Distinct challenges are posed when conveying Contemporary Metal Music’s(CMM) sounds and performance perspectives within a recorded and mixed form. CMM often features down tuned, heavily distorted timbres, alongside high tempi, fast and frequently complex subdivisions, and highly synchronised instrumentation. The combination of these elements results in a significant concentration of dense musical sound usually referred to as ‘heaviness’. The publications for this thesis present approaches, processes and techniques for capturing, presenting and accentuating heaviness, as well as intelligibility and performance precision which facilitate the listener’s clear comprehension of the frequent overarching complexity in the music’s construction. Intelligibility and performance precision are the principal requirements for a high commercial standard of CMM, and additionally can enhance a production’s sense of heaviness. This synoptic commentary defines heaviness from an ecological perspective, by highlighting invariant properties that shape the embodied experience of being human. Heaviness is primarily substantiated through displays of distortion and, regardless of the listening levels involved, the fundamentals of this identity are ecologically linked to volume, power, energy, intensity, emotionality and aggression. In addition to distortion, a vital component of heaviness is sonic weight, which refers to CMM’s low frequencies being associated with large, intense and powerful entities. CMM’s heaviness is also considered in terms of the perceived proximity of activity, apparent size of performance environment, and level and type of energy being expended. In particular, CMM provides the listener with the sense of utmost proximity to the band, usually without any significant perspective of depth. Production strategies for achieving a high commercial standard in CMM are then presented. This is followed by a reflective commentary on the portfolio of productions, which includes discussion of the author’s transition from emulative to professional level of production and considers originality within this body of work. By presenting the subject as an important, valid and authentic scholarly discipline, this work bridges the gap between the worlds of academia and music production practice for this style.

This thesis explores the production of DIY punk alternative cultures, communities and identities as activism. Based on an ethnographic study of DIY punk in North East England, it combines and integrates the disciplinary approaches of sociology, cultural studies and geography. Using an interpretivist epistemology, the research focuses on DIY punk participants’ subjective realities and experiences, through participant observation, of punk events and shows, and interviews. Carried out by a researcher who was both embedded in the scene, as a punk participant, and outside it, as an academic PhD student, it enhances methodological and epistemological debates about the ‘insider/outsider’ research stance and subjectivities. This thesis promotes DIY punk as a relevant and rich area for scholarship. It theorises DIY punk participation as cultural production (Moore, 2007), existing within a framework of activism, as participants attempt to bring into being ‘hoped-for futures’ (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010) using a multitude of tactics. Identifying multi-layered and multi-scalar acts of resistance, the narrowness of the concept of activism in the literature is critiqued. A more inclusive conceptualisation of activism, as more than oppositional, is proposed. A DIY ethic is theorised as anti-capitalist and interconnected with other complexly interwoven ideologies and politics. The everyday challenges that participants face, in negotiating a DIY punk ethic, and the interface between DIY punk culture and ‘mainstream’ society, are examined. Participants narratively construct DIY punk through ongoing negotiations, which affect how participants produce and interact with and in DIY punk spaces. The research contributes to scholarship on punk and community by arguing that DIY punk cultural production is strengthened by notions of community. It has wider relevance by exploring the meaning of community in a unique cultural context. It offers a definition of community that recognises DIY punk communities as imagined (Anderson, 1991) but sensitive to the significance of place.

Since rock became the subject of academic study, its attendant ideology has been scrutinised and its mythical and Romantic components exposed. Largely absent from this account has been a thorough analysis of the phenomenon of the ‘band’. The role of individual acts and the wider contexts in which they worked has been discussed at the expense of an examination of an important form of music-making. This thesis seeks to address that gap. Using a mixture of literary research and ethnography, I present an overall picture of the band as a modus operandum, charting its evolution during the emergence of rock and presenting evidence that it has become a key means by which people enter and engage with the field of popular music. I suggest that debates about ‘authenticity’ in rock, in seeking to see through industry rhetoric have overlooked the way in which creativity in bands is closely connected to social interaction. My historical analysis brings to light the way in which the group- identified band has become embedded into popular music practice through the power of narratives.Two case studies, contextualised with archival material and interviews, form the basis for a model for collective creativity. By demonstrating how social action and narrative myth feed into one another, I argue that the group identity of a band is the core of the industrially mediated texts to which audiences respond. Our understanding of how authenticity is ascribed in popular music, and rock in particular, has paid too much attention to genre-based arguments and not enough to musical and social methods. I propose a way of revising this to take better account of rock as an actual practice.

