Introduction
Alex Kurtagić (born 1970) is an artist, cultural commentator, satirist, musician, novelist, and publisher, based in the UK. He is the founder of Supernal Music and various publishing houses. His writing has dealt with topics relating to culture, society, politics, music, and community relations in the contemporary West. He is known as a proponent of elitism and as a critic of conservatism. He is also known to have ties to racist and Neo-Nazi organisations.
Life
Kurtagić was born in 1970. Due to his parents' jobs he spent part of his youth in South America. In 1995, he founded the project Benighted Leams, which has since released four albums. In 1996 he founded Supernal Music.
During the mid-to-late 1990s, he was active as an album cover illustrator. Most of his artwork appeared on albums by black metal artists, such as Dimmu Borgir, Deinonychus, and others. His artwork is featured in the book Heavy Metal Thunder: Album Covers that Rocked the World.
Writer
Kurtagić's dystopian novel, Mister, was published in 2009. For the next few years, Kurtagić was active as a social, cultural, and political commentator. In 2011 a collection of articles and essays was published in book form by Unitall Verlag in German translation, with the title Ja, Afrika muss zur Hölle gehen.
A second collection, also in German, was published by Antaios in 2013 as Warum Konservative immer verlieren.
More recently, a book collecting his artwork was published, containing also anecdotal, fictional, semi-fictional, and satirical texts.
Supernal Music
Supernal Music was mainly known throughout the late 1990s for its mail order catalogue of underground music, particularly extreme metal in all categories, but mainly black metal. Later on it became known in the underground black metal scene through a roster that included bands such as Astrofaes and Drudkh from Ukraine, Fleurety and Mayhem from Norway, and The Meads of Asphodel from the United Kingdom.
In 2008 the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight published a critical article on fascist lyrics and imagery in some styles of black metal that included criticism of the label's newsletter for having featured Savitri Devi, Ernst Junger, Miguel Serrano, and Julius Langbehn on its covers and for the content of some of the CDs on offer.
Discography
Benighted Leams
- Caliginous Romantic Myth (1996)
- Astral Tenebrion (1998)
- Ferly Centesms (2004)
- Obombrid Welkins (2006)
Translations
- The Golden Tread by Miguel Serrano. The Palingenesis Project, 2017.