Introduction

I discovered blackmetal in 1993 or 1994. Before that I was listening a lot of different death metal and grind core. As I remember, my first black metal album was Darkthrone's "Under a funeral moon". I still think that it's the second best BM album ever made (on the first place is Darkthrone's "Transilvanian hunger"). But back then everything else, all the scandinavian top bands and all the other who just wore corpsepaint also seemed interesting. I wasn't very demanding - all I needed was blastbeats and tremolo guitars. But my musical taste developed and some years later I was already listening to Stereolab, Sonic Youth and a lot of older progressive rock. And after that I began to explore the most obscure territories - free improvisation, outsider music etc.

Lately ,I don't know why, but I began to miss those teenage years of black metal. I started to explore the scene and I found that a lot of interesting stuff had happened during these years. Nowadays I can't tolerate most of the things I once loved in black metal. I tried to listen to Emperor, but it just made me feel stupid. I think that genuine black metal has to be as minimalistic and raw sounding as possible. Of couse, there are exceptions as always, but all the BM bands with sterile clean production and cheap anonymous metal sounds, trying to create something symphonic, make me sick. And even most of those bands who are supposed to be old-school and true are nothing but boring.
There are numerous bands doing more or less traditional primitive black metal that I still like - Blasphemy, early Graveland, Burzum, Mayhem and Immortal, Hellhammer, Sarcofago, Von and Mütiilation. These are examples of how things should be done in BM. But I'm not going to write about them in the following reviews. Most of these mentioned bands have a big cult following in metal circles. They are classics and everyone interested in BM should check them out by themselves.
Here I have set the goal to write about all the BM bands I know, who have done something strange, out of ordinary, experimental, amazingly eccentric etc. Some have just a slight experimental touch, some of them are doing more or less typical music, but have just one strange song, but metal is a very orthodox phenomenon, so it's still important to point these things out. And some of them are not musically experimental, but have just interesting lyrical conceptions. But I'm glad to say, that most of these groups and one-man-bands fall straight to the category of seriously braindamaged outsider music. And all these bands share the aesthetics of lo-fi production.