Neofolk – Page 3 – A Blaze Ansuz: Antifascist Neofolk

Wardruna is Taking Back Nordic Pagan Culture and Music from the Far-Right

As a blog, we have focused on profiling some smaller and emerging neofolk bands in an effort to draw out the DIY elements of a grassroots scene. The perception that many have of neofolk is that all the major bands are held tightly by the far-right, examples being Blood + Sun or Death in June, but there is a whole universe of major neofolk bands who have taken a public stand against white nationalism. This is particularly true outside of the narrow English language post-punk bands that dominate much of the music press coverage. Many of the bands who drive their inspiration directly from the folk music run against this fascist interpretation, including the heathen bands of the Northern Tradition.

Wardruna is the best known of these, with their notoriety resulting from the path they have charted in taking back Nordic heritage and history from those who have attempted to racialize that history. Wardruna, which is primarily the project of musician and Nordic pagan historian Einar Selvik, has become a central figure in this trend for bringing a certain historical accuracy to portrayals of Viking Age art and music. This is what led Wardruna to the soundtrack for the History Channel show Vikings, which brought Selvik a lot of attention.

The sound itself is subcategorized as Nordic folk as it focuses heavily on heathenry, the pagan tradition that honors the Aesir and Venir and the traditions of the Nordic people’s in what is now Scandinavia. Their music drives directly from the myths and sagas, with a massive range of instrumentation that pulls from the diverse cultural span that made up the Viking Age.

When people hear terms like Nordic heritage and Viking music there is a certain unease that appears because of the way that fascists have appropriated that culture, a process that goes back almost 200 years into the early volkisch movements of 19th Century Germany. Using pseudoscienifitic and mystical ideas, they created the idea that Germanic Gods were part of the spiritual psyche of people of Germanic ethnic heritage, and that those archetypes define them as people. This rejects the actual history of heathenry, which was diverse, multiracial, and had influences from global cultural exchange.

This is a part of why Selvik has made Wardruna heavily indebted to historical accuracy and openly professes the intent of the project. White nationalism has nothing to do with the rediscovery of paganism, and uses a false modern construct to employ ancient folkways as an excuse for fascist revolution. As Selvik says:

This project takes inspiration from our native culture but it is about creating something current and new. It is also important for me to dispel a few myths about the Runes and Norse culture that have been misinterpreted and made almost cartoonish by the media.The image of the Runes has been tarnished by some right-wing racist idiots who have no business using them and only did so for their own gain.

This reconstruction of paganism is also in opposition to Christianity, seeing it as an imperialist religion that wipes away indigenous cultures through domination. This is, again, a fact that has often drawn in elements of the far-right that share an anti-Christian stance. It is also what drew in the black metal element, and something that Selvik has in common with early Wardruna member Gaahl of the early Norwegian Black Metal band Gorgoroth.

The serious focus to pagan histories, so much so that Selvik gives lectures on pagan history and sells books on heathen rituals and spirituality on the Wardruna website, is also what creates the unique multicultural understanding the band brings to the music. For Selvik, it is the diversity of pagan practice that actually unites humanity.

I’m generally interested in culture, whether it’s slavic, siberian or african. What’s fascinating, if you go back in time far enough, you’re going to see all these similarities, how we are connected. Of course, in my work, in early work with Wardruna, because the history is very fragmented, it’s only natural to look into other neighbouring cultures for inspiration and also clues.

Instead, it is allegiance to the ideas and passion for the tradition that binds a community together, not a false notion of race.

I prefer to sow seeds and let them grow, and this little weed then enters the shade of the new shoots. It is very convenient to live far from the origin of a tradition, claiming it for yourself and focusing on ethnicities rather than nature. At the same time, nature has shaped culture. I would much rather be a blót with a Spanish person who gets it than with a Norwegian who does not get it. If you are stupid, you are stupid. It does not matter if you’re descended from any Viking king.

The increased focus on Nordic history and culture, which Selvik has been a big part of, has helped to create a barrier to stop the far-right from being able to continue appropriating it without a counter-narrative.

It is a very positive effect, that increased interest does not allow the subculture on the extreme right wing to use our history in peace. We have somehow taken our own story back.

“It is difficult to take them seriously, and it testifies to great lack of knowledge when right-wing extremist groups have used our cultural heritage in their propaganda,” says Selvik, pointing out that the far-right lacks a clear understanding of Nordic paganism and instead uses it simply as an aesthetic rather than a true spiritual path.

Gaahl had been a part of the project since its founding, which many saw as problematic given that he often made up the more offensive side of black metal and was involved in far-right gangs in his youth. He has since repudiated those politics and publicly rejected them, and spoke out about what it is like to be an open gay man in the black metal scene, but we were still not comfortable with his involvement in Wardruna. In 2015 he left the band entirely and has not had any more relationship to it, a move that we support. We would not have included Wadruna if Gaahl was still in the band, and we think it is important to outline this history.

