Black metal: history and politics

Black metal is one of the main subgenres of extreme metal; others include death and doom metal. Musically, black metal guitar style features tremolo picking and two-note oscillations, often a semitone or tritone apart and without palm muting; black metal vocals tend towards higher-pitched shrieks and screams. The characteristic strident, fuzzy black metal sound was originally a result of low-fidelity production practices; nevertheless, today, even bands with high production values continue to imitate this feature.Footnote ⁴ Black metal may be virtuosic, or display punk's ‘aesthetic of ineptitude’ (Hegarty Reference Hegarty2007, pp. 89–91). Historically, black metal musicians and fans have been associated with Satanism, paganism, fascism and neo-Nazism; despite a long-standing interest in awe-inspiring landscapes, often bent towards the promotion of ethnic paganism, the turn towards outright environmentalism has been a recent one. In general, however, there has been a consensus ‘that black metal [is] more than just music’ (Lucas et al. Reference Lucas, Deeks and Spracklen2011, p. 285). Whatever ideology a band may follow, some degree of theatricality in performance is expected; common displays include performer pseudonyms (often of mythological or occult origin), cloaks or costumes, corpse paint and sets or props that promote an aura of mystery and the arcane. Nathan Snaza argues that these practices demonstrate black metal's interest in ‘dehumanisation’ and presents the performer as a ‘vector’ or medium (Snaza Reference Snaza2016, p. 89). Bands comprising one multi-instrumentalist who writes and performs all parts are also common in black metal. Such ‘bands’ may either never perform live or hire session musicians for live performances.

Analysis of black metal demands reckoning with its history, which includes a spate of murders, suicides and church arsons that took place in Norway in the 1990s, as well as its broader associations with Satanism, neo-Nazism and other extremist (generally extreme right-wing) ideologies. While extremist, white supremacist and pagan/anti-Christian black metal can be found in any Western nation that hosts a black metal scene, the idea of this kind of black metal has become closely wedded to Norway owing to the events of the 1990s and their solidification of the then-youthful scene.Footnote ⁵ The details of these events have been rehashed numerous times, from the lurid journalistic accounts found in Lords of Chaos (Moynihan and Søderlind Reference Moynihan and Søderlind2003) to musicologist Ross Hagen's (Reference Hagen, Wallach, Berger and Greene2011) academically detached summary. In 2018, a true crime thriller based on Lords of Chaos and sharing its title premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, signalling that the malfeasance of early Norwegian black metal has been sensationalised to the point of total commercialisation, and that 25 years later, these events remain in large part the core of black metal's legacy.

Despite this sensationalism, the genre of black metal has largely been rehabilitated in Norwegian culture, its sordid past lending present musicians a veneer of wickedness. Ross Hagen suggests that the acceptance and even promotion of black metal in Norway that began at the turn of the century is at least in part due to the recognition that although black metal may not have much power to sell records, it has the power to sell Norway (Hagen Reference Hagen, Wallach, Berger and Greene2011, p. 198). In the face of a homogenising Western culture, black metal is something unique about Norway that can be sold alongside fjord cruises and Viking trinkets. The imagery of Satanism and Norse paganism, despite its past uses, need not inspire fear if it produces a desirable result – in this case, stimulation of the Norwegian economy and bolstering of its national identity. Black metal's frisson of evil is safe when it becomes a commodity.Footnote ⁶

Fifteen years after black metal's violent eruption in Norway, the development of US black metal shows that the same musical style still energetically seeks harsher sounds, but has often dropped themes of Satanism and fascistic neo-Paganism in favour of biocentric environmentalism, a branch of environmentalist thought that asserts the intrinsic value of non-human life, and posits that the rights of humans do not supersede the rights of other species. The changes that black metal undergoes in this turn towards environmentalism re-invigorate the discourse surrounding the music's politics, and reveal that while black metal remains centred on individualistic impulses, generalised misanthropy and Nature worship, its periphery has widened to include explicitly environmentalist themes that promote ecocentric perspectives. Botanist, along with other environmentalist black metal bands, harnesses a pointedly aggressive musical style towards a feeling of ecological urgency. The Norwegian black metal musicians of the 1990s believed that Satanism and the return of the Norse gods could bring Christianity to its knees; Botanist believes that nature will eventually bring all of humanity to its knees. In addition to black metal's characteristic grating sound world, they share a radicalism that reviles the status quo and revels in misanthropic fantasies of destruction.

