Progressive metal -- Attempt at a Definition

This has been swimming in my mind from when I read Jeff Wagner's book on the subject of Progressive Metal. I got a real handle on it a couple of weeks ago as I was playing choice cuts from the genre for my girlfriend. I tied down the nascent description I'm about to present to exact musical quotes and this helped in solidifying my theory. I'll try to do the same here, though keep in mind I'm still working out the implications.

So, why am I trying to reinvent the wheel? Progressive metal has been defined literally to mean "metal (or metal-esque) music intent on constantly changing/evolving' for decades now and it's a favorite pastime of pony-tailed metalheads to argue about how a band is truly Progressive (or merely 'progressive' or 'prog') so why mess with it and them? Because that definition doesn't work, even worse, because it's pathological. In the popular conception, Progressive metal owes to its name to keep on moving forward, ultimately further and further away from its 'Heavy Metal base' and further away from the archetype into curious reconfigurations that constantly push the envelope, any envelope. This is a recipe for disappointment if there ever was one and it's very curious, psychologically, why people would obsess over their favorite bands eventually becoming something different from what made them their favorites to begin with. After all "inclined to constantly progress" is not a positive or negative attribute in itself, it isn't something one can love and attach themselves emotionally to. It is to what one progresses towards that could possibly be the attraction point for the listener, but then, even if the band reaches that initial promise, the mandate of "Progressive" demands that they then discard it and move on. It's schizophrenic. But that - the psychological profile of the pony-tailed metalhead and his mock (I contend) desire for ever-forward moving progress - can wait a while.

I think Progressive metal, as we've experienced it from 1986 to roughly the end of the '90s is actually defined by very different things than what are popularly accepted. Metalheads have this curious incapacity, well, perhaps not incapacity, perhaps it's a lack of desire, but anyway, they don't want to consider the social context that shaped the subgenre variations of Heavy Metal they're devoted to. It's as if speed metal, then thrash and power metal, then progressive metal, were destined to come into existence because the Metal Gods willed it so and that's as musicological one has to get about it. Do you like it? That's the issue for them, not how or why something came to be exactly. Jeff Wagner took a brave step outside of this mentality in his book by tracing the musical lineage of Progressive Metal to its rock counterpart, but there's more there, I think.

Rush is a big deal for Progressive metal, so thinks Jeff Wagner and so do I as well. But besides the obvious technical chops and lengthy compositions of the band, we can take a sideways look into Rush and explain what Progressive metal really is about. The Canadian trio is considered the forefather of most, if not all things Progressive Metal for the straightforward reason that the forefathers of that genre (Fates Warning, Dream Theater, Watchtower but not Queensryche, who were influenced by them only by a degree of separation through Iron Maiden) are all professed fans of the band and because traces of their music of Rush can be directly found in most of these bands material. It's not high musicology, 'Ytse Jam' sounds like 'YYZ', there you go.

However, Rush were not a band infinitely bent on progress, and even if they gave that illusion during the one quantum leap in their '70s discography between the first two records and what came after, or if we're lax and consider their shift of sound towards the more streamlined, techno-pop of their '80s material a move in that same progress, it still then ended. In fact, that '80s shift in Rush is I think, emotionally, the crux of modern proghead mentality. '80s Rush found their final, adult sound and have occupied that niche since then. Progheads keep hoping that an equivalent adult metal sound will be found, but no such thing exists so far.

Furthermore, keep in mind that when Progressive Metal was in its heyday, Rush have been putting out the same record for half a decade already. Rush as an inspiration was not to push the Progressive Metal stalwarts towards infinite progress (what we instead came to call 'Avant-Garde Metal' instead, for good or worse), so... what?

It was the gradual move from the fantastic, romantic and solipsist (the domain of Heavy Metal, now and forever) towards the modernist and humanist that Rush started. Rush were an inspiration to young metalheads in the late '80s to attempt to write songs about their real and current human situation. Rush, for every 'By-Tor and the Snow Dog', for every 'Necromancer', also presented (Ayn Rand inspired, curiously but not surprisingly) paeans towards self-will and actualization, allegories towards surviving modernity and even negotiating singular identity in a mass-consumption world. These are concerns that every sentient being in the modern world has to deal with, and that's what Progressive Metal tried to introduce into the Heavy Metal cannon. The psychological reasons for such a violent shift of context in metal music in the latter part of the '80s has to do, I theorize, with the increased outsider interest in the genre and the market pressure on it. As I've said many times before, metal music felt that in the spotlight, it had to come up with something 'grownup' to say. This may sound damning but I do not necessarily think that nothing useful and artistically vital could come from such pretensions of adulthood. If anything, those that got the worst of it were not the musicians that created Progressive metal masterpieces but the naive progheads that structured their identity on the basis that their 'grown-up metal' was better than everything that came before it. Progressive metal was an open question but yet it was percieved as a final answer by many.

I've said this in different ways on Poetry of Subculture and other places, but never so clearly and directly. Progressive Metal (of that ten year period, modern prog is a different matter, which we'll get to) is not focused on endless forward movement as an end in itself, it is about the introduction of modernist themes that deal with the social human condition while using Heavy Metal tropes to achieve energy and direction. That modernist concerns are inherently confusing and sap willpower, whereas Heavy Metal music is inherently simplistic and directive are contradictions of intent and form is very much apparent and at the core of the genre.

To qualify my statements we'll have to look at a few disambiguating examples. First, let's think a bit on technicality. Much is constantly made about Progressive Metal being the technical frontier for not just metal musics but rock instrumentation music in general. Indeed if one listens to Watchtower or even Dream Theater's debut (1988-9 releases) there isn't much in popular rock music that offered such pyrotechnical display. However jazz and fusion musics were miles ahead, even then, in the pursuit of intricacy as raison d'etre. Perhaps today the two fields have been largely equalized, but listening to say, Tribal Tech, back in 1989 would put the rigid ditties of Dream Theater in some perspective. Furthermore, in the metal field it could be said that the true frontier for technical intricacy had been pushed by the many children of Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, in the 'shred' sub-genre. Or from a different vantage, the barrier for information density had always been the domain of technical death metal, not Progressive Metal itself.

