Arma Christi: Black Metal Apparel from the 20th Century is the huge new photo book created by one Jean-Emmanuel Simoulin, better known to many as Valnoir. As monumental in size as it is ambition, this mighty tome is filled to the brim with black metal’s most formative and iconic designs, documenting a vast curation of black metal merchandise over more than 300 pages. Thus we are treated to vintage shirts from the genre’s most formative years by every band you could hope for; Mayhem, Rotting Christ, Gorgoroth, Samael, Venom, Darkthrone, Summoning, Nifelheim, Impaled Nazarene, Vlad Tepes, Master’s Hammer, Abigor, Cradle of Filth, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Emperor, Judas Iscariot, Burzum, Bathory, Necromantia… in short, almost every essential 80s and 90s black metal act. We decided to catch up with the prolific and opinionated Frenchman for a few words on this bloody monster of a book…

Cult Never Dies: You discuss your early years as a metal fan in the book’s introduction, but for newcomers, could you briefly explain how you became a metal fan in the first place?

Valnoir: “I always think that there’s nothing as tedious as an old metalhead playing over and over the record of his personal story with metal, and it’s in the introduction of the book, so I’ll try to make it snappy: I was born in 1979 and am therefore 44. Before the age of 10, I was already fascinated with metal aesthetics: Those black leather rockers I would occasionally bump into in the streets of Paris were fascinating, with their long hair and horrific apparel. I was mostly obsessed with the figure of Eddie from Iron Maiden, but seeing an interview with Slayer on the French/German channel Arte in 1992  is what ignited the whole arson. Those guys were reeking of danger and represented to me a real threat, with their volatile mix of Satanism and fascism. The documentary featured the Slaytanic Wermacht artwork that, since then, never stopped to haunt me. So yep… even before being a fan of the music (which back then I found frankly inaudible), I got drawn to this constellation through the prism of visual aesthetics.”

How did you progress from such beginnings to becoming involved in the still-underground black metal scene?

“Two years of initiation of heavy metal and thrash classics (and very, very little death metal) followed before I bought Samael’s Ceremony of Opposite on October 12th, 1994. The little I heard about black metal back then was mostly carried by the rumours and facts connected to the acts of terrorism coming from Norway. I realised then that what I was looking for in metal was not mere entertainment but a complete body and soul commitment to the axis of evil. See, I was always on the side of villains in movies, and the left-hand path seemed to be a much more exciting way of life than adopting a normcore existence.” 

“Listening to those first records (Ceremony of Opposites, Battle in the North, Suomi Finland Perkele, Wolfheart) was like sticking my fingers into an electrical outlet of pure, privileged excitement and pleasure, taking me to places I had never been before. There was no way I would dedicate my life to anything else. Satan within me, you know. 30 years later, here I am, and I didn’t dedicate my life to anything else. Of course, I diversified a bit, but I worked as a visual art director for close to 300 bands (half of them being black metal, including Deathspell Omega, Taake, Ulver, Watain, Behemoth, etc.), and I’ve authored and/or edited a dozen of books, all focused on visual terror beside one cookery book I did with a friend called L’archipel du goulache – The Gulash Archipelago – but even this is directly connected to totalitarian regimes. Devil is always sitting somewhere on my shoulder!”

At what point did you become seriously involved in art and illustration? Did this passion precede your interest in music, or was it a result of that in some way?

“It is a parallel and progressive development. In fact, one could safely assert that children are often encouraged to engage in drawing earlier than in a more thorough practice or exploration of music. What I mean is that a child can enjoy and practice drawing at an age when they have not yet developed a personal curiosity for music. And a kid quietly drawing in a corner is more tolerable than one with a flute, or worse, a drum set. But let’s move on to the moment when things really get complicated: the onset of adolescence. When I experienced my first visual and musical emotions related to metal, one thing was certain – I was already drawing. Not a great talent in itself, but compared to the lack of skill and, more importantly, the lack of interest in it among most of my peers at the time, my DNA was equipped with a little something extra.”

“Metal, with its universe encompassing all forms of expression, was a creative driving force for me from a visual and graphic standpoint. At first, you copy the Maiden logo and draw Eddie on your schoolbook instead of listening to the teacher, and from there, you go deeper. However, there’s a hiatus in this journey: paradoxically, my deep dive into black metal in the mid-90s was so profound that it completely and temporarily anaesthetised my appetite for graphic practice, plunging me into a state of total inert contemplation… perinde ad cadaver – ‘not unlike a corpse.’ So much so that it momentarily compromised my plans to study applied arts at the high school I was attending. Nevertheless, I managed to get into a public school of graphic arts after my high school diploma in 2001, and that’s when things got really serious. It was also at that point that my active musical practice (especially my solo project Gohr Al Krohn) came to a halt, as I dedicated myself 100% to visual arts. I did participate in various projects, but only in a dilettante manner or as an occasional contributor. It’s only this year that I’ve started writing music seriously again.”

