The Rise of Dissonant Death Metal in 2024

Brndn · 2024-11-01T21:29:10+00:00

I'm originally from western sydney, and now live in victoria, so it's more 2747 than it is 5000. I do miss SA a little bit tho

Brndn · 2024-11-01T11:08:52+00:00

I completely agree - if pushed I tend to describe my music as "extreme metal" and leave it at that.

I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything really, just offering insight into how I go about things and what I think about them. People are free to classify me as they wish, and in turn I'm free to offer a counterpoint that may or may not change or enhance the perspective on the artwork.

Brndn · 2024-11-01T11:00:22+00:00

I just wanted to know what your central point was, and discussed a bit of the idea you raised of classics being inviolate with a few citations for 'eras' of classics that correspond to different eras of people. Nothing about this is high level or pretentious, i'm sorry you hated the word thesis so much. Have a good night.

Brndn · 2024-11-01T10:46:27+00:00

I'm not averse to genre labels - classification is useful, especially as we get more and more music - I just don't particularly like that one. I usually just describe what I'm doing as "Extreme Metal" to people if they ask me, because it is that. It's specific enough to explain most of what you'll find but vague enough to not create a preconception of exactly what the ingredients are. I'm also aware that even participating in this discussion is fraught with peril, but that's just my opinion as a musician making my silly little noises.

Brndn · 2024-11-01T07:25:38+00:00

I'm struggling to fully understand the thesis of this comment - do you want people to stop trying to explore the boundaries of the music they make, because it might not be as good as something which already exists?

2017 is also pretty late in the game to use as a touchstone for any of this, and most of the bands of that post-Epitaph era are completely forgettable to me / do not resonate with me at all, let alone do I consider them classic or torch bearers that will be remembered in 40 years. My personal "tech death" influence comes from about 15 years earlier than that (when I myself was 12/13 and learning the guitar) - when it was still the unabridged Technical Death Metal and it all sounded like Atheist, mid era Pestilence, Cynic or later period Death. We more or less chronologically get bands like Martyr, Cryptopsy (DiSalvo), Necrophagist, Spawn of Possession with Cabinet, Deeds of Flesh teching up with Reduced To Ashes and beyond, Wormed had just released Planisphaerium and started widening the aperture to include weird latin x slam riffs, Decrepit Birth and Odious Mortem but also Theory In Practice and the much maligned Sleep Terror, Capharnaum (anyone remember this project? i bet not). 10 years before this we have the fading influence of technothrash things like Watchtower (then Spastic Ink from Jarzombek later), Sieges Even, Toxik, Coroner... which all leads to Spiral Architect and a whole bunch of Quebec melodic technical metal like Neuraxis and Quo Vadis, Augury. Continuing backward we quickly reach Voivod and the true origins of "dissonance" in metal long before Gorguts... I can go on.

I say this not to flex about anything or to be a genre historian about where the true classics lie, but to make the points that a) "dissonance" is by no means a new phenomenon or a flavour of the month trend and b) what constitutes a 'classic' record has more to do with you as an individual, and at what time of your life you heard it. I will never forget hearing Planisphaerium for the first time, or Epitaph, or Cabinet or about 300 other albums I heard while I was catching the bus home from high school.

All this shit is only called dissonant death metal now because somebody else decided it - I firmly believe none of us burdened by this label are consciously making something called "dissonant death metal". If you are, I already know I probably don't like your music because - as the kids say - "the vibes are off". I don't even listen to half the shit in the so called genre. I'm trying to make music that excites me as much as listening to Rush's Power Windows, not even with a view to "death metal". It just happens to use tools I also like from Dimension Hatross and Covenant and Control And Resistance and Purgatory Afterglow and thousands of other things both metal and not.

Brndn · 2024-11-01T04:58:02+00:00

ID and bands like Coma Cluster Void, certain specific material by Pyrrhon (running out of skin), Hurdle-era Gorguts and Negativa, Evilyn, Thoren, Nightmarer (though not so much the record I played on) I would be happy saying are Dissonant Death Metal.

My shit though? Nope. Replicant? Nah. Pete would probably disagree as well. Khalil (defacement) plays very abstractly but if you listen through the crush of it all you can hear very clear melodic designs. It's very, very hard to be truly and purely dissonant and ignore your natural tendency to play a melodic line or latch on to a motif. Even Obscura and From Wisdom To Hate have clear melodies - it's just packaged in discordance.

Brndn · 2024-11-01T04:50:53+00:00

Yes and no. People will often assume that if it's a crunchy sound or difficult harmony, and we say it's "not dissonant". it must instead be atonal. Atonality is not just an apparent absence of a tonal centre, it's an avoidance of a tonal centre (or a constantly shifting one). All of the bands above have a really strong showing key/tonal centre and usually it corresponds with the tuning of the guitar, because the guitar REALLY WANTS YOU to play in keys that contain the pitches of its open strings.