Black metal and the environment

Ecocritical readings of music have worked towards untangling how music assists in building ideas of landscape, home and place-based identity, thereby mediating understanding of our natural surroundings and our relationship to them. Botanist, as a product of black metal culture and an expression of apocalyptic environmentalism, expands these roles by offering a reversal of anthropocentrically focused environmentalism centred on the identities and experiences of plants, rather than on those of humans. Awe in the presence of natural beauty has been a longstanding topic of black metal, with particularly strong links to the Norwegian scene's predilection for snowy forests and majestic fjords, an expression of National Romanticism that stretches back to the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, this shift towards an activist environmentalist stance reorganises black metal's priorities, shifting them away from the nexus of Satanism/(neo)-Paganism, nature worship and white nationalism, and towards lamentation and anger over the failures of the human-nature relationship. In short, this transfer of energy re-directs black metal's fantastic anger and apocalyptic attitude towards protecting the environment for its own sake. Botanist hews closely to black metal's historical proclivity for fantasy, as seen in the Norwegian scene's daydreams of an ethnically homogeneous, neo-Pagan Norway – ideas that were based in racism, misanthropy and a misplaced, ill-informed nostalgia. Botanist's fantasy, however, is not based on a misunderstanding of the past, but a projection into the future and an indictment of all human civilisations. The music's tone is bleak and moralising, and tries to build a musical world that conjures up the musicologist Daniel Grimley's (Reference Grimley2008) exhortation to ‘Listen, or else …’.

Other contemporary black metal bands have taken explicitly environmental stances in their music. On the 2012 album Kentucky, Austin Lunn's one-man-band Panopticon used black metal, blended with bluegrass, covers of coal protest songs and samples from archival recordings to critique the socio-economic and environmental impact of coal mining in Appalachia (see Lucas Reference Lucas2015 and 2016).Footnote ⁷ Wolves in the Throne Room, a project of brothers Nathan and Aaron Weaver, have used their music to promote biocentric ideals; their contributions to environmentalist black metal have been extensively analysed by Morton (Reference Morton2013), Scott (Reference Scott and Wilson2014b), Wilson (Reference Wilson2014), Pratt (Reference Pratt2016), Snaza (Reference Snaza2016) and Lucas (Reference Lucas2014).Footnote ⁸ As these and other examples attest, engagement with environmentalism is widespread and varied in metal, and indeed across contemporary popular music genres more generally. Botanist's music, however, marries a form of posthumanist environmentalism with black metal's predilection for the arcane, resulting in an output that is bizarre in its unrelenting focus on plants and uncomfortable in its easy dismissal of humanity's perception of its own significance.

Black metal's turn towards environmentalism has attracted significant analytical attention. Scholars have repeatedly pointed towards black metal's ability to trenchantly dwell in the negative, without seeking resolution or reparation; see, for example, the work of Niall Scott (Reference Scott2014a, p. 227) or Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani (Reference Masciandaro and Negarestani2014, p. 263). Building on this consensus, Scott sees potential for environmentally concerned black metal to dethrone the human perspective in line with the goals of biocentric environmentalism, or ‘deep ecology’ (Scott Reference Scott and Wilson2014b, pp. 65–6). Others, including Morton (Reference Morton2013), Pratt (Reference Pratt2016) and Snaza (Reference Snaza2016), have reached similar conclusions, arguing for black metal as a productive form of ecological thought. Collectively, these authors conclude that black metal's particular affective strategy produces a potent opportunity for listeners to engage in a decentring of the self and/or anthropocentric perspectives. This decentring in turn produces optimal conditions for a meditation on ecological collapse that allows (human) listeners to dissolve into their coexistence with the problem, rather than to stand outside it and look for solutions. In this article, I expand on these perspectives, demonstrating how Botanist fits into a broader trend of apocalyptic environmentalist thought that spans many media and forms of popular culture.

