Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The lazy account of raw black metal says the bands could not afford better. It is a comfortable story, it explains the hiss without anybody having to listen to what the hiss is doing, and it is contradicted by the single most important record in the style. Raw black metal is a set of decisions taken by people who had the alternative in front of them and refused it, and the evidence is in the studio invoices.
The band that had the best studio in Scandinavia and walked out of it
Before they were the reference point for lo-fi, the quartet from Kolbotn made a clean record in an expensive room. Darkthrone recorded Soulside Journey at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm in September 1990 with Tomas Skogsberg producing and Uffe Cederlund working on the guitars, which is to say with the producer and the room that had defined the sound of Swedish death metal, and Peaceville put it out on 14 January 1991. It is a fully professional death metal album. Everything that follows was made by people who knew exactly what they were giving up.
What followed was a retreat conducted in three stages. A Blaze in the Northern Sky came in 1992 with the death metal thrown out and the guitars thinned to a wire. Under a Funeral Moon went further in 1993. Then, between November and December 1993, with the band down to two members, Gylve Nagell recorded every instrument on a four track machine in his own bedroom, a room he labelled Necrohell on the sleeve, and Ted Skjellum put the vocals on top; Peaceville released Transilvanian Hunger on 17 February 1994. AllMusic later gave it four and a half stars and Rolling Stone placed it 85th among the hundred greatest metal albums ever made in 2017. A bedroom tape, on a list next to records that cost six figures.
What the treble is actually doing
Strip the low end out of a black metal mix and the music changes shape rather than merely getting worse. Tremolo picking played through a thin, treble heavy signal stops reading as a sequence of individual notes and starts reading as one continuous band of sound, so the ear follows the chord movement underneath instead of the picking on top, which is precisely where the writing lives in this music. Take the bass frequencies away from a blast beat and the kick drum stops being a punctuation mark and becomes texture. Compress everything into a narrow range and nothing peaks, which means nothing arrives, which means a seven minute song has no obvious middle and time inside it goes flat.
That flatness is the effect the style is built around, and it is why a well recorded version of the same riff sounds wrong to anyone who knows the original. Clean production separates instruments. Separation gives you a band playing together. Raw production fuses them into a single object with no interior, which is a different and much colder thing to listen to, and a set of songs written to exploit it will collapse the moment somebody remasters them properly. Several bands have found this out by trying.
Clean production separates instruments. Raw production fuses them into a single object with no interior.
The hiss is the second guitar
The most extreme version of the argument was made by a musician who went out of his way to get worse equipment than he had access to. Burzum recorded Filosofem in March 1993 at Breidablik with no guitar amplifier at all, running the guitar into the amplifier of a domestic stereo through old fuzz pedals, and asked the engineer for the worst microphone in the building for the vocals, which turned out to be an ageing helicopter headset. Misanthropy and Cymophane issued the result on 31 January 1996. Whatever else is true of that record, it was not the product of a shortage.
The other pole of the same idea is Ildjarn, the Telemark project of Vidar Våer, active from 1991 and recorded almost entirely on a four track: two minute songs, three note riffs, drum patterns simplified past the point where a drummer would tolerate them, and vocals nobody has ever transcribed. The self titled album arrived in 1995 and Forest Poetry in 1996 through the small Norwegian labels. It is closer to hardcore punk than to anything on a Peaceville sleeve, and the tape hiss carrying it is not a defect in the recording. It is the second guitar. Remove it and half the record disappears. Where that logic goes once the guitars come out altogether is the subject of ambient Black Metal and Dungeon Synth.
The year the excuse died
Ulver settled the question in public. Signed to Century Media, a label with real money, the band delivered Nattens Madrigal on 3 March 1997 in a state that sounded like a bootleg of a rehearsal, and a story went round that they had taken the advance, spent it on a car and drugs, and recorded the album outdoors on eight tracks. Kristoffer Rygg has denied the spending flatly in interviews since, has suggested the tale may have come from the label itself, and has also declined to kill it off entirely. The relevant fact needs none of the folklore: a band with a budget available chose to sound like a band without one, and said so, as an argument against what the genre was turning into.
Since then the position has hardened into a permanent wing rather than a phase. The tape circles that ran through France, Finland and the American north west in the nineties never went away, they moved onto Bandcamp with the same runs of a hundred and fifty cassettes, and a generation that has never touched a four track now records digitally and then deliberately ruins the file. The equipment argument is dead. Anyone can get a clean recording for nothing. What is left is the choice, which is the only thing it ever was, and it is one of the sharpest divisions in how black metal split.
Good raw and lazy raw
None of which forgives the bad half. There is a large amount of raw black metal in which the production is doing all the work and the songs underneath are three chords and an attitude, and the aesthetic is a convenient place to hide, because a record that has decided to be unclear cannot easily be convicted of being empty. The test is simple and it is the one the good records survive: play it at low volume, where the noise is least flattering, and see whether there is a melody in there worth following. Transilvanian Hunger passes that test at any volume. A great deal of what claims descent from it does not.
The honest position is the one the founders took. Raw is a compositional constraint, adopted deliberately, that changes what a riff can do and forces the writing to work in a narrower band. It is not a badge of authenticity and it is not a substitute for having written something. The rest of the argument, and where this branch sits against everything around it, runs through the KaosMetal black metal overview. Listen quietly. The good ones survive it.
