The Theosophist

This conceptually weighty EP self identifies as “gnostic black metal”. Borrowing artwork from William Blake, and drawing heavily on ancient Roman and Greek esotericism, one could be forgiven for thinking that ‘The Theosophist’ would be a confused exercise in sensory overload so common to modern extreme metal with aspirations to the intellectual. But no, Rome’s Theomachia keep things brief and understated for their debut EP, offering an interesting blend of trancelike repetitions, with elements of minimal Russian black metal, neofolk via the lens of a Negura Bunget or a Khors, and some more familiar Burzum shaped calling cards.

The black metal elements are kept minimal and distant, with simple ruminating riffs set to galloping rhythms, all deployed in order to set the scene rather than acting as a centrepiece. Picking up these simple melodic frameworks are breakdowns of clean guitar arpeggios that draw the rhythmic philosophy closer to the personable character of folk, which serves as a welcome contrast to the washed out severities of the black metal elements. Drums submit to these rhythmic dictates, switching from mid-paced blast-beats or busy double bass driven drum patterns to simpler rock back-beats with ease.

Vocals veer from mid-ranged growling to droning clean vocals, the latter of which is not the strongest in terms of carrying a tune, but the distant, almost sleepy style fits the subtle, dreamlike qualities that Theomachia flesh out on this EP.

The push and pull between the aggression of the distorted style and the profound fragility of ritualistic clean chanting is mapped onto equivalent tensions found within the music itself. The folk elements are not simply decorating a black metal EP, they seem to be working in direct opposition to them. A subtle war of attrition is drawn out between the competing tenets of human fragility vs. the bracing dangers of the universe external to this.

And this is where the tag “gnostic black metal” warrants further interrogation, because it seems that we could analyse all great works within the genre in these terms to some extent. In its attempt to subvert the various conceptual frameworks imposed from above by institutional hierarchies, black metal seeks to cut the umbilical cord of prolonged socialisation under consumer capitalism. Black metal is a form of meditation directed toward experiencing what the romantics would have called the Sublime directly nad without mediation, whether this be through direct experience of natural wilderness, the currents of deep history, mythology, or the thrills of internal exploration via the physical and emotional extremities of occult ritual and personal strife.

One reading of the various currents of black metal over the years is that of a quest to bypass the noise of societal hierarchies, preconceptions, and traditional moral structures in search of a more permanent reality that persists beyond our own in-built mortality.

It is interesting therefore, that Theomachia, in attempting to expand on this idea by directly referencing this as conceptual material for ‘The Theosophist’, should come to such an understated and – dare I say it – intimate EP by black metal standards. Although the familiar cogs of black metal are at work behind the scenes on these three tracks, they work in direct contradiction to the underlying themes of the music, which seem to lean more toward neofolk in spirit. Most black metal searches for a means to transgress modernity through encounters with external forces beyond the self, eshewing the immediacy of the human psyche, self-reflection, ritual, and intuition. ‘The Theosophist’ by contrast, is black metal that seeks revelation by looking inward, to the boundless eternity of the self, to which the exterior forces of reality and nature represented by the traditional black metal elements are antagonistic.

Originally pulished at Hate Meditations