Les Légions Noires was an avant-garde group of French undergroundblack metal musicians and their bands, centered mostly around the city ofBrest, in Brittany. The bands involved limited their releases to very small numbers, and distributed them among friends and close workers.
History
Possibly the circle was formed in the late 1980s, early 1990s, in response to the supposed Norwegian "Black Metal Inner Circle". According to a 2005 series in Terrorizermagazine on the history of black metal, "A bunch of corpsepainted characters, rumoured to be drawn from such acts as Mütiilation, Torgeist and Vlad Tepes named themselves the 'Black Legions' as a tribute to the so-called 'Black Mafia' Norwegian BM heroes Darkthrone and Burzum, who were supposedly ready to terrorize Christians a couple of years before." The first recordings of LLN members came about in the early 1990s, and their influence was acknowledged in the same issue of Terrorizer: "One should never count out France, primarily as the home of the inscrutably influential Black Legions of ridiculous rawness during the mid-90s." Regarding their influences, Wlad Drakksteim of Vlad Tepes referred, in an interview with Petrified magazine, to Hellhammer and especially Bathory: "Every True Black Metal Horde should play in old Bathory style." When asked about the "Norwegian Black Metal Mafia", he said, "Norwegian mafia did lots of 'bad' things to this world. With Euronymous death MAYHEM is definitely dead and it's better like that as it will help Black Metal to return to darkness. must be in peace now so I don't complain him. And about Varg Vikernes I don't have any opinion. WE have OUR opinions and he certainly knows them so..." The best-known bands of the LLN are Mütiilation, Belketre, Torgeist, and Vlad Tepes. Vlad Tepes have been outspoken in the goals of their black metal: "We are Black Legions of Satan, we are the immortalwarriors of Black imperial blood. We are here to pervert christian worms and they shall face the Black holocaust. It's near!" While none of the bands involved in Les Légions Noires released any new material from 1998 to 2014, Belketre released a new EP entitledRyan Èvn-A in 2015. It is unclear if the bands were inactive during that time or simply preferred not to release their material to the public.
Discography
Mütiilation: Hail Satanas We Are the Black Legions
