This small presentation deals with extreme music and extreme singing, through the example of black metal: more precisely, of blackgaze(1), which is a softer version of it that focuses on a more aerial atmosphere, and which is probably more accessible to metal laymen.

In black metal, there is a specific and recurring singing technique that’s called screaming. It is different from the ‘usual’ screaming that you can still hear in punk & hardcore music. Our usual way of screaming takes a heavy toll on vocal cords, and can cause irrevocable damage. Metal screaming revolves around a specific breathing technique, and a very specific use of our “voice box” (the larynx area).

We actually have two sets of vocal cords in our throats. The lowest one is called “true”, and basically produces the sound in the vocal process ; the highest one, whose role is often undermined, produces vibrations that keep our voice stable, and are necessary to ensure we can breathe properly. False vocal cords can create sound, we can speak and scream through them, and they are much more resistant than the “true” ones – but the sound isn’t melodic. Metal screams come from these secondary cords, put into vibration by a specific contraction of the upper larynx. The sounds produced by false cords is almost unrelated to the singer’s voice signature. While every singer of course has a different screaming intensity and pitch, these differences aren’t related to these singer’s true vocal cords. A voice of higher pitch could have a naturally low-pitched scream, etc. This means that our false vocal cords are the vessels of another voice within us. This other voice might have something to say about us, as singers and as living beings.

 

I’m going to exemplify this by saying a few words about a song by Alcest, “Là où naissent les couleurs nouvelles” (‘Where new colors are born’), from their 2012 album Les Voyages de l’âme (“Journeys of the soul”).

There is a clear progressive pattern in the first half of the song, that I’ll be focusing on : a first verse of aerial clear singing with floating guitars, that then accelerate with drums kicking in, introducing the second verse ; then leading to a wordless bridge that binds clear singing, and backing screams ; and finally an outburst of screaming.

Alcest is a very structural band, that often emphasyzes transitions between singing and screaming. This progression is a poetic goal to Neige (which is French for snow), Alcest’s frontman and singer. While a lot of black metal bands use screaming as their only vocals, having that technique convey rage, horror, or depictions of dark withcraft and mystics(2), Neige goes another way, putting emphasis on the transition from singing to screaming as an embodiment of elevating the soul.

This particular song is about starting at, and departing to another plane which ‘calls’ one away (l’appel). Often opposed to ‘earth’ and its sterilizing immanence, the longing for Air is recurrent in Neige’s lyrics. The second verse is full of this isotopy – around a “house lost in the skies”. Of course, the first phrase that is screamed stands out both for sound and content : “Trop de pesanteur ici” (“Too much gravity/heaviness here”).

From dreamy to nostalgic lyrics sung with true cords, the song pivots to a scream that protests our winglessness. The frantic drumming, a technique called “blastbeats” in metal, which accompanies the shift to screaming, instantly transports the song into a much more intense plane – a breathtaking moment that sounds like a lift-off.

The progressive and dual nature of his singing makes it sounds like Neige literaly has ‘more than a voice’. And maybe the screams, coming from our “false vocal cords”, carry out a truth about us that exceeds our daily speaking and breathing. This definition of screaming as carrying “truth”, or some origin of oneself, might sound essentialist for what remains a ‘technique”. But a lot of singers justify their screaming in this way, that makes it more of an impulse than a device. Neige uses it to convey an intense and primal longing for the freedom to breathe as a “wandering spirit”.

Léon Pradeau

 

For curious minds, here are three suggested songs of similar fashion and similar times, wich follow a comparable progression/transition between earth and air, singing and screaming :

Alcest, “Oiseaux de proie“, in Kodama, 2016.

Heretoir, “Exhale“, in The Circle, 2017.    (3)

Sylvaine, “Abeyance“, in Atoms Aligned, Coming Undone, 2018.       (4)

 

Notes :

(1) The genre of such metal songs is harder and harder to define, with the eclosion of various subgenres that derive from black metal – Alcest has been said to belong to blackgaze, post-black metal, post-rock, or atmospheric black metal. 

(2) Which is the case in, as one of many examples, the famous and seminal “I Am The Black Wizards” by Emperor.

(3) This song has added interest to us: only when the clear sung voices exhale, give their last breath, does the screaming kick in, with all the rage contained in its utterance – and the screaming dies down in the end, just like in “Là où laissent les couleurs nouvelles”. Neige is featured in Heretoir’s The Circle, as guest screamer in “Laniakea Dances (Soleils Couchants)”.

(4) An untranslatable in French – the lulled state of flowing in the air just as being trapped by it, as shown in the music video – crying out “let me escape from abeyance”. Sylvaine is originally a solo project of multi-instrumentalist Kathrine Shepard, who is also Neige’s companion.