In 2002 two brothers moved onto an overgrown property outside Olympia in Washington State, and held their first rehearsal in a cabin that was falling down. There was no rehearsal room to rent, no club to play and no scene to join. They called the place Calliope Farm, grew a good deal of what they ate, and made records in the gaps.
Everything filed twenty years later under the heading of Cascadian black metal comes out of that decision, and the decision was not primarily a musical one. Wolves in the Throne Room did not set out to invent a regional style. They set out to live somewhere specific and let the consequences reach the tape.
What Cascadia is, and who named it
Cascadia is a bioregion rather than a country: the drainage of the Cascade range, running from British Columbia through Washington and Oregon and down into northern California, with its own weather, its own forest and a long standing separatist tradition that has a flag and no state to hang it on. The bands did not choose the term. Writers did, some time after the records existed, and several of the musicians it was applied to have spent the years since explaining that they are not a movement.
Aaron Weaver has put the band's position plainly more than once: they are not a black metal band, or more exactly they play black metal on their own terms and for their own reasons. That is a refusal of the uniform rather than of the music, and it is the single most Cascadian sentence anybody in this scene has produced.
In Wildness is the preservation of the World.
Henry David Thoreau, Walking
The subject changed, not the technique
This is the part that gets misdescribed, and the misdescription has done real damage to how the records are heard. The tremolo picking is intact. The blast beats are intact. The guitar tone is cold, dry and thin in the second wave manner, with none of the layered saturation that the shoegaze branch depends on. What changed is what the songs are about and how long they are allowed to take. Diadem of 12 Stars in 2006 and Two Hunters on Southern Lord in 2007 run four tracks to the side of an hour, use field recordings of weather and water as structural material rather than as an intro, and put a clean female voice at the point where the tradition would have put another shriek.
The result is a hymn recorded with the door left open, so that the rain is on the tape as an instrument. That is not a metaphor about atmosphere. It is a description of the production decision, and it is why the records sound spacious where blackgaze Explained describes a sound that is dense. Two branches of the same decade, opposite solutions to the same problem of what a black metal record can be about once Satan has stopped being interesting.
The tremolo picking never changed. What changed is that the subject moved outdoors and the songs were allowed to take as long as the weather does.
Agalloch had already done half of it
Formed at Portland in 1995 around John Haughm, with Don Anderson and Jason William Walton joining soon after, Agalloch reached Pale Folklore in 1999 and then The Mantle in 2002, a record that puts acoustic guitar, doom tempos, folk melody and spoken word into a black metal frame and barely raises its voice for long stretches. It predates the farm records and it makes most of the same arguments, which is why the histories that begin the scene in 2007 are wrong by five years. Marrow of the Spirit, issued by Profound Lore in 2010, is the heaviest thing they made. The band broke up in May 2016 over the ordinary problem of whether to tour full time, and returned in 2023 to play a limited number of shows.
The Olympia bands Threnos and Echtra were working in the same direction at the same time and reached almost nobody, which is the usual arrangement. Reputation in this music has never tracked chronology.
The man at the desk, and what happened after the farm
A scene defined by weather still needs somebody who can record weather, and for most of a decade that was Randall Dunn. Two Hunters, out on Southern Lord on 25 September 2007, was made at London Bridge Studio and at Aleph in the Seattle area with Dunn producing alongside the band, and the same partnership carried through Black Cascade in 2009 and Celestial Lineage, released on 13 September 2011 with additional recording spread across three rooms and mixing done at two more. That is an unusual amount of studio labour for music whose whole reputation rests on sounding untended, and it is the flat contradiction at the centre of the style: the forest on these records is engineered.
What the band did next settled the question of whether they were a black metal band at all. Celestite in 2014 removed the guitars, the drums and the voices and left the synthesiser material that had been holding the records together underneath, which is either a companion piece or an admission depending on how generous the listener is feeling. Thrice Woven followed in 2017 on the band's own Artemisia label with the blast beats back, and Primordial Arcana arrived through Relapse in 2021, recorded and produced by the band themselves with no outside hand on it at all. Twenty years from a collapsing cabin to a self produced record on a large label, and the songs are still four to a side.
The rest of the map
The scene proper is small and its records are hard to find, which suits everybody involved. Fauna, out of Olympia, write pieces that pass twenty minutes without a chorus anywhere in them. Skagos worked out of British Columbia and treated the whole apparatus as a rite rather than as a performance. Alda, from Tacoma, named a 2011 album Tahoma after the mountain the settlers renamed Rainier, which is the scene's politics in a single title. Ash Borer, from Arcata in northern California, took the long form and made it colder and less consoling than anybody else has managed.
Two of the most convincing bands working this way are nowhere near the Cascades. Falls of Rauros write about Maine and Panopticon writes about Kentucky coal country, and both prove that the method travels because it was never really about the Pacific Northwest. It was about writing black metal concerned with a place the band actually lives in, which is a portable idea and a far older one than the label suggests. The full American story, and the argument about who is entitled to any of it, is cascadian black metal in the chapter above this one.
The objection, and what survives it
The charge made against this scene from the beginning was that it had swapped one costume for another: that ecology, ritual and the forest are as much a set of props as corpse paint ever was, and that a band who will not put on the uniform has removed the one thing that made the genre uncomfortable to be near. There is something in it. A great many records made in this style since 2010 consist of twenty minutes of reverb, some rain, one riff and a photograph of a tree, and the style has generated more filler than any other American branch because its surface is easy to copy and its structure is hard.
What survives the objection is the small number of records that earned the form. Two Hunters, The Mantle, Marrow of the Spirit and Black Cascade are records with real writing inside the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is a consequence of the writing rather than a substitute for it. The rest is weather. Anyone who wants to hear where this branch sits against everything else the genre has done since 1982 should read black metal, the whole genre first and come back afterwards, because the distance travelled from a Norwegian basement to a farm in Washington is the most interesting thing about either end of it.
