Alex Kurtagić


Alex Kurtagić is a British artist, cultural commentator, satirist, musician, novelist, and publisher. He is the founder of Supernal Music and various publishing houses. For a time, he was a far-right speaker and writer, although he's since drawn a line under political extremism. 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.

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 became known for his album cover illustrations. His artwork appeared on albums by black metal artists, such as Dimmu Borgir, Deinonychus, among others. His cover of Dimmu Borgir's Stormblåst 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