About Us.
HIEROPHANT NOX – EXTREME METAL FEATURES, NEWS, REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS
Hierophant Nox began life on the 1st January 2009, founded by a group of individuals with a variety of webzine, magazine, broadcasting and event organising experience who fancied a fresh start and a slightly skewed (in a good way) approach to making the most of what an internet platform has to offer the flighty and underground world of extreme metal and all of its bastard cousins.
We originally set out to follow an ‘issue’ model, whereby the site was updated with features fortnightly (with a rolling, daily news update). This worked well for us in being able to nab an audience for our articles, but as life rather inevitably became more complicated for our small crew, it became difficult to maintain long-term, leading to two frustrating hiatuses between Spring and Autumn of 2010, and Winter 2010 and Spring 2011. The endearing, if utterly awful, old-school manner in which the site was constructed did nothing to aid our plight in this situation.
Roll-on to April 2011, and a radical re-think. Making use of the Ryzar creative network (www.ryzar.com), it has been possible for us to think big in our re-imagining of what Hierophant Nox should do. Although a few of us have previously burned out on the ‘constantly updating webzine’ model, we’re pretty confident about moving away from the issue pattern this time, simply because updating just became a whole world of easy, and we remain just as passionate as ever about sticking our oar in and necks out, and mouthing off about what’s amazing and what’s an outrageous disgrace.
We hear (frequently) that there are loads of webzines, and what’s the point… but we always have and still do see a point – we go to odd corners, we take ‘music from the edge’, with a disregard for genre about which I’ve also been openly proud. Additionally, we endeavour to look at it not from the viewpoint of being the first to review the big label band, or of flooding the ether with a zillion, poorly-articulated pieces, but instead as a way of providing the kind of writing about extreme metal that people actually want to read. ‘Incisive’ is a bit ambitious, but yeah…. I like incisive. Once we’ve written it, we go about spreading it all across the world, same way as ever. Our new site design should help us in our evil task.
Will I still be one of the most frustratingly tardy editors you’ve ever worked with? Most likely, although I can’t begin to explain how much more responsive we can be now. Things will go up and down again I’m sure, as life does. We’re very much still at it, though, we’re clearing through our backlog, and when you see what I’ve got lined up for our official re-launch… oh my soul…
Stick with us, baby: we’re still the ones with the most progressive understanding of the internet, we’re still defiantly weird and we’re still dangerously outspoken in that calm, informed way that makes you thank us for kicking you in the teeth.
Dark regards
Ellen – April 2011
Crew
• Ellen Simpson – Editor
• Satanic Muttley – Features Writer
• Sage Charles – Features Writer
For our areas of interest and submission guidelines, please check the ‘Contact’ page.