylvan goes little further, reflecting on tendencies within psytrance discourse

discourses of oneness, energy, and immediatism within the conscious party-

For François Gauthier, ‘rave brews up mythologies of an “elsewhere” ’

(2015: 253). Rather than merely identifying this continual wandering charac-

at experiencing the immensity of Otherness out “there”, without transferring it

Mysticism can be investigated in the ways that bodies engage transforma-

undergoes constant transformations during the performance, influenced by the

body, the experienced texts or textual experiences of an inherited tradition are

In a similar way, psytrance continually explores the transgression of boundaries

Empirical mysticisms II: Dub

textual practices or how they relate to musical sound. Christopher Partridge,

Dub, as we have seen, is frequently and ambiguously described as mystical.

Religion and metal music

contestation by proponents of Christian metal, who instead held that metal

does, though, discuss Tunisian bands’ negotiation of orientalist tropes as cli-

coherent wholes, religious ideas relating to paganism, Satanism, non-​Western

Mysticism and religious experience in metal

In addressing mysticism, academic literature on metal has tended to follow

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover image © G.Light/Shutterstock

coherent wholes, religious ideas relating to paganism, Satanism, non-Western

same time, bands also drew deliberate links to similar-sounding contemporary

A lengthy discussion ensued on a YouTube posting (Om –Advaitic Songs

A review of Bong’s album Mana-Yood-Sushai (2012) begins with a more detailed

Hyperbole and self-conscious excess

Listening to Mana-Yood-Sushai makes me wish I was a tree. (B13, Survey, 2013)

Extraordinary! I described it to a non-attending friend as being like being

There is a sense of humour in many such descriptions too, a self-awareness

OC: Why did you decide to go to the Gravetemple show at Roadburn

SK13: I felt like I reached the absence of consciousness I expected from

OC: What other experiences (musical or other) are comparable or similar in

rather than a purely musical genre’ (Granholm 2015: 27–8). Similarly, Christian