Stephen O'Malley in Prague. Photo by Lindsie Zakopal.

[Ed. note: We're squeezing in one more post from Amelia Ishmael before we introduce our next blogger-in-residence later this week. Enjoy!]

Stephen O’Malley is a wildly prolific musician and artist.

He is perhaps most widely known as a guitarist for the band Sunn O))), which is a sound project he has performed in art galleries and concert venues with Greg Anderson since 1998. Stephen’s other sonic projects include Æthenor, Burning Witch, Khanate, KTL, Lotus Eaters, Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, and Thorr’s Hammer. He has also worked collaboratively as a musician, producer, and composer with some of the most important musicians and composers in contemporary music including Boris, Merzbow, and Attila Csihar.

In addition to sonic art, Stephen has a history of designing, curating, and art directing album cover art and design since the early 90s—including those for Earth, Burzum, Emperor and Melvins. He has also worked with the French choreographer and theatre director Gisèle Vienne and the American sculptor Banks Violette.

The following interview is part of a larger conversation that I had with Stephen a few days ago. The parts I excerpted concern Stephen’s work with with Iancu Dumitrescu in the Hyperion Ensemble, his zine Descent from the early 90s, and his work as an art director and album designer. His innovations with sound waves—which become very sculptural and psychological when experienced live—have already been widely written about, so for this post I wanted to concentrate on Stephen’s visual work, which has not necessarily received the amount of recognition it deserves. Words really fail me in describing what types of sounds, images, and vision Stephen creates, so I’ll just dive into the interview now, after affirming once more that I think that Stephen is one of the most important figures in sonic and visual art working today.

AI: You were recently on tour. Could you tell me more?

Stephen O’Malley: Recently I was working with a Romanian composer, Iancu Dumitrescu, and we did several concerts last month with the Hyperion Ensemble. He developed the Hyperion Ensemble. There were three concerts in Paris, three in London, and two in Berlin that I played in. But they were Iancu Dumitrescu and a second Romanian composer named Ana Maria Avram. They promote a festival called Spectrum 21. Some guests and variations apply in each city, the same festival never happens twice, but the common denominator is that Dumitrescu and Avram are both conducting the ensemble and a lot of their compositions are what are being played, but not exclusively.

AI: You are performing composed pieces then as part of the ensemble? Isn’t that rare?

SOMA: Playing with an ensemble? Yes. That’s something I’ve just done this year actually through meeting, specifically, Dumitrescu. He’s a composer that I’ve been really interested in for quite a while and I got a chance to meet him in January of this year and play some concerts, or just kind of step into the ensemble, so it was definitely a new thing as far as playing guitar. I’ve played other instruments in the past, and sometimes in different ensemble arrangements and bands in different types of set ups, but that’s definitely a different thing. […] He’s really interesting. He has a really long history; he’s […] been composing and performing his work since the 1960s. His music is pretty hardcore in the 70s actually. He’s working with an orchestra, but he’s pretty challenging. He kind of falls into the bigger category of Spectral music. He’s a historical figure, for sure. This is why I would play with an ensemble: I get to work with this guy! It’s a good opportunity to access a lot of knowledge about sound and just the behavior of being an independently-minded artist.

AI: I’m curious about what kinds of sounds you create… what you do with this ensemble, is it related to your other projects sonically?

SOMA: Definitely. I’m playing guitar. I’m not switching modes and playing classical guitar or something. One of the reasons that we connected was just the timber of what we are doing is similar actually. So I guess in the ensemble I’m playing the low bass role. That’s basically the frequency, or the area. Something like what the double bass is playing, but it’s an electric guitar and amplifier: at least to me, as a player, as a listener, and as an appreciator of sound phenomena.

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Terence Hannum in Terence Hannum and Nicolas Lobo's "Broadcast Against Recording" performance event at de la Cruz Collection, Miami, Fl, United States, July 9, 2011.

Terence Hannum is a musician and studio artist who has recently relocated from Chicago to Baltimore to teach at Stevenson University. I first met Terence shortly after moving to Chicago myself about two years ago, at an artist book fair held at University Illinois Chicago’s Gallery 400. This event directly followed a concert that Terence performed at the Empty Bottle with Steven Hess and Andrè Foisy as the experimental Drone Metal band Locrian. I was instantly fascinated by Hannum’s art practice, which eloquently moves from stage to studio. And, I have shamelessly been a fan of Terence’s work ever since, attending nearly all of his local performances and writing reviews of his exhibitions. Attending Locrian concerts has been a significant part of my life in Chicago and, in fact, my MA thesis on Black Metal and contemporary art was conceived while I was in the audience at a Locrian concert. Indeed, Terence was the first artist that I asked to be part of my Black Thorns in the White Cube curatorial project.

Terence has shown in solo exhibitions at Depaw University, Indiana; PeregrineProgram and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Invisible NYC in New York City; and Light & Sie in Dallas. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Western Exhibitions in Chicago; Photographer’s Gallery in London, UK; Apex Art in New York; and San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco, CA; Schalter in Berlin, Germany; and Bergen in Norway. He performs music solo and with the band Locrian, and his zines and publications are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana University, Herron School of Art and Design, Columbia College Chicago, and DePaul University.

The following interview was sparked by Hannum’s recent exhibition at the Cultural Art Center of Chicago, where he currently has a solo exhibition through the end of December. In addition to the paintings, collages and video on view, he also did a solo performance event the opening week. Taking our conversation beyond this exhibition, I wanted to learn more about his background and how this exhibition compares to his previous exhibitions in Chicago throughout the past year and a half.

Amelia Ishmael: Let’s start with the most obvious question. Why Metal and underground subcultures? What does it mean to you to represent your experiences with these subcultures so dominantly in your paintings, videos, and zines? 

Terence Hannum: I have never been interested in much of popular culture. It is entertaining, but after a while it loses its relevance. Subcultures, in general, generate an interesting dynamic, I think, by skirting mainstream attention, for the most part. They tend to generate ways of dress, speaking, codes, sounds, days of remembrance, and hierarchies on their own that force the uninitiated to decipher them. Most of my work began by dissecting different arenas of hardcore and punk music, and then moved into the realm of other, more extreme, underground subcultures. I felt as if this abject periphery was important to address, it raises some interesting questions I can’t quite answer, like, for being so self-proclaimed “profane” in content or aural material, these subcultures can function with very intense definitions as to what is “sacred” for them.

Terence Hannum. "Mass," 2008. Oil on panel. Image courtesy the artist.

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Mark Titchner performing at Warsall New Art Gallery in front of his installation "Be Angry But Don't Stop Breathing," September 2, 2011. Photo by Amelia Ishmael.

In September of this year I traveled to Wolverhampton, U.K. to present some of my research on Black Metal and contemporary art to the Home of Metal Conference, a three-day long event that brought together Metal academics—yes, there are such things—from across the U.S., South America, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition to the Conference, Capsule also organized an extensive program of events under the Home of Metal title throughout 2011—including film screenings, performances, and gallery exhibitions—to celebrate the Black Country and Birmingham as the birthplace of Metal. One of my favorite art events included was Mark Titchner’s solo exhibition “Be True To Your Oblivion” featured at the New Art Gallery in Warsall.

Mark Titchner is a British artist who is probably best known for his text-based works. Frequently assuming the format of large billboards, these works pull quotes from a wide range of sources—from Black Sabbath to the Black Panthers, and countless smart, consumer-targeted phrases in between—to create inspiration-speak such as “if you can dream it you must do it.” Titchner’s art practice is located somewhere between advertising, social activism, political and cultural criticism, and motivational speaking. He has exhibited in solo exhibitions at locations including Vilma Gold and the Tate Britain in London, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Peres Projects in Berlin and L.A., the Venice Biennale, and the Arnolfini in Bristol. In 2006, he was a Turner prize nominee.

