On 19 and 20 August 2015 a Slovenian group played two nights in the main hall of a music conservatory in Pyongyang, in front of an audience of up to a thousand people, having first submitted the whole show to a state committee that cut it from eighteen songs to nine and from ninety minutes to forty five. That is the outer limit of what has ever happened. It remains the single most extreme concert the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has permitted, and the band in question plays neither black metal nor anything adjacent to it.
The honest answer to the question in the title is that there is no north korean black metal scene, there never has been one, and the interesting part is not the absence. It is the persistence of the search: several hundred people a month go looking for this, and the reasons they keep looking say a great deal about how the genre thinks about itself. If what is wanted is the definition rather than the geography, that is what black metal is.
What a musician in the country actually has
Music in the DPRK is a state function. Ensembles are formed, staffed, named and disbanded by the state, their repertoire is approved, and the best known of them are pop and light orchestral groups assembled to perform material written for the occasion. Instruments and recording equipment are state property. Foreign recordings are contraband, and the penalties attached to distributing them are severe and have been documented by defectors and by human rights reporting for thirty years.
None of that is a colourful backdrop for a metal article. It is the reason the question has the answer it has. A genre that requires a private rehearsal space, imported records to learn from, a duplicating machine and a postal route to somebody who wants the tape cannot exist under those conditions, and the four or five other countries where the same is true have the same blank against their name.
An empty square on a map that keeps filling itself in, because the internet cannot leave a blank alone.
The band that says it is from Rason
There is one claim worth taking seriously enough to examine. A project recording under the Korean name Kuryong, rendered in English as Kowloon, says it operates from the Sonbong district of Rason, the special economic zone in the far north east where the Chinese and Russian borders meet, and describes itself as an arts group working inside state regulated cultural projects. Its first release, Summon of Baekdu, is three finished songs recorded across roughly six weeks, and the accompanying statements describe restricted access to equipment, interruptions to the power supply, state ownership of the instruments and a stated intention to capture the spirit of the land.
Take the claims one at a time and the picture does not hold together. Rason is the most porous point in the country and the one place where the argument is at its strongest, which is presumably why it was chosen. Against that sit the things the recordings themselves demonstrate: a working knowledge of a specific European genre, its production conventions and its vocabulary, acquired somewhere. The material a person would need to learn this from is precisely the material the state confiscates. Nothing in the account explains that, and until something does, the sensible reading is that the record was made somewhere else by somebody who found the frame more interesting than the songs.
| What is claimed | What it has to survive |
|---|---|
| Recorded in Rason, in the north east | Plausible as a location; the most open point in the country |
| Operating inside a state cultural programme | No approved DPRK ensemble has ever performed anything resembling this |
| State owned instruments and equipment | Consistent with how music works there, and unverifiable from outside |
| Musicians who understand the genre's conventions | Requires years of access to recordings the state treats as contraband |
| Released to an international audience | Requires an internet connection almost nobody in the country has |
The archive, and the jokes filed in it
The other thing a searcher finds is the metal database, and the database is where a good deal of this began. Encyclopaedia Metallum organises bands by country, which produces a page for every state on earth, including the ones with nothing on them. Somebody will always fill an empty page. Entries have appeared under North Korea over the years whose names are the joke itself, submitted by people in other countries who thought a blank space was an invitation, and each one has then been screenshotted and passed around as evidence.
This is worth stating plainly because it is the mechanism behind most of the myth. A listing in an open database is a claim somebody typed, not a fact somebody checked, and the further a screenshot travels from the page it came from the more authority it appears to have. The story of how the rite actually travelled, country by real country, is the chapter this belongs to.
What people are actually looking for
The search splits three ways, and only one of the three is about North Korea at all. Some of it is idle curiosity about whether the most closed country on earth has the most extreme music, which is a question with a one word answer. Some of it is people who have seen a screenshot and want to know whether the band on it is real. And a substantial share of it is people who mean Korea and land on the wrong half of the peninsula.
That third group is the one that can be answered properly, because South Korea has had a black metal scene since the nineties. Oathean formed in 1993, took their present name in 1997, and have been running longer than any other metal band in the country, working a melodic form of the genre with the haegeum and the daegeum, two traditional Korean instruments, played inside the arrangements rather than laid over them as decoration. That is a real scene with real records, and it is what a large number of the people asking this question would rather have found.
Why the question will not go away
Because the genre has spent forty years telling itself that the music belongs to the coldest, poorest and most closed places, and North Korea is the logical end point of that story. A scene there would be the ultimate proof of the thing everybody in this music half believes, which is that the more hostile the conditions the truer the result. It is a bad theory. Some of the best black metal ever made came out of a state funded concert hall with a professional engineer in it, and some of the worst came out of genuine deprivation.
What remains true is that the map still has blanks on it, and that this is a fact about states rather than about music. Where the records do get made, somebody has to press them, pay for them and post them, and the businesses that did that for this genre for forty years are the Black Metal Labels.
