Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory

Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory (Mimesis, 2015). 300 pp. (sewn binding)

[available in print or ebook]

CONTENTS

Introduction: Mystical Black Metal Theory

Black Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song - Nicola Masciandaro 

Leave Me In Hell - Edia Connole

What is This that Stands before Me?: Metal as Deixis - Nicola Masciandaro

Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya - Nicola Masciandaro

WormSign - Nicola Masciandaro

On the Mystical Love of Black Metal - Nicola Masciandaro

The Missing Subject of Accelerationism: Heavy Metal’s Wyrd Realism - Edia Connole

Silence: A Darkness to Ward Off All Spells - Nicola Masciandaro

Les Légions Noires: Labor, Language, Laughter - Edia Connole 

Black Metal Commentary - Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani

Interview (Miasma) - Nicola Masciandaro

Interview (with Dominik Irtenkauf, Legacy) - Nicola Masciandaro

Interview (with Domink Irtenkauf, Avantgarde Metal) - Nicola Masciandaro

Interview (with Nina Scholz, Jungle World) - Nicola Masciandaro

Metal Studies and the Scission of the Word - Nicola Masciandaro

Reflections from the Intoxological Crucible - Nicola Masciandaro

Interview (with Dominik Irtenkauf, Legacy) - Edia Connole

What is Black Metal Theory? - Edia Connole

Why You . . .

The Reason You . . .

The Impossible is Inevitable

"The Impossible is Inevitable," Segue Reading Series, Zinc Bar, NYC. 

audio

'Dark Wounds of Light' in VESTIGES_00: Ex-Stasis

VESTIGES_00: Ex-Stasis

beauty as an experience of the limit

Featuring: Daniele Bellomi, Louise Black, Gabriel Blackwell, James Brubaker, Mauro Javier Cardenas, Ryan Chang, Erin Fleming, Tristan Foster, Michaela Freeman, Róbert Gál, Evelyn Hampton, Anton Ivanov, M Kitchell, Sam Kriss, Emily Laskin, Robert Lunday, Stéphane Mallarmé, Nicola Masciandaro, Elizabeth Mikesch, Rebecca Norton, Yarrow Paisley, Andrei Platonov, Alina Popa, Tom Regel, Forrest Roth, Jacob Siefring, George Szirtes, Colin James Torre, Chaulky White

via Black Sun Lit

Theoria e praxis del Black Metal

Interview with Fabio Selvafiorita at L'Intellettuale Dissidente.

[Tombs, "Seance"]

Part 1

Part 2

Ocean Seeping Eyes

Twenty-three pseudo-ghazals.

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Bask in the Glory of Bewilderment

1. To perish with every breath in overwhelming astonishment.
2. To be so far gone that you never arrived.
3. Have no idea.
4. To be so clueless that every clue is itself eternally stunned by its own inexistence.
5. Obliterate multiverses by means of bewilderment.
6. Become so lost in disbelief that everything is absolutely, unintelligibly true.
7. Wonder so deeply why anything is happening at all that it never did.
8. Mercilessly send all your questions back to the omnipresent front lines.
9. Fail to meet me for fear of being swallowed alive by an enormous question.
10. Fall into the gaping abyss under your feet until you shoot up out of the ground.
11. Writhe in unknowing.
12. Live in the midst of continual well-coordinated all-out attacks upon everything you ever felt or thought was true.
13. To always already be inexplicably pierced by yet another incommunicable arrow.
14. Watch the world vanish like mist before the glorious sun of secret maximal confusion.
15. Leave me behind so fast that you bump into me in infinite regress.
16. To give everyone a look that shows what they are in for.
17. Lay your life aside in favor of becoming a cosmically autophagous query.
18. See human knowledge for what it is: a messy mass of poorly formulated search terms.
19. Drink wine of bewilderment until the tears wash away your face.
20. To erase every trace of yourself with a free lifetime supply of the Ointment of Mystification.
21. Think about something by evaporating the thought.
22. Act in way that effectively accuses everyone of insufficient astonishment.
23. Follow yourself off the cliff of total bafflement.
24. Leap for joy into spontaneous senseless distress like a child into the arms of its mother.
25. Indulge profoundly in the pleasure of forgetting everything people say.
26. Offer everything as a reward to anyone who successfully steals all your answers.
27. Infinitely reverse the ontological order of answer and question.
28. Immediately become incapable of following any directions other than the irrepressible hunch that you are absolutely and hopelessly lost.
29. Dive into delightful epistemological despair past the point of really needing to do away with yourself.
30. Abandon inner connection to all persons who actually think they know what they are talking about.
31. Exploit your friends to bust all of you out of the prison of knowledge.
32. Deliberately refuse to know, no matter what the world offers you.
33. Develop courage for greater and greater bewilderment by remembering all who have died in the depths of ignorance.
34. To wonder why one ever bothered to . . .
35. Fail to believe how you ever fell for it.
36. Make no difference between small and great matters that do not make sense.
37. Know not what to do, think, feel, or say.
38. Place no secret hope in your absolute bewilderment.
39. Figure out a way off the island of being that does not involve figuring it out.
40. Suspect everything.
41. Renounce your bewilderment for nothing (except greater and greater bewilderment).
42. Know so little that the whole universe flocks to your for meaningless questions.
43. To let no light ever escape the black hole of your non-knowledge.
44. Offer no explanations, give nothing away.
45. Die of unknowing.
46. Remain unintelligible, especially to omniscience.
47. Thrive by robbing yourself in the apophatic alleys of radically immanent auto-blindness.
48. Eclipse all knowing in the perfect pitch blackness of your pupil.
49. Wonder why until why itself never made any sense in the first place.
50. Expose your whole system to the plague of inexplicability.
51. Hypothetically blame everything on everything in order to be even more astonished by all that remains unaccounted for.
52. Crack open your skull like lightning on the stone of pure astonishment.
53. Bask in the glory of bewilderment.