Using a distinctly and deliberately interdisciplinary approach to the subject of religion and spirituality as it presents itself within modern Western Societies today, this thesis argues that Straight Edge hardcore punk is a surrogate for religion. The term surrogate is used to denote the notion of a successor and a protector and provider of nourishment. It has been re-interpreted from Theodore Ziolkowski’s work on the same term in ‘Modes of Faith’, in which he examines surrogates for religion which emerged during the early part of the 20th century. An in-depth study, both theoretical and ethnographic in nature and presentation, of Straight Edge hardcore punk is provided to demonstrate that traditionally held categories of religion, secular, sacred and profane are being dismantled and re-built around ideas of authenticity, community, integrity, d.i.y and spirituality. Through the syncretic practices of the Straight Edge adherents they are de-essentialising religion and thus enabling us to re-consider the question of what religion is or could be. This thesis relies on theoretical ideas, interview quotes, informant quotes, researcher taken photographs, and interviewee created or utilised images, tattoos, graffiti and flyers. All of these are interspersed with song lyrics from various bands relevant to the time period under discussion and the themes being drawn out. Much like the adherents themselves, this thesis exists very much within the space of the ‘in-between’, which creates and reacts to necessary tensions throughout.

This thesis examines the subject in Popular American Metal music and culture during the period 1994-2004, concentrating on key artists of the period: Korn, Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Tura Satana and My Ruin. Starting from the premise that the subject is consistently portrayed as being at a time of crisis, the thesis draws on textual analysis as an under appreciated approach to popular music, supplemented by theories of stardom in order to examine subjectivity. The study is situated in the context of the growing area of the contemporary gothic, and produces a model of subjectivity specific to this period: the contemporary gothic subject. This model is then used throughout to explore recurrent themes and richly symbolic elements of the music and culture: the body, pain and violence, the grotesque and the monstrous, and the figure of the child, representing a usage of the contemporary gothic that has not previously been attempted. Attention is also paid throughout to the specific late capitalist American cultural context in which the work of these artists is situated, and gives attention to the contradictions inherent in a musical form which is couched in commodity culture but which is highly invested in notions of the ‘Alternative’. In the first chapter I propose the model of the contemporary gothic subject for application to the work of Popular Metal artists of the period, drawing on established theories of the contemporary gothic and Michel Foucault’s theory of confession. The second chapter focuses on instances of violence to the body and the recurrent themes of pain and violence, which are explained through the model of corporeal verification and consensual violence. In the third chapter I explore the contemporary gothic subject in the tradition of the grotesque and the monstrous, drawing on theories of the gothic monster, to suggest that the subject is engaged in a negotiation of the boundaries between self and other. The fourth chapter concentrates on the figure of the child, drawing on theories of horror film and fiction and the tradition of the Evil Innocent and the Gothic child. The final chapter is a case study of Marilyn Manson, exploring his role as a paradigmatic example of contemporary gothic subjectivity.

