Heaviness: A Key Concept of Metal Music Through the Lens of Deleuzian Philosophy (original) (raw)

Toward a Systematic Understanding of “Heaviness” in Metal Music Production

Rock Music Studies, 2022

"Heaviness" has been one of metal music's defining features in three decades of metal scholarship. Research acknowledged its essential quality, but no comprehensive definition of musical heaviness was developed. This article, therefore, elaborates a preliminary framework of musical heaviness by identifying its constituent production, performance, and compositional components, including their relationships. The findings suggest that while structural and performative components provide the necessary foundation for heaviness, metal has been increasingly driven by its production. Since musicians reach limits, technology has become one of the primary means to produce ever heavier metal music in the genredefining quest for greater heaviness.

Heavy Metal : A Genre for All and None

2015

This paper draws links between the Apollonian and Dionysian figures in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzschean ethics, Bataille’s writings of sacrifice and nonproductive expenditure, Foucault’s repression hypothesis, and the Heavy Metal communal experience. The rejoicing of life through music, even throughout its darker periods, is present in the Heavy Metal communal setting. Likewise, the concept of “self-overcoming” (Selbst-Überwindung) fits the festival-like happenings that are Heavy Metal concerts. Moreover, the lifeaffirmation that occurs within the communal experience demonstrates a creation of a transgressive Self, only possible through group affirmation. This creates an atmosphere that allows catharsis and sensorial affirmation. Introduction: Into the void “There are some, who, from obtuseness, or lack of experience, will deprecate such phenomena as 'folk-diseases,' with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own 'healthy mindedness.' But, of course, s...

Sound, Symbol, Sociality: The Aesthetic Experience of Extreme Metal Music

Based on ethnographic research within the extreme metal community, Unger offers a thought-provoking look at how symbols of authenticity and defilement fashion social experience in surprising ways. Exploring the many themes and ciphers that comprise this musical community, this book interprets aesthetic resonances as a way to understand contemporary identity, politics, and social relations. In the end, this book develops a unique argument: the internal composition of the community’s music and sound moulds symbols that shape, reflect, and constrain social patterns of identity, difference, and transgression. This book contributes to the sociology of sound and music, the study of religion in popular culture, and the role of aesthetics in everyday life. It will be of interest to upper level students, post-graduate students and scholars of religion, popular culture, and philosophy.

Metal Music Studies 5.3 'Metal and Musicology' Editorial

Metal Music Studies, 2019

Given its short history as a self-conscious academic field, metal studies' interdisciplinarity is impressive. Metal studies actively draws upon and engages sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, history, geography and, of course, musicology. This special issue of Metal Music Studies, 'Metal and Musicology', is primarily concerned with the latter discipline and its interaction with metal studies. This is the editorial for the 'Metal and Musicology' special issue of Metal Music Studies journal, co-edited by Lewis F. Kennedy and M. Selim Yavuz (2019). The rest of the issue can be found here: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/mms/2019/00000005/00000003\. Members of the International Society for Metal Music Studies have access to the entire back catalogue of Metal Music Studies journal. Join the society here: https://www.metalstudies.org/membership

Becoming and vibrating: From becoming-woman to the nomadic subjects in musical creativity (The example of atmospheric black metal genre)

8th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe , 2022

This presentation aims to elaborate on the potential of sounds and vibrations within the context of Deleuzian-Guattarian understanding of becoming and Braidotti‘s nomadic subject. This philosophical position and conceptual route emphasize the non-hegemonic, dynamic, fluid, transgressing, and transformative potential of creativity. The DeleuzianGuattarian perspective of ―the privilege of the ear‖ will be further argued, extending the discussion to the process of creativity and the process of becoming a vibrant nomadic subject throughout the former. In other words, I propose that sound, and thus music, has a very special and crucial place in terms of the capacity of an artistic creation that is transformative and encompassing. Finally, I argue that the awareness of such a capacity would open grounds of not getting lost in the era of crises, flourishing the ways for coexisting. This presentation aims to contribute to the theme of 'gender‘ from the posthumanist and new materialist viewpoints, especially by tackling the concept of "becoming-woman" and "the nomad".

