The Letters That Ran Faster Than the Internet
There’s a particular kind of foreign coverage of Japan’s metal underground that drives me a little crazy — the breathless “discovery” piece, written as if Abigail or Sabbat appeared out of nowhere in the 1990s, fully formed, waiting to be found by some European with a passport. I’ve read enough of those. What I find genuinely interesting is the rarer article, usually buried in some xeroxed European death metal zine from the era, that understood something the glossy retrospectives keep missing: the network came first. The music traveled inside it.
The correspondence between bands like Gorerest and Abigail and their European counterparts wasn’t a footnote to the music. It was the music, in a real sense. A cassette dub tucked inside a hand-addressed envelope, routed through postal systems that took three weeks each way, carried weight that a Bandcamp link never quite replicates. The European zine writers who covered this — the ones actually receiving those tapes, those crumpled photocopied flyers with katakana band names spelled phonetically into Roman letters — they had skin in the game. They waited for the mail.
What strikes me, reading those accounts now, is how methodical the whole thing was. The underground operated on reciprocity. You send me yours, I send you mine, I mention you in my zine, you put my address in your demo insert. Japan was not on the periphery of this system. Abigail, with their raw black-thrash ferocity, and Gorerest, grinding down in the death-metal trenches, weren’t supplicants knocking on a European door. They were nodes. Active ones. The letters went both ways, the tapes went both ways, and the zines — European, Japanese, South American, American — all fed the same loop.
Where the Coverage Gets It Right (and Where It Slips)
The best foreign writing on this period resists the colonial framing. It doesn’t treat Japan as exotic soil that happened to grow metal. The zines that got it right tended to be the small ones, the ones run by one obsessive in a bedroom in Hamburg or Stockholm who had personally traded tapes with someone in Osaka or Tokyo. Their descriptions were specific. Sweaty. They talked about the sound of a particular tape copy, the generation loss, the way certain demos had that warbly high-end from being duped on cheap equipment. That’s not romanticism — that’s memory.
Where I’ve watched foreign retrospective coverage stumble is in the timeline. There’s a tendency to flatten the chronology, to treat the entire Japanese underground of the 1980s and 1990s as one undifferentiated blob of extremity. It wasn’t. There were distinct waves, distinct regional energies, distinct arguments happening inside the scene about what the music should do. When a European writer collapses all of that into “Japan’s ferocious metal underground,” something real gets lost — not out of bad faith, just out of distance.
Honestly, the zine writers of the actual era often did better than the documentarians who came later. Proximity helped. So did the fact that they were writing for readers who also had calluses on their fingertips from rewinding cassettes.
I think about those flyers sometimes. Printed on whatever paper was available, folded into envelopes, crossing twelve time zones for the price of a postage stamp. The European zines that covered Abigail and Gorerest and their scene weren’t doing journalism exactly — they were participating. That’s a distinction worth holding onto.
Read the old zines if you can find them. The scan quality is terrible. That’s kind of the point.
