Michael Moynihan

Michael Jenkins Moynihan (born 1969) is an American writer, editor, translator, journalist, artist, and musician. He is best known for co-writing Lords of Chaos, a book about black metal.

Moynihan is founder of the music group Blood Axis, the music label Storm Records and publishing company Dominion Press.

Moynihan has interviewed numerous musical figures and has published several books, translations, and essays. He also published and edited James Mason's neo-Nazi book Siege, writing the book's introduction and helping Mason promote his work. Often linked to the far-right, Moynihan's politics have shifted through the decades, but remained controversial throughout his career.

Biography

Moynihan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1969, the only son of upper-middle-class parents. He became active in underground tape-trading and fanzine culture as a teenager. He began making experimental music from 1984 with the multi-media project Coup de Grâce, forming Blood Axis in 1989 and releasing his first album under that name in 1995.

Moynihan collaborated with noise musician Boyd Rice from 1989, and in 1990 the two moved into an apartment in Denver.

During the summer of 1991, Moynihan was visited at his apartment by agents of the United States Secret Service about an alleged plot to assassinate then-President of the United States George H. W. Bush. Moynihan agreed to a polygraph test, and no charges were filed. Moynihan stated that it was a simple case of intimidation stemming from his correspondence with Charles Manson, whom he was interviewing for a national magazine.

He was one of the four members of the "occult-fascist" Abraxas Foundation, which he joined in March 1989.

In 1995, Moynihan released the first full-length album by Blood Axis, The Gospel of Inhumanity, and moved from Denver to Portland, Oregon, where he became an editor at Feral House, a publishing company owned by Adam Parfrey. After studying language and history at the University of Colorado and Portland State University, Moynihan received his B.A. in German language in 2000. He received his Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Books and articles

Moynihan's first publication was an art fanzine called The Final Incision, which he published under the name Coup de Grâce in 1984. It featured contributions from various artists associated with the underground industrial music scene, including "MB" (Maurizio Bianchi) and Trevor Brown. Coup de Grâce also issued various art posters and newsletters between 1985 and 1989. As a graphic artist, Moynihan designed posters for live performances by Coup de Grâce, Sleep Chamber, and Hunting Lodge in the mid-1980s.

Between 1990 and 1995, Moynihan contributed articles, photography, and editorial work to various magazines and journals including the "extreme culture" magazine The Fifth Path (of which he became associate editor), an underground music and culture magazine edited by Robert Ward; the Colorado Music Magazine, a Denver-based music monthly; and the internationally distributed newsstand music and art interview magazine Seconds, edited by Steven Blush and George Petros. During this time, Moynihan also published journalistic work in High Society.

Among the artists and figures Moynihan has interviewed are power electronics founder Whitehouse; Unleashed; Bathory; In the Nursery; Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey; convicted murderer Charles Manson; Peter Steele of Type O Negative; Burzum; George Eric Hawthorne of RAHOWA; Misfits founder Glenn Danzig; Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV founder Genesis P-Orridge; and Swans founder Michael Gira.

Moynihan started a publishing house called Storm Books. Together with Stephen Flowers, Moynihan co-authored The Secret King (2001, rev. ed. 2007). In 2001, Moynihan edited a reprint of Julius Evola and the UR Group's book Introduction to Magic, originally published in 1929, and in 2002, he edited the first English language translation of Evola's 1953 book Men Among the Ruins (both published by Inner Traditions). In 2004, Moynihan edited with Annabel Lee the first English publication of a treatise by erotic and surrealist artist Hans Bellmer titled Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy of the Image. The book, which was issued in a limited edition of 1,100 numbered copies, is translated by Jon Graham and includes a preface by the artist Joe Coleman. In 2005, Moynihan edited and published a collection of essays by British writer John Michell (selected from Michell's contributions to The Oldie) entitled Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist.

Moynihan was the co-editor of the journal TYR: Myth – Culture – Tradition.

Lords of Chaos

Moynihan co-authored with Norwegian journalist Didrik Søderlind the book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (Feral House, 1998), an account of the early Norwegian black metal scene. It won a 1998 Firecracker Alternative Book Award. In 2018 a full-length dramatic film based on the book and bearing the same title, Lords of Chaos, directed by Jonas Åkerlund and starring Rory Culkin, Emory Cohen, and Sky Ferreira, was released.

Reviews of Lords of Chaos were mixed. The publication was sometimes criticized for a perceived lack of distance towards its subject matter. This was considered especially alarming to groups and figures that had accused Moynihan of right-wing sympathies, charges which Moynihan has dismissed as inapplicable due to the "intricacies of such subjects". However, several critics praised the book for offering an informative or at least interesting view on a relatively obscure subculture.

Tyr

Tyr: Myth—Culture—Tradition is a journal edited by Moynihan together with Joshua Buckley. The publication is named after Tyr, the Germanic god. The editors state that it "celebrates the traditional myths, culture, and social institutions of pre-Christian, pre-modern Europe." The first issue was published in 2002 under the ULTRA imprint in Atlanta, Georgia.