Going forward, Wardruna is continuing to be a massive project, one of Selvik’s many music endeavors, and will set the tone for much of how this more traditional sound comes together in neofolk. It is his public declarations of the intention of the music that is important because it forces the community away from an apolitical stance. While Wardruna is not political on contemporary issues, it is much more focused on songs about Thor and sailing, they use the moments they have to make it clear that they are taking a stand against the fascist creep into this cultural landscape.

We are putting a few of our favorite songs by Wardruna from their Bandcamp below, and just added a few Wardruna tracks to our Antifascist Neofolk Spotify playlist!

Deafest and Uaithe’s 2014 Concept Album is a Lost Neofolk/Black Metal Classic

There is a tendency in “extreme” music, from black metal to neofolk to grindcore, to create a constant churn of creative partnering. Dozens of musicians lead to hundreds of projects, chronicled in collaborations, limited edition split records, b-side and “bootlegged” live tracks. One of the reasons why niche music like this has been able to succeed is in the massive amount of material, often turned into collectibles themselves, that is out there. This move towards collaboration has led to some of the biggest antifascist black metal projects like the Worldwide Association of Metalheads Againsts Nazism (WOMAN) and the Black Metal Alliance Crushing Intolerance compilations. These bring together leftist metal bands in an explicit statement of support, and with the Black Metal Alliance this has meant a particular focus on eradicating National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) who try to create a metal to nationalist pipeline.

The black folk metal band Deafest has been behind the Black Metal Alliance’s efforts and has been releasing stacks of collaborations, including a fantastic 2017 split with Kageraw and Rampancy. Over epic tracks, ranging fifteen minutes plus, there is a musical progression with its own storytelling beats, crushing solos matched by moments of sheer silence, just the story of black metal on the neofolk ledge.

We aren’t here to talk about Deafest’s long career though (we will definitely dig more deeply into them and the Black Metal Alliance in the future), but instead to highlight a particular collaboration they had with the one-person instrumentalist project Uaithe out of Los Angeles. Originally named In The Sea of Trees, which was highlighted by antifascist black metal blogs, they joined up with Deafest for a collaborative album in 2014 called Of Moss and Stone. Deafest’s tracks are what you would expect, ear splitting but grounded in the kind of nature gazing that has made them an anchor for the revolutionary green revival that is happening in metal along with bands like Wolves in the Throne Room.

The three tracks by Uaithe offer a different angle, sparse strings and light drums rebound the sound to something traditional, something that could have existed for centuries. There is a minimalism to this approach while calling to ancestral music that feels even more centered in the forests they hope to save. The same fusion that made In The Sea of Trees stand out, mixing in Japanese, Romani, and other folk traditions. Like much of the cascadian scene, there is a strong green anarchist relationship to the sound, which is why the pairing with Deafest is symbiotic.

Of Moss and Stone is a concept album with Deafest and Uaithe alternating tracks, which are numbered and meant to tell a unified story. This works in the kind of harmony you would least expect, alternating the vicious clashes of metal war and the kind storytelling of the hearth. It is this kind of collaboration that keeps these genres vital, and why we wanted to raise up a record that is five years old and has made few rounds.

We are embedding the album below from Bandcamp, but it is unfortunately not available on Spotify so it cannot be added to the Antifascist Neofolk playlist. Because of that, we will be adding a few stray tracks, including an old classic by Rome, and ‘Rite Against the Right’ by Sieben (who will be profiling in the coming weeks).

Check out the Spotify Antifascist Neofolk playlist!

Hindarfjäll is the Nordic Folk Band You Have Been Waiting For

The term Nordic folk has emerged to distinguish a series of bands that are directly connected to the revival of heathenry, the tradition of the Aesir and Venir, often focused on Nordic cultural identity and accurate history of pre-Christian Scandinavian countries. The term has a double usage in that it is a way to not say neofolk, which has the occasional baggage of costumed racists like Sol Invictus or Allerseelen. Drawing a distinction is especially important as white nationalists have staked their claim on heathenry, using pseudoscientific theories like “metagenetics” and misreadings of Carl Jung to argue that heathenry is a religion that is for people of Northern European descent only.

For the vast majority of heathens, particularly heathens outside of the U.S., this notion is absurd, and instead Asatru and heathen denominations across Nordic countries have been active in anti-racist campaigns and welcome a worldwide kindred. The neofolk duo Hindarfjäll comes from this tradition, using the traditional regional instruments and sounds of Norway and Sweden to revive a historical music that is tied directly to the earth. Started by vocalist Nils Edström in 2015, the project was inspired by bands like Wardruna in that they drove directly from a historical memory that centered an earthy pagan worldview.

