This morning I got into the West End at the crack of ten to attend a press screening of Until The Light Takes Us, the new feature length black metal documentary by these two San Franciscans called Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell.

Fans of the artier end of the music spectrum initially (Aaron is in the band Iran), they were introduced to black metal by a friend of theirs in San Francisco. They were impressed by the thought that had gone into the music and got pretty into it, so much so that they moved to Norway for two years to shoot the film.

The result of their work is this moving, kind of arty film about the main protagonists of the black metal scene, shot from a sympathetic outsider’s perspective. You end up totally getting behind all the guys, Fenriz from Darkthrone is pretty damn charming as everyone already knows, but you even start to like Varg Vikernes, despite knowing he thinks the Jews run the world.

The point the film manages to get across, while managing to not over intellectualise anything, is that these kids in the early nineties burned all those churches and created their own subculture almost totally from scratch because -either consciously or unconsciously- they were disgusted by Western society. People like Fenriz and Varg end up coming across as dissident free thinkers with a lot to contribute, probably more so than the art school kids who usually make experimental or progressive music, and I reckon that’s why so many people are drawn to black metal these days.

The directors’ statement in the press release is pretty good to read, download it from here.

Here’s a trailer for yer: