Table of Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Mysticism and metal music 2. To be experienced not understood: Empirical mysticisms in dub, trance and drone 3. Beyond heaviness: Listener experience in a translocal and marginal genre 4. Pilgrimages to elsewhere: Languages of ineffability, otherness, and ambiguity 5. Amplifier worship: Materiality and mysticism in heavy sound 6. Methods to cross the abyss: Ritual, violence and noise 7. Conclusion: Drone metal mysticism References Index

Promotional Information

Provides an innovative theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of religion and popular culture through an in-depth analysis of the religious dimensions of drone metal.

About the Author

Owen Coggins is Honorary Associate of the Religious Studies Department at the Open University and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Brunel University London, UK.

Reviews

Mysticism, Religion and Ritual in Drone Metal provides an interesting and persuasive look at an alternative expression of the human mystical impulse, as found in a seemingly secular, relatively unpopular form of pop culture.
*Nova Religio*

This book could be useful in upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses to work through overlaps between more extreme regions of popular culture and more traditionally “religious” settings mediated by iconography, ritual, and embodied experience.
*Religious Studies Review*

In his ground-breaking new book, Owen Coggins has found a way of analysing mysticism and the religious in a way that refuses easy banalities and looks directly at the ambiguities of the musical talk he studies.
*Performance, Religion & Spirituality*

Coggins offers insightful perspective in a field that can be rife with pitfalls for researchers not attuned to the subtleties of the music and culture.
*The Wire*

A ground-breaking study of the genre’s culture which expands the horizons of our thinking about mysticism, ritual and spirituality in musical experience. I look forward to seeing how this landmark contribution shapes our ever-evolving understanding of the making of new forms of mysticism and ritual in, through and with music.
*Popular Music*

A landmark achievement in the scholarship of religion and popular music. Coggins’s exhaustively researched and theoretically astute book not only sheds light on an under-documented metal subgenre, it succeeds in demystifying mysticism as a form of discourse. A must-read for anyone with an interest in the varieties of musical experience in the contemporary world.
*Jeremy Wallach, Professor of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, USA and co-editor of Metal Rules the Globe (2011) and author of Modern Noise, Fluid Genres (2008)*

It is easy to claim that religion and the sacred manifest in popular music. It is much more difficult to demonstrate it. By turning the attention to religion as a communicative resource for articulating the drone metal experience, Owen Coggins does exactly that. Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal is not only the first in-depth study of the genre, but also provides religious studies and metal studies with fresh and inspiring perspectives.
*Titus Hjelm, Reader in Sociology, University College London, UK*

Owen Coggins’ innovative study on metal music and the subgenre of drone music and mysticism is simply outstanding. It offers significant new perspectives for music scholars, metal music studies and religious studies and those who seek to bathe in its sound, not just listen to it. Coggins opens up novel ways in which the listener can engage with these musical forms that take us beyond what is painful to the ear, disruptive to the body, but enlightening for the soul.
*Niall Scott, Reader in Philosophy and Popular Culture, University of Central Lancashire, UK*