Speculative 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...

“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...

In 2024, Speculative Metal (the most experimental extreme metal) has had numerous contributions from those bands that continue to show a limitless ambition to place metal outside the rational coordinates that make it a domesticated and predictable art. Speculative Metal bands make explorations outside the known cartography of the genre , through incursions into the irrational based on rhizome-shaped vanishing points that deterritorialize metal, releasing diagonals (oblique vectors) to deviate from the marked path. As Razalas reminds us in his "Liber Semitarum": "In speculative metal, all aspects of music are forced, not only the voice, the guitars and the drums but also the production, the form, the mix... affecting the entire sound spectrum." In "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia", Deleuze and Guattari talk about: "... bifurcations that venture into the outside. Speculative Metal is not built, but constantly diverges as it accumul...

With the release of Kenose in 2005, Deathspell Omega confirmed the trend they had started with SMRC. Dissonance as the basis of extremely complex and extensive compositions, the likes of which had never been seen before on the scene, made all eyes turn to them. Here begins a true revolution in Extreme Metal with a band that composed with unparalleled mastery and whose legion of imitators and followers has only grown since then. Hyper-riffs, speculative melodies, polymorphic rhythms, rhizomatic structures, hyper-complex narrative architecture... A sound and aesthetic discourse that will know no limits... Kenose I A drum pattern serves as the basis for an arpeggiated guitar riff that is repeated 4 times in a vast formal structure. The repetitions add variations to the guitar, which adds details to its harmonic skeleton, complex but subtle. In the percussion, the changes are more noticeable and evident with an excellent handling in the development of the resources used: the drummer builds...