Hindarfjäll is centered well in neofolk in both sound and practice, with each member filling multiple roles as they juggle a range of instruments from flutes to guitar to bassy percussion, all backed by looping chants. There is something haunting about the folk-inspired sound that comes out of the frigid woods, and Hindarfjäll feels like they are emerging with a sound meant to capture a life guided more by the cycles of nature than the modern travails of politics and conflict. Each track feels precisely laid, patient and haunting, acting as a reminder of a life that once existed and could again. This may be why the bands in the Nordic folk scene have been so centered on history, particularly the accuracy of it, because of the misappropriation the far-right has made of their cultural legacy.

Hindarfjäll is new on the scene and has yet to put out a full-length album, and has instead been releasing demos that sound like they could have been birthed by a dozen musicians syncing for a decade. With the very brief coverage they have had, they have used it to make a public statement about what they stand for. Before playing their first live show in 2016 at The Asgardian, they wanted to make clear that they reject any element of the racialist pagan movement.

I want to add is that I think that racism is a very important subject because Asatru and the music we play attracts a lot of idiots unfortunately. Such as nazis and racists, I think that’s unacceptable. Hindarfjäll does NOT tolerate such things. We take a stand against hatred and racism.

The Asgardian was put together by Asatru UK, a heathen association that prohibits racism in their organization. “Asatru UK is an organisation that abhors all forms of discrimination and racism in Heathenry, and though it is sad to say – these views ARE still out there. For the good of our members and the community we are creating, we do have to have some measures in place to keep that community hate free.”

We are jumping the gun a bit to include Hindarfjäll since they only have a few public recorded tracks and have yet to release their full length album, but we were blown away and wanted them in the mix early. We are putting some tracks below from Bandcamp and YouTube, but unfortunately they are not on Spotify yet and cannot be added to the playlist.

Cede No Ground to Fascists

Margaret Killjoy discussed why romantic ‘extreme’ music should not just be given over to fascists.

By Margaret Killjoy

When the nazis came to town, a friend of mine got in her pickup truck and drove around the entire night. Not just to keep track of the fascists, but to give rides and offer safety to anyone and everyone who felt threatened by them. I know without a doubt she would have climbed out of her truck and intervened more bodily if it had been required of her.

She’s also white and has a rather large and prominent tattoo of Mjolnir, “Thor’s hammer.” She listens to black metal, writes in runes, tends towards misanthropy, and draws strength from the old gods. These are all things a lot of nazis do too. Which is to say, my friend spends a lot of her time in contested cultural terrain. I love her for it.

* * *

My favorite type of metal is black metal. My favorite type of goth is neofolk. My favorite type of punk is oi!. All my favorite musical genres are rather heavily populated by fascists.

I don’t like fascists.

I still listen to black metal because I love it. I still listen to black metal because I don’t believe we should cede cultural and aesthetic terrain to fascists.

On one level, it’s easy to distinguish myself and my interests from those of fascists: I don’t believe in racism, “racialism,” conservatism, or patriarchy. I don’t believe in authoritarianism or nationalism. But the fascist project, as I understand it, doesn’t organize itself solely on political lines; it’s actively engaged in cultural warfare (which it refers to as “apolitical”). It attempts to imbue society with certain values.

Some of those values are those overtly political ones I outlined above, but there are others. There are values like glory, honor, struggle, tradition, faith, reverence for the earth, love of family, and the beauty of death. These values aren’t inherently fascistic, but they are values that are easily perverted to fascist ends.

I’m drawn to black metal and neofolk precisely because they incorporate aesthetics based on those values. This wasn’t a conscious choice, of course. I like the music that I like. But in retrospect, it seems obvious that these values attract me.

As anarchists, we interact with those values too.

To take “war” as an example: I once wrote a book about the militaristic defense of an anarchist society. I struggled to represent war as complicated and traumatizing at the same time as I valorized it. Whether or not we tend to use words like glory, honor, or valor, we celebrate the courage of people who are willing to fight and potentially die for the larger social body. We celebrate that courage because we need that courage ourselves, and it is largely through culture that we imbue ourselves with that courage. As an antiauthoritarian, however, I’m going to go about imbuing that courage in a different way than authoritarians might. I have no interest into romanticizing a sanitized version of war. The state has an interest in creating naive soldiers, but I want to represent struggle as dangerous and horrific at the same time as it is beautiful.

We must represent war if we are to represent society honestly, and certainly if we are to represent revolution honestly. The glorification of struggle is cultural/aesthetic terrain I must, by necessity as a non-pacifist anarchist fiction writer, share with fascists.

A lot of fascists are also into paganism (particularly European paganism, naturally). Paganism is not terrain we should cede to fascists. Some people (antifascist pagans) are not capable of ceding the terrain to fascists, so it behooves the rest of us to not abandon them.

