In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Everything north of the Alps built this music out of weather. The Italian and Iberian bands built it out of ceremony, and the difference is audible in the first thirty seconds of almost any record either region produced: candles rather than snow, a seance rather than a treeline, an organ and a spoken invocation rather than a guitar recorded to sound like wind. It is the least documented corner of European black metal and the one with the longest continuous history, because Italy was making extreme metal with occult subject matter years before Norway had a scene at all.
The survey in chapter five gives the two founding Italian bands a paragraph. What follows is the rest of it: the first wave, the seance wing, the Milanese fanzine that turned into a label, the two branches Italy invented on its own, and a Portuguese scene that has been running quietly since 1990.
Italy was early
Bulldozer formed in Milan in 1980 and had The Day of Wrath out in 1985. Necrodeath formed in 1984 and released Into the Macabre in 1987. Death SS had been running since 1977 with a stage act built out of horror cinema and occultism. None of those bands called what they were doing black metal, and all three were doing it while the Norwegian founders were at school. The point is not a claim of priority for its own sake. It is that when the second wave arrived in Italy, it arrived in a country that already had ten years of occult extreme metal behind it and saw no reason to throw that away.
The seance wing
Mortuary Drape, formed in Alessandria in 1986, released All the Witches Dance in 1994, and Opera IX made The Call of the Wood in 1995 with Raffaella Rivarolo, who works as Cadaveria, on vocals until she left at the start of the 2000s to run her own band. Both records treat occultism as a practice with props and a running order rather than as an image. There are ritual passages, invocations, organ, and long instrumental sections that exist to set a scene rather than to carry a riff. A Norwegian band of the same year would have regarded most of that as theatre, which it is, and that is precisely the argument: these bands never accepted that seriousness required austerity.
Candles rather than snow, a seance rather than a treeline. Nobody in Alessandria accepted that seriousness required austerity.
What ceremony means in practice is a set of arrangement decisions rather than a costume. Tempo changes inside a song are normal rather than a concession. A clean spoken or chanted passage is allowed to run for a minute without a guitar under it. Keyboards are used as an instrument with its own part rather than as a wash behind the riff. Songs are ordered as a sequence with a beginning and an end rather than as seven interchangeable tracks. All of that was ordinary in Italian metal by 1986 and all of it was regarded as a weakness by the second wave, which had decided that anything resembling composition was a compromise. Thirty years on, the Italian records have aged considerably better than that judgement.
The fanzine that turned into a label
Three metal enthusiasts near Milan ran a fanzine called Thanatography and in September 1990 turned it into Obscure Plasma Records, which operated until 1993; in early 1994 one of them, Roberto Mammarella, who also played in Monumentum, reincorporated the operation as Avantgarde Music. It went on to release Katatonia, Mayhem, Behemoth, Opera IX and Diabolical Masquerade, which is to say that an Italian company started by three people with a photocopier ended up carrying a substantial part of the Norwegian, Swedish and Polish canon. Italy has never had a large domestic black metal market. It has had, continuously since 1990, a catalogue with international standing, which is more than most of the scenes in this chapter can say.
Two branches Italy invented on its own
Forgotten Tomb was started in Piacenza in 1999 by Ferdinando Marchisio, who signs himself Herr Morbid, and who played everything on the records until 2003. Songs to Leave came out in 2002 through Selbstmord Services and Springtime Depression in 2003 through Adipocere, with Love's Burial Ground following in 2004 and Negative Megalomania on Avantgarde in 2007. Slow, repetitive, built on two or three figures held for eight minutes with a vocal that sounds exhausted rather than aggressive, they are among the earliest coherent depressive black metal albums made anywhere, and the later catalogue has moved steadily away from that towards something closer to a nihilistic rock record.
Aborym went the other way entirely. Kali Yuga Bizarre, released in 1999 by Scarlet Records, put programmed drums and industrial texture under black metal guitar with Attila Csihar guesting on three tracks, and Csihar then joined as a full member for the album that followed. With No Human Intervention arrived on 8 January 2003. The band was doing this in Italy at the same time as the better known industrial black metal records were being made in Norway, and it has never been given much credit for it, largely because Italy is not where anybody was looking.
Portugal has been at this since 1990
The Iberian half of this story is mostly Portuguese and it is older than most people assume. Decayed has been running since 1990 and has toured Portugal and Europe for three decades without ever moving beyond the underground. Filii Nigrantium Infernalium was recording in the same early period. Moonspell formed in 1992 under the name Morbid God, played black metal for its first years and then became something else entirely, taking a Century Media contract with Wolfheart in 1995 and moving into gothic metal from there. Corpus Christii was the first band from the country to build an audience on several continents rather than in one region, and Black Cilice has spent fifteen years making deliberately unclear recordings that the raw wing of the genre treats as a reference. Gaerea is the current export, masked, on Season of Mist, and playing to larger rooms than any Portuguese black metal band before it.
Spain is the thinner half and it is honest to say so. What the country has produced is at the black and death metal border rather than in the middle of this genre: Teitanblood, formed in Madrid in 2003, put out Seven Chalices on 27 March 2009 through the French label Norma Evangelium Diaboli and is the Spanish record that everybody in the international underground actually owns. There is no Spanish equivalent of the Portuguese continuity, and no domestic label that has done for Spain what Avantgarde did for Italy.
Taken together the two peninsulas make the same argument from opposite ends. Neither ever had a scene big enough to need a doctrine, both kept the theatre that the north stripped out, and both have depended for thirty years on the survival of one or two small companies. The next article leaves Europe entirely for a country that took the same records and rebuilt them with no local tradition to fall back on at all: japanese Black Metal Bands.
