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TEITANBLOOD - THE BANEFUL CHOIR (listening guide)

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0. Introduction The release of Teitanblood’s third album once again represented a new twist in the band’s sound. Seven Chalices (2009) was one of the best debut albums in the history of extreme metal. Its impact on the scene was enormous, and its influence has only continued to grow. The colossal ambition of Seven Chalices generated several escape points that can be summarized as follows: - The consolidation of Blackened Death and War Metal during the last fifteen years. - Its contribution to Old School Death Metal (with a proposal both avant-garde and reverent toward the past), in which the importance of sound stood out for a more textural and atmospheric approach — the first step of modern Death Metal toward the deterritorialization of extreme metal, its drift toward abstraction. - It unleashed Death Metal from its limitations regarding formal complexity and compositional length, endowing it with unrestrained ambition and an unprecedented conceptual and lyrical depth (following the e...
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Speculative Cartography 2: Deterritorialization (Techniques and Chronology)

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"... this smooth, amorphous space is constituted by an accumulation of environments, and each accumulation defines a zone of indiscernibility proper to “becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , p. 632) INTRODUCTION In this second part, we will analyze with concrete examples how extreme metal bands introduced speculative elements by applying specific techniques of deterritorialization , and how these elements moved from the marginal to the structural, from the decorative to the ontological. What in the 80s were atmospheric intros has today become the very body of many compositions. Metal no longer limits itself to deforming its language: it transcends it, generating non-Euclidean, rhizomatic forms based on dispersion, patternless repetition, and fusion with other aesthetic languages. This implies the application of Salazar’s Law : to shift the axis of perspective by raising the weight of a secondary symbol (the techniques of deterritorialization) to the same level ...
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Speculative Cartography: Deterritorialization in Extreme Metal

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 "Deterritorialization is the movement by which one 'leaves' the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight." (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus) INTRODUCTION What is "territory" in extreme metal? - Territory consists of conventions: riffs, block structures, established sections (intro - riff - verse - solo - bridge - outro). Territory is any element within a composition that has a function, a place, a proportion... in a logical and balanced form. Zdzisław Beksiński DETERRITORIALIZATION: A PROCESS In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two types of space: smooth space—open, continuous, and non-hierarchical; and striated space—organized, metric, structured. This distinction, originally spatial, can be applied to music—and, in particular, to Extreme Metal—as an opposition between the fractal and the modular in order to describe a phenomenon that has gone unnoticed: deterritorialization in Extreme Metal. In tr...
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TEITANBLOOD - DEATH (listening guide)

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“Midway upon the journey of our life  I found myself within a forest dark,  For the straight-forward pathway had been lost.” Divine comedy, canto I (Dante Alighieri) "There was only darkness. It flowed like a black river with no bottom. And it was not bounded by any shore, endless, turbulent and moving aimlessly, without any origin or destination. There was only darkness flowing into darkness." My Work Is Not Yet Done (Thomas Ligotti) 0. Introduction The analysis of “Death” is really complex since we are faced with an album whose dimensions and power have few rivals within Extreme Metal. The title of the album, “Death”, makes a double reference to death metal as a style and to death as a conceptual entity, (although now we will see that there is no such terminological separation for Teitanblood, for whom both things are the same). The differences with “Seven Chalices” are evident and voluntary since Teitanblood is an ambitious band that is not interested in the least in repea...
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