Monday Breakfast Blend - Les Légions Noires: Underground French Black Metal 1990-1996

in

This morning we’re looking at the music of Les Légions Noires, or L.L.N., or the Black Legions as they’re variously called — a small, extremely insular circle of black metal musicians in France, mostly around the city of Brest, in the early to mid 90s. Their scene was unique in many ways. They seemed to talk about their internal worlds — sadness, grief, melancholy — more than other black metal bands of the period; for every “Black Wind of War” there’s an “I Died From a Vampiric Grief” (relatable). Sonically, the music of Les Légions Noires is sometimes so strange that it veers off the path of what can honestly be called metal entirely. They created a language, “gloatre,” consisting of lengthy strings of unpronounceable letter combinations with abundant and various accent marks. All these tactics helped ensure that their music was like the group itself — strange, melancholic, and to some degree unknowable. 

We started off listening to some of the central Black Legions bands like Mütiilation, Vlad Tepes, and Belkètre; in the next block we dug a little deeper with some proto-LLN bands like Chapel of Ghouls and Zelda, and also explored some of the other bands from this scene that also played at least semi-traditional black metal; in the next block, however (getting weirder and less pronounceable as we go), we looked at central figure Vordb’s solo work, with tracks from Moëvöt, Brenoritvrezorkre, and Vagézaryavtre; finally, we took in the mixed bag featuring other dark ambient artists like Satanicum Tenebrae and Aäkon Këëtrëh, but also raw black metal from the likes of Vèrmyapre Kommando and Seviss.

Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you in two weeks!

___________________________________________________________________________

You can listen to an archived recording of this episode here.

Here is a link to an archive of photos, interviews, zines, and scans of Black Legions output.

___________________________________________________________________________

Playlist for this episode:

 

lln fixed.png