Could Progressive Metal players of 1985-1995 play even flashier, more dense, more intricately? That question is diverting from the important fact that even if they could, they didn't. Progressive metal, especially in its infancy, was flashy, but not too flashy. They were trying to do something with their chops that wasn't devoted to the chops themselves. They were using modern technique and equipment to express modern themes and considerations. There were much more technically obsessed types of music than Progressive Metal in that period and its only due to musically illiterate fans (it's true, the elitist progheads usually can't tell consonance from dissonance, they can only tell when 'there's a lot of notes') that the reputation of Prog is primarily one of technical overindulgence. One needs only compare a Dream Theater instrumental with any given top-player fusion jam session to see the difference in focus. Progressive Metal overplays like a nerdy but bright pre-grad university student trying to attack a subject they have burning interest in from every which way. And that interest was the human condition. Naturally, a sophomoric atmosphere is inherent in much Progressive metal due to this, but even that can have its charm.

The other issue I have to tackle is the mythos of Progressive Metal constantly having to move forward to dignify its moniker. This is a trip many Progressive Metal musicians of the early '00s (the decade of post-modern self-reflection for metal) fell into as well, eventually taking their bands and aspirations completely outside the field. Fans rejected most of these bands for their 'betrayal' while at the same time still considering the need for ever-forward progress as the definition of the sub-genre they so loved. This must have been confusing for musicians and listeners alike. Bands that have enjoyed the interest of Progressive Metal fans have instead kept to a narrower path. Dream Theater is the most striking example of a Progressive Metal band that is very conservative, almost never moves forward. But even slightly outre bands like Fates Warning, have enjoyed their lasting success for keeping to a general formula of Progressive Metal. Bands on the fast track to actual progress, like Mayfair or Depressive Age, were finished with metal in the span of one or two records. There's a reason for this: Heavy Metal can do only a few things, but it does these things great. If you try to make it hit different beats, it's a lot of work for relatively few returns. Eventually the struggling musician realizes they can actually achieve the moods they're going for without depending on distortion, solos and double bass, and they morph into the electronica or post-punk or whatever else outfit they needed to be anyway. Those that keep the metal tropes are doing it because they still love Heavy Metal for its romantic core, and that's not 'Progressive' at all.

So that's the tension inside Progressive Metal circa 1985-1995, romantic tools in the service of modernist goals. The genre was bound to suffer commercial death early on with such a volatile tension in its core. Rush circumvented implosion by dropping the romantic tropes of grand compositions and overplaying arrogance by the '80s and instead found the contemporary rock niche in which they could explore their modernist concerns and they grew a whole second audience for it.

So what of modern (post '90s) Progressive Metal? Or, to put it as its now known, "prog". That's second generation music that has had to deal with the confusion I describe above and it has had to take a stand on what it wants to be in light of such information. Most of it has tried to be all things at the same time: hyper-technical, yet constantly bastardizing the metal with outside influences, both completely left-field and at the same time rigidly conservative when it comes to Heavy Metal play structure and composition. The end result is schizophrenic: imagine Meshuggah covering U2 while Tangerine Dream supplies keyboard drones. Some people like that type of music, I personally can't stand to listen to it for long because it hasn't made a choice of focus, instead it has made its focus to not have to commit to a choice. This is the perfect music, psychologically, for people who suffer from delusions of grandeur and/or enjoy self-validation by how elite their hobbies are. At any case, not a good path in life.

Humanist arts are necessarily wimpy. They're not tough, or macho. In fact, the forces behind such stances are under the critical eye of humanism. Chauvinism, racism, sexism, inherent philosophical aspects of most romantic ways of thinking are deconstructed in every way by modernist arts. That is after all, their purpose. Watchtower have nothing in common with Exodus or any other beer-thrash band. If anything, Watchtower felt they are here to destroy this conception of what Heavy Metal music is. Now that all that stuff's in the past it's easier to see it in a docile light, but the minor revolution of Progressive metal was that it was flamboyantly weird, wimpy, nerdy... even gay, at times. Modern progressive metal that tries to be all things for all people all the time is terrified of being gay and wimpy and weird predominantly. It thinks the way to counteract that aspect of its identity is by slapping on Pantera and Meshuggah riffs to keep the image 'tough', it's schizophrenic.

Let's listen to this, the quintessential Progressive metal song, and see if we can find anything even remotely 'tough' in it:



This is not at all manly. As intercourse, this is erratic and interrupted. As rhetoric it's rambling and multifaceted, fractured thoughts going every which way. Driving pulse is sacrificed for scope and color. This song goes in many directions and it most importantly takes the most roundabout route to its destination. This is the essence of Progressive metal. It's the audio version of a painting such as this:



That struggles so not to say one thing in the most direct and clear manner, but instead to convey as many aspects of a situation, with its many actors and disparities and often even illogicality. Of course this high concept is wimpy! Machismo is a simple and heavy concept, a bold red color that destroys nuance and detail, it has no place on the page. Listen to that fractured riff, modulated through many keys and rhythms, as if Fates Warning are trying to present it in as many ways as possible, leaving it to the listener to decide, in dialogue with it. Of course the guitar sound is hollower (Rush producer being no accident) and lower in the mix, so that every voice in the mix is equal. Democracy, such an incompatible notion in dynastic Heavy Metal, yet, here it is. From this song to everything vaguely Progressive metal that came out in its shadow, these concepts and concerns are clear and bright to the educated listener.

This means that it's possible to make Progressive metal as such even today, and still keep to the formula. Indeed many bands do. The clarity of the approach should be judged on the modernist grace of the music, not on whether it's overtechnical, genre-bending or all-things-at-once carnival music. Progressive metal is judged on how it utilizes composition to augment its modern program. As the concerns of modernity have not been assuaged (and never will) so will every living popular music have a fringe aspect dedicated to it. Literal-minded metalheads will eventually need to develop the knowledge and language to understand what it is Progressive metal tried to do.

Blind Guardian - Somewhere Far Beyond

Released by Virgin, at some point in time or another.

They say Hansi Kürsch, André Olbrich, Marcus Siepen
and one Thomas Stauch partook in its devising.




I am going to hurt you. I will try you with cruelty. On the precipice where you stand, you sicken me. A foolish step forward will plunge you into darkness and the faltering, cowardly step backwards will see you blinded forever. Platonic light at your back, endless dark cave forward. Your long shadow, like an arrow, leads you only to your death.

Yet you'll have to move, otherwise it's slow decay for you, withered entropy as the world turns. You are useless. Why where you ever born? We will see what you have to say with a tender heart only after your flesh is rent and flayed. I will not push you. It is pain that will push you.


You are sixteen, fifteen, thirteen now. Do you recognize your body? It doesn't recognize you, it doesn't submit to you, it doesn't agree with you. The face you look to every second morning is slightly different. Features move tectonically, volcanically, you burst and bleed and change and beauty is only a word. The world knows. They know you do not belong inside yourself, you are simply an impostor. A child's heart in a body half-way towards adulthood, responsibility, continuity.

Yet, at night. Interminable dreams of death and pathos, they drive you secretly to absurd rituals of dirtying and cleansing. Does your mother know what you do alone under the sheets? What does she tear down only for you to studiously build up again, day by day, in the killing light? The Iron Maiden poster you hang above your bed, how many times have you re-placed it? You do not plan to quit, do you, you sickening child? It is the picture of death, you know, that is what you put above you. There is no Christ, no savior there to crown you. There is instead a reanimated corpse, forehead struck with occult lightning. See death walking, death alive.

What is it that pulls your fantasy to death? Is it that you cannot bear the interim between childlike naivety and the responsible life of adults? Hanging in the middle, waiting for life to begin.


Let no one know with what violence you beat yourself, all bones and tendons, sickly thin. You have no friends, you only have conspirators within the Guild of the guilty. They will forget you with robust bodies and cars and jobs and normalcy, eventually, you'll see. Yet you'll remain in the middle, you know it. Your sin is aberrant, a lust for the impossible, the knowledge of something far beyond. The vital drug you take with your black sword, you rob it when you slay chaos gods trapped in plastic, vinyl, tape. You wrestle them until you forget the middle where you stand, you test wax wings in free fall. You fool, do you not know this is not how birds fly? You are crushed in black volcanic stone, sad wings destroyed, in magma you ingress. Inside your molten waters a black stone you find. It radiates wisdom, it speaks in ancient tongue


You are not a child. You are not an adult. You are forever, you never existed. Time does not exist. You are a god, With this power over time, you become a god. You will never explain it to anyone else, they will never understand. Yet, should you ever forget this way you feel, you will age and wither, you will become but another linear traveler, trajecting time in the foolishness that is two dimensions. Light at your back, long stretching shadow at the front. Kill yourself now if you are brave!

This much any mystic, any bard can tell you through ritual and song that they intuit. This is the endless quest, they who undertake it can never achieve it. Odysseus sails to Ithaka forever. His wife plundered by the mores of modernity. His son, Telemachus the idiot, he bides his time.

"Fantasy metal" adults scoff. Polyhedral, pretend pathos and distance, so much distance. Analysis, anthropology, musicology, philosophy and sport, so much sport. And humor. Let us laugh, ha ha. This is the way they take a sideways glance inside your dark pool. They pacify the wisdom that has been passed on you, they interpret it until there's nothing left but an interpretation. Power is a word. Death is a word. Art is a toy.

But I eradicate the distance. You have learned nothing. You are not an adult, your years are MEANINGLESS. Time doesn't exist. In your thoughts and in your dreams, what is always in your mind? That is all that exists. I manipulate you to that final step where everything begins. I do not believe any lie. Are you a child or are you a human, or are you what is in between? Souls travel endlessly inside the black chamber, they want to know what is outside this palace called life. I want you, faithful fool and human, to explain to me what you believe there is to this life. I will wait forever while you burn inside, for the words to come.




Now let's talk about cheese. Cheese smells funny. Synthetic orchestra strings and multi-tracked falsetto vocals and fake violins weeping thirds over parallel fifths, they smell so funny. People smell funny too. When you smell funny, people make fun of you! Mom, I don't want to go to school today, they say I smell funny. Twenty years later the adult in his perfect attire and groomed countenance, he's so worried he's going to smell funny. More wine than cheese, the idiot fabricates an Ideology of Cheese. He says he's an adult, he holds consequence in high regard (after all, it is in trying to make his new words cohere with his old words that he has arrived in this perfect mess - from childlike fear of cheese to an Ideology of Cheese), yet all I see is a nose. A nose so honed to smell cheese, I often wonder if his other senses have subdued completely to make space for his olfactory prowess. From the numberless senses the adult counts and assigns to the pity extremities on his ape-like paw, they forget the sense of wonder. They forget the sense of ambiguity, of uncertainty, the sense of a world that isn't finite because it has never started and never plans to end, it is forever.

Instead, the psycho-sexual castration of distance: I know things because I can judge them to be lacking in this or that regard. You can trust me because my judgments pile and stack, my whole identity is a series of betrayals to rationalize and the debris of disappointment. This fantasy metal is so cheesy, don't you agree? Let us instead choose this perfectly inoffensive post-metal-about-nothing-in-particular-exactly to mock rape us with its flaccid penis for a few minutes. Here', I'll turn it up to three, we don't want to upset the neighbors while we die a little, do we?

On the precipice where you stand, do you want to travel sideways into this? Perhaps you prefer the pain of further indecision instead. I knew you would.

You are ugly, you know that. But at least your face suits you. Blood shot wide eyes, and strong, wired legs, they suit you t0o. Because you'll have to take that step eventually. If we earn our face with years and our features reflect what we have lived, let's say that you didn't strive for a hound-like nose signifying decades of such scented judgment and disappointment, nor for a mouth full of rude tongue suggesting your impeccable sense of taste. So you have not yet taken the role of the perfect bourgeois consumer. Let us instead hone that hidden sense, the vision which looks in the far distance and sees the second horizon behind the globe's tall curve. Let us grow the strength of stride for the vision quest, that sacred circular trek. If there is wisdom in fantasy, if there is strength in oblivion... you know where the arrow points.

Step followed by step, inside the darkness of the self. You will lose everything on the circle back to the start, but what will you miss? I will wait here, on the stone. Forever for your answer.

Metal Consumerism part the second

"I think I'm cool because I chose to have something done to me."

For as long as I've been communicating with music aficionados of any type, that's what I've been sensing their tastes mean to them. They derive a sense of self-worth over belonging in a subculture rotating around this genre or type of music, as opposed to that other one. The most recent development is that subculture with so hybridized tastes that they take pride in not belonging in any traditional musical subculture because their tastes are so eclectic, that they therefore create the ultimate antagonistic subculture, that which denies it itself exists, yet very neurotically clings to their ultimate status as knowers-of-taste. Though the post-modern definition of such a group is tricky, how it functions is ageless, it's how any societal in-group functions. We are better. The Other is worse. Those people that listen to that other type of music are lame, obviously. Music taste as an ornament, not much different from having body piercings or an ironic tattoo, only even easier.

Listening to music is the easiest thing a person can do on this earth. It's actually almost not even an action. Music is done to you. Easier than watching a movie because there's no plot to follow and it can be done completely passively and in the background. Easier than reading a lowbrow romance novel because you don't even have to turn the pages with your fingers. Music demands almost nothing from you, and even the few requests it may project are subject to the consumer's adventurousness. You don't even have to pay for music anymore. And in return you can now claim to be better than other people that have different, 'less advanced' tastes than you.

Self-definition based on what a person chooses to be a willing victim to is problematic. If this or that music means something more to you, figure it out. Explain it to yourself, and to others. Be proactive about what you learned through art, put your theories to the test.

Taste is meaningless. Actually, let me qualify that, taste is very meaningful when one is searching internally to see what their aesthetic sense will lead them to. When that has occurred, taste is now bereft of function. You are you, your tastes are just a reflection of you. You can't talk about tastes without talking about yourself. Yet people try. They use their disembodied taste, socially, to maneuver around others and ultimately hide themselves. This is counter to the function of aesthetics. What type of music moves you is not useful to anyone unless it's in conjuncture to an explanation on how that music moved you. For such an explanation, the focus shifts inevitably from the 'music', to the 'you'.

There's been a critique on Poetry of Subculture that it's too subjective, too based on my own experiences with the music. I find that critique absolutely fitting, and I encourage anyone who's looking for faux-objective reviews of records to move along. What type of music I've allowed to have happened to me is not very important. What I got from it, is. If there's anything I want to encourage with this blog, it's a dialogue on the characters (myself and commentators) behind the tastes, the human beings that are trying to negotiate what a "Heavy Metal" might mean to them. The equal process could be done with a "punk rock" instead. The only reason it's not is that I can't talk about punk rock because I haven't been exposed to a lot of it. I'm sure there's a blog out there somewhere trying similar things with that, and with whatever else type of art.

I have a Heavy Metal blog because I spent many years listening to Heavy Metal. Not because Heavy Metal is better than any other type of music around. That sort of antagonism is diverting from the function of aesthetics: a common language to discuss intuitions and personal philosophy.


There's a few social reasons people what art to be just something that they 'chose to be a victim to'. First of all, the modern concept of art is that it's the product of some sort of savant geniuses, who, eschewing societal norms, choose to dedicate themselves to the Great Art. Towards them the consuming public feels constantly inferior. They listen to the loud music and they feel raped by their betters and they love that place of powerlessness, the small death of having someone else's will completely envelop them for a few minutes a day. Obviously artists play up to this role, there's much to gain by pretending to be a god. People do not love art and the artist and therefore make them successful, people love the artist and their art because they are successful. Artistic failure is the subject of the cruelest mockery instead. First the rape, then the Stockholm syndrome. A rapist with a flaccid penis is a failure of ontological proportions.

Deep down inside, the consumer loathes the power of the art over them. They then try to play it off as if it's just entertainment. They pretend art is a toy. What is the functional definition of a toy? An approximation of a real thing, a fakery that is given animation only at the hands of a proactive party. Music isn't a toy because the listener is not giving it life with their will. They're just pressing a button and the art takes over. The listener is the plaything of the art.

Either vantage towards art is distant, it bridges no space towards the center. It's just an endless revolution around an inscrutable core, obfuscated through social reinforcement of the 'art' as something simultaneously frivolous and beyond the capacity of the consumer to achieve on their own.

I do not know if every person has it in them to become artists. And when I hear absurdly talented and very successful artists such as Steve Vai go on about how 'making music is a human right and every person should know how to play an instrument' I get sickened by the distance between what he's describing and what my reality is as much as any consumer around me that hasn't even touched a guitar. The issue is much more systemic: what are the systems of authority and power in our western world that want art (and not mere performance, which has been subverted to commonality over reality talent shows and other such debris over the last decade) to be both unreachable but powerful, frivolous yet mystical? Is this because this is the best way to keep people buying product? When they at once feel that they never could create this art on their own, that it's special, but at the same time that it's a consumable commodity that needs be replenished as soon as possible?

Metal Consumerism

Some art is here to remind the audience of positive past memories and to provide a comfortable space in which to re-approach them from slightly different vantages. The interest in that type of art rests on those reconfigurations being inventive enough for the familiarized audience to want to follow them for a duration, but not so derivative as to make the effort seem not worth it. At the end, this type of art is at best supplementary to the original material: it might be conducive to an enjoyable time, but the exact tool it uses to be approachable (its reference of past art forms) serves also as the main reason for it being inessential.

How essential art may be could be judged by how the audience is drawn to repeated experiencing of it and/or of how enduring the internal representation of the art is, how it connects with various strands of one's psychic web. Most people do not rush to re-experience art that is strongly referential to past glories. They go instead, directly to those past glories. What identity is left for this strongly referential modern art artifact, is that of yet-another product. Inoffensive, taking up bitspace and perhaps hoarded by collectors of artifacts.

When compulsive consumers-cum-critics praise this or that modern piece of referential art, they're pretending that they're spending a lot of time with it and that this is a testament to the quality of the material (they're making a claim then, of the art being essential, as explained above). Do not trust them, divide their claims of how much they've experienced the object of art by ten or more. If they say they've been listening to a record for two months straight, this means they've given it a half-dozen incomplete listens while surfing the internet, perhaps. The reason they're lying is because they know nobody will pay any attention to their recommendations if they were truthful about how they're using the product. Art is still sold on the basis of essentialism even when both critic and consumer do not consume the product with mind to its essential quality. The merit of art has been sidestepped, it has become at best a selling point on a marketing sheet. What is sold and bought instead, is a brief feeling of elation, belonging, an experience of something one already is prepared to experience.


Art that builds strongly on past foundation often becomes blurred together in the minds of the audience; in this way often Heavy Metal bands are no longer interpreted as if they're making confident strides forward with their musical offerings to the form, instead their - often decades long - contributions are slight and non-cumulative. This band introduced more orchestral elements, perhaps that one plays faster than most. This one has some kickass graphic design to go with their extreme metal. These aren't innovations, they're safe variations. There is no 'one album' that cuts through the mists as a definitive statement. Ergo, listeners do not come to these bands to be immersed in a singular world, to feel as if the only thing that exists at that moment is themselves and the Entity summoned by this mythical piece of art. They listen to this music instead on shuffle, a record's as good as any other, all from a distance. They can appreciate what the band may be bringing to the table on some intellectual level, but they're not enchanted by the music to the degree that they suspend the language through which they categorize and codify their experience. This art is just not startling enough to achieve that. It is in this way that say, a black metal band in 2011 becomes just a black metal band in 2011. The riffs might be nice, the songs might flow well, the black mountains and treetop frost cover is pleasant to look at but... all these aesthetic signifiers are gazed upon from a distance. With distance comes irony. The feeling of being outside and afar from what one feels is a defining aspect of modern life. Art, romantic art in particular, was intended as a remedy of exactly that. If it fails at eradicating the distance between host and emotion, it has failed completely as romance. What is left is mostly a comfortable, safe product.


There's also a different type of art. Strongly iconoclastic, it channels most of its strength through violence, an eventual destruction of all past reason, 'artistic norm' and audience expectation. Often this music is abrasive and extreme, it likens in its assault the psychosexual charges of sado-masochism. It aims to destroy boundaries. Appreciators of this type of art endlessly try to negotiate what this music means to them and its seeming resistance to pacification. This type of art means the audience harm. It means to strike at their core and watch how the organism mutates to cope with the reminder of mortality. The purpose of the subculture around this type of art is one of understanding, applying of meaning and eventual pacification. When someone says "oh yeah, I love listening to noise music" what they're saying is "I am fascinated by how this music startles and shocks me, and I'm trying to wrestle some meaning out of this by owning these feelings and fashioning an identity out of my weakness".

This type of art is more difficult to commercialize because its benefits are less obvious to the distanced consumer. It's very difficult to keep one's distance when they're being raped, though modern culture is trying its best to achieve this.

Art that doesn't rest well in the mold of commerce struggles to find a place in a capitalist society. Some is branded 'outsider art' (whatever that means), or often it is forgotten as some curious evolutionary dead-end buried in some niche of extremity.

Both tendencies described above exist in Heavy Metal music. I'd go as far as to say that the most successful examples of Heavy Metal music are found in bands that straddle the space between these two impulses: to build and to destroy. They make music to be enjoyed, but not to be enjoyed too much. They make music that suggests, but doesn't make itself a slave to suggestion. Heavy Metal failure is often the inability to keep this balance. Some of it is strongly classicist in its self-considered place in musical history. It draws directly from past sources with reverence and docility. There is nothing extreme in an Iron Maiden clone band in 2011, nothing startling, nothing to crush the distance of the disaffected consumer. Those that appreciate it do so because it reminds them of something that once was startling and strong. That's as much as they need from this music anymore. Other is so bent on extremity and destruction that it forgets that to ensnare a listener there needs to be a promise of enjoyment on the surface. In either case, there seems to be a market for the debris of this friction between extremes.

Heavy Metal is intensely commodified and this is easy to see by how its treated by the internet world: blogs upload product, reviewers talk about 'value for money' and aesthetic considerations are bypassed as so much as homework: "we're here to tell you this might be worth listening to once, the work of what it means is best left to the consumer". Pretender taste-makers rush to exclaim how much they care about lyrics and cover art and meanings only to so clearly show how little they actually do. Their reflex is to shift through product, catalogue any reaction slightly above complete apathy, and (through detestable hyperbole of said slight emotions) shift the public's gaze towards anything that isn't bare nothing. You should totally listen to this, dude. It's your new favourite band, trust me. I've been blasting it while working out for like, two months now.

In this climate, even Heavy Metal music bent to startle, to rape, to destroy, is promptly de-fanged. When the listener has no stake in what they're perusing, when there's so much distance to be thwarted, even the most savage voices in Heavy Metal will be muted. In this climate, what has become the outmost savagery, is a return to the human, a return to ambiguity and a challenge to the consumer to stop consuming and start reinterpreting.

So much extreme metal, in this sense, is anything but. It's safe, it's comfortable. The consumer that buys a goregrind or a national socialist black metal cd knows what they're getting. There's nothing to interpet. If there's anything scary, anything startling in this process is how willingly they indulge their consumer vices. The music itself is just a reference to a time where blood and guts and crematoriums were briefly shocking for their teenage psyche. The consumer is building an identity as an eater of woes. Gulping down the worst psychic wounds of humanity in prepackaged, easy-to-swallow artistic representations. They're pretending to grow up by eating harm and shitting distance. Sideways glances into a wound that would be insufferable to gaze directly inside of.

But romantic art is made to push you beyond your limits.


As I've explained, the artists themselves feel these things and they try to negotiate a path through it all, and there's much valid critique to be made of what they come up with. But also, at some point, the art itself is blameless. Even if an artist is doing their best to transcend the debris of commercialization (though most are not even trying), the eaters will eat them all the same and feel a slight heartburn perhaps, something that classifies as barely above the nothing. And then they'll burp their transient opinions on some blog. The only remedy to this for someone who wishes to use art to better themselves, is an aesthetic diet: to stop eating so much horror so as to remember what horror means. To stop eating so much comfortable referential-exultant reprise of the past so as to remember what the original emotion felt like. As one rids extraneous fat and toxin, they will lose the taste for most extravagant perversions. Then, when they return to listen to the few great records and they will be again shocked by them. They will fear them. They will be touched by them. And they will have again to live with them, not just consume and pass them as they're trained to.

So, my suggestion is to consume less art. Download less of it. Have less to say on every new thing that comes out. Hone taste until taste doesn't matter. Spend more time with less to focus on, get to the bottom of what it means inside. I know this is not a fashionable opinion and that it potentially robs a lot of bloggers of a hobby, but perhaps that's for the best in the long run. Perhaps if one feels so burning a desire to share something new with the world every day, they should look into sharing cooking recipes instead, there can never be enough of those.

Black Sabbath

Brother,

I write to you of dread. A fear that I suspect is close to unknowable from your enlightened, future vantage. I need your ear, I need to recount my experience not for the sake of your intellectual curiosity, but in hopes that the retelling of what - already - feels more akin to the dream-imaginings of a fevered patient long past the point of no return, will help burdensome emotions dislodge from my thoughts, so that a narration might stabilize, overcome the senselessness that thins my blood. I do not write to you to save myself, I am already dead - no, it is worse than dead... I hope to trace the outline of horror, for the sake of your future, the future that so once repulsed me from your side. Furthermore, Brother, I have no one else to write to. Humor me this missive, let there have been at least some purpose to my madness.

