It's rare that a self-described black metal album earns kudos from both Pitchfork and New York magazine, and even rarer that the black metal band in question is fronted by a young man whose conversation is peppered with references to Romanticism, Slavoj Zizek, and Robert Smithson. Liturgy's "Aesthetica," out now, is a full-bore aural document, an example of what singer/guitarist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix heralds as "Transcendental Black Metal." (That platform was explicitly laid out in an academic manifesto.) Needless to say, all this intellectual noodling hasn't always sat well with the metal community itself. But Hunt-Hendrix simply considers the occasional criticism and Internet-enabled vitriol to be a part of the total Liturgy artwork — or 'Arkwork.' ARTINFO spoke to him about the band's ambitions to affect the wider culture.

Listen to Liturgy's "Generation," from their album "Aesthetica":

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What do you think shook people the most about your "Transcendental Black Metal (TBM) Manifesto," which both seems to call for a particularly 'American' form of black metal (while referencing Aaron Copland and Ornette Coleman, no less) and also shows a certain disdain for black metal musicians who perform in disguise or corpse-paint ("We refuse to lurk in the shadows... we do not hide behind costumes or esoterica.")?

I like your word "shook." Makes me think of Dan Graham's "Rock My Religion," about how American rock began with the Shakers, which is not unrelated to my answer. Anyway, originally there was not much of a reaction to the "Transcendental Black Metal" piece. I delivered it at the Hideous Gnosis black metal theory symposium in 2009 then published it in a journal called Lacanian Ink. Very few music-oriented people knew about it or saw it until more recently. Now, with our new record "Aesthetica" coming out, the text is getting attention from the metal community. Mostly people are furious about it, or "shaken" as you say. I don't think people actually read it; seems more like the mere fact of its existence is infuriating enough on its own. I think musicians, metal or otherwise, see it almost as a virtue to not be articulate, to let the music speak for itself. Otherwise one is pretentious and so on. But I disagree. Or to be more exact, I am really intrigued by the act of declaring something, forcing people to react one way or another to a Name and an Argument. Also, I am intrigued by my own urge to do this. In the manifesto I declare that, first, black metal is the death of the tradition of counterculture. Secondly, black metal itself has also died. Then I declare the intention to resurrect black metal and in doing so to rekindle the true counterculture, which pertains to a spiritual and political utopian vision, personified by Allen Ginsberg. The vision can be traced back through Henry Miller to Whitman and transcendentalism, and ultimately to William Blake where it all began. For those who read the TBM essay, maybe it's a surprise to see black metal situated in a wider historical context. But also ultimately I just think it's the nature of a document like TBM to anger people. It's sort of a sine qua non of the manifesto form.

Can you explain the TBM-related video project you have planned? Will it be designed to convey the information in the manifesto in a didactic sort of way, or will it be more a poetic or visual interpretation of those concepts?

The video is called "Genesis Caul." It's about 40 minutes long and it's basically completed, though I can't stop editing it. Actually the source material is footage I took of myself as I was developing the ideas for the Transcendental Black Metal lecture. Originally it was essentially a video notepad, to be referred to later as I began to actually write. I began with attempting to flesh out concepts and neologisms that had occurred to me: the Haptic Void, the Burst Beat, Aesthetics, and so on. But soon my relationship to the camera changed, it became a document of the insanity of the creative process... and I knew I had to make it into a video piece. It is a loose narrative, but I edited it to be very jagged and musical, using repetition and splicing to extract pitches out of speech, sort of like Steve Reich's early tape pieces. I also picked out points of forgetting, struggle, slips of the tongue, hoping to capture the nature of inspiration. It isn't meant to be didactic, or an interpretation of the TBM concepts; it's essentially an index of an act. The indefensible, irredeemable, senseless, illegal yet supremely meaningful act. The statement: "I declare that Transcendental Black Metal is born" and the follow-through, the suffering with and coagulation of the concepts. I'm very interested in this kind of act, both the phase of creative struggle and the phase of reception by culture. My name for it is Arkwork. You could say the entire Liturgy endeavor, including reactions to the band in the blogosphere, critical reception and so on, are elements of a single creative act, the Arkwork. The video supplements the manifesto, the manifesto supplements the music, the opinions and cliches blossom out and the whole thing develops like an organism. Interviews are a part of it too. It is all ultimately about being captivated by and following through with an idea, hanging in there, and seeing what happens.

Why do you think certain artists — Adam Helms to a degree, or Banks Violette — respond to the aesthetic of black metal, or a certain side of that aesthetic? Or someone like Matthew Barney, who is both a fan of the music and an occasional co-organizer of cross-over events, like the WOLD performance he staged at his studio last year with Brandon Stosuy…. What other metal/art collaborations give you hope for the future of both the music and the art?

