Gratiae salutaris percipiendae: exhumation through catharsis or how the darkness gave me light

In order to engage with black metal, one must speak and perform from inside the crucible. By stepping into the dark void, an enveloping cavern of liminality surrounds the self and calls for pause, acknowledgement and honesty. Black metal expects direct engagement with those who enter, requesting existential soliloquies with the self; one must be prepared to surrender everything. The specificities of writing, composing, performing, living in and through black metal, mean that experiences are forced open, a rendering and expulsion through the suffering body of trauma to the affirmation of contemporary black metal performance. This facilitates an ontological process of trauma writing as autoethnography that uses black metal composition and performance as reclamation and catharsis. Through my own subjective engagement with black metal as a front woman and guitarist, I have become increasingly aware of some important ontological signifiers regarding my own performativity. This has rewritten my epistemology to include a more focused, personal connection with my own composition, performance and perhaps most importantly, the expression of trauma through black metal performance. By drawing from the model of interpretive performance autoethnography I am able to use my black metal performance as a space to claim as my own, an abyssic territory that creates rupture from pain, transcendence from stasis and liberation from servitude. By stepping forward as a front woman, I am empowered to demarcate this denigrata cervorum as my own and use it to perform my transforming subjectivity.