If we decide black metal is fascist, then fascists will recruit black metal fans uncontested. If antifascists decide that some specific subculture, aesthetic ideas, or spiritual practices belong solely to fascists, then we are in essence giving to fascists all the practitioners and appreciators of those ideas. We shouldn’t let nazis have nice things.

Of course there is cultural terrain that is, and should stay, solely in the hands of the right wing. White people with swastika tattoos are not really fighting fascists for cultural terrain — they are either ignorantly or maliciously promoting nazism. Bands that will neither confirm-nor-deny being nazis and make constant use of nazi imagery both for its shock value and because they are advocates of European nationalism, like Death In June, are doing the work of the right wing.

It behooves people who are in contested cultural terrain to, well, contest it. Practitioners of European paganism are working hard to drive nationalists and fascists out of their spaces. Even “nonpolitical” black metal bands can and have taken stands against fascism, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask for someone to say “fuck no” when asked directly if they are national socialists.

It’s possible that we might lose some of these fights. Despite skinhead culture coming out of a multiracial British working class identity, and despite antifascist skins standing at the forefront of antifascist organizing and fighting for decades, the skinhead aesthetic (and name) became practically synonymous with racism.

I don’t spend much of my time talking about “honor” or “glory,” because the first thing I think of when I think of those words isn’t pretty. Maybe we lost the fight for those specific words, I don’t know. The concepts themselves, though, still have resonance for me. I don’t always know how to talk about those values as an anarchist, but I do know that they get at something deep and meaningful to me. I cry every time I visit the graves of the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago, and when I need strength I draw upon my pride at being part of a long tradition of rebels.

I don’t want the fascists to have the concepts themselves, and I will fight for them. Because I like black metal and hate nazis.

If you appreciate Margaret Killjoy’s writing and want to help her do more of it, please consider supporting her via Patreon.

This article was first posted on Margaret Killjoy’s blog Birds Before the Storm on May 11, 2017.

Nuwisha, Portland’s Eco-Neofolk Band Bringing DIY Back to the Scene

The wooded strip of land that runs along the coast West of the Cascade Mountains seems to draw its own sound, meted out of the deep woods and the terror of deforestation and ecological collapse. Nuwisha makes perfect sense as it is part and parcel of this environmental inspiration that comes from “cascadia,” the western region of Oregon and Washington that stands out as a unique bioregion. Like other cascadian bands, particularly black metal projects like Wolves in the Throne Room, there is a “cascadia scene” of bands coming out of the woods, with their music tied deeply to what the natural world inspires and the fierce rage that is sparked in its defense.

We first came across Nuwisha on Red and Anarchist Black Metal (RABM), which noted that it really is a blackened neofolk project because of the black metal elements like a grinding guitar that appears as a layer under some songs or the screeching vocals. These are really intermittent, and it feels more like Current 93 in the vocal style than Empyrium. You get the sense when listening to their debut demo and their 2013 album Solitary are the Winter Woods that this is a DIY project, driven people getting together and performing and recording it themselves.

While it is a diverse and eclectic sound, there is a conscious effort to appeal to the neofolk scene, even including a musical interlude halfway through called “Winter Interlude (A Song of Ice and Fire).” The lyrics are classic neofolk fare, focusing on the cycles of natures, the celebrations of the equinox and Ostara, and calling back to an earth-centered view of what creates vibrance in a community. The stifled cold of winter plays its own character in the album, which is the kind of mournful cry that often gives neofolk that bitter call, the kind of thing that is perfect for your Yule sunset playlist.

The band launched its first demo, Laughter on the Wind, 2012 in Portland, Oregon by Rowan WalkingWolf, who is noted by RABM to be one of their readers and how they were keyed into the band even though it may be a little past their scope. The eco-anarchist perspective was highlighted there, saying that it was the “profound experiences in and deep ecological connections with the Cascadian landbase and by dreams of the inevitable annihilation of civilization and the aftermath thereof.” This is reminiscent of many of the hardcore projects that lingered around Earth First! In the 1990s, like Earth Crisis. Rowan has a second neofolk project, Sparrowhawk, which we will profile in the future, which also has members of the Portland synth-folk ensemble Plantrae (we will probably get to them too).

Nuwisha seems to be on hold right now since they have not had a major release since 2013, which likely owes to the fact that Rowan is running around starting up new projects around cascadia. This is common in this sort of scene, constantly reinventing the sound, starting new bands and solo projects, and finding any way of making something unique in a flurry of Bandcamp releases.

Nuwisha is not on Spotify, so we will just put the Bandcamp embedding here to check out. We may start doing an alternative playlist function so we can keep bringing in bands not found on Spotify.