I was wrong. I will concede this not to appeal to your pride (and take my word, as you did on that day, I never will return). I was wrong as you were also. Though I once scoffed at your mundane desires, blinded as they were by these newfangled 'mysteries of logic', for a life dictated by reason and causality, it is my path that has taken me to the precipice of nothingness instead. Far beyond my dreaming inspiration for an unnamed God- do you remember, our discussions? I remember every word.

How you said the ancient, green luminescence of sacral decrees, for whatever reason they came to be, has long been extinguished in the grey waters of history, there were nothing can by itself explain any other one thing. How it is now a burden -- no, a responsibility of the community of man to shape a common reality, where one light will shine from many sources to extinguish utterly, the shadows of unreason. I thought that future to be one of a different terror, a surgical one. Where the innards of the human being, dissected on the stone slab would dispel the grand mystery of life. A man and a woman separated only by their altered machines in their bellies, it disgusts me still, this idea, I hide it not. A world where one knows all and all know one, what occulted meaning can there hide? In what shadow can a secret garden flourish?

I have secrets. I did not find them easily but I didn't find them with great difficulty either. I did not plunge into the darkness with a light heart, but neither was I ready for what I found there. It is a song of irony then, that the resources I perused in my lorn path were made available by inventions of your future world. The printing press, brother, it changed everything. Words of masters of ancient wisdom... I did not have to kill a lord for a glimpse of them, I did not have to cross unknown lands for a fragile Alexandrian scroll, made incomprehensible by the ravages of entropy. In books, printed with a typeset perverted form its sacral function, mass-produced, brother. There I found plenty mysteries. And trust in me that what I did have to destroy for them will be missed by no one.

In the thirty years we have been strangers, I have pursued greater art, I have become a sorcerer whose dreams shape the dreams of others. You were right, brother, the worldly domain is made of marble that cannot be chipped with willpower alone, it is there, it is what it is and the analytical tools that you so fell enamored with can help in divining its purpose. It takes the might of many to move that will, I will concede you that. It is instead, in the hearts of men that mystery still lives, it is in the deepest crevice of sentience that no light will ever shine. Tell me brother, if you're brave, what do you know of a man's soul? How has your dissection of the brain informed your understanding of what it is to feel and experience? Has any of your 'philosophers of the light' anything to offer that would explain the atavist stench, the pull towards violence and lust? I am certain you feel it too, you know what experience drove us apart, you know what experience binds us still.

The light cannot guide you to the cathedral of the soul. Nothing can guide any of us there. Nothing can help us live in that darkness. Now I know.

It was no more than ten days ago, brother, though it feels a withered age instead. After the consumption of the sacred flower (do not pretend you do not understand me, surgeon!) and the utterance of prayers which you would not fathom even if every word were categorically defined for you in common language, I lay to sleep, much as I have done for decades. With certainty to dream of darkness. I do not know what it was that made my dream quest behind the walls of sleep different that night, it could be the ringing of the church bells, curse the mad monks and their perverted tastes for inversion, I never understood them: is it not enough to worship a warped reflection of the demiurge, do we have to flaunt it as well by striking the bell at the hour of the witch? It could have been the storm, Brother. No, it must have been the storm. Do you remember the oldest of our gods, thunder? It was at his command that I met the messenger.

Power over dreams is a bittersweet fruit. At once addictive for what one experiences in the mist is of the same potency as what resides in the killing light of your reason, you learn that well and certain, surgeon. But at once, there is the disappointment (and knowledge of further disappointment for those more experienced in the ways of darkness) of the waking; Though the power is real and what you feel is real, it is not forever. The sleeping village awakens. If there is a teaching I can impart on you is that, contrary to what your Aristotelian 'logic' would desire, the darkness must be tended to with the same reverence that the priests offer to their pity candles and incense to the Autocrat above. Darkness doesn't merely occur in the absence of light, no... that is instead, nothingness.

That is what I met, brother. Excuse my long road to this, I cannot bear to recount it. What I found in the mist of dreams this time was not what there I had left before me. My power words of flight could not take me to the castle in the skies at will, my power was robbed of me. Instead I lay grounded, crushed, to walk in a dead forest for what felt like two lifetimes. I grew so desperate, for you see, there is neither thirst nor hunger in dreams, and worst there is no tiredness to schedule time around. I walked forever, it seemed, my only beacon a fluttering black light in the distance. Before I reached it it reached me, it overtook me with a swiftness that your physical experience may not parse. It was there before I knew it, it felt like it was always there. A black shape with eyes of fire, it points at me. There is no scorn that your evangelists warned of, in the presence of the Lord below. There is only a smile and a question. What is it that I desire?

You will laugh from your ivory tower brother, but you know well what I asked for once I recovered my wits like a good sorcerer. It is what you would have as well. Knowledge. Awareness. Truth. I longed to write to you with absolute certainty a different letter, one where I would in perfect speech convey the supremacy of the inner world against the outer. I wished you would wield to the inexorable conclusion and perhaps then brother, we could be brothers again, I cannot lie on this, not with my last breath. My lust, displaced as you well know from the flesh of women for decades now, towards this higher goal of awareness, it drove me to this hubris. The messenger paused for an eternity, then made it known me that this knowledge is forbidden, it told me that what I seek is what tore the world apart in the beginning of time, not between 'above' and 'below' but between inside and outside. Yet it did not scold me, there was no grandeur to its mist shape at all. Only onyx flame, raising ever higher, waiting for my impossible desire. I still wanted to know what prizes lay hidden in the darkness. And it is in this way that I learned the only truth there is, brother. I cannot impart to you its realization, only in common words describe it and I know it is meaningless, worthless. You will not understand it, you cannot understand it, it is better that you never do. Bear it even so.

The truth is there is nothing. Nothing exists, nothing has ever existed. Nothing has lived, nothing has died. We have never lived, we haven't died. We never existed. Dreams is all there ever was, and the dreams may pass. There is no romance to the Earth, brother, no higher beauty to the animals or stones. There is no idol that a god might reside in, even for a time. There is no idea, there is no hope, there is nothing. Nothing at all.