I am concerned with the performance of subversive ... narratives ... the performance of possibilities aims to create ... a ... space where unjust systems and processes are identified and interrogated. (Madison 280). If a woman cannot feel comfortable in her own body, she has no home. (Winterson, J; The Guardian 29.03.2013). Black metal is beyond music. It exceeds its function of musical genre. It radiates with its sepulchral fire on every side of culture [...] Black metal is the suffering body that illustrates, in the same spring, all the human darkness as much as its vital impetus. (Lesourd 41-42). Representation matters. Growing up there were only two women in famous metal bands that I would have considered role models; Jo Bench from Bolt Thrower (UK) and Sean Ysseult from White Zombie (US). This lack or under-representation of women in metal was always obvious to me and has stayed with me as I have developed as a metal musician. Women fans that see women musicians on stage, creates a paradigm of connection; that representation means something. Judith Butler states ‘on the one hand, representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative function of language which is said either to reveal or distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women’ (1). Butler references de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, Foucault and Wittig regarding the lack of category of women, that ‘woman does not have a sex’ (Irigaray qtd. in Butler 1) and that ‘strictly speaking, “women” cannot be said to exist’ (Kristeva qtd. in Butler 1). If this is to be understood in relation to my research, my embodied subjectivity as performative text, regardless of its reception suggests that my autoethnographic position acts as a counter to women’s lack of category. If there is a lack of category, then there is something important happening to ‘woman as subject’. This research seeks to analyse ‘woman as subject’ in female black metal performance by using interpretive performance autoethnography and psychoanalysis. As the guitarist and front woman with the black metal band Denigrata, my involvement has meant that the journey to find my home rests within the blackened heart of musical performance. Interpretive performance autoethnography provides the analytical frame that helps identify the ways in which patriarchal modes of address and engagement inform and frame ‘woman as subject’ in female black metal performance.

This thesis examines Chinese metal of the mainland China as a contemporary cultural phenomenon, which consists of seven chapters. It begins with three premise chapters providing the necessary definitions and terminology about Chinese metal, reviewing the relevant literature, and explaining the multiple methodologies applied, respectively. Based on that, the following chapters explore Chinese metal from four perspectives, including the history, identity, industry, and social meaning. More specifically, Chapter 4 defines the history of Chinese metal as two waves, the heavy rock era (1990-1996) and extreme metal era (2000-2013). This overall trajectory had been moving forward with the country’s economic growth, technological progress, and cultural liberalism, showing a unique U-shape curve: starting in the mainstream field in the early 1990s, declining in the late 1990s, booming underground in the early 2000s, and rising again in the 2010s. Chapter 5 illustrates that the development of Chinese metal underwent a tension between globalisation and localisation, which were reflected in the texts of the music, MV, cover art, and folk metal subgenre. Particularly, this tension resulted in an identity struggle of the current Chinese metal musicians, which was realised by a mechanism of original identity suspension, textual deconstruction, and identity reconstruction. Chapter 6 proposes that the Chinese metal industries made great progress driven by the country’s rapid economic growth and cultural diversity, and a relatively maturely industrial system with different capitals and fields had been established by the 2000s, including the sections of labels, recordings, lives, media, merchandise, and a few peripheral activities. Chapter 7 argues that because of its essence of symbolic transgression, Chinese metal provided the musicians and audiences with a quasi-ritual catharsis to temporarily escape from the pressures of the reality. Meanwhile, Chinese metal presented a unique attribute of “pseudo-evil” as an intentional reaction against the general hypocrisy which is the most severe social pathology in the contemporary Chinese society.