The sound of Botanist

The musician behind Botanist, in the tradition of black metal pseudonyms, operates under the name ‘Otrebor’. He released his first album in 2011, replacing black metal's typical electric guitars with a hammered dulcimer, heavily treated in post-production to meet the genre's demands for strident din; later albums incorporate the guitar, but still heavily feature the hammered dulcimer. In interviews, Otrebor has stated that the choice of the hammered dulcimer was based on his inability to find a guitarist to work with; as a drummer, he found learning the dulcimer easier than taking up the guitar: ‘for a drummer, it just makes sense to make melody by hitting things in time’ (Gotrich Reference Gotrich2011). Otrebor furthermore found that the hammered dulcimer expanded his ability to create percussive melodies:

As for the dulcimer's association with Appalachian music, Otrebor says he [doesn't] ‘even know the first thing about it’ (Gotrich Reference Gotrich2011). Interviewers have tried to read the use of the hammered dulcimer in Botanist's music as a deliberate turn towards the acoustic in line with the band's eco-critical perspective, but Otrebor has resisted this interpretation, repeatedly emphasising the dulcimer as a means to percussive melody-making (El-Naqib Reference El-Naqib2015). Moreover, given the extent to which the dulcimer is distorted and otherwise treated in his music, its sound quality is no longer acoustic.

Like most environmentalist black metal bands, Botanist's outlook for the future of the human species is explicitly bleak, declaring that the Earth would be better off without us, and that on our way out, we deserve suffering and violence.Footnote ⁹ A sticker on the front of his first album even labelled it ‘eco-terrorist black metal’, conjuring up the possibility of connections between Otrebor and fringe groups such as the Earth Liberation Front. While support for eco-terrorist activities would create an exciting narrative for black metal history in which the activities of church burning have been channelled into those of tree spiking, Otrebor claims he is not interested in such activities or their associated political movement; ‘rather, the eco-terrorist stance is a reflection of the Botanist's view of the natural world's reclaiming of the Earth and particularly in direct opposition to humanity. The Botanist sees humanity as flora's nemesis, and as such, flora will do all that it can to eradicate its enemy’ (Hoffart Reference Hoffart2011). In his own view, then, plants themselves are the terrorists, and humans are the victims of their avenging wrath.

Musically, Botanist is cacophonous. A choking, emetic growl ushers in onslaughts of amplified, distorted hammered dulcimer and snappy, over-trebled drums. Together, the drums and the dulcimer create a haze of high-frequency fuzz; it is pitchy percussion at its most abrasive, and the gagging grunts of the vocalist assault the ears. In live performance, the Botanist and his live session musicians wear long, hooded brown robes, sometimes decorated with wreaths or vines. Images of plants are projected on a screen behind the musicians. As with many other black metal bands, creation of a ritual atmosphere is an important part of the live aesthetic.

Beyond upping the sonic ante with his grating dulcimer, Otrebor's shift to a narrative of Botanical revenge marks a thematic shift away from traditional black metal topics, while retaining black metal's interest in the esoteric and arcane. He claims to be a medium for an entity called ‘the Botanist’, who is the voice of the ‘Verdant Realm’, which awaits its chance to destroy humanity and usher in a new era of floral dominion (Botanist 2012). The lyrics that accompany his music delineate the bloody revenge of kingdom Plantae in violent detail. The Botanist's fantasies include such delights as humans vomiting blood from the ingestion of black hellebore (‘Helleborus Niger’), grayanotoxin found in rhododendrons leading people to a ‘hallucinogen grave’ (‘Rhododendoom’) and the fatal halting of human protein synthesis caused by Abrus precatorius, a legume with seeds more toxic than ricin (‘Abrus Precatorius’). Indeed, the lyrics read as a graphic ode to the world's toxic plants, and their potential to rule the Earth's ecosystems. The frequent use of Latin taxonomical terms and obscure medical terminology pays homage to black metal's tendency towards the esoteric; it is arguably more horrific to croak out ‘mycorrhiza’ than ‘root fungus’.Footnote ¹⁰