And yet I hope, as I am sure you have divined by the purpose of this missive, still. I hope to dissuade you and more importantly your children from ever seeking the truth in darkness. The cruel joke is on me, your light is a lie, but it's a useful one. Let not your children seek the darkness, it will, if they are strong, and I know our blood is strong, lead only to something worse than their death. Oblivion. If you can, destroy the power of Art over man, make it an entertainment, a consumption safe, robbed of its eldritch potency. Parlor magics for a generation drowning in luxury. They will be unhappy but at least they will continue to be. In your future world, make the pursuit of Great Art a masturbation intended for fools and narcissists alone. Neuter all talk of souls and Gods, they are useless to us, they are only a symbol of our own inexistence. Where there is beauty, hide it behind reason. Where there is force, pretend it belongs to the many. Where there is hope, cling to it, appropriate it, enforce it with your ethics and social programming, enforce the desire for man to exist, to never understand he has never existed.


As I write this I feel my will extinguishing, my last hope is fading, as I am fading too. My hands are neither old nor young, my knowledge spectral. My severed head is bloodless white with eyes silver, blind.

Intercontinental Jealousy

Heavy Metal is born in the UK, the first time as a passing notion in the '70s and the second time, for real, with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Great music comes from the UK is the cliché. The US looks with reverence to the old country and also jealousy. "I can do that as well" they say, "and I can do it better!". There you have your Jag Panzer, with their three Judas Priest album's worth of riffs in their one song. Succeeding with excess.

The United States are a country constantly searching for history. One needs watch only a couple of the newer Scorsese films like "Gangs of New York" or "The Aviator" to see the great pains their psyche goes through to evangelize and invent upon some would say paltry two hundred years of recent activity. A country of immigrants trying to do the world one better: let's invent the perfect nation.

This is a weakness and a strength. Shoulders unburdened with the weight of an Aristotle or a Nietzsche, when the US get in on some cultural action, they do it with such earnestness and desire to augment ("put on steroids" is the ugly cliché I'm trying to avoid) that the mutant results are equally grotesque and fascinating. Yet, for all their enthusiasm, they usually move on to the next thing in increasingly brief allotments of time. Five years in the maximum.

Such was their involvement with metal music, between 1984 and 1990 or so. They took the basic formula of Heavy Metal and made it faster (speed metal), made it punkier (thrash metal) made it more shocking and weird (death metal) and they even tried to make it modernist (progressive metal). And then they were bored and done with it, they moved on to reinventing and augmenting different musics. Only very recently have they returned to savage the corpse of past inspirations again, I guess we must be running out of 'new' things to make 'newer'.

Here's where it becomes complicated, however. Europe isn't just the United Kingdom. Other countries around these parts that were in the sphere of cultural influence of America, due to the language barrier and other reasons did not notice the incongruity between NWOBHM and US metal, they took everything prima facie, a real history and an invented one both together, the grand Heavy Metal tree with all its various co-habitual branches. This was a misunderstanding, for as far as the US type of cultural thinking goes, once you augment the music you started with, once you take Heavy Metal and you create out of it 'Power Metal', then Power Metal has killed Heavy Metal. This is the anxiety of a country with little history: how to carve out a niche for oneself, how to ascertain one's continued existence. Roots must be invented, exploited, discarded, start again. "Thrash metal" wasn't meant to live side to side with old world metal, it was meant to replace it.

Europeans, due to naivety and perhaps lack-of-naivety as well, do not think in this way. They were impressed and inspired by the US boom of metal sub-genres and they took them and expanded on them infinitely, they found a place for invented history in real history, and that's how the story goes. Where the US is jealous of the artistry that comes with the management of the weight of history, the old world vampires are jealous of the spontinaety and vitality of the US.

Bethlehem - Dictius Te Necare

Released by Red Stream in 1996

Rainer Landfermann : Vocals
Kläus Matton : Guitars
Jürgen Bartsch : Bass
Chris Steinhoff : Drums


Let's say a 'musical instrument' is defined by the sound it makes when manipulated. Where does the sound come from? Though the actual physics of sound are complicated, let's say that the conjured sound that comes from this manipulation does not originate in the human playing the instrument, instead it originates from within the instrument itself. Wherewithin exactly? Let's say it is in the exact center of its mass, in its absolute core. For us humans, that core would be the place you feel that burning, fluttering sensation when you're on the verge of action. Remember that feeling? Right at the edge, the precipice of life? That is the feeling of being alive, and in a carved piece of wood with strings over it, music is the same: a conjuration of life in the inanimate. The first man who hit one piece of wood with another felt as much. From these sounds came thoughts, and the thoughts, as modulated through the pitch of the imagination, became meanings.


Modern electronically-augmented music, in this context, is a misleading. A piece of machinery is manipulated by the human, and the sound is carried to a displaced location through wiring, reproduced and treated by a disembodied signal processor and amplifier. The thing itself, the object in the hands of the musician doesn't produce the end signal, it translates intention as a secondary degree of separation: a conduit of a conduit. Through this muddling of the signal, through this broken telephone, we achieve inspiration. We are used to this now, but please consider the world in a stupider, more primal way for me, just for a second.

I stand to your left and strum my electric guitar. My amplifier far to your right lets forth a resonant, distorted chord. You look at me, and my hands, but the sound comes from somewhere else. Isn't it ridiculous? Let's say the amplifier is at a very low volume, don't I look silly toiling at my mechanical erection only to summon forth those tiny, displaced cricket sounds? There is something there, some would call it dishonesty, some would call it a subversion. Let's consider that now I am attacking my instrument with renewed fervor, I am bending the strings, grinding them on the frets, I am making guitar-player grimaces, I am sweating. We turn the amplifier up until the whole room resonates. What physicality, you think. Yet the sound of my labor doesn't connect to my body, the weight, the violence of it is meta-physical. I am entering your mind, I am burning your soul, and I haven't touched you - I haven't even touched the sound that I am using to do this to you.


