Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal - (Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Popular Music) by Owen Coggins (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This is the first extensive scholarly study of drone metal music and its religious associations, drawing on five years of ethnographic participant observation from more than 300 performances and 74 interviews, plus surveys, analyses of sound recordings, artwork, and extensive online discourse about music.
Owen Coggins shows that while many drone metal listeners identify as non-religious, their ways of engaging with and talking about drone metal are richly informed by mysticism, ritual and religion. He explores why language relating to mysticism and spiritual experience is so prevalent in drone metal culture and in discussion of musical experiences and practices of the genre.
The author develops the work of Michel de Certeau to provide an empirically grounded theory of mysticism in popular culture. He argues that the marginality of the genre culture, together with the extremely abstract sound produces a focus on the listeners' engagement with sound, and that this in turn creates a space for the open-ended exploration of religiosity in extreme states of bodily consciousness.

Review Quotes

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

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

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

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.