Michael Moynihan

Michael Jenkins Moynihan (born 1969) is an American writer, editor, translator, journalist, artist, and musician. He is best known for co-writing Lords of Chaos, a book about black metal. Moynihan is founder of the music group Blood Axis, the music label Storm Records and publishing company Dominion Press.

Moynihan has interviewed numerous musical figures and has published several books, translations, and essays. He also published and edited James Mason's neo-Nazi book Siege, writing the book's introduction and helping Mason promote his work. Often linked to the far-right, Moynihan's politics have shifted through the decades, but remained controversial throughout his career.

Biography Moynihan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1969, the only son of upper-middle-class parents. He became active in underground tape-trading and fanzine culture as a teenager. He began making experimental music from 1984 with the multi-media project Coup de Grâce, forming Blood Axis in 1989 and releasing his first album under that name in 1995.

Moynihan collaborated with noise musician Boyd Rice from 1989, and in 1990 the two moved into an apartment in Denver.

During the summer of 1991, Moynihan was visited at his apartment by agents of the United States Secret Service about an alleged plot to assassinate then-President of the United States George H. W. Bush. Moynihan agreed to a polygraph test, and no charges were filed. Moynihan stated that it was a simple case of intimidation stemming from his correspondence with Charles Manson, whom he was interviewing for a national magazine.

He was one of the four members of the "occult-fascist" Abraxas Foundation, which he joined in March 1989.

In 1995, Moynihan released the first full-length album by Blood Axis, The Gospel of Inhumanity, and moved from Denver to Portland, Oregon, where he became an editor at Feral House, a publishing company owned by Adam Parfrey. After studying language and history at the University of Colorado and Portland State University, Moynihan received his B.A. in German language in 2000. He received his Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Books and articles Moynihan's first publication was an art fanzine called The Final Incision, which he published under the name Coup de Grâce in 1984. It featured contributions from various artists associated with the underground industrial music scene, including "MB" (Maurizio Bianchi) and Trevor Brown. Coup de Grâce also issued various art posters and newsletters between 1985 and 1989. As a graphic artist, Moynihan designed posters for live performances by Coup de Grâce, Sleep Chamber, and Hunting Lodge in the mid-1980s.

Between 1990 and 1995, Moynihan contributed articles, photography, and editorial work to various magazines and journals including the "extreme culture" magazine The Fifth Path (of which he became associate editor), an underground music and culture magazine edited by Robert Ward; the Colorado Music Magazine, a Denver-based music monthly; and the internationally distributed newsstand music and art interview magazine Seconds, edited by Steven Blush and George Petros. During this time, Moynihan also published journalistic work in High Society.

Among the artists and figures Moynihan has interviewed are power electronics founder Whitehouse; Unleashed; Bathory; In the Nursery; convicted murderer Charles Manson; Burzum; George Eric Hawthorne of RAHOWA; Misfits founder Glenn Danzig; Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV founder Genesis P-Orridge; and Swans founder Michael Gira.

Moynihan started a publishing house called Storm Books. Together with Stephen Flowers, Moynihan co-authored The Secret King (2001, rev. ed. 2007). In 2001, Moynihan edited a reprint of Julius Evola and the UR Group's book Introduction to Magic, originally published in 1929, and in 2002, he edited the first English language translation of Evola's 1953 book Men Among the Ruins (both published by Inner Traditions). In 2004, Moynihan edited with Annabel Lee the first English publication of a treatise by erotic and surrealist artist Hans Bellmer titled Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy of the Image. The book, which was issued in a limited edition of 1,100 numbered copies, is translated by Jon Graham and includes a preface by the artist Joe Coleman. In 2005, Moynihan edited and published a collection of essays by British writer John Michell (selected from Michell's contributions to The Oldie) entitled Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist.

Moynihan was the co-editor of the journal TYR: Myth – Culture – Tradition.

Lords of Chaos

Moynihan co-authored with Norwegian journalist Didrik Søderlind the book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (Feral House, 1998), an account of the early Norwegian black metal scene. It won a 1998 Firecracker Alternative Book Award.

Reviews of Lords of Chaos were mixed. The publication was sometimes criticized for a perceived lack of distance towards its subject matter. This was considered especially alarming to groups and figures that had accused Moynihan of right-wing sympathies, charges which Moynihan has dismissed as inapplicable due to the "intricacies of such subjects". The publication is named after Tyr, the Germanic god. The editors state that it "celebrates the traditional myths, culture, and social institutions of pre-Christian, pre-modern Europe." The first issue was published in 2002 under the ULTRA imprint in Atlanta, Georgia.

