Liturgy has been a punching bag for metal’s genre police at least since the 2009 release of its first full-length, Renihilation. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, front man of this New York-based band, had been releasing solo demos as Liturgy since 2005, but in ’09 he made the fateful decision to publish the philosophical manifesto Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism as a sort of companion piece to Renihilation. It described transcendental black metal as, among other things, “the reanimation of the form of black metal with a new soul, a soul full of chaos, frenzy and ecstasy,” and its heady tone and lofty criticisms of traditional “hyperborean” black metal couldn’t have been better engineered to infuriate the reactionary gatekeepers of the metal tribe.
I spoke to Hunt-Hendrix by phone, hoping to get some insight into The Ark Work and the theoretical scaffolding behind it—a system he’s developed privately over the past decade and doesn’t necessarily share with the band. “The album is not about this cosmology, but by developing this cosmology, I was able to make the album,” he told Pitchfork last month. As you might expect of someone who’s been pilloried for years because he aired his ideas in public, Hunt-Hendrix can be wary in interviews, but he seemed relatively comfortable by the end of our conversation. The transcript that follows has been edited for length and very slightly for clarity—for better or worse, we both really talk like this.
I listen to a lot of weird metal, and I have to say, the new album is pretty unprecedented. I want to ask you some more detailed questions, but I figured I’d start with something that anybody could ask—what is an Ark Work? I’ve seen the term in your writing, but I couldn’t define it.
He died before he was able to complete that piece. He was planning to write a tone poem that would resonate in such a way that it would trigger some deep tectonic potentiality in the world that would cause the revelation to happen and redeem humanity. There’s lots of composers and artists who have this type of vision in their work, and essentially this is the effort to do that as a black-metal band.
Yeah, basically. I’ve always been frustrated with countercultural formations, and there’s this relationship that capitalism has with cultural forms that oppose it, which is that it just consumes them. I mean, I love lots of music that’s in that vein. But this is a different kind of effort than that.
I’ve persuaded myself, listening to the new album, that I can hear Moroccan trance music and maybe even gamelan, but who knows. What ritual-music traditions is Liturgy actually borrowing from?
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