Avant-garde Metal
Avant-garde metal, the wrecking yard where extreme music takes itself apart, broke loose from every rulebook when Celtic Frost took Into the Pandemonium into strange territory in 1987, welding saxophones, drum machines and electronics onto whatever survives of the riff. Anything can be an instrument.
Metal on the operating table
The laboratory wing of the heaviest music, avant-garde metal, was born, in Ian Christe's account, when musicians walked out of death metal's tightly wound structure and started experimenting with the pieces, and it saws the riff open on the bench and stitches free jazz, electronic percussion, robotic vocal effects and dissonant guitar into the wound. The patient survives. Some records hand the rhythm to a drum machine, others drown the voice in electronic treatment until it sounds built rather than sung. The style also answers to experimental metal, avant-metal and art metal.
An avant-garde metal record works like a church organ wired into a demolition crane: the hymn keeps playing while the steel ball swings through the nave, and the listener hears both at once. The collision is the composition. A saxophone can cut across a blast beat, a trip hop groove can take over from a black metal riff, and the band treats both as material of equal rank.
What separates avant-garde metal from progressive metal is the goal. Progressive bands keep a tight focus on metal instrumentation and aim at technical complexity, while avant-garde bands put the experiment first and let technique follow. A progressive record wants the part played right. An avant-garde record wants it played like nothing before it.
The avant-garde metal cells
The door opened in Switzerland, where the turn of Celtic Frost towards classical music and electronics led journalists to reach for the word avant-garde, and by the middle of the nineties the style had cells in Oslo, Tokyo, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston and Seattle. Early fellow travellers include Voivod, Earth, the Melvins, Mr. Bungle and Neurosis. None of them followed one rulebook. Each tore up a different one.
Norway supplied the largest cell, black metal musicians walking out of the frost. Ved Buens Ende set jazz dissonance against black metal on their only album, Ulver left the forest for electronics on a double album built on William Blake, and Dødheimsgard, formed in Oslo in 1994, threw their sound under industrial machinery. The duo of Lazare and Cornelius in Solefald drew death threats from a listener who called their 1999 album an abomination to black metal. Fleurety brought in the saxophone.
In Tokyo the black metal band Sigh, led by Mirai Kawashima, opened its records to jazz, classical piano, psychedelia and, in time, disco. New York answered decades later with Imperial Triumphant, three players in golden masks and black robes who pour the jazz of their city into dissonant black metal. The borders stay open on every side, to industrial, to post-metal, to progressive metal. Avant-garde metal bands walk in and out. The label follows the record, never the band.
Eight records first
Eight avant-garde metal albums in listening order, from the Swiss break of 1987 to the masks of New York.
- Celtic Frost Into the Pandemonium Noise, 1987
French lyrics, a Wall of Voodoo cover, orchestral parts, a female voice and drum machine rhythms on the record that made the avant-garde tag stick.
- Ved Buens Ende Written in Waters Misanthropy, 1995
The trio's only full album, experimental black metal in jazz clothing that AllMusic said still sounds like nothing else.
- Arcturus La Masquerade Infernale Music for Nations, 1997
Norwegian black metal veterans tear the style open with theatrical clean vocals, electronics and orchestral colour, a masquerade ball staged in the ruins of the second wave.
- Ulver Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Jester, 1998
A hundred minutes of electronics, industrial noise, ambient passages and metal set to Blake's text, the moment the band left black metal behind.
- Dødheimsgard 666 International Moonfog, 1999
The Oslo band's black metal fed into industrial and electronic machinery, the record where the old style was stripped down for parts.
- Solefald Neonism Avantgarde Music, 1999
Black metal, pop, classical and punk fused under the banner of radical designer rock and roll, a record that split its audience down the middle.
- Sigh Imaginary Sonicscape Century Media, 2001
Jazz, classical piano, psychedelia, dub and disco threaded through Tokyo black metal, and Terrorizer's tenth best album of 2001.
- Imperial Triumphant Vile Luxury Gilead Media, 2018
Recorded at Colin Marston's Menegroth studio in New York, dissonant black metal soaked in the jazz of the city that made it.
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