On September 2, Mark Titchner gave a performance at the New Art Gallery in front of his installation “Be Angry But Don’t Stop Breathing;” the next day he was joined by the artists Nicholas Bullen and Charlie Woolley for a panel discussion at Lighthouse on the University of Wolverhampton’s campus. I was fascinated with Mark’s exhibition, and the discussion that ensued at the Lighthouse shook me out of my jet-lag long enough to attempt hijacking the conversation towards issues of interdisciplinary art practices, Metal as Sound Art, and where subculture ends and “high culture” begins. I met with Mark afterwards to ask if I could follow up with him in the future about his work. The following interview is an extension of this discussion.

Amelia Ishmael: I’d like to start by asking about the way your artwork incites public participation. From the 2006 “Thought is Signal” project in Bristol to the 2011 stage installation “Be Angry But Don’t Stop Breathing” at the New Art Gallery in Walsall, part of your practice involves handing the mic over—sometimes quite literally—to the public. This type of activism seems based on the notion that, as an artist, you have a particular platform to speak to larger groups of people; it draws attention to the artist, and artwork, as a sort of mediator. Can you tell me about this practice? Do you have an aim in mind with who the public is speaking to… is it a political entity? Or does the work exist as a broader exercise in clearing the throat, reacting to one’s world, and speaking out?

Mark Titchner: There are a number of intentions with these “interactive” works.  The first is a very simple idea about the functional potential of sculpture, that it becomes a device rather than an object. When I started to think about this concern a number of years ago, I suppose that I was thinking about creating the notion within the viewer that the work would always remain lacking or incomplete without their participation. This is obviously the case with any work of art, but I wanted to play with this idea by trying to replace some type of mental process with a “use” one. It was also very simply about the viewer taking some form of responsibility. Secondly, these works are about the way that we occupy public spaces, how we behave in them, and what a public space actually is. Artists do have a particular platform, but this is complicated in a gallery/museum situation as we have a space with a very clear hierarchy, and we learn to behave a certain way in these spaces. Though I think that this is a situation that is changing, given the emphasis on education, particularly for the young.

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Hunter Hunt-Hendrix presenting "Transcendental Black Metal" at Denmark National Art Gallery, 2011 (image gleaned from "Black Sofie," via the Facebook).

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s work first caught my attention a year and a half ago when I came across his manifesto “Transcendental Black Metal” in Hideous Gnosis, a published compendium of the papers delivered at the 2009 Black Metal Theory Symposium. Since its inception, this manifesto—which explores European and American Black Metal music subcultures, philosophy, and musicology—has sparked a lot of friction. This reaction is due, in part, to Hunter’s unique definition of Black Metal and his amalgamation of ideas that typically have a nearly allergic response to one another.  But, prominently, the most aggressive reactions have been incited because Hunter is not only delivering papers at alternative academic affairs, he is also actively redefining previous notions of the underground extreme music subgenre Black Metal as the frontman of the American Black Metal band Liturgy.

I first contacted Hunter because I was intrigued by his manifesto, ecstatic that his interpretation of Black Metal offered an account of Transcendence over the Nihilism widely prescribed to the subgenre, and inspired when I finally caught a Liturgy concert live. Since I began my art historical and curatorial research in Black Metal and contemporary art (the subject of my graduate thesis project at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) I have gleaned scores of artists whose interest in Black Metal has drastically influenced their studio practice, yet it wasn’t until I joined Hunter for a three-mile-long walk from Chicago’s West Loop arts district to the Empty Bottle concert venue this Spring that I realized the relationship between Black Metal and contemporary art was much closer than I had previously conceived. Hunter was interacting with many of the same theories that my favorite artists were, traveling from Black Metal towards studio art… meeting at the same trans-modal stage.

