I registered the Street Metal Forum domain on March 20th 2006. It was named after the Abigail album “Forever Street Metal Bitch”, which I had recently discovered with Howie Change (Sabbat in Throne of Mortality). He had also gotten me into Mütiilation, and that was the beginning of of Les Legions Noires for me. I started looking for more of their stuff, and it was quite difficult to find, and what I did find was in horrible quality. I contacted Der.Walsch who lived in France and had some of the rare stuff to freely share with me. We decided that we’d like to start up an online community to discuss and research the LLN material, and possibly share them free in order to reduce the bootleg selling individuals. The first three members were myself, Der.Walsch and Phil Altobelli (Darklink). After creating the website, I went to Scugog, Ontario for a few months and I didn’t actually start working on building the forum until July of 2006, at which point Der.Walsch had already uploaded his material. The original forum had two sections, one for the downloads and one for the discussions. At first it was solely LLN material, but as the community grew, we allowed other black metal uploads.
We were very strict in the beginning about the people who could join. There was a great deal of spam and bots going around forums, so we made a rule that each member had to upload something to be allowed into the forum. It was a very tedious task for Der and I to manage. Forumer had great restrictions on what we could do as a free forum, so the entire management was a pain in the ass. We also used to delete members who had not logged in in three months, as to keep the forum fresh. We must have deleted a few hundreds easily during the time we were doing this.
The forum really grew that entire summer, people were submitting their rare LLN stuff and we had a load of discussions going. We wanted to keep all the hatred out and just focus on discussing it intelligently. Of course our goal was to eventually get in touch with the members themselves. In 2006, none of them were showing any presence online, apart from occasionally sending death threats to bootleggers.
The second SMF banner
Street Metal Forum during its height in 2006
I wanted to write a book on LLN, something professional and elaborate on the entire years and doings of theirs. In fall 2006 I started talking to Noktu who ran Drakkar Productions, and through him got an email of a guy who was still friends with Wlad Drakksteim, who was most known for Vlad Tepes. He gave me Wlad’s email and I started exchanging emails with him. At first he was willing to share all this information, sending me lists of non-circulated projects that the circle had. When I started asking him for more information, he offered to get me interviews with the current six members of the circle, at 50 euros a piece. He said we could do “The Black Plague: Chapter Two”, in reference to the zine that Meyhna’ch had printed in 1995 called “The Black Plague: Chapter One (And Maybe Last One)”. I was insulted and also surprised, because after all, Noktu had constantly told me that the only proof of a members officialism, would be that he would never ask for money. So now I was confused, and started wondering if all the information he had given me was correct, and if I was even talking to the real person. I then contacted Vordb, who promptly told me he had no wish to discuss anything related to the circle, even for a book. By October 2006 I started putting my efforts into my own circle, Triskalyon, and the forum was slowly forgotten, but I added other moderators to take care of it for me.
The forum continued taking care of itself for the next couple of years after I had given it up in March 2007.
Street Metal Forum banner in April of 2007
In 2008 my email was hacked and I lost all the saved emails of the people I had talked to. It took until the summer of 2010 to go see what the forum was up to. I wanted to bring it back and get some activity again, because by then myspace pages had flourished and a lot of other communities had been started by other LLN fans, the majority of them were started after they were banned from SMF after posting their own version of their stories with no proofs and were insulting anyone who would intelligently question them and ask where they had gotten their information. However by then most of the members has dispersed.
The third SMF banner
It took a few months for me to clean up the site. We had been allowing non-LLN uploads on the site, and it really had nothing to do with it anymore. I took off everything non-LLN related, apart from the general discourse section. Pretty much all the links of the LLN downloads were dead, so I also took those down and asked for people to reupload them, hopefully in the best quality they had. I wanted to have a replacement function so that if someone had a better version of a recording, they could replace it. The gallery was also inactive and disorganized. I created a new one and a lot of people added new images. But not everyone because of security reasons, and they knew that people would steal their scans and claim it as theirs. Finally I created a poll to vote for the best new name for the forum. It was chosen to be March to the Black Holocaust, named after one of the most famous releases. Unfortunately, the fan base really had died, and the forum never got back to its momentum it had in 2007.
The last version of the forum
Links:
http://www.streetmetal.forumer.com always worked and redirected automatically to:
1:
2: http://www.streetmetal.7.forumer.com
3: http://www.streetmetal.fr.yuku.com