Crossing Borders and Joining Forces: KL Metal Mayhem Festival (UK Edition)
- Nedim Hassan
- Nov 5
- 3 min read
Metal on Merseyside has developed an exciting new collaborative partnership with Black Label Production, a Kuala Lumpur based music promotions company.
Earlier this year, Black Label Production brought Black Fire, an extreme metal band originating from Perlis, Malaysia, to Liverpool as the first stop on their inaugural UK tour – a tour supported by the Malaysian government.
Widely regarded as the first band in Asia to perform Black/Thrash/Doom Metal in the Malay language, Black Fire’s history stretches back to the early 1980s and they have had a substantial influence on Malaysia’s metal scene since that time.
Metal on Merseyside members provided promotional support for the concert event and created an opportunity for the Black Fire band members to visit Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and learn more about some of the research that has taken place as part of the project.
Inspired by their first visit to Liverpool, the Black Label Production team, returned to the city last month. This time they launched the first edition of their KL Metal Mayhem festival (UK edition), which is an expansion of their Kuala Lumpur based festival of the same name.
Taking place at EBGBS on Seel Street in Liverpool city centre on Saturday 4th October, the festival featured some of the rising stars of heavy rock and metal music from within the north-west region. The bands OmegaThrone, Archaea, Steel Forge, Napierdalać and the Machinist took to the stage before a packed audience.
To complement this brand-new festival, the day before saw a unique academic and industry symposium being hosted by LJMU. Crossing Borders: Metal Music Scenes and Extremity was a full day event featuring a range of metal music industry practitioners and academics from the field of metal music studies.
Taking place in the Student Life Building, Crossing Borders featured presentations that explored the themes of transgression and extremity, considering pertinent issues such as what interactions take place when regional music festivals transcend their local boundaries.
Keynote speeches were provided by both the Black Label Production team and Dr Susana González-Martínez (University of Helsinki), author of the forthcoming book Feminist Metal Music: Learning from the Underground (Bloomsbury Academic).
The overall event lived up to its name in that it provided several interesting “border crossings”. The audience, made up of both academics and practitioners, were able to engage in productive dialogues that were informed not just by scholarly concerns but also by the imperatives of scenes and industries.
Furthermore, the range of subject matter that was covered and the thoughtful ways that this was conveyed via the incorporation of anti-colonial/decolonial practices, feminist perspectives, ethnographic research, and critical approaches to historiography and mediation, helped to ensure that knowledge derived from the “margins” was privileged at the event. We may have been in the heart of Liverpool, a city characterized by dominant heritage narratives, but at Crossing Borders the “usual suspects” of music culture and history were nowhere to be seen, making for a fresh and lively occasion.
The symposium was an ideal companion to the KL Metal Mayhem (UK edition) music festival and was funded by both the UK-Malaysia University Consortium and LJMU’s new Centre for Cultural, Social and Political Research.
A documentary film giving an insight into the festival and symposium, as well as the overall partnership is available via the Metal on Merseyside YouTube channel (see below).
Team Leader for Black Label Production, Zax Zulkifly, revealed during his keynote address that plans are already underway for more music events in Liverpool during 2026.
Both Zax and his team alongside members of Metal on Merseyside are pursuing the longer term aims of enriching the collaboration by enabling further events.
We are looking to foster opportunities for cultural exchange that enables artists and metal scene members from both the Liverpool city region and Malaysia to learn from each other, so watch this space!
Comments