Beyond the violent potential of toxic plants, Botanist's songs are also a celebration of plants and their diversity. His scientifically meticulous lyrics enumerate what plants offer the world – visual beauty, fragrance, symbiotic relationships with other organisms and a variety of chemical compounds with the power to nourish or destroy us. His 2014 album VI: Flora, in particular, steers almost completely clear of human demise, instead focusing on describing the reproductive traits, leaves, growth patterns and natural habitats of plants such as wisteria, dianthus and mangrove. (One song, ‘Cinnamomum Parthenoxylon’, considers the titular plant's production of safrole, the precursor to MDMA; this is the only song on the album in which plants deliberately interfere with humans.) On this album, the relationship between humans and plants is contained in human knowledge of the plants; the plants’ existences are framed in terms of what humans see and smell. The plants of VI: Flora have no agency and no plan for world domination. In general, however, Botanist's work proceeds from a spirit of apocalyptic environmentalism that views plants as the worthy heirs to a planet cleansed of human life.

Plants with voices, plants as terrorists

Botanist's work, with its focus on plants as vengeful killers, inhabits a history of artistic explorations around this topic. Indeed, the prospect of killer plants rising up to destroy humankind at a moment of weakness provides for fantastical, outlandish science fiction. John Wyndham's Reference Wyndham1951 apocalyptic science-fiction novel The Day of the Triffids relates the rise of a species of venomous, carnivorous plants capable of locomotion. As the plants multiply, the human population dwindles towards extinction while nature ‘[has] its revenge … Rejoicing that [humanity is] finished, and that it's free to go its own way’ (Wyndham Reference Wyndham1951, p. 269). Wyndham's novel presents the essential narrative of apocalyptic bioterrorism: humankind, with wanton hubris, has sown the seeds of its own destruction, and earned whatever horrors befall it on the way to elimination. The appealing circularity of such narratives enacts the form of a contemporary morality play, in which the natural world justly punishes humanity's wickedness. While the plot of The Day of the Triffids is tinged with Western Cold War-era suspicion of all things Soviet, Botanist's iteration of this narrative indicts human society in its entirety.

The world of literature and film offers many depictions of fictional killer plants, a few of which have attained significant cultural prominence, such as the carnivorous plant depicted in Little Shop of Horrors or Tolkien's Ents.Footnote ¹¹ The world of music, on the other hand, is less replete with such examples. In perhaps the earliest rock song to take up the killer plant theme, progressive rock band Genesis’ ‘The Return of the Giant Hogweed’ (Nursery Cryme, 1971) tackles the damaging potential of giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazziani); the song weaves an apocalyptic tale based loosely on the reality of the plant's toxicity. Attaining a height of up to 5.5 metres and native to Asia's temperate zones, giant hogweed was first introduced to the British Isles as an ornamental plant in the nineteenth century, where it quickly became an invasive species; it is now found throughout northern Europe and North America. Furocoumarin in giant hogweed's sap causes a phototoxic response in human skin; contact can cause blistering burns (phytophotodermatitis) and leave dark scars that remain for months or years. Contact with the eyes can cause temporary or permanent blindness. ‘The Return of the Giant Hogweed’ exaggerates the plant's real damaging potential, and imbues the plants with agency and a desire for revenge against humanity's ‘herbicidal battering’: the song's final verse (6:30–6:55) switches to the hogweed's point of view, as they reach the population tipping point that ensures their victory:

Here, the vocals take on a new timbre, as the singers enunciate the plants’ words on rising lines that break into falsetto.

In a more recent take on the vengeful vegetation theme, experimental metal band UnexpecT's ‘Orange Vigilantes’ (Fables of the Sleepless Empire, 2011) depicts a revolution in which pumpkins violently take over the world as ‘heroic icons of the vegetable supremacy’. As with the Genesis example, however, this song represents a one-off depiction of plant warfare, in contrast to Botanist's devotion to the theme across multiple albums.

