Embodied encounters with death affect humans deeply, with the power to crush, transform and strengthen individuals and relationships. Understanding that these encounters often have a musical accompaniment, this edited collection offers a range of critical, analytic, discursive and personal reflections on how music provides both a container and a medium for experiencing, processing and integrating embodied encounters with death. The collection showcases new and original interdisciplinary case studies written by authors from several different countries across Australia, France, The Netherlands, Poland and the UK. Taking an international, interdisciplinary and inclusive approach, this carefully curated collection elaborates embodied encounters with death through music across a variety of praxes and disciplines such as death & grief, queer studies, disability, philosophy, and more. Providing a mix of personal perspectives and insights on the impact of music and death alongside more conventional academic studies, the chapters reveal how music and human nature are intimately, and bodily, entwined. Framed by opening and closing chapters written by the team of three editors, this core text in the field provides a unique overview of the implications and ramifications of the embodiment of death through music and the musicalisation of death through the body, and signposts possibilities for further research.

Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss weaves together trauma, black metal performance and disability into a story of both pain and freedom. Drawing on her years as a black metal guitarist, Jasmine Hazel Shadrack uses autoethnography to explore her own experiences of gender-based violence, misogyny, and the healing power of performance. This profoundly personal book offers a detailed explanation of autoethnography, followed by a careful exposition of the relationship between metal and gender, considering - among other things - how women are engaged with by metal music culture. After examining the various waves of black metal and how this has impacted black metal theory, the book moves on to consider female performers and performance as catharsis, including a discussion of the author's work as guitarist and vocalist with the black metal band Denigrata and her alter-ego, the 'antlered priestess' Denigrata Herself. The book concludes with some thoughts on acquired disability, freedom and peace. The book includes a foreword from eminent gender researcher Rosemary Lucy Hill, a guest section from metal scholar Amanda DiGioia, an epilogue from Rebecca Lamont-Jiggens (a legal pracademic specialising in disability), suggestions of sources of help for those in abusive relationships and further reading for those wishing to learn more about black metal theory.