Paper short abstract:

This poster contains images and artwork collected and photographed during black metal music concerts in Serbia, Romania and the Czech Republic, in which my fieldwork is being conducted. The images depict a church that was destroyed by musicians as well as concert photographs and textual analysis of material displayed.

Paper long abstract:

This poster explores the experience of comunitas within the context of the Slavic black metal music scene. Due to the multi-sited-ness of this music scene, attention will be drawn to the meanings created through different forms of participation e.g. from everyday face-to-face interaction to the production of music, artwork and small scene based entrepreneurial activities.

An examination of the kinds of interaction produced when a band plays a number of shows in different regions, areas and countries, tells us something about the role of prior musical knowledge. In the case of bands from former Yugoslavia, this often sheds light on the tensions inherent and negated through shared music scene based identities. However this prior knowledge may be deemed less relevant in the context of a ‘crowd winning’ performance and the mutual sense of ‘collective effervescence’ forged during these occasions tells us much about the ‘quality’ of the music performed.

Therefore this poster provides an insight into a relatively modern (early 1990s) music scene that is aesthetically misanthropic and came to prominence due to several cases of church arson, murder, suicide and other forms of violence. Yet, in practice this facilitates a high degree of (relatively) egalitarian interaction, displays novel forms of anti-reflexive reflexivity in regards to extremist hate based politics and has produced tangible and lasting ‘glocal’ communities/neo-tribes.