Until the Light Takes Us

Until the Light Takes Us

95 Minutes

It’s not even remotely a part of our collective cultural consciousness, but there’s no denying that black metal’s been a recurring, if esoteric and mostly novel, object of fascination for people-of-a-specific-temperament the world over for a number of years now. That its draw has always existed more outside the realm of its sound is interesting, because both the historic/contextual fascination and musical rejection of the genre are rooted in the same feeling of repulsion. The morbidity of the sub-genre’s story is paralleled by the suffocating nihilism of the music, all of it aggressively and willfully buried, entombed, haw haw, beneath its deliberately poor production quality; restless high-pitched tremolo riffs and primal howls seep through the cracks of tape hiss and relentlessly fast popcorn drums, all accompanied by magisterial keyboards or other similarly sweepingly melodic touches that only serve to isolate the sound all the more. The music is atmospheric, a sonic wash, the opposite extreme of ambient.

I say these things because Until the Light Takes Us, a documentary ostensibly about black metal, never really bothers about the music, its soundtrack is instead dominated by ambient acts like Boards of Canada and Múm, and when a black metal song does come on, it usually fades away 20 seconds later, undermining any possibility of the music’s atmosphere coming through. The film, it seems, assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the music and with its history. I guess that’s to be expected, given the fact that almost no one would be drawn to watching it without being attracted by either the music or the sordid interests that accompany it, but it unfortunately arrives at the tail end of a number of black metal-related books, films, TV specials and magazine features that have already covered a lot of the same territory – the murders, the church burnings, the ridiculous Kiss-style stage makeup most commonly referred to as corpse paint. Because the music is so de-emphasized in the film, the personalities on-screen are left stranded without their largest statements, and whatever their music can do to better articulate their ennui is lost. You’re left with nothing but a bunch of idiotic malcontents. This isn’t a documentary about art or about artists, to the extent that it doesn’t allow itself to be either.

The filmmakers apparently moved to Norway for a couple years to get to know these guys and up their degrees of access, which shows in some of the episodes they manage to capture – “Fenriz” of Darkthrone getting tear gas taken away from him on a train, “Count Grishnackh” sitting in his jail cell (for murder) describing why his childhood was idyllic and settling on the adjective “homogeneous,” “Frost” appearing at a gallery in Italy to put on a performance at a black metal-themed art show that results in him stabbing the shit out of a couch and then himself. Between the white supremacist garbage and the violence you’ve got enough of a reason to be uninterested in these people, but the intellectual rigor of their positions leave something to be desired, as well. “Norway’s the kind of place where people stand next to each other at the bus stop and don’t say a word to one another, can you imagine?” says Fenriz. Woah bro, it’s like, all the lonely people, you know? Where do they all come from?

by Andrei Alupului