This is the first extensive scholarly study of drone metal music and its religious associations, drawing on five years of ethnographic participant observation from more than 300 performances and 74 interviews, plus surveys, analyses of sound recordings, artwork, and extensive online discourse about music.Owen Coggins shows that while many drone metal listeners identify as non-religious, their ways of engaging with and talking about drone metal are richly informed by mysticism, ritual and religion. He explores why language relating to mysticism and spiritual experience is so prevalent in drone metal culture and in discussion of musical experiences and practices of the genre.The author develops the work of Michel de Certeau to provide an empirically grounded theory of mysticism in popular culture. He argues that the marginality of the genre culture, together with the extremely abstract sound produces a focus on the listeners’ engagement with sound, and that this in turn creates a space for the open-ended exploration of religiosity in extreme states of bodily consciousness.
Owen Coggins is Honorary Associate of the Religious Studies Department at the Open University and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Brunel University London, UK.
List of figuresAcknowledgements1. Introduction: Mysticism and metal music2. To be experienced not understood: Empirical mysticisms in dub, trance and drone3. Beyond heaviness: Listener experience in a translocal and marginal genre4. Pilgrimages to elsewhere: Languages of ineffability, otherness, and ambiguity5. Amplifier worship: Materiality and mysticism in heavy sound6. Methods to cross the abyss: Ritual, violence and noise7. Conclusion: Drone metal mysticismReferencesIndex
Mysticism, Religion and Ritual in Drone Metal provides an interesting and persuasive look at an alternative expression of the human mystical impulse, as found in a seemingly secular, relatively unpopular form of pop culture.
Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman, Monica R. Miller, Anthony B. Pinn, Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman, USA) Miller, Monica R. (Lehigh University, USA) Pinn, Anthony B. (Rice University, Christopher Partridge