Contribution short abstract:

In this presentation, I reflect on Doom Metal and their affective/sensitive world, taking as a starting point my (auto)ethnographic research on the 2023 and 2024 editions of the Doom Over Vienna festival.

Contribution long abstract:

Doom metal is a sub-genre of extreme metal that has been sonically characterised by its low-pitched tones, moaning vocals, and often extreme slowness, which are in dialogue with aesthetic concepts such as depression, melancholy, suffering, hopelessness, monotony, isolation, and solitude. Alongside this, researchers also point out the persistence of ideas such as mysticism, romanticism, beauty, contemplation, spiritual connection, calm, completeness, and joy. This alleged paradox actually constitutes an important part of the internal dialectic of Doom Metal both in its productive and receptive moments. In this sense, Selim Yavuz underlines the tension between the surface emotions in Doom Metal and these emotions’ reflections on the fans and how dissonant expressions like "delightfully depressing" actually collaborate in the social construction of Doom Metal as a music world.

In this presentation, I propose reflecting on Doom Metal and their affective/sensitive world, taking as a starting point my (auto)ethnographic research on the 2023 and 2024 editions of the Doom Over Vienna festival. My focus is then the concepts, interpretations, subjetivities, experiences, motivations, and behaviours around Doom Metal observed and analysed in my fieldwork. In this case, I use autoethnography as a first step to access the "aesthesic" and receptive dimensions of Doom Metal and analyse my experiences in the field. As a hypothesis, I propose that the experience of Doom Metal serves as an alternative way of engaging with the own affective world through music, as an aesthetic delimitation against the world, and also as a non-normative form for understanding and experiencing temporality.