Speculative Cartography 2: Deterritorialization (Techniques and Chronology)
"... 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 as the primary symbol (the established form of the song, the canon). Thus, we are in transition toward a completely new sonic universe. We now proceed to worship new and unknown gods, from canonical monotheism to formless polytheism.
On the horizon rises a completely new morphology that succumbs to deterritorialization, the victory over matter, the overcoming of linear and Euclidean perspective in order to unleash an atmospheric perspective with multiple simultaneous vanishing points. It is the struggle against established architectural motifs, subjected to a critical energy that cracks all foundations, opening the way to the irrational, to the outside, to the mysterious (that is, what remains hidden and is now revealed/explored). Spengler puts it better:
“In a process analogous to the beginning of contrapuntal music, from the canon as center there spring the finest threads that, in their weave, envelop the different worlds of form, incorporating infinitesimal mathematics and dynamic physics to masterfully crystallize the teachings of Zarlino (1558).” (The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, Ch. IV, p. 404)
We are witnessing the decisive impulse toward an ornamental language of undeniable power. If music is mathematics itself, deterritorialization plunges us into a post-Euclidean abyss of irrationality and delirium. We stand before the death of the canon, of the formal architecture upon which the song as musical form is built to limit and control deterritorialization (the primordial basis of ancestral peoples and their indomitable, infinite musical expressions).
“Deterritorialization makes it possible to dilate the sonic body to infinity, to dissolve it into an infinite space of sonorities.” (Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, Ch. IV, p. 340)
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| William Turner - Snow Storm (1842) |
After describing the specific techniques of deterritorialization, a chronology of bands is presented with the aim of analyzing the phenomenon of deterritorialization in extreme metal:
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| Mark Rothko |
SPECIFIC TECHNIQUES OF DETERRITORIALIZATION
- Accumulation of environments: Speculative Metal does not seek a linear or predictable development. Its logic is different: it is built by an accumulation of sonic environments. Each environment—a texture, an atmosphere, a harmonic or rhythmic color—does not replace the previous one but coexists with it, overlaps it, folds over others. There are no borders, only thresholds. This accumulation does not follow a logic of modular construction, but of atmospheric stratification; a fractalization of rational architecture. The hierarchy between background and figure is annulled.
- Zone of indiscernibility: When an accumulation of environments occurs, zones of indiscernibility open up—spaces where one no longer distinguishes between riff and texture, between atmosphere and rhythmic impulse, between form and noise. The narrative discourse becomes unrecognizable and enters a larval phase, in transit toward something not yet defined. A space is generated where elements are no longer functional but presences, abstract forces.
These zones are not simple transitions: they are smooth (not striated) spaces, places where the identity of the elements blurs, where they no longer follow rational patterns. The canon of the song cracks and dissolves. Everything merges into a continuum where metal becomes unrecognizable and irrational.
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Vassily Kandinsky, Controlled Accumulation (1938) |
- Liminal deterritorialization: A form of aesthetic, structural, and affective displacement that happens at the edges, blurring traditional linear narrative. It does not occur at the “center” or core of the musical discourse (for example, the riff, the blast beat, the verse–chorus structure), but in transitional passages, where the music seems “about to mutate,” not yet consolidated as a full entity.
A liminal deterritorialization does not destroy the territory, but suspends it momentarily. Its function is to produce a crack, to destabilize listening, to attack the listener’s expectation, keeping them in a transitory space of stylistic ambiguity.
- Parallel chambers: Superimposition of autonomous sonic layers that do not follow the same temporal or tonal logic. Each acts as an acoustic “chamber” with its own rules.
- Internal structural deterritorialization: Dissolution of the internal logic of the song (verse, chorus, development) from within: elements disintegrate without breaking the flow, sections emerge and disappear without following conventional development.
- The interzone, inter-strata, transcodifications: Hybrid spaces between genres, aesthetics, or perceptual modes. Transitional zones where codes collapse.
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| José Hernández - The Wave |
- Deep fog: limit saturation through massive superimposition of layers. Subject the music to a sonic conjuration, to an alchemical process to transmute it. It entails the dominance of texture above all else. Aesthetic contamination and the breaking of hierarchies: the textural replaces the rhythmic or the melodic. The background devours the figure.
- Hyper-riffs: The riff disappears as a recognizable form; it is not identifiable as a closed unit. It becomes a flow, a process, a constant mutation.
- Rhizomatic structures: The rhizome as a compositional form—nodes in a formless network; sound is a decaying organism without a center. In a non-hierarchical, non-sequential composition, a network without beginning or end, without recognizable repetition: nodes, folds, connections, irrational vanishing points to build a delirious vibratory anarchitecture.
