"A Maze with Very Minimal Guiding Light, Thematically Slithering Between Worlds": Black Metal, Progressive Rock, and Ambivalent Constellations of Imagination in Remmirath’s Shambhala Vril Saucers

The 2015 album Shambhala Vril Saucers by Slovakian band Remmirath combines black metal and progressive rock, mixing extreme sounds and an esoteric underground aesthetic with omnivorous experimentalism, incorporating musique concrète, Buddhist chants, video game noises, country music, and obscure samples. Lyrics and artwork invoke and erode boundaries between fantasy fiction, marginal religion, esoteric history, and UFO mythology. The album features ideological associations and narrative conventions of black metal and progressive rock, balancing the former's tendencies toward fragmentation, esotericism, and exclusion with the latter's ideal of assimilationist worldbuilding inclusion. The chapter discusses the overall picture tentatively configured in Shambhala Vril Saucers’ constellation of references, and the album's place within a constellation of institutions, instances, and ideas that constitute genre conventions, before finally questioning the ideological implications of such imaginative suggestions in light of contemporary ‘post-truth’ political discourse, critiques of modernity, and black metal's troubling affiliations with esoteric fascism.