This interview builds off of previous interviews Hunter has given with Elodie Lesourd for C.S. Journal and Scott Indrisek for Artinfo to explore the performances of “Transcendental Black Metal” he presented earlier this year at both MoMA and the Danish National Art Gallery, and his video project “Genesis Caul.”

Amelia Ishmael: Although your work with Liturgy [Tyler Dusenbury, Greg Fox, and Bernard Gann] is probably most widely recognized, you have also presented solo art performances, such as one held at MoMA in July earlier this year. How has your approach to Black Metal provoked these projects?

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: I’d like to think that at the institutional level the divisions between the networks supporting all the different kinds of creative activity out there are evaporating—not just art and black metal. That said, there is clearly a particular resonance between the two. When I started Liturgy I was extremely frustrated, almost desperately frustrated by the realization that at a certain point I’d have to choose a “world” to deposit what I was making. I hate these “worlds” like the d.i.y. independent music scene, the metal scene, the art world, “serious music,” the so-called indie rock music industry, philosophy, critical theory. I was never able to compromise and choose a single path, so it’s been a struggle. We’ve always been half-deposited in a few different worlds. It has been very uncomfortable, because I always end up with the sense of being half-recognized, as an intriguing outsider and/or a charlatan.  At the Hideous Gnosis symposium I was the only musician to present a paper, which was the “Transcendental Black Metal” lecture. The presentation at MoMA of the same lecture was a meant to be a cross between performance art, ritual and pedagogy, in homage to Joseph Beuys, which is why I wanted to do it next to his “Eurasia Siberian Symphony” (1963) sculpture.  I presented it as a Powerpoint with laser pointer along with chanting and candles at the Danish National Art Gallery just a week ago.  It was pretty cool to actually do it in Scandinavia.  I get off on infiltrating art institutions; these are concrete ways of crossing boundaries.

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Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert, film still from "Toward the event horizon," 2011.

Earlier this year Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert responded to a call for entries I posted for two separate curatorial endeavors: one for the Black Metal theory journal Helvete, and the other for the film/video screening “Black Thorns in the Black Box.” I have no idea how these two artists escaped my knowledge for so long and instantly wanted to learn more about their practice.

Gast and Nadine were both born in Luxembourg and are currently based in Brussels, Belgium. They have worked together since 1990s, using a combination of photography, video, and sound to create potent social, political, and institutional critiques which they have exhibited at major international venues including the Muzeum Sztuki Lodz, Poland; Philharmonie, Luxembourg; Trienal de Luanda, Angola; Busan Biennale of Contemporary Art, South-Korea; Domaine de Chamarande, France; Casino Forum d’Art Contemporain, Luxembourg; and Camouflage Johannesburg, South Africa… just to name a few. And, in 2009 they represented Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale.

Their work enchants me. Not only for its intellectual richness, but Gast and Nadine’s incorporation of alchemical aesthetics are absolutely gorgeous, and their collaborations with noise musicians adds intense layers of somatic and psychological stimulation.

Following is an interview that I conducted earlier this month with Gast Bouschet.

Amelia Ishmael: Let’s start by talking about “Toward the Event Horizon,” the recent video and sound performance that took place October 8 at the Mudam Luxembourg. What happened here?

Gast Bouschet: Well, different things to different people, I guess. What’s important to us is the location and context of the event. Where we project our art and sorcery, what’s the nature of the game and what we are throwing out into the world. Making the video and building up the energy is a long and slow process. We went several times to London to film the financial district and shoot images in Iceland after the eruption of Grimsvötn earlier this year. The live performance itself was a quick discharge of this energy. As we believe that art is more than entertainment and has to go somewhere to produce results, we bombarded the Museum building with light and sound vibrations. Our goal was to trigger seismic molecular events within architectonic concrete and glass. We wanted to shake the wall and bring this thing down. Of course we failed.

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