Do you remember how the idea of Arma Christi first germinated, and did you envision it in a similar form to the finished tome in terms of content?

“I can trace the birth of most of my other books down to the exact day and sometimes hour, but not Arma Christi. One possible hypothesis is that there was never really a clear break between the moment I started to love heavy metal merch and the moment I began working on this project. But in any case, I always have a fairly clear image in mind when I start a book project. The title and subtitle came to me quite early; I believe that the name of a publishing project should encapsulate its essence and tell its story in just a few words. I also quickly established the structure, its architecture, the type of image sequencing, and the layout naturally follows. In this case, there were quite a few questions about the sequencing. I ended up opting for a chronological order, as this book places the phenomenon within a specific timeline (until the end of the millennium), where the evolution of black metal was incredibly rapid, with everything changing from one year to the next. It seemed interesting to be able to measure this evolution from a graphic rather than a musical perspective. But other options were considered, such as a geographical distribution of the models (ultimately deemed not sufficiently narrative), or a typology based on the band’s musical style (which was too subjective).”

Speaking of subjective, can you tell us a few of your personal favourite shirts in the book?

“There are those that stand out because their message makes them almost unwearable, if not completely unwearable: the radicalism is an element that distinguishes black metal from the rest of the metal scenes, and it’s an important marker for me. And then there are those with iconic minimalism, or on the contrary (and this is more of a marker from the very end of the 90s), those that are outrageously kitsch, a sign of the recent discovery of technologies like Photoshop, which had only recently become accessible to the general public and were often used haphazardly. This gives them a lot of charm: clumsiness and spontaneity are two important facets of the black metal prism at that time. But in the end, what I find interesting really doesn’t matter at all. It did matter, of course, during the conception of the book. In my curation, I mainly aimed to offer a very broad and representative range of what the scene was over almost two decades. But after that, the real adventure begins when each reader finds the designs that matter to them, the ones that will evoke emotions connected to their own history, as if, while flipping through a photo album, they find a picture of themselves from 30 years ago. That’s what counts. Behind a documentary and historical facade, this project is, above all, profoundly and painfully emotional. These pieces of merchandise are, for those for whom black metal truly mattered, linked to our stories, to our lives.”

I think we must address the striking and imaginative front and back cover and the accompanying process of scarification.

“Given the nature of my career, if there was one aspect I couldn’t overlook for this book, it was its cover. A cover’s primary missions are, first and foremost, to evoke the content of the book, either directly or indirectly, and to prompt curiosity in the viewer, imprint itself in their mind, intrigue them, and make them want to dive into reading the work. If it manages to traumatise them for life, that’s an undeniable bonus, but even making it memorable despite the overwhelming, ceaseless flow of images we all face daily is already an achievement in itself.”

“In this instance, the fundamental premise was to talk about clothing and black metal. I wanted to avoid at all costs a too literal approach, which would have required showing a T-shirt in some way. Telling a story without looking at it head-on, marvelling at its shadow rather than its face, is one of the challenges of my craft. What struck me deeply during my immersion in black metal in the 1990s was, of course, its radical nature and the risk (moral or physical) taken by those who dove into its ocean. Like many, I practised self-scarification at the time; it was a way of wearing the stigmata of the experience on oneself, like adornment, like clothing. From that point, linking the two became evident to me. Beyond that, I could mention that a genuine author lays their skin on the line when working on a book and that since the start of my career, I have had the habit of signing my books with my own blood rather than ink (What could be more natural when you think about it?). I designed the lettering, asked my partner, who is a tattoo artist, to cut my skin from my back, chest, and forearm, and there you have it. No pain, no gain.”

Arma Christi is a 312 page colour hardback book and includes a bookplate marked by the author in their own blood. It is officially released in January 2025, but can be ordered now from the main Cult Never Dies store (cultneverdies.myshopify.com).

In January and February 2025 it will also be available from the Cult Never Dies EU store (https://cultneverdies-eu.travelling-merchant.com), as well as a range of metal / book stores including (in alphabetical order) Ajna Offensive, Black City Records, Centennial, Consouling, Coop Records, Dark Earth, Darkness Shall Rise, Katakomben, Levykauppa Äx, Raven Records, Rockmark, Season of Mist, Vrijheid, Direct Merch and more.