The fascination with killer plants speaks to the fact that humans are profoundly dependent on plants for necessities such as food and clean air, as well as for relative luxuries such as erosion control, fuel, building materials, medicine, textiles and cosmetics. Plants vastly outnumber us, but conveniently, they cannot move from where they are rooted, cannot hear, cannot see and generally respond to stimuli slowly. As organisms, plants are so extraordinarily different from us that mortal terror of them is incomprehensible. Even plants that house lethally toxic compounds strike no real terror; one can simply distance oneself, while they remain rooted to the spot, unable to follow. Owing to their profoundly different way of being, plants can be understood through lens of the Lacanian Big Other, a ‘radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification’ (Evans Reference Evans1996, p. 133). In other words, they are so different from us that we cannot conceive of their subjectivity – we cannot identify with plants. As organisms, they are so different from us that we do not normally even think about being afraid of them. As the aforementioned artistic depictions demonstrate, plants with volition and agency are a terrifying prospect; without the ability to grasp their way of being, it is difficult to determine how they might be stopped if they were to attack.

The question of plant agency is not new, having been the subject of a slew of pseudoscientific experiments in the 1950s and 1960s, detailed in the hit 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, which suggested plants are sentient, can read the human mind, do basic arithmetic and have the capacity to suffer pain (Tompkins and Bird Reference Tompkins and Bird1973). All of the ‘studies’ supporting these claims have long since been repudiated, but that they were conducted betrays a widespread interest in understanding what plants can sense and know. In recent years, there has been a resurgent interest in the anthropomorphisation of plants as a means of better understanding their ways of being and recognising their ecological value. The year 2015 saw the publication of two non-fiction books in this vein: Richard Mabey's (Reference Mabey2015) The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination and Peter Wohlleben's (Reference Wohlleben2015) The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries From a Secret World. In these books, ideas of plant communication and intelligence are used to increase sympathy in the reader, while also imparting the uneasy sense that plants’ perceived passivity and unconsciousness have been taken for granted. Artistic anthropomorphising that projects anger onto plant life builds on this history of pseudoscience and emotional projection. This process of anthropomorphisation re-interprets plants’ sophisticated, evolved defence mechanisms, many of which are dangerous to humans, as offensive mechanisms under the power of a botanical will.

Beyond their rootedness, the silence of plants further adds to their appeal as subjects for artistic renderings of the Big Other. With the exception of exploding seed pods found on plants such as members of the acanthus family, plants are generally perceived as passive sound makers: the wind rustles them or makes them groan as they bend. If plants make sounds of their own, they do not fall within the range of human hearing. Nevertheless, scientists and artists have increasingly found ways to ‘listen’ to seemingly noiseless organisms. Some artists have attached transducers to plants, converting the plant's biofeedback into sound and amplifying it to a level audible by the human ear (Garcia Reference Garcia2010). Sophia Roosth has analysed the effects of sonocytology (amplification of cellular vibration to audible levels) on the understanding of cellular activity. Roosth's essay particularly examines the discovery that yeast cells ‘scream’ when doused in alcohol (Roosth Reference Roosth2009, pp. 338–9). By interpreting the change in the vibrations of the yeast in the presence of alcohol as screams, the listening scientist grants the cells voices and agency, creating what Roosth calls ‘cellular subjects’ (Roosth Reference Roosth2009, p. 339). Sound has been and continues to be used as a means of mapping and understanding that which cannot be seen – from the bottom of the ocean to the inside of the human body, and now, the internal activities of cells (Roosth Reference Roosth2009, p. 349). As Roosth points out, however, to refer to cellular vibrations as voices, capable of responding to adverse stimuli with screams, is to ‘project cultural notions of what it means to be human, to be subjective and have agency, and even for something to be meaningful, into a cellular milieu’ (Roosth Reference Roosth2009, p. 350). Similarly, novels like The Day of the Triffids or songs like ‘Return of the Giant Hogweed’ project subjectivity onto plants, while cataloguing their physical attributes – including their ‘voices’ – in unavoidably anthropoid terms.

