Speculative Cartography: Deterritorialization in Extreme Metal
"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...