Well, Black Metal has been Norway's largest export in music for a couple of decades so it's interesting to discover that someone's taking time and effort in covering bands like Burzum, Darkthrone, Mayhem etc. with surfer versions.

(almost there with the clip "The Darkthrones - Californian Hunger" and "The Beherits - The surf of Nanna") Haha..

Org. 1960's Trve Kvlt Music

Last edited: Aug 29, 2013 03:13:07

We discussed these a while back, and I still think they're brilliant.

Mike
http://www.youtube.com/morphballio

Sorry, this is new to me and I did'nt know this being a topic in the past.
Funny how someone mentions The Fender IV's in the earlier post's, I was thinking the same thing when listening to the cut "The Emperors - I am the Surf Wizards".
Well, so who did all this, anyone in here maybe?

Last edited: Aug 29, 2013 09:22:42

BLACK METAL SONGS REIMAGINED AS SURF ROCK

Last edited: Sep 16, 2013 17:20:32

Did anyone notice the great Slayer cover mentioned in the article Rudi posted?

Mike
http://www.youtube.com/morphballio

Snore.

http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/1124/top-10-most-ridiculous-black-metal-pics-of-all-time-2/
Nothing else need be said

https://www.facebook.com/coffindagger
http://coffindaggers.com/
http://thecoffindaggers.bandcamp.com

Last edited: Sep 17, 2013 14:35:27

Disclosure time! Or something....

I made the original Surf Black Metal tracks back in 2010. I had a Youtube channel with the monicker Mrmeddled. The 'Meddle' came from the Pink Floyd album, and Youtube added 'Mr' because there was already a 'Meddle' on there. Not a great start.

At the time I was sharing a house with three other guys. I was a student in my 3rd year at college. I got the idea of setting black metal tunes to a surf sound one night when I couldn't sleep. That was it.

As for the recordings, I used two guitars. One was an Aria Strat copy I had fitted a hotrails pickup (Artec I think) to the bridge position of. The other was an SG copy with repro PAF pickups and a bigsby vibrato. My pedals at the time were pretty sparing. I had a Zoom G2, an Ashdown bass drive that I used on guitar, an Arion EQ pedal and a Marshall delay pedal. I recorded all the tracks by looping a sampled drum rhythm from a borrowed Yamaha keyboard then recording each instrument, in mono, via the microphone jack on my laptop. I recorded everything to Audacity. As my laptop had latency issues I usually had to manually trim tracks to sit on the beat correctly, and even then there would be goofs where the audio was not recorded correctly. I mixed everything to have the thin, hollow sound of black metal coupled with the primitive, and sometimes lop-sided mixing of early stereo surf tracks. That was it. The 'trumpet' and organ parts went on last. I borrowed a Juno synth to fill in these parts, choosing a Farfisa-type organ patch and using the Zoom pedal to add the wide tremolo effect. No track took longer than an hour to record, "mix", etc etc... it took longer to upload them to Youtube via our heavily used Wifi connection.

I recorded them firstly to show to friends as a joke. I did I am the Black Wizards by Emperor first as it was a tune we listened to a lot when we would get together. I don't think I called it "I am the surf wizards". By the time I was done with my Youtube channel it had 50k+ views, and a few people had ripped the audio and made 'mirror' videos which also had plenty of views. For a while I entertained requests, which I got fairly often, but I thought it was a joke that was getting propagated too far. It did elicit responses from elitist metalheads (including one on this forum I see), which is always good. Always fun having 18 year old kids telling me I am selling a genre down the river for a cheap laugh...

My mistake was to use my regular Youtube account. One user got mightily offended that I had mixed the audio badly on the surf metal videos and took to following me around. As I tended to post on a wide range of videos I started getting bombarded with random posts, usually about how poorly I EQ'd the drums, or other buffoonery. At that point I had also applied for an MSc at university and was told that anything, Facebook and Youtube primarily, linked to my email account would be monitored. The relentless trolling, abuse, and lists of obscure 'trve cvlt' black metal bands that needed covering got tiring, fast. I never made any money from any of it, before you ask.

Any questions, or can this tired meme be put to bed already?

Last edited: Feb 05, 2014 01:02:38

Hah, awesome that The Atlantics were part of your early exposure; I think if I had heard them as a metal-loving teen in the 80's, it may have become an obsession for me way sooner! As you can probably imagine, we have pages and pages of discussion about the surf sound, but the distinct tonality you hear is probably primarily due to outboard reverb units. Also, in the Dick Dale school of playing, surf guitarists tend to crank their amps pretty loud, adding that extra bite. (Some would also add thick strings to the equation, and of course technique.) Nothing special with the pickups though- traditionally they're just Fender guitars with either stock single coils or soapbars. (Re: The Atlantics' equipment, them and many other surf bands outside of the US used tape echo instead of reverb, but otherwise similar principle.)

Mike
http://www.youtube.com/morphballio