One of Botanist's most intriguing albums (IV: Mandragora) delves into the lethal potential of plant vocalisation, with an album exploring the mythology of the mandrake's ‘scream’. In the same way that his wider project inherits a history of killer plants, this album can be contextualised amidst a broader interest in the possibility of conscious plant vocalisation. Wyndham's triffids communicate with one another by rattling appendages on their stalks. Audrey II, the carnivorous alien/plant of Little Shop of Horrors, speaks and even sings human language, in a much less realistic imagining of plant vocalisation.Footnote ¹² Tolkien's Ents move a step further, able in their great anger to bring about physical destruction by the sounds of their voices alone: as they launched their assault on Isengard, the Ents ‘roared and boomed and trumpeted, until stones began to crack and fall at the mere noise of them’ (The Two Towers, Book III, Chapter 9 ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’). In Mandragora, however, plant vocalisation is the central focus of the story, and the means by which the plants accomplish their goal of inaugurating a new era with themselves as the dominant life form.

The mandrake's scream

Mandragora (2013) brings together the narrative of vengeful plants with a mythology of lethal plant vocalisation. The album tells the story of an army of mandrakes that exterminates the human race with its lethal screams. The genus Mandragora (mandrake) belongs to the nightshade family, and the toxic alkaloids it contains have long been valued for their anticholinergic (blocking the neurotransmitter acetylcholine), hallucinogenic and hypnotic effects on humans. These chemicals, in addition to the plant's characteristic large taproot, which is often branched such that it has a vaguely humanoid appearance, led to the proliferation of folklore, witchcraft and mythology concerning the mandrake and its powers.Footnote ¹³ Botanist's album mixes and matches mandrake lore of a variety of origins, but hews closely to the most sinister stories, which held that mandrakes sprouted from the ejaculate of hanged men, and would scream when uprooted, killing anyone within earshot.Footnote ¹⁴

Over the course of five songs, Mandragora tells the story of the mandrake army raised by the ‘Botanist’ – the fictional entity ‘channelled’ by the musician Otrebor. Vengeful trees hang their ‘human prey’, and the mandrakes sprout below their corpses. The second song details the mandrake's distinctive botanical features, and its chemical attributes and their effects on humans, while the third and fourth detail how the Botanist will bring the army to maturity: at the vernal equinox, the mandrakes are dug up and replanted on graves. After a month, they are dug up again and soaked in milk in which three bats have been drowned, then dried, at which point they ‘awaken’, ready to kill. In the final song, ‘Mandrake Legion’, the army of mandrakes, ‘progeny of man/now the engine of its demise’, destroy the human race:

In this narrative, human corpses provide the seeds for the plants that will eventually destroy their entire species. Sanitised of its violence, it becomes a typical apocalyptic environmental narrative: humanity has sown the seeds of its own destruction, and deserves whatever horrors befall it. What is distinctive about the Mandragora narrative is the role of sound in bringing about human demise.

In reality, the mandrake's ‘scream’ is merely the faint groaning and cracking of the taproot pulling free of the soil – sounds which can be heard when uprooting a variety of well-developed, deeply rooted plants. When this sound, however, is amplified by the mythology of the mandrake's powers, it becomes lethal. The sound of the mandrake's scream is never articulated in the course of the music; Otrebor instead leaves the sound up to the listener's imagination. The sound of Mandragora, like Botanist's other albums, hovers in the realm of the caustic, heavily emphasising cymbal crashes and the electronically distorted dulcimer, and creating a cloud of noise in the upper frequency ranges. Electricity amplifies the hammered dulcimer to a grating, acrid, overwhelming mess of sound, just as mythology amplifies the groan of snapping roots to a deadly scream.