- Sonic folds: Self-interiorization of sound: the music folds in on itself like a body contorting to its limit. A cyclopean point of density is produced where multiple vanishing points converge.
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| Francis Bacon - Head VI (1949) |
CHRONOLOGY
What follows is a chronology of the use of sonic deterritorialization—understood as the inclusion of sonic elements foreign to the traditional narrative structure of extreme metal, especially abstract passages, atmospheres, noises, silences, or incursions of foreign aesthetics—from the 1980s to the present. I also underline how that use has migrated from peripheral functions (intro, outro, interlude) to occupy the structural core of composition, generating true rhizomatic strategies that lead toward speculative metallurgy.
1970s – The Primordial Fracture
Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970)
Definable as one of the most powerful incantations ever cast, the opening of Black Sabbath’s debut marks the foundational moment for the birth of metal. What is truly remarkable is that we can already perceive how deterritorialization, as a compositional strategy, was present from the very beginning. The mist-laden, storm-charged atmosphere, with bells tolling like a primordial proclamation, tore a fissure in the space-time continuum of musical evolution—through which an entire sonic universe of indescribable richness would emerge. The dawn of Heavy Metal as a genre, with its forbidden and inconceivable riff, required the support of an ambient texture that could situate us on the proper plane, transporting us with that unrepeatable atmosphere from which everything came and to which everything shall return.
1980s – The Threshold
“In this first phase, the deterritorializing gesture does not act from the structural core of the track, but from its margins, in the form of sonic thresholds. We speak here of a liminal deterritorialization: a suspension of the territory before its affirmation, an intermediate state that disturbs the directionality of the musical discourse and keeps the listener in a zone of unstable, open, rhizomatic listening.” (Relgneps Razalas, Metallorum mutatio: Corpus theoreticum, ch. 3, “Time and Fate; Space and Causality”)
Celtic Frost – To Mega Therion (1985)
Intro “Innocence and Wrath”: symphonic fanfares and ritual percussion, anticipating a mythical landscape rather than a song. Celtic Frost’s ambition forces them to turn to orchestral instruments to introduce an album in which the compositions needed to be separated from the concept of mere music. It is a first act of “open world” and a tendency toward deterritorialization, but still as prologue.
Metallica - Master of Puppets (1986)
Metallica composed several of the most famous intros in the history of Metal based on acoustic guitars, but Cliff Burton went a step further by using his bass with distortion and wah-wah, clearly affecting the piece’s texture through timbre, creating a transcodification of parallel chambers and a precedent for the accumulation of environments.
Slayer – Reign in Blood (1986)
The track “Raining Blood” opens and closes with an unusually extended atmospheric tension for thrash of the time. It is not yet ambient, but it is a gesture of narrative abstraction that leans on the textural to convey a sensation that the “traditional” instruments alone cannot achieve.
Godflesh - Streetcleaner (1989)
An example of internal destructuralization, with the riff subjected to the pressure of the machinic repetition of the percussion, affecting the repetition of patterns. The riffs unfold in infinite loops full of dissonances that transform the music into pure contaminated atmosphere in a claustrophobic environment. Here the machine is introduced as a virus, a radical anomaly that will give rise to inconceivable mutations.
1990s – The Interzone
Morbid Angel - Domination (1989) + Nocturnus - The Key (1990)
With “Domination,” Morbid Angel intensified the use of textures and abstract ambiences that even manage to penetrate traditional tracks, contaminating the plot while still subordinated to the riff and the structure. From them departs Nocturnus’s vanishing point, who would take deterritorialization even further through the use of parallel chambers and accumulation of environments (with a use of keyboards in Death Metal equivalent to Emperor’s in Black Metal).
Darktrhone - A Blaze in the Northern Sky (1992)
Black Metal would use intros, interludes, and outros much more frequently than other styles. These compositions function as interzones or inter-strata, and begin to be used to provoke a crack in the listener’s auditory experience that allows the listening to be transported to a territory otherwise inaccessible. Darkthrone helped expand this kind of liminal deterritorialization.
Emperor – In the Nightside Eclipse (1994)
Keyboards and symphonic textures were used here for the first time as a central, structural element, not decorative or accessory. Orchestration and keyboards do not accompany; rather, they make entire segments independent, floating between riffs as parallel chambers, deterritorializing the music in a process of syncretism that would open the way to new paradigms in extreme metal.
Burzum – Filosofem (1996)
Tracks like “Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte” occupy 25 minutes of ambient with no guitar or voice. Here, metal deterritorializes itself: it is no longer an interlude or an accumulation of environments, but a totally new territory that culminates the band’s earlier experiments. Keyboards here are an utterly visionary agent of structural deterritorialization.
Neurosis - Through Silver In Blood (1996)
On this album, the use of abstract textures tending toward noise sparked a revolution. Seldom before had they been used with such intensity. It is a masterful use of the accumulation of environments, producing extensive zones of indiscernibility where the band’s sound is absorbed by an abyss of geocosmic strata of inconceivable power. A syncretic blasphemy that transforms narrative into a collision of frequencies that produces a fascinating, blinding foam.
Gorguts – Obscura (1998)
Radical dislocation of traditional patterns. Although there is no ambient, there is indeed a new sonic morphology where riffs and silences coexist without linearity. It is an example of internal structural deterritorialization. This album was composed by applying Salazar’s Law, which subverted the primary and secondary symbols of extreme metal, contaminating its codes (not from outside, but from within the style) and proposing a non-Euclidean rhythmic–harmonic cartography. Here the foundations are laid for multiple lines of flight for the future of the style.
2000s – Aesthetic Contamination and the Breaking of Hierarchies
Sunn O))) - ØØVoid (2000)
Riffs cease to be identifiable: they dissolve into eternal drones that are almost unidentifiable. stratifications of sound. We are dealing with a textural metal that prioritizes sensation over form, a sonic mass that nullifies points of anchorage. Each note becomes a prolonged chamber that exists for itself. Drone is the collapse of metal as a genre.
Deathspell Omega – Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice (2004) / Fas – Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum (2007)
In SMRC, the album is built by raising a cyclopean, demented architecture, deploying thematic and formal nodes that act as internal, subterranean interconnections over which the compositions flow. The introduction of rhizomatic structures breaks classic black linearity, interleaving hymns, liturgical choirs, silences, and dissonant passages that destabilize the narrative tempo. We are no longer dealing with “intros” but with liturgical processes.
In Fas, deterritorialization becomes more extreme: metal is contaminated by atonalism and musique concrète. The riff is now pure dissonant flow: it ceases to be recognizable, mutates as it advances, and its “inhuman logic” is closer to Ligeti than to Darkthrone. The riff technology displayed here (hyper-riffs) unfolds relentlessly; the form decomposes even as it expands at dizzying speeds... an organism exploding in all directions at once.
Ulver – Blood Inside (2005)
Although already unbound from traditional black metal, Ulver represent a mutation of the DNA that departs from metal toward completely de-hierarchized narrative forms: jazz, electronics, noise, neoclassical. An early example of maximal deterritorialization.
Blut aus Nord – MoRT (2006)
An album in which microtonal textures and industrial hums suspend metal in a larval state. The riff disappears as a recognizable form. The logic is inhuman. To erode the identity of the riff; instead of emphasizing the riff, it destabilizes it: it dissolves it, drags it toward environments of vibration where it loses its identity.
Reverorum Ib Malacht - What Do You Think of the Old God, We Call Him Judas? (2005)
The emergence of RiM on the scene was utterly revolutionary in applying speculative tools with a depth rarely seen: accumulation of environments, zones of indiscernibility... Atmosphere reigns supreme. The deranged use of reverb on the guitars simulates a third and fourth sonic dimension: it creates the illusion of distance and vertical displacement, expanding the sound in a rhizomatic spiral. The recording studio is used as a hyper-instrument, a totalizing compositional device that does not emit sounds as an isolated entity but conditions listening, deforms space, generates zones of indiscernibility, and suspends narrative logic.
The music here is a body without organs, a latent energy that does not articulate itself as melodic line or functional harmony, but as vibratile frequency, deep fog.
Teitanblood: Seven Chalices (2009) / Death (2014)
The traditional instruments withdraw and we face a process of sonic deterritorialization that opens a crack in chronological linear time and breaks with the previous paradigm. The procedure of speculative metallurgy the band applies here triggers a process of deterritorialization. A line of flight takes us away from the established terrain throughout the album to distant, abstract regions, dominated by a weave where the pulse disappears and the rule of the margins begins in contrast to the center, there where nomadism and atmospheric flows dwell, where horizontal frequencies impose themselves over vertical resonances. A rupture occurs in the sonic fabric. The lines of articulation that had traced vanishing points unfurling to raise a temple of indescribable resonances dissolve to let us enter a viscous region of liminal flows where nebulous, metaphysical textures reign. The temple, the organism, has been undone at its foundations, and intensity mutates into an unquantifiable abstraction."