Né à la fin des années 1980 en Scandinavie, le Black Metal est un genre musical underground, descendant du Heavy Metal. Nous avons tenté, dans cette thèse, de reconstituer tout d’abord sa genèse, avant de montrer comment il a construit son esthétique, au travers des concepts de la transgression et de la transcendance. Grâce à une analyse fondamentalement pluridisciplinaire, nous avons observé un grand nombre de paramètres caractéristiques du genre en convoquant un panel conséquent de groupes, majoritairement européens. Il est ici question des aspects musicaux, détaillés grâce à des analyses du langage harmonique, mélodique et rythmique, ainsi que des techniques de jeux instrumentales. Une place importante est aussi accordée à l’observation minutieuse des textes. Les attitudes scéniques et l’iconographie du Black Metal sont aussi des facettes auxquelles nous avons consacré de nombreux paragraphes au sein de cette recherche doctorale. Emaillées des références littéraires, philosophiques et spirituelles des musiciens, l’éthique, les idéologies, les croyances représentent également d’incontournables clefs de lecture en vue de la compréhension de ce genre déjà trentenaire et encore insuffisamment traité au niveau universitaire en France. / Black Metal is an underground musical genre, descended from Heavy Metal and born in the late 80s in Scandinavia. In this dissertation, we are aiming to reconstruct its genesis before showing how it builds its aesthetics alongside the concepts of transgression and transcendence. Taking a fundamentally multidisciplinary perspective, we aim to maximise the genre’s characteristic parameters by addressing a large number of bands, mostly from Europe. The analysis addresses both the lyrics and the accompanying music, including the harmonic, melodic and rhythmical elements of the speech and the various instrumental techniques. Black Metal’s stage attitudes and iconography are also important contributions to the overall modes of expression. They have all been analysed in the context of the musicians’ personal ideologies, ethics, and beliefs, including their literary, philosophical and spiritual aspects, to provide a holistic understanding of this thirty-year-old genre.

Le courant des musiques industrielles, apparu au milieu des années 1970 et loin de s’en tenir à un phénomène d’expérimentation sonore, a produit en quelques années une culture visuelle globale croisant différents médias (graphisme, film, performance, vidéo), dans un dialogue étroit avec l’héritage de la modernité et sous l’emprise croissante des technologies. Ce phénomène britannique amorce un mouvement qui connaît un grand développement en Europe, aux États-Unis et au Japon durant les années 1980. Les expérimentations sonores déployées par les groupes industriels – élaboration de synthétiseurs, manipulation et transformation de sons enregistrés issus de bandes audio, recyclées ou conçues par les artistes – viennent enrichir un éventail de productions visuelles radicales, prenant ses sources dans les utopies modernistes de la première partie du XXe siècle. Cette thèse entend inscrire le projet visuel de la culture industrielle dans une histoire générale de l’art en analysant les différentes thématiques abordées par les principaux acteurs du mouvement. Dans la première partie, l’étude du contexte postindustriel de l’époque révèle combien ces performers intègrent à leurs œuvres une esthétique de la destruction par une appropriation des friches industrielles et urbaines comme nouveaux lieux de création. La deuxième partie envisage les « tactiques de choc » du genre industriel par le prisme du contrôle mental, de la criminalité, du totalitarisme et de la psychiatrie, avant de traiter d’un féminisme pro-sexe radical. Ces enjeux transitent vers un fort intérêt pour l’occultisme et le transhumanisme, faisant l’objet d’une troisième partie consacrée à la façon dont les artistes modifient leurs corps par des rituels magiques contemporains et par des expériences physiques confrontées aux nouvelles technologies qui renouvellent les protocoles habituels du domaine de la performance. / Industrial musics appeared in the mid-1970s, and far from sticking to a phenomenon of sound experimentation, produced in a few years a global visual culture operating at the intersection of a multitude of media (graphics, film, performance, video), in a close dialogue with the legacy of modernity and under the growing influence of technology. This British movement had a great development in Europe, the United States and Japan during the 1980s. The sound experiments deployed by the industrial bands – designing synthesizers, manipulate and transform sounds recorded from audio tapes, recycled or conceived by the artists – were supplemented by a rich array of radical visual productions, taking its sources in the modernist utopias of the first part of the 20th century. This thesis aims to include the visual project of industrial culture in a general history of contemporary art by analyzing the different topics tackled by the main actors of the movement. In the first part, the study of the postindustrial context of this period reveals how these performers integrate in their works an aesthetic of destruction through industrial and urban wastelands used as new places of creation. The second part examines the “shock tactics” of industrial music through mind control, crime, totalitarianism and psychiatry, before dealing with radical sex-positive feminism. These issues move towards a strong interest in occultism and transhumanism, studied in the third part, which is devoted to the body modifications of these artists through contemporary magic rituals and physical experiments confronted with new technologies that renew the usual protocols in performance art.