Burning the Black Flame

or, Why I Made This

The Black Flame began in 2011 as a little blog of mine that I christened (lol) Blackened Relics. I started it with the intention of curating an archive of all of the (digitized) black metal-related materials that I'd been collecting since 1998 or so: interviews, photos, articles, etc. As I began work, it rapidly began to resemble and, more importantly, feel like those glorious old, DIY internet fanpages hosted by GeoCities, Angelfire, Lycos, and the like. It was as much nostalgic for me as it was an archive of materials: having been born in 1985, the very year that Bathory's The Return... was released, I initially dove into extreme metal with the help of the good ol' internet in 1997 after having initially discovered "the Underground" in a feature on it in an old Guitar World. I touched on this above, but to expand more fully: I miss looking at homemade websites that kinda look like shit but that were obviously created out of love of and enthusiasm for this music. That's what I have ultimately envisioned for Blackened Relics. Think of it, then, as an archive modeled after fansites like they used to make 'em; fansites are, after all, the fanzines of music sites. Let me explain further.

When I discovered black metal, there was no Wikipedia, there was no Encyclopedia Metallum (bless 'em), there was no Lords of Chaos, there was no Google as we know it today. Hell, there wasn't even Napster yet: there was just Alta Vista leading us to ineptly designed fansites and Audiogalaxy. Oh, there was also ANUS, but that was ever only so helpful when you're 12 and trying to read a review that wants you to know that "Intricate subchambers of reaction provide space for iteration of higher level events." Yeah.

I miss those days. I remember poring over search results for hours hoping for something useful, or at least something new, about this extraordinary new world of music I'd just stumbled upon from some out of the way fan site with five thousand visitors ever; I remember hearing A Blaze in the Northern Sky or De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas or The Celtic Winter for the very first time via mp3s with hilarious(ly low) bit rates that only featured the middle two minutes of a song; and I remember waiting for what seemed like years for those very records to come in the mail after having finally found them in some bedroom distro on the other side of the world, because none of them had been reissued yet and CD Now sure didn't carry 'em, never mind a physically-located music/media store.

And you know what? It was awesome. It may seem silly to some of you who don't know what I'm talking about, and it may even seem silly to some of you who do, but for me the manner in which I dove into metal was awesome and ultimately life-altering. I can only imagine how much more awesome discovering this music must have been for a tape-trader five, six, seven years prior, but I digress.


I've been babbling about black metal, and other music that I love, for a good long time in a good many places. That being the case, certain things you'll find here have been taken from Blackened Relics - may it rest in peace; the limitations of Blogspot just no longer suited my needs - and from my account over at Rate Your Music. Indeed, The Black Flame is something of an evolution of Blackened Relics, which was also focused expressly on old black metal by way of interviews, photos, and musings, and, like this current site, intentionally constructed as reminiscent of DIY internet black metal fanpages from the '90s and early '00s (aka I'm only just learning html). This site is significantly grander in magnitude than its predecessor, though, and while I'll be reusing certain content from Blackened Relics, this is intended to be its own thing.

The spirit that I was trying to achieve, however, is very much the same, and in fact I used "burning the black flame" as a tagline throughout my posts on Blackened Relics going nearly back to the beginning, in 2011. It was, and still is, a universal metaphor for the personalized ritual in which each of us no doubt participate when immersing ourselves in black metal. I'm sure the specifics vary from person to person and even from day to day, but the net result is the same: you're looking to capture the feeling - that most singular of feelings that you can really only ever get from proper black metal - and capturing that feeling is burning the black flame.

And hey, look: burning the black flame don't gotta be fancy. It can be as convoluted or as simple as you need, and bottom line, if you're here, you're burning it. I bring the candles, you bring the flame, sweet to taste, saccharine.