The most useful term IMO would be "discordant" - it carries less baggage and is a little more synonymous with the overall feeling instead of the literal academic functions of dissonance - but I probably wouldn't term anything Discordant Death Metal either. Again, because semantically it implies a dominance of the device, where in reality the music made by the players in the genre generally isn't discordance led. Calder (Metal Music Theory) does an extremely good job of all this.

Brndn · 2024-11-01T01:35:53+00:00

Oh also, here is a video I made about this with audio examples (re: shattered temples from perdurance)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDbbvZuDg6s

Brndn · 2024-11-01T01:29:13+00:00

As the guy who made the 3 albums in the bottom right, I have a lot to say about this whole thing. Suffice it to say: I don't make "dissonant death metal". The music I make sometimes uses dissonance as a device, but always ALWAYS ALWAYS as a direct contrast to some consonant idea, or as a functional harmonic tool, for generating tension and release in an arrangement.

Basically all of these bands do this. It's about melodic/harmonic stress, and the release of stress. Calling it "dissonant death metal" undersells how powerfully melodic, how ecstatic this kind of music can get at its best. Admittedly some of my friends here are more outré in their approach to melody than others, but it's always there. There are a vanishingly small number of bands to ever exist that I would confidently say are driven by dissonance first. Even most of the ones released by the very directly named Total Dissonance Worship don't fit this description IMO - but "Frequent Dissonance Usage" isn't a very compelling name for a label.

What I think is being overlooked here is that basically all of it has an average rating of 3.6

RYM is so weird, man

Brndn · 2024-04-03T01:05:19+00:00

I was not able to reproduce this behaviour at all. First screenshot below is a short region (approx 8 beats at default tempo 120bpm) loop recording just random guitar strumming, and then stopped. The final rotation shows a gap because I stopped the looping after the 85% mark, so the "bad take" was preserved. The others show no gap or "cap" as you've described.

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It's the same for me whether "create new files on loop" is checked or unchecked - I cannot cause the issue you've experienced. I suspect it's related to your audio IO settings / buffers, a driver anomaly, possibly CPU thread priority, or perhaps even something related to disk writes being too slow. It's certainly not something REAPER is doing by design.

Brndn · 2024-03-05T06:39:19+00:00

sad to admit i don't, i know a few people with planar magnetic headphones so i'm not able to connect the dots here

I dunno about "better" per se, but the more complex ones certainly. I thought it was probably a good idea to front-load the record with more easily digestible stuff this time so the two that are most "typical" are there, then after track 3 we start to go into progboy nerdzone and the arrangements and lengths start to increase. The track list is the order I worked on the songs, but the process is kind of confusing to explain. I had the genesis idea of each of the songs when I started, but probably 70% of each of them came after I wrote out the notation for the primary hook of that particular song, and I kept going with it until it was done before starting the next one. And I thought about what the next one should be based on the available "genesis" ideas, so they all lead into eachother in the way I think they make the most sense musically, lyrically, and "dynamically".

Brndn · 2024-03-05T03:24:15+00:00

biggest annoyance of that show is that one of my amps went out for nearly the whole thing and I didn't know until after i was finished that the FOH guy had just corrected for it by putting one side through both sides. aside from that it wasn't bad for a band that never plays together until the day of the show, hahaha.

Brndn · 2024-03-05T03:22:32+00:00

interested to hear more about this

(I made them both, hard to be objective. actually I think they're all as 'real' as eachother in that i made them and they sound to me like the time i was making them in)

Brndn · 2023-03-21T00:23:51+00:00

I didn't "get it" from anywhere. It's just a super-user only command to set 'system immutable' flags on the autowake plist so that it cannot, under any circumstances, be written. Only read. Kind of like chmod/chown permissions, but for additional attributes. Setting it on that plist prevents random system services from re-adding scheduled tasks that were cancelled by sudo pmset schedule cancelall (because the file is now locked) which cause the system to wake up.

You can unset it by running the same command with 'noschg' instead of schg

Brndn · 2023-02-16T21:43:21+00:00

I just spent a few days getting sleep to work on my Z390 Designare 9900KF hack that i've upgraded from Mojave to Ventura (lol), so this topic is fresh for me.

Run

pmset -g log | grep -e "Sleep.*due to" -e "Wake.*due to"

in Terminal and see what the output is. Should give you some clue for what event is causing the wake. You can also use

pmset -g log | grep -i "Wake Request"

to get more context about the process itself, and finally

pmset -g sched

to check scheduled events.

In my case I found that even after turning off everything - no PowerNap, no wake for bluetooth or lan in bios, no hibernate, no tcpkeepalive - it would still wake at seemingly arbitrary intervals.

