It’s those frictions, this spark, that let in the imagination, that slowly stretch and connect all the gentle, impossible places. This is where I can say: imagine Puberty and the shadow around her body as the pearl diver and the octopi on the beach. Imagine that the shadow is a glowing, black organ that stretches out of her body, fusing inside and outside, darkness and glow, fury and joy, her hatred and mine. This is where I can say: imagine the Southerner’s soft consonants and vowels, like when they say hate like hadår (or Father like Fadær), imagine how this softer language stretches like amphibian, salty tentacles from further down in the deep, down in the sea, the throat, the body, the underground, the magical dimensions.
These are the associations that white honesty erases, scrubbing them along its sheepback rocks. They can only be resurrected in the underground. This is what I wanted to write to you, in a language that love couldn’t summarise.
Tell me, in your darkness, in your ocean, am I ever there? Have we ever reached each other?
The Pixels
We’re back where we started, in the camcorder universe, in the black metal bonus material. We see spruces, forest floor, grey sky. The camera movement has just made the forest sway and flicker as Nocturno Culto or Fenriz walks along the path, I don’t remember which one. He’s no longer in the frame. I’ve just scribbled something in the film’s overcrowded side panel, and as I did so I briefly paused the video. We’re now watching a still without people, a quarter-of-a-second loop with only nature, swirling trees, blurred tree trunks and vague clouds.
Here, the primitive digital camera technology meets subculture’s low resolution. If we zoom further in on the image we won’t see more detail. We can’t see snowflakes shaken off the blurred branches or the difference between the bark and the wood inside it. We can’t see the actual curves, the elasticity of the branches. The image is flat and pixelated, an unreal representation of reality. The file data doesn’t bother with fidelity to nature, with gravity’s pull or the associations of the treetops’ upward growth. The only thing reproduced of this exaggerated colour contrast is an ambiguous chaos of black and white. The frame lacks nuance, yet deep down in the roots of subculture, in the network and seeding speed between the nerds, the fans and the enthusiasts, sending the file from machine to machine. The only thing we can zoom ourselves into is our own fantasy. Only I can supply these pixels with my own.
We’re in a different image now. It’s almost identical to the still, but this isn’t from the Darkthrone DVD. This is a picture I’ve taken. We’re not in 1993, but in 1998. The photograph is from a practice session with the metal band I’m in; we’ve probably attempted to record a music video late at night, but I’m not the one filming, of course. I’ve just photographed the place we’ve been, that’s why there are no people in this image, only a clearing with a narrow path through the snow and some trees lit up by torches or the front lights of a car. You can just make out footprints next to each other on the dark snow under the trees. Apart from that, the image is coarse and underexposed, the snow is grey and all colours between the trees are erased, all of them black and dark grey. Only the contours of the treetops are visible against the sky.
I have a lot of these pictures of Southern forests, taken when I was in college, and I’ve seen a lot of similar motifs on Terese’s old disks and from other black metal videos and band pictures from the ’90s. In these photos it’s always winter, and there are always the same trees, spruce and pine, the same sections of forest canopy. The pictures are never realistic; there’s always too much movement or too little focus to give the sensation that anything’s been captured. Branches, snow, stones and white-hot sky bleed into each other. I don’t understand why I always take these kinds of pictures, test shots without people, the lighting far too dim, and the resolution too low. I have no interest in learning photography, not while I’m in college. My pitiful images are doomed to end up in the recycling bin on one of the school computers. But for some reason I keep doing it anyway, continue to use my terrible photography skills to document things that seem unnecessary. I continue to be pulled toward something, the bad, the empty and unreal.
A series of these images are emerging now, both stills and unused test-photographs. They are so similar they can almost be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, to form a continuous forest. But only just. Together they form a chaotic landscape, a crushed forest. It’s not nature, or a reproduction of nature, that these images seek. These images want to destroy what we’ve been taught is reality. It’s as if we’re attempting the same thing, in different places, in different times, me and Darkthrone and lots of other teens. As if we’re zooming into the darkness, into the silent letters, looking for a place that doesn’t exist.
Look at this place here … in one of the pictures … and look at it here, in the next one. We’re back in one of my documentation images. It’s impossible to see where it was shot – Fevik, Austre Moland, Nedenes, Groos?
Here, the real place doesn’t exist anymore, just as Nocturno Culto doesn’t exist in the frame of that first still. The only thing left is an impossible place.
We’re in
