Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal

Description

This is the first extensive scholarly study of drone metal music and its religious associations, drawing on five years of ethnographic participant observation from more than 300 performances and 74 interviews, plus surveys, analyses of sound recordings, artwork, and extensive online discourse about music. Owen Coggins shows that while many drone metal listeners identify as non-religious, their ways of engaging with and talking about drone metal are richly informed by mysticism, ritual and religion. He explores why language relating to mysticism and spiritual experience is so prevalent in drone metal culture and in discussion of musical experiences and practices of the genre. The author develops the work of Michel de Certeau to provide an empirically grounded theory of mysticism in popular culture. He argues that the marginality of the genre culture, together with the extremely abstract sound produces a focus on the listeners' engagement with sound, and that this in turn creates a space for the open-ended exploration of religiosity in extreme states of bodily consciousness.

Owen Coggins is Honorary Associate of the Religious Studies Department at the Open University and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Brunel University London, UK.

Mysticism, Religion and Ritual in Drone Metal provides an interesting and persuasive look at an alternative expression of the human mystical impulse, as found in a seemingly secular, relatively unpopular form of pop culture. * Nova Religio * This book could be useful in upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses to work through overlaps between more extreme regions of popular culture and more traditionally "religious" settings mediated by iconography, ritual, and embodied experience. * Religious Studies Review * In his ground-breaking new book, Owen Coggins has found a way of analysing mysticism and the religious in a way that refuses easy banalities and looks directly at the ambiguities of the musical talk he studies. * Performance, Religion & Spirituality * Coggins offers insightful perspective in a field that can be rife with pitfalls for researchers not attuned to the subtleties of the music and culture. * The Wire * A ground-breaking study of the genre's culture which expands the horizons of our thinking about mysticism, ritual and spirituality in musical experience. I look forward to seeing how this landmark contribution shapes our ever-evolving understanding of the making of new forms of mysticism and ritual in, through and with music. * Popular Music * A landmark achievement in the scholarship of religion and popular music. Coggins's exhaustively researched and theoretically astute book not only sheds light on an under-documented metal subgenre, it succeeds in demystifying mysticism as a form of discourse. A must-read for anyone with an interest in the varieties of musical experience in the contemporary world. * Jeremy Wallach, Professor of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, USA and co-editor of Metal Rules the Globe (2011) and author of Modern Noise, Fluid Genres (2008) * It is easy to claim that religion and the sacred manifest in popular music. It is much more difficult to demonstrate it. By turning the attention to religion as a communicative resource for articulating the drone metal experience, Owen Coggins does exactly that. Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal is not only the first in-depth study of the genre, but also provides religious studies and metal studies with fresh and inspiring perspectives. * Titus Hjelm, Reader in Sociology, University College London, UK * Owen Coggins' innovative study on metal music and the subgenre of drone music and mysticism is simply outstanding. It offers significant new perspectives for music scholars, metal music studies and religious studies and those who seek to bathe in its sound, not just listen to it. Coggins opens up novel ways in which the listener can engage with these musical forms that take us beyond what is painful to the ear, disruptive to the body, but enlightening for the soul. * Niall Scott, Reader in Philosophy and Popular Culture, University of Central Lancashire, UK *