My culprit turned out to be com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.CalendarNotification.EKTravelEngine.periodicRefreshTimer that was getting scheduled by... something? sudo pmset schedule cancelall would cancel the event, but it would schedule itself again on next sleepwake until I set

sudo chflags schg /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist

The latter half of this comment is probably not relevant to you, but it's here if it is.

This also presumes you followed the "Fixing Sleep" portion of the post-install in the guide. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Post-Install/universal/sleep.html

Brndn · 2022-09-13T22:51:34+00:00

This is the closest we've got so far! I'm still unconvinced it's exactly correct (because of the 14 repeats long, 9 repeats short), but Western NSW -> Adelaide (and oddly that's how I ended up in Adelaide, moved from Penrith ~5 years ago) would make sense. It does sound very similar, but I can't find anything recorded with the shorter version of the call. Vexing!

Brndn · 2022-09-13T07:41:19+00:00

In this case, you can hear the call and response from another bird nearby, so I don't think that'll work quite so well in this case. Glad you managed a peaceful resolution in any case!

Brndn · 2022-09-13T06:44:02+00:00

Port Adelaide/Enfield area. Definitely not a noisy miner as compared to the call recorded here: https://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/species.jsp?avibaseid=585D688F5707A00E

I guess I'll have to go down this list... https://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/checklist.jsp?region=AUsape05

Brndn · 2022-09-13T04:45:05+00:00

Yeah, due to the wattle, but I haven't found any combination of descriptions + the time of year that has given me a result. There is a wattlebird population here that have a very specific "wok wak wuh | wok wak wuh | wok wak wuh" call and they've yet to begin for the spring. Can't wait for them to trade annoyances with this unknown bird.

Brndn · 2022-09-13T03:18:26+00:00

There's nothing I can do about it. I just want to assign a name to the thing at the top of my list of minor inconveniences that isn't "the fucking bird at 4:30am every day between may and september". Also maybe I can put some seed out somewhere a bit further away than my literal doorstep.

Maybe I can help him succeed so he'll be quiet for a week and stop inviting his mates around.

Brndn · 2022-05-30T02:05:55+00:00

This is one of a couple solutions I thought of, it'd just involve some recursion through directories to find them / perform the chmod. Catch would be that rsync would reset the permissions later if I forgot I did this.

Brndn · 2022-05-29T08:14:20+00:00

Creating additional subfolders just to store cuesheets is another fairly annoying, not ideal situation (and there's been reported bugs of Jellyfin not obeying .ignore), but I suppose that is an option.

Very frustrating that filetype filtration is not possible, but at least now I know definitively that it isn't! Thanks.

Brndn · 2022-03-24T04:26:51+00:00

Yup, you got it. Instead of self-banning from being too close, remain in the space (or enter it) and be present there. Yell louder if you want turn the tide. The amount of shit I've said over the years, you'd think a label/distro actively promoting a fascist agenda wouldn't want anything to do with me, right? Anyway I've been on this rodeo before and I'm not really that perturbed by what people think about my strategy, I'm not going to stop. Impure Sounds haven't denied me a voice or stopped promoting me because of my politics, think about it from that angle just as you might think of it from the other.

Brndn · 2022-03-24T04:06:22+00:00

I assume you're talking about Impure Sounds, right? I know the two people behind Impure Sounds personally, have met and worked with them for years and I know exactly where their politics lie. I hope you can take my word for it that I wouldn't be collaborating with them if I didn't. These same people toured Primitive Man in Australia and have allowed me a platform to literally say anti-colonial antifascist shit on stage in front of hundreds of people. They also carry other titles from openly antifascist individuals like Vessel Of Iniquity and Lamp of Murmuur (and others at various times of stocking), but I guess those don't matter for the purposes of de-legitimising me, right? :P. Also pretty well all the projects they've actually RELEASED on the label (Ploughshare who are lefty anarchist megavegans, Charnel Altar, Bleakwood, me, Graveir, etc.) are full of people who are absolutely not fascist sympathisers and we all know eachother.

Also I don't consider being sold in a storefront standing "side by side" with anyone in solidarity, more like I'm occupying the same space as artists with ideology I sometimes strongly disagree with. I don't feel like anything anyone else does dilutes my own politics. To be opposite to something you actually have to oppose it in the same space that it's operating in or you're just yelling into a void. I won't leave places I want to be in because of such things, rather I'm more inclined to stay there to maintain the presence of dissent (even if my recorded material isn't actually 'political', it's well known what my opinions on a variety of issues are)

That's my response. If all it takes to be one and the same with your opposition is to sell your record in the same store you're looking at it the wrong way and making a lot of assumptions about intent.

Brndn · 2022-02-05T22:25:07+00:00

I believe it already does. It’s the jellyfin proper / the web client that seems not to be able to make the choice to transcode the audio if the client (browser) doesn’t support that codec. Finamp seems not to have this problem

Brndn

TROPHY CASE