Siege by James Mason In 1992, Moynihan, under his imprint Storm Books, published and edited the influential book Siege, an anthology of the writings produced by the neo-Nazi James Mason for the newsletter of the same name. Moynihan would later shift away from National Socialist and fascist politics.

Music Influenced by first-wave industrial music artists such as SPK and Throbbing Gristle, Moynihan started his first electronic music project in 1984, which he called "Coup de Grâce". Along with audio cassette releases and live performances, Coup de Grâce also produced art booklets, posters, postcards, and texts. In 1988, at the age of 18, Moynihan published an edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Antichrist featuring artwork by Trevor Brown.

According to Moynihan, a cassette from his project Coup de Grâce was received by an art group called Club Moral in Belgium, resulting in a positive review in the cultural magazine they produced called Force Mental. Club Moral invited Moynihan to come to perform at In Vitro, an art and music festival in Antwerp. He accepted, which resulted in a small European tour of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, while he was based in Antwerp, Belgium. In Germany, he came in contact with Cthulhu Records, the German underground label which would later release the first Blood Axis compilation tracks and album. Upon returning to Boston in the United States, he was invited to join the experimental music group Sleep Chamber. and an Italian language book entitled Day of Blood was published focusing on the musical group.

Political views In the 1990s, Moynihan was frequently characterized as a fascist or neo-fascist by some critics and fans. Moynihan accepted these descriptions with reservations, but in the 2000s dismissed them as inapplicable buzzwords used by "anti-this and anti-that activist types" and denounced the far-right.

Mattias Gardell writes in his 2003 book Gods of the Blood: "Featured in different contexts, Moynihan projects many different faces and has been classified as an 'extreme rightist', an 'extreme leftist', a Nazi, a fascist, and an anarchist". Gardell wrote that Moynihan was a priest in the Church of Satan but "rarely flashes his membership card" and instead "has long found the heathen path more rewarding".

Investigative journalist Kevin Coogan has linked Moynihan more explicitly with the extreme right but states that Moynihan does not fit into a "conventional definitions of fascism". Coogan has classified Moynihan as an "extreme rightist". Moynihan dismissed activists labeling him a Nazi or a fascist as misinformed hysterical alarmism.

In 1999, Moynihan was one of several musicians listed by Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report magazine as examples of black metal music being used to recruit white supremacists. The magazine also excerpted an interview with No Longer a Fanzine, where Moynihan denied the Holocaust but said that he would "prefer it if it were true". The SPLC article was criticized by Decibel Magazine in 2006 which described it as being misleading and being poorly researched. In the Decibel article, Moynihan responded to the SPLC report, saying it was "packed with misinformation and outright errors" and focused "on a few provocative statements selectively culled from interviews done nearly 15 years ago".

Moynihan has repeatedly denied political ties. In response to the various political accusations leveled against him, Moynihan calls the far-right "a bunch of isolated losers" who are "all deluded". In response to accusations concerning the influence of his political views on the writing of Lords of Chaos, Moynihan made statements denouncing the far-right and white supremacism. The Southern Poverty Law Center later listed Moynihan as an intellectual leader of the far right for statements such as "The number of six million [Jews killed in the Holocaust] is just arbitrary and inaccurate [...] If I were given the opportunity to start up the next Holocaust, I would definitely have more lenient entry requirements than the Nazis."

The anti-fascist researcher Spencer Sunshine offered this assessment of Moynihan's political evolution in 2024:

Moynihan’s politics—or at least his representation of them—went in phases. In the first, roughly from 1989 to 1993, he was explicit about his interest in and desire to promote Masonite National Socialism while embracing Social Darwinism. By 1994, in the second stage, his self-identification moved closer to “fascist.” In the third, after Lords of Chaos came out in 1998, he became quite cagey and represented his view as being neither Left nor Right but also specified that they were neither National Socialist nor Social Darwinist. This was quickly followed by a fourth stage. Although still promoting Nazis and collaborators like Wiligut and Evola, Moynihan began expressing his allegiance to what could be called an ethno-separatism (although he did not use the term) based on sub-racial identities, a la de Benoist, and started using the description "radical traditionalist."

Personal life Moynihan has a child with his partner Annabel.