Let's now kick me and my amp out of the picture and consider a Heavy Metal song in its entirety, as experienced by the listener in their privacy. The stereo sound space is packed with information, meticulously crafted and placed in the range by a recording engineer and the band. There's often multiple clones of the guitarists playing on the far left and right of the field, some dry and in-your-face, some farther away and dampened by room acoustics of a room that doesn't exist. The drum set, whose physical location in the studio session was centered in a three meter cubicle, now spans the wide stereo range, the toms in a amphitheatrical radius around the listener's brain. Lead guitars appear suddenly, cutting right in the middle, competing with a chorus of singer-clones, or they instead are barely felt tens of meters away, deep in a nearby cave, reverberating ghastly. Keyboards rumbling low in the ground or perhaps instead high in the celestial heavens, black stars in the sky and flashes of bright thunder. What a stage that is, right? Absolutely impossible, improbable, sublime. How little it has to do with how the performers looked when they engaged their conduits-of-a-conduit in the recording session. Sometimes one at a time, playing to a click track. Sometimes their performances replaced in part or in whole by triggered electronics, their inputs stripped bare of nuance and error, only the binary intention left: a note appears here, or else there is silence here. This is how music crosses the Rubicon from the world of the living flesh, to the elysian fields of memory. This is how music dies to become perfect. The memory of its physicality remains an alluring connection to our experience, yet it has become spectral, intangible. It can never again be contained, scrutinized, dissected, like a physical effect. Do you know that even musicians forget how to play their songs some time after they've recorded them?

Heavy Metal is part of a long lineage of electronically augmented musics to embrace this paradox of meta-physicality. Whereas its spirit hearkens back to that primal state of "hitting the instrument so it may channel", its sound design is resolutely modern and programmatic: how can we place these disparate performances in a wholly invented sound field so as to conjure imaginative and inspiring vistas? How can we use the sound pool, the prime material to encourage the listener to tell a story that is more than the sum of the parts of the recording session?

When I listen to Heavy Metal I very rarely imagine a bunch of sweaty dudes in a room playing something, the sound coming from them or even from the instruments in their hands. I do not imagine physical human beings at all. It is therefore very odd to me, often disappointing, when I go to live shows and hear music that I've been intimate with for sometimes decades and I see these people play it out as if it's some kind of song, played on a couple of guitars and a drum kit. The older I get, the more I've been able to pinpoint this source of disappointment, and the more it's keeping me away from live shows. No matter how perfect the performance of the musicians in respect to the recorded material, it can never be perfect enough, for I still see it in front of me performed by musicians. The perfect state of (most, not all) Heavy Metal music is far away from human hands and instruments plugged in to amplifiers and PA systems, the perfect state of Heavy Metal is meta-physical, beyond life, a mirror to death. A bridge between lonely sentience and natural grace. Have you ever wondered why there's so many Heavy Metal album covers where there's a levitating guitar, sometimes set on fire, sometimes struck by lightning, once or twice coming out of an Albion lake, not a handler, a human in sight?

Heavy Metal knows itself, and even as it tries to perfect itself (=to kill itself) it rebels to that same process (it wants to stay alive). It levitates in the middle of the journey, it tries to have it all. That is what is most alluring about it, the headless statue that through chaos probability may magically find its head, the living who is dead. There is the violence of Heavy Metal - it has nothing to do with worldly pursuit of power, it has everything to do with to live and die at once. Breathing corpse. Beautiful & grotesque, morbidly angelic, a dream of death.


What there is to feel in Bethlehem's music can be found in the sound design of "Dictius Te Necare". You've probably heard a million different bands playing their variations of angry rock music by now, but please, return to that stupider, more primal state for a few seconds more and listen as if it's the only thing you've ever listened to. Classify the metaphysics of this with the urgency of survival. Beyond the obvious malice and menace of the screaming head, levitating high and low, laughing, weeping mumbling endlessly, there are other signifiers. Listen behind and around it. Dry, linear tremolo riffs abruptly giving away to open spaces where little happens. Stop thinking about this as entertainment, stop trying to have an opinion, a characterization that will make the incessant screaming head safe. You don't have to like it or dislike it, it isn't art, it isn't made by human beings, it is instead like the the stone, like a tree. It is there and what you do with it is imagine.

Amidst guitars and reverberated battery, the sound of fountain spring, few melancholy notes listlessly linger. The accusation towards Bethlehem of making music that sounds premeditatedly insane is a surface one, for those that can only hear the screaming head and cannot parse what it is saying. There are as many colors and movements here as there are inside any romantic art, though the value and meaning of them is dark. Whenever we most closest to a meaning, the band seemingly gives up, they run away at different directions, leaving behind distant murmurs or perhaps a lonely guitar playing little queen codas to nothing.

I do not know how many songs there are on this record, or what it is that separates one of them from the next. I have never listened to it in part, on purpose, nor do I have any favorite sequences I could point you towards as indicative of the benefits of it as entertainment. My mind rebels at trying to describe it, even. What I can tell you is that it took a long time to accept this music as it is, to look behind the screaming head. This achieved, what I am left with is a space that feels my own and yet alien. Listening to "Dictius Te Necare" for me is a dark walk outside on the inside... is it worth it to describe something so ingressive as if it's not? What would happen then?

Let's return to our smarter, modern, more self-aware mindsets now and see. The scientist has to say from his reductionist outlook and his Aristotelian tool set that this is made from riffs, common song structures, relatively safe minor melodies and common rock beats. There's even parts that sound like Iron Maiden and Scorpions. It is methodically robust, like most extreme metal, it is even conservative in structure. And yet, that screaming head, none of its choices make any sense. Could it be that it didn't make choices? It feels as if the band captured this person from the street, gave them the lyrics sheet and pressed record and this man cut off his head and let all the hateful blood jet out coldly, all at once, no grace or taste in it at all. Here are your “lyrics”, gents. Every word uttered perfectly, yet its all so wrong, the cadences out of time and the rhymes unfinished. This I believe to have been malice against the scientist, intentional and clear. If it is something Bethlehem did not want their music to be, is safe and enjoyable for the reductionist that pacifies everything with knowledge. Wrestling with art, armed with a scissor will always result to its wielder winning, but at what cost? When all the weird has been cut off for logic to add up, we're looking at the hands beating the instrument and saying how beautiful is the sound we have chosen out of it. If it was a matter of choice, there would be no instrument involved, music would be an academic thesis, printed and distributed but never felt in the space beyond space.

But that's not what we do with music. If "Dictius Te Necare" has a meaning, it's difficult to tie down. It's very lonely, but I am not lonely when I listen to it. It is dark, but it does not drive me to depression when I engage it. It is demented but I am saner and my focus more crystallized when I experience it. This is what romantic art does with the ghastliest of sources and it's how it's often misunderstood: the end result is of inspiration and imagination, not of impression and subjugation. What resonates, the quality to seek is not in values and ideals conjured but the space that's left sparse to wander.