2010s – The Rhizome as Compositional Form
Liturgy – The Ark Work (2015)
The album operates in a space of transition between genres, where the black metal matrix is barely a distant echo, transfigured by the incorporation of elements such as trap beats, brass fanfares, glitches, and polyrhythms typical of contemporary music. We enter a textural paroxysm that leads us to Hyperritualism.
Portal – Ion (2018)
Here the guitars deploy hyper-riffs like alien machinery. They do not fulfill the traditional function of rhythmic or melodic anchor. They are dislocated, dense, centrifugal patterns: sonic architectures that self-assemble and disintegrate at vertiginous speed. The guitar becomes a source of turbulence, a swarm of particles, a quantum collapse. a non-linear experience, where auditory memory is continually erased by the next sonic avalanche.
Sumac – Love in Shadow (2018)
The frame of sludge/post-metal is dilated until it breaks its own margins, absorbed by long improvisations, sections of textural free jazz, and tense silences. There is no closed narrative: the pieces unfold as sonic masses that mutate slowly, eroding any predictable structural reference in an expansive deterritorialization. We are dealing with an example of hypermorphology: from an initial riff or motif, unforeseeable ramifications emerge that sometimes return to the core and other times disperse until they are lost in abstraction.
Reverorum ib Malacht - Ter Agios Numini (2017)
The album consists of atmospheric and abstract textures over which the drums improvise: intangible, undefined sections where atmosphere stands above all else. The band once again deploys hidden techniques of Speculative Metal, such as timbral psychedelia and ritual percussive flow. The production creates a sonic space that oscillates between the abysmal and the claustrophobic, with exaggerated reverberation and superimposed planes that deny any point of stability; it is a music that unfolds and collapses constantly, creating an unstable spatiality. Time is not perceived as linear advance, but as an act of repetition and demolition. The sections can last longer than musical logic suggests, in a sacrificial temporality, until the listener’s resistance is broken.
2020s – Metal as a Medium Deterritorialized by Default
Imperial Triumphant – Alphaville (2020)
Imperial Triumphant integrate musical blocks from different stylistic provenances without assigning them a hierarchical function: integration of dodecaphonic jazz, cinematic production effects, manipulation of time and space. Jazz used as a vector of flight. The drums operate as an axis of instability, inserting polyrhythms and metric displacements. The tracks function as open cartographies in which it is possible to jump between sonic territories without the need for gradual transitions.
The Body - I've Seen All I Need to See (2021)
On this album, The Body push timbral deformation to a point where instruments no longer refer to their physical sources and come to function as vectors of undifferentiated sonic mass. The recording studio is not here a medium of capture, but a device of auditory deterritorialization, where extreme compression, saturation, and dynamic manipulation turn each attack and resonance into an unpredictable event.
Krallice – Crystalline Exhaustion (2022)
A writing about structural exhaustion: synthesizers and cosmic ambiences where the blast beat no longer drives but inhabits the atmosphere. The layers of synthesizer function as a narrative vector that traverse the composition and redistribute tension continuously, constantly accumulating energy.
Pylar – Límyte (2023)
Here deterritorialization is used not as a resource but as a structuring principle. Each sonic passage can expand in multiple directions, without narrative subordination. Here, deterritorialization is no longer rupture, but ontology.
Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja (2024)
A continuous sonic field composed of autonomous layers that interact and modulate one another. Each element (guitar, bass, synthesizer, percussion, processed voices) is treated as a source of texture, assembling into a complex hypertextural architecture, achieving the dissolution of the initial cell from which the tracks depart into a flow in constant reconfiguration. Ideas are used as patterns of density, deploying the accumulation of environments with masterful control.
Ancestros - Blasfemia Austral (2026)
A band that applies all speculative techniques of deterritorialization simultaneously.
Razalas writes of ∀ncƎstr∞Ƨ that “I have never seen an entity so sinister. Their thirst for rebellion and undermining of all styles and aesthetic currents within metal surpasses every limit and measure of infamy... Their recordings and sonic experiments are so deeply rooted in the deep past of the style that neither theorists nor practitioners can unravel even a hint of their meaning and of what lies in the depths of their proposal. ∀ncƎstr0s are the cosmodromic blasphemy… Their music leads you to radical delirium. The ‘southern barbarity,’ as the band is called, pays tribute to Lilith, the mother of abominations, she who reigns over dust and deep fog.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCU5clxiCA8
First part of this text: https://speculativemetal.blogspot.com/2025/07/speculative-cartography.html
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