Even in the Quietest Moments (Black Metal)
Flatbed digital serigraph on wood, 12×12 in.

A mash-up of the Supertramp album cover of the same name (original cover design by Mike Doud) with David Monson‘s photo of the Odalen Church, outside Edinburg, ND burning on June 21, 2007.

The alterations are subtle, but the implications are monumental. The pentagram in the snow and the burning church in the background represent events in the Norwegian Black Metal scene of the early 1990s, as documented in Michael Moynihan‘s Lords of Chaos. Panik MK worked as a publicist for a prominent heavy metal label in the late 1990s and was in direct contact with members of seminal Norwegian BM bands Mayhem and Emperor among many others. The churches destroyed at the height of Black Metal hysteria represent an incalculable loss of cultural treasures, and the loss of life in the greater Scandinavian Satanic metal scene to murder and suicide has no comparable scale in any other musical movement in history. Hip hop artists have battled both figuratively and literally, and Gangsta Rap was frequently the scapegoat of gang violence, but the death toll and destruction accumulated within the relatively small circle of middle class black metal bands in Sweden and Norway remains peerless and puzzling.

And so the altered, stoic, beauty of this classic, soft-rock masterpiece and it’s album closer, Fool’s Overture, is made even more ironic than originally intended.