I can't speak for artists who are drawn to black metal, but from the reverse perspective it looks something like this: I think the resonance between black metal and contemporary art has to do with something unresolved in Romanticism. Slavoj Zizek says that the philosophical outlook of a Romantic like Schelling is still the true horizon of philosophy today, and personally I think that the parallel holds true for art and music — that Romanticism is the horizon of all true culture. Someday modernity and postmodernity will be seen as sub-eras of the Romantic era. Maybe the artists who are interested in black metal instinctively know this. I also think there is a resonance between black metal and "serious music" or contemporary classical music, though it seems like there are fewer people interested in this resonance. Anyway, as for metal/art crossover collaborations, I don't know quite what to say. The one collaboration I was ever involved in was a project organized by Kai Althoff and Brandon Stosuy called "Mirror Me." Until a week before the event I thought I was simply being invited to perform at an opening, but in fact I was supposed to participate in an entire happening including tattooing, cutting, pissing, and more. It was great. I know Stephen O'Malley has done some cool collaborations with Banks Violette and with Gisele Vienne. David Lombardo playing drums with all the bees in "Cremaster 2" is rad — I actually had a dream about those bees the other night.... But I'm more excited about the idea of metal and fine art merging into a sort of higher Wagnerian unity, obviating the question of crossover.

You mentioned an affinity for Barney as well as Beuys and Robert Smithson. In the case of Barney and Beuys, specifically — what is your own interest in the concept of 'ritual' as it applies to performance, whether that performance is 'artistic' or 'musical'?

I think ritual is a real thing, that the word "performance" when applied to ritual is much stronger than when applied to either art or music, and sort of trumps the distinction between the two. Performance of a ritual isn't just aesthetic; it is religious, ethical, power-generating and so on. The differentiation of the different spheres of culture is unfortunate, because it produces partial effects: mere entertainment and distraction, or an obsession with novelty, originality and cleverness, or a sort of tribal identification and orthodoxy. Ritual is the space of true culture in its unity. Ritual instantiates a literal connection with a real cosmic creative force: God, Elan Vital, Desire, Libido, the Virtual, whatever. This force is responsible for genuine novelty, for the development of various traditions aesthetic and otherwise, and it is the only place we can go for Hope. And ritual is the way to access it, to allow itself to manifest itself. Liturgy's performances are rituals, though with no symbols, costumes, or rites. We burst into that realm by means of raw intensity.... Greg's drumming is really important in that. It's more like an ecstatic quawwali thing. Part of why I like Beuys, Barney, and Smithson is because I see them as more than artists, in the way that William Blake was more than a poet. Blake was a prophet, writing apocalyptic texts meant to usher in a new age of world history. He was writing sacred texts. Some of my favorite work by Smithson is the early Blake-inspired writings and paintings he produced before he'd found his voice. I think they inform the nature of the earthworks. Beuys was a mystic, a political activist, a guru, a lecturer. Wagner wanted to create a religion, Alexander Scriabin wanted to trigger the apocalypse. I like when creative figures shoot for effects beyond what is normally considered to lie within the realm of the aesthetic. These people are tapping into poetic/spiritual channels which escape the categorizations of different arts (music, the art world, literature) or even different domains of society (religion, art, politics).

Kanye West received fairly bland reviews for his performance at MoMA last month. Would Liturgy ever perform at the MoMA Garden Party?

I never heard about Kanye performing at MoMA, but that reminds me that I thought it was cool when Orphan played at the Whitney Biennial. I'm a big Kanye fan, though. I really admire his attitude towards culture. He's unflinching in his ambition to be the greatest musician ever — he tweets about loving Rothko and claims his music videos are art films. People laugh at him, but I love it. I think it's a healthy sense of ambition and heroism, something I wish there was more of these days. He's a lot like Alain Badiou in that way. I love how Badiou is always invoking his own last name in the third person and compares himself to the greats. "Aristotle said this, Kant said that, Badiou says this." His fundamental ideas are wildly audacious — like the claim to have discovered a new, higher logic that subsumes the system developed by the analytic philosophers and accounts for the nature of social, political, and emotional struggles. It's all about that space where nothing can be proven, they can only be asserted, and it's a matter of faith, resoluteness, honesty, and a certain flickering inspiration that is hard to describe. The audacity of these figures is so refreshing to me. It is affirmative. I see the opposite attitude around me so much, anti-everything, anti-history, anti-culture, this weary, hopeless nihilism. People are so cynical. Everything's been done, everything's fake, whatever. Personally I want to make work that is as profound as possible, and profound in as many ways as possible. Hopefully that includes a redemptive aspect. It's just an urge; I can't help it. Everyone thinks you can't do anything unless you're an expert in your field. I disagree. I think that attitude is just a symptom of the flattening of the human race that Nieztsche warned about.

Liturgy celebrates the release of "Aesthetica" on June 2 at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn.