Forging The Darkness : Collaborative processes in the creation of extreme metal

This thesis explores how music and musical ideas can take shape through collaborationwithin an extreme metal band. The band I'm a member of, Mass Worship, is geographicallyseparated all over Sweden, so it wasn't possible for us to meet in our rehearsal space and tryout ideas in a more traditional manner. The solution was that we had weekly meetings,sometimes up to three times a week, where we met and discussed both what our vision for thealbum was, but also more broader perspectives regarding music and philosophy that then fedinto musical ideas, and perhaps primarily shaping the writing of the lyrics. These meetingswere recorded and used as the material for analyzing different aspects of the collaborativeprocess. This thesis does not try to give a general idea of how music is created in this genre,but is a specific account of how we did it for these specific songs.