Botanist and apocalyptic environmentalism

Like Wyndham's novel about the triffids, Botanist taps into the rhetoric of apocalyptic environmentalism, which Lawrence Buell calls ‘the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal’ (Buell Reference Buell1995, p. 285). Greg Garrard lays out the power of the apocalyptic for bringing attention to environmental problems: in Western society, Christianity's role in the formation of culture has ensured the importance of the eschaton as idea, as believers await the second coming of Christ, which will bring with it the end of the world (Garrard Reference Garrard2012, p. 94). The imminence of the end times varies among Christian sects, but in general is used as a reason for repentance from sin and moral perseverance against persecution. Apocalyptic logic has been successfully used by a much wider variety of groups, ranging from Nazis and communists to today's environmentalists (Garrard Reference Garrard2012, p. 93). In these cases, judgment comes not from the divine, but from ‘superior’ humans (generally the in-group, or ‘true believers’ of the apocalyptic message) or Nature, but the logic of straining towards a total collapse that will result in a cleansed, re-born world remains largely the same. Botanist takes up this logic, depicting a world cleansed by plants fed up with human damage to their world.

Apocalyptic logic is difficult to depict through sound alone, and it is for this reason that this mode of environmentalism has largely been the province of literature and film (as the examples from Atwood, Wyndham, et al. attest); their ability to construct clear narratives that build up to doomsday make them clear choices for expressing this kind of environmentalism. Music, on the other hand, has tended towards the nostalgic mode of environmentalism, which uses ‘the commemorative and community-building powers of music in the service of ecological approaches’ (Rehding Reference Rehding2011, p. 413). Botanist's investment in apocalyptic environmentalism shows both music's potential for contribution to this metaphor and the challenges of communicating this kind of crisis in a sonic medium.

The apocalyptic mode of creative environmentalism uses the imagination of apocalypse to attempt to prevent a real-world crisis of similar proportions (Garrard Reference Garrard2012, p. 94). Garrard identifies two modes of apocalyptic thought, which he calls ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’ (Garrard Reference Garrard2012, p. 94). The tragic strand of apocalypticism is fatalistic, and points towards inevitable doom; it is this strand to which Botanist most closely adheres – in the world of his music, the end of humankind cannot be averted. As Garrard points out, one of the significant stumbling blocks faced by tragic apocalypticism is that its adherents may face ridicule when their predictions fail to materialise. Further, if the apocalypse is truly unavoidable, there is little incentive for change (Garrard Reference Garrard2012, p. 114–15). In comic apocalypticism, on the other hand, events are ‘episodic and open-ended’, changes of course are possible, and good and evil need not be as sharply divided (Garrard Reference Garrard2012, p. 96). Comic apocalypticism does not rely on having its exact predictions come true, and its focus on warnings rather than the exact nature of impending doom makes it less prone to breakdown or dissolution into violence (Garrard Reference Garrard2012, p. 96). The comic strain, in avoiding futility, often proves more useful for inspiring change; if there is no future and humans have no power to change the course of events, then there is no reason to change our ways. Or as Garrard puts it, ‘only if we imagine the planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility for it’ (Garrard Reference Garrard2012, p. 116). In the face of comic apocalypticism's capacity for hope, Botanist's stoic determinism creates challenges for untangling the significance of his project, which is steeped in a tragic apocalypticism that suggests there is no hope for humanity.

Whatever the weaknesses of tragic apocalypticism for inspiring environmental reform, Botanist's project embraces its fatalism. In the context of his project, humanity is the evil from which the natural world struggles for release, and which will be unequivocally eliminated. The indulgence in fatalism is characteristic of black metal, with its tendency towards nihilism and misanthropy. Media scholar Michelle Phillipov has discussed the perceived political lethargy of metal music, finding that ‘metal's nihilism and fatalism is thought to divert the attention and energies of disaffected youth away from more productive political goals’ (Phillipov Reference Phillipov2012, p. 54). While the ‘politics’ Phillipov has in mind have primarily to do with socio-economic (in)equality, Botanist's fatalistic view of environmental degradation fits the general description of ostensibly politically apathetic metal that she outlines. Given the esoteric nature of Otrebor's project, in which the voices of plants speak their righteous indignation, it is unsurprising that a practical take-away for listeners is hard to find; the message seems to be that human life is, in the end, inconsequential. Even outside his music, Otrebor remains apathetic with regard to the effectiveness of environmentalism as a political movement. He views the current state of environmental politics with deep cynicism, suggesting that environmental reform will remain side-tracked unless it becomes a pressing economic issue for those wielding political power:

