Recorded in 1988. Released in 1995. Seven years between a tape existing and a record being for sale, and in between them a change of political system. Tormentor's Anno Domini is the founding document of black metal in this part of Europe and the clearest illustration of what made the region different: the music was made before the infrastructure to sell it existed, so it travelled the only way it could, by post, in copies, to people who paid nothing for it.
The chapter on black metal outside Scandinavia establishes the Czech claim to the earliest record in the genre. What follows is the rest of the region: the Hungarian tape that reached Norway, the Czech bands that never stopped, and a Slovak scene that arrived twenty five years late and was better for it.
Czechoslovakia got there first, and then kept going
Master's Hammer has the earliest album in this chapter and the loudest advocate for it, but the band that turned Czech extreme metal into a continuous tradition is Root. Formed in Brno in late 1987 by the vocalist Jiří Valter, who works as Big Boss, and the guitarist known as Blackie, it released Zjevení in 1990, Hell Symphony in 1991 and The Temple in the Underworld in 1992, moved into longer and stranger writing with Kärgeräs in 1996 and The Book in 1999, and is still working almost forty years later. Big Boss sings in a deep clean baritone rather than a shriek, which by 1993 had made the band unclassifiable to an audience that had just been told what black metal was supposed to sound like.
The distinction Big Boss himself draws is that his subject is a personal system of magic and myth rather than an inherited one, which is a genuinely different proposition from the Norwegian bands and explains why the Czech records of the period sound theatrical where the northern ones sound doctrinal. Timpani, horns, opera house dynamics and spoken passages were normal here. Nobody in Bohemia was trying to sound like a rehearsal tape.
| Band | Country | Recorded | Released | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tormentor | Hungary | 1988 | 1995 | seven years |
| Master's Hammer | Czechoslovakia | December 1990 | February 1991 | two months |
| Root | Czechoslovakia | 1990 | 1990 | none |
| Cult of Fire | Czech Republic | 2013 | November 2013 | none |
| Malokarpatan | Slovakia | 2014 | 2015 | months |
The Hungarian tape that reached Norway
Tormentor formed in 1985 around the singer Attila Csihar and recorded Anno Domini in 1988, at which point there was no mechanism in the country to put it out. The band dubbed copies itself, and through the tape trading network the record reached the United States, western Europe, South America and Scandinavia while remaining commercially unavailable at home. Nocturnal Art Productions and Head Not Found licensed it and put it out on compact disc and vinyl in 1995, seven years after the sessions. By then its consequences had already happened: it was the recording that led to Csihar being invited to sing on Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, which means the single most imitated vocal performance in the genre was hired out of a Hungarian tape nobody could legally buy.
The most imitated vocal in black metal was hired out of a Hungarian tape nobody could legally buy.
Hungary has never produced a scene on the scale of the Czech one, but it has produced consistently odd bands. Sear Bliss, running since 1993, put brass instruments into black metal arrangements decades before that became a normal thing to do, and has kept at it across nine albums without ever moving to a large label.
What the Czechs did next
Maniac Butcher ran through the nineties on a policy of two members and no guests. The Czech band Inferno has spent thirty years moving from orthodox black metal towards something closer to structured chaos. And Cult of Fire made the strangest Czech record of the century: मृत्यु का तापसी अनुध्यान, released by the German label Iron Bonehead Productions on 30 November 2013, with all eight titles in Sanskrit, sitar and chant in the arrangements, and the whole record dedicated to the goddess Kali and to Hindu funeral rites. A Czech band with no connection to any of that material studied it properly and made a coherent album out of it, which is either the best or the worst argument available for black metal borrowing from other traditions. The pair behind it also run Death Karma, which builds records out of burial customs country by country.
Who actually put these records out
Trace the catalogue numbers and a pattern appears that the region has never escaped. Ritual. went out at home through Monitor in February 1991, and it is very nearly the last important record from these three countries to do so. Osmose in France took it worldwide in 1994. Tormentor was licensed to two Norwegian companies, Nocturnal Art Productions and Head Not Found, in 1995. Cult of Fire went out through Iron Bonehead in Germany in 2013. Malokarpatan is on Invictus in Ireland and The Ajna Offensive in the United States. Thirty five years of work by bands in Prague, Brno, Budapest and Bratislava, manufactured and sold almost entirely from somewhere else.
That is not a complaint and the bands do not treat it as one. A region with no domestic industry also has no domestic gatekeeper, no scene politics worth the name and nobody in a position to tell a band that timpani or a sitar or a Slovak folk melody is not permitted. What it costs is money and visibility. What it buys is that a Czech band in 2013 could spend a year studying Hindu funeral rites and put the result out without a single person in the process asking whether it would sell.
Slovakia arrived last
Malokarpatan formed in Bratislava in 2014, which is twenty five years after everybody else in this article, and immediately produced the most distinctive body of work in the region. Stridzie dni arrived in 2015, Nordkarpatenland in 2017 and Krupinské ohne in 2020 through Invictus Productions and The Ajna Offensive, the last of them a concept record built on a seventeenth century witch trial in the town of Krupina. The writing takes as much from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal as from black metal, the lyrics are in Slovak and full of regional folklore, and the band has stayed with a small Irish label through repeated interest from larger ones.
Every other scene in Europe spent the nineties trying to sound like Norway. This one spent them trying to sound like the place it was actually in.
Andrzej Sawicki, KaosMetal
What links a Prague band writing in Sanskrit, a Brno band inventing its own mythology and a Bratislava band reconstructing a witch trial is a refusal to take the doctrine as given. None of these countries had a scene large enough to enforce orthodoxy, which turned out to be an advantage, and none of them ever had the industry to make a mistake expensive. The country that had both, and that spent thirty years being told it had no business making this music at all, is covered in british Black Metal. The scenes immediately to the east, working under very different pressure, are in russian and Ukrainian Black Metal.