Authentic Heavy Metal and Contextual Aesthetics

2015

The present paper will outline under which conditions it is possible to make sense of aesthetic evaluations of music, without ending up merely referring to subjective taste, and attempt at providing an argument for why a contextualized account of musical aesthetics makes this possible. This will be done through addressing the supposed relation between ethical content and aesthetic quality in works of art, combined with a concept of music genre and a certain notion of musical authenticity – specifically what can be referred to as genre-authenticity.

Dissonance in metal music: Musical and sociocultural reasons for metal's appreciation of dissonance

Metal Music Studies, 2022

This article explores reasons for the proliferation of dissonance in metal music. It asks why metal musicians compose dissonant songs and what sociocultural functions dissonance may have for metal as a community. The findings suggest that exploring ways to further utilise dissonance is crucial to the genre's development and continued transgression, especially in progressive and extreme subgenres, and that fans derive pleasure and meaning from dissonance in the music. Dissonance is not only present in many metal compositions, but its prominence suggests that dissonance is one of the genre's central aesthetic features, at least in its more extreme subgenres. This is a subversion of the typical values in mainstream popular music, where dissonant features are fleeting points of tension. The article argues that dissonance is valued for its congruence with an aesthetic that transcends the genre through its overall transgressive traits. Such an aesthetic is appealing because it facilitates the exploration of negative emotions and ideas in safety, both individually and communally.

Metal music studies at the intersection of theory and practice

Metal Music Studies, 2021

Welcome to this special issue arising from the conference Crosstown Traffic: Popular Music Theory and Practice held at the University of Huddersfield (United Kingdom) in September 2018. As a joint conference arranged by four popular music studies research organizations, 1 including the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), it aimed to integrate different disciplines and professions, promoting interdisciplinarity and collaborative work. A total of 272 speakers from 26 countries presented 131 papers over five days, thirteen of which were directly related to metal. The central requirement for acceptance was that a presentation had to engage with topics relevant to more than one organization, namely popular music studies, metal music studies, electronic dance music and record production. Although this requirement was a political decision of the conference committee, it encourages reflection on the development of metal music studies in general. There is a broad consensus that while research on metal music

The DAW, Electronic Music Aesthetics, and Genre Transgression in Music Production: The Case of Heavy Metal Music

Producing Music (Perspectives on Music Production), 2019

This chapter continues my ongoing research into the DAW and its role in reconfiguring popular music practice (see , with particular reference to genre characteristics in heavy metal music. My focus is on the manner in which those "rules" that determine the "compositive" elements of the metal genre (see are "transgressed" as a result of their interaction with new technological forms. These ideas are applied specifically in relation to DAW-based practices, highlighting the manner in which this medium might be regarded as an agent of genre deconstruction and destabilization. Key to my argument is the hypothesis that the DAW is essentially a genre-specific medium in the sense that it foregrounds specific notions of creative practice associated with the aesthetics of electronic music. To illustrate this, I trace the route by which the DAW and its inherent electronic music aesthetics have become gradually integrated into metal music practice, from metal musicians' uses of the DAW during the mid-1990s through to the activities of DAW-based metal practitioners during the mid-to late 2000s and the hybridized forms of "electronic" metal that emerged at this time, including djent, djent-step, and cyber-grind. The concluding part of the chapter discusses situations in which older metal bands have attempted to incorporate, from outside their idiom, the traits of DAW-derived genres, with a particular focus on the dubstep collaborations on Korn's 2012 album, The Path of Totality. The chapter's key assertion is that metal artists who have gravitated toward either the DAW, or DAW-based practitioners, are all engaging to some degree with the aesthetics of electronic music and, while this has enabled the domain of metal music