The growing number of references to Black Metal in today's contemporary art is neither accidental nor fortuitous. Since its brutal birth in late 1980s Norway, the Black Metal genre has always had ambitions of being more than a simple musical trend, claiming to be a genuine and "total" aesthetic and political movement. Over the years, it has spread throughout the world and extended its influence into fine arts, literature and even political ideology. Its visual vocabulary borrows motifs from the traditional heavy metal repertoire, German expressionism, and Romanticism, and the lyrics often deal with literary issues of sadness, sorrow and melancholy. This fairly solid artistic background, plus its controversial history of church burnings, murder and misanthropy, have certainly given contemporary artists much creative material to work with.Yet most of the time, artists only reference or quote the visual lexicon of the genre, leaving the music, arguably the most important and definitive component, aside. That’s what makes Mickaël Sellam’s piece so innovative and radical. His installation embodies the musical genre as both sculpture and musical instrument. Black Metal Forever is an industrial cherry picker entirely outfitted in black and rising 16 meters high. As the disturbing-looking machine slowly raises and lowers its metallic arm, it creates its own powerful and unsettling soundtrack, one we think the forefathers of Black Metal would approve of.Sellam elaborates on the project:Equipped with sound sensors that amplify the noises it makes while moving, the machine becomes a massive and worrying musical instrument that plays in a dramatic atmosphere. From the top of the picker, the operator directs and synchronizes the movements of the machine so as to produce a spectacular and wild soundscape, a mechanical black mass.The music is therefore entirely generative, directly produced by the installation's own movements and broadcast in real time. The result is surprising and doesn't sound like the typical generative music you'll find in any digital arts installation—which is, more often than not, some kind of dull minimalist electronic ambient fare. Here, the resemblance to actual Black Metal, and in particular the Black Metal subgenre of drone, is uncannily convincing. The video trailer above sounds like a good mash-up between American Black Metal ambassadors Wolves in the Throne Room and drone-electronic producer Tim Hecker.Black Metal Forever was nominated last month for this year's Qwartz Awards, an annual and institutional French ceremony that awards groundbreaking and emerging artists in the electronic and/or "new" music field. It didn't win, which is frustrating news for Sellam, but good news for Black Metal's infamous and subversive reputation.
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