As a musical project, Botanist actively disengages from political realities and focuses instead on building an apocalyptic narrative that destabilises the assumed significance of human life, and in this interview, Otrebor works to justify this decision, emphasising what he perceives as the futility of political discourse on the environment. He has also suggested, on multiple occasions, that a failure to ‘save the world’ would eventually become irrelevant, as it would only result in the elimination of human life, not all life on Earth:

Here, Botanist shows the influence of James Lovelock's popular ‘Gaia hypothesis’, which considers the Earth as resembling a single complex organism in which all systems and species are interdependent. Lovelock concludes, however, that many larger species, including humans, are inessential for the Earth's survival and could be eliminated without much harm to their ecosystems (Lovelock Reference Lovelock1979). Environmental philosopher Kate Soper further refines this idea that humanity cannot actually destroy the Earth by distinguishing between what she refers to as ‘deep-level’ and ‘surface-level’ nature; ‘deep-level’ nature is the ‘complex of causal powers and structures’ that determines what happens to ‘surface-level’ nature – the ‘set of resources and surface environment’, which we could very well destroy (Soper Reference Soper1995, p. 195). It is this ‘deep-level’ nature that humanity cannot destroy: ‘Nature at this level is indifferent to our choices, will persist in the midst of environmental destruction, and will outlast the death of all planetary life’ (Soper Reference Soper1995, pp. 159–60).

Botanist seems to execute apocalyptic judgment on the world with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders, exhibiting no attachment to his own place in the world. Phillipov has argued that it is this cynicism that has led to charges of metal's political impotence. She goes on to assert, however, that hastening to conclude that extreme metal is politically ineffective overlooks the listening practises that are unique to extreme metal. She contends that the ‘politics’ of extreme metal cannot be approached in the same way that music with aurally comprehensible vocals and more straightforward song structures – and thus in her opinion a clear message – can. Instead, extreme metal must be understood with regard to the listening pleasures it affords (Phillipov Reference Phillipov2012, p. 74): the embrace of ‘transgressive forms of representation’ (Phillipov Reference Phillipov2012, p. 90), that follow in the tradition of the carnivalesque and its disruption of identities, boundaries and hierarchies (Phillipov Reference Phillipov2012, p. 110). Ronald Bogue, from his Deleuzian perspective, similarly finds that the intensity of extreme metal's listening experiences ‘converts the lived body into a dedifferentiated sonic body without organs’ (Bogue Reference Bogue, Buchanan and Swiboda2004, p. 106). Both Bogue and Phillipov thus find that the pleasures of listening to extreme metal involve, at least on some level, the disturbance or disruption of the listener's sense of integrated identity and enable a ‘safe’ exploration of the abject and liminal subjectivities. In this case, engagement with the fatalistic apocalypticism of a band like Botanist enables listeners to explore the limits of their own subjectivity and thus feel themselves as part of some larger process in which humanity's centrality in the world is interrogated.

Botanist's project strives towards an eco-centric perspective in which human life has – at best – no more value than other life forms, and is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. From an anthropocentric point of view, his lyrical narratives express a hopeless, unavoidable apocalypse; from the invoked perspective of the plants, however, the stories communicate hope for a better world. Kate Soper critiques the possibility of achieving a truly eco-centric perspective, as our ideas of plants’ or animals’ intrinsic value are, in the end, projections of human desires onto nonhuman beings. As she writes,

In other words, Botanist's assessment of plant revolution as justice is a human act of judgment, rather than an ability to ‘get beyond’ an anthropocentric perspective. Nevertheless, there may be value to using the idea of ecocentrism to disturb and interrogate one's sense of self and the centricity of one's own narrative. As Soper continues, ecocentric perspectives ‘invite us to think more seriously about how nature may be said to have value, and about the incoherence of attempting to speak for this except by reference to human utilitarian, moral or aesthetic interests and predispositions’ (Soper Reference Soper1995, p. 257). Botanist's music works in this vein, inviting listeners to reconsider their assumptions about the relationship between human and plant life.