Despite a population of only about 345,000, throughout history, Utrecht has been one of the most important Dutch cities, and today, it's one of the most international cities in the Netherlands, because it’s home to the country’s largest train station and one of its largest universities. Second only to Amsterdam for its cultural relevance, Utrecht’s most notable music event is the Le Guess Who? festival, whose diverse and well crafted line-ups have turned into one of Europe's most interesting festivals, serving as a perfect complement to Roadburn in terms of proportion between heavy and non-heavy music. In the past decade, a fascinatingly uncommon black metal scene has grown within the city.
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It’s a scene whose music and image arguably owe more to left-field 90's names like Ved Buens Ende than it does to their more traditional counterparts. During a time in which dutch politics have mostly been known for the rise of the right-wing populism of PVV (or the Party for Freedom, a Dutch nationalist party), Utrecht's 2018 municipal elections were won by the left-wing GroenLinks. In other words, Utrecht is not representative of the overall right-leaning political developments that have taken place in the country, and its black metal scene is not what one might imagine a local black metal scene to be. As I sat down in a cafe in Utrecht to talk with Laster's N.*, from one of the scene’s leading collectives, he elaborated on the contrast between this scene and others he has observed over the years. He said that while kinship among musicians is certainly common in local black metal communities, more often than not “it's built on hatred or a certain dislike. A dislike of either certain music, certain people, certain races, certain political agendas.” However, the foundation upon which the Utrecht scene is built is one of “mutual love for harsh, loud music in general. It's no longer about dislikes, it's about what we enjoy within the sounds we make,” he concluded.A few days later, in an Amsterdam bar, I met with Johan van Hattum, Terzij De Horde's bassist and one of its lyricists. During the band's early days, they noticed that while it was not difficult to play shows in Utrecht, where they knew most promoters, they didn’t have the same experience in other cities. They were too black metal for hardcore punk bookers and too hardcore for black metal ones. According to Johan, this led them to say, “fuck it, we're going to do shows for bands that are not that easily pigeonholed.” With that, Footprints In The Void was born, an ongoing series of concerts put together by Terzij De Horde and local venue and rehearsal center dB's studios, in which a good chunk of the bands discussed below started rehearsing.
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Footprints In The Void “brought all the great aggressive, atmospheric, dark, blackened bands to Utrecht that you knew about and really wanted to see. Bands like Fell Voices, Ash Borer, Vampillia,” N. told me. This meant not only a regular influx of challenging black metal artists over the years, but also that young local bands got to perform with them early on. It also help to set the tone of the scene, allowing its musicians to, in N.'s words, “freely embrace the progressive character of the genre.” He further explored his view on the genre's nature, adding that “black metal started as a progressive genre and then, thanks to the big hype, it became this conservative beast. Now, places like Utrecht opened up this progressive character that has been stowed away for too long to my taste.”If you ever wonder what black metal would be like if its more experimental early practitioners had become its standard bearers, Utrecht might provide not just one, but many glimpses into this idea. At the end of the day, according to Johan, it's not a particular sound but passion that unites them, but “a passion for living, a passion for music, a passion for discovery, a passion for improvement in the broadest sense possible. If you didn't know the persons and listened to records from these bands, you'd never put them together, you'd never think that it's a collective of friends and individuals who share ideas.”
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Terzij De Horde
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Laster
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Ons vrije fatum is a black metal album that deals with “love, friendship, social pressures, and anxiety.” It reaches its peak in the second half, which perfectly illustrates the idiosyncratic entity Laster has become. For instance, “Helemaal naar huis” uses black metal a la Czral as its linguistic building block, includes an excellent saxophone passage, poetic spoken word, and tells a story of anxiety with the rather dutch flavor of mentioning stolen bikes. The last two songs of the record, “De roes na” and “Er wordt op mij gewacht” tell personal stories with a cinematic feel induced by explicit invocations of Utrecht's main canal and tower. Above it all, the record includes some of the best music within these fringes of black metal released last year.
Verwoed
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Black Decades
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Project Nefast
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Grey Aura
Verval
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The most recent release from the studio is from “Wederkeer”, the debut of the newest project of the drummer/producer, Verval, where he reunites with former White Oak partner R. Schmidt. The record was released earlier this year by Canadian label Tour de Garde and displays neo classical elements amidst the atmospheric black metal that characterizes most of W.'s output outside of Laster. The record features guest vocals from Galgenvot with whom W. plays in Nevel, an atmospheric black metal project whose debut Teloorgang came out in 2014. Later this month, Verval's guitarist, bassist and cellist R. Schmidt will debut yet another project, Wesenwille (with Wrang drummer, Valr), which plasys a considerably less atmospheric style of black metal than the one usually found in his projects. Think of an even more restless, clean-produced Svartidauði and you get a small idea.Earlier I alluded to the particularly eventful evening when Black Cilice played their first-ever live show in front of a sold-out dB's, accompanied by dutch artists Folteraar, Faceless Entity, and Warden. While that show was eventually co-organized by Footprints In The Void at dB's main venue, it was originally supposed to be a rehearsal room show put together by Tenebrous Haze. These extremely intimate shows used to be a regular occurrence, often organized by the somewhat related group Violence Action. Regardless of who was putting them, that was the place to see “the under underground,” as Johan puts it. This sub-level was a good way to witness live appearances by bands from the extremely prolific Dutch tape label The Throat, which specializes in raw black metal.One of the new members of their roster is Cer, a one-man project from Utrecht whose first full-length “Void Emissions” was released last year and has that lo-fi quality one would expect given the label. On top of this, it can best be described as an even more twisted and relentless take on the sound of Darkspace. Cer's composer, R. v. R. is also active in a few other solo projects, chiefly among them Seer's Fire, where the black metal takes a back seat to some keyboard-driven soundscapes with a background of epic fantasy.Among The Throat's vast roster stands another purveyor of fascinating black metal from Utrecht, Kaffaljidhma. If you happen to stumble head-first into their demo “II” and are not particularly a fan of the noiser fringes of black metal (their last outing, “IV” is much more accessible), the band's name might be easier to pronounce than their music to hear. If, on the other hand, proper lo-fi atmospheric black metal is the kind of thing that gets you going, you might want to keep the Kaffaljidhma name on your radar. In the last two years, this one-man project by multidisciplinary artist T.J. released four one-track demos of harsh atmospheric black metal with a penchant for cosmic themes, as clearly displayed by the song-titles and the beautiful, minimalistic artwork.Kaffaljidhma can also work as a gateway for the myriad of other projects of its creator, which range from drone, synthpop and, of course, black metal. Highlights of the latter include the melodic and somewhat soothing atmosphere of “Primitive Casket”, the debut EP from Olxane, another solo project and, on the other end of the spectrum, Mirre. Mirre is a trio whose harsh but rewarding raw black metal is not so much noisy as it is drenched in noise to the point that everything else on this article sounds considerably clean by comparison.*Some names in this piece are listed as single initials in this piece to protect the artists' privacy.Luís Pires is a freelance writer and physicist. You can find him intermittently on Twitter.