Session 10: Metal as Performance

Jasmine Shadrack: Femme-Liminale: Corporeal Performativity in Death Metal Given the research undertaken into notions of Dark Leisure (Spracklen, 2013), space becomes an engendered negotiated terrain not only in terms of performing masculine inscribed music such as Death Metal but occupying space within the scene itself. Claiming identity through mapping one\u27s relationship to societal constructs of self and notions of belonging within peripheric and marginalised music forms such as Death Metal means that gender becomes foregrounded. Death Metal in its socio-musical constructs is male; the virtuosity and dexterity required to compose and perform it has its legacy in patriarchal cultural practices such as lead guitar solos and traditional band formations being occupied in the majority by men. There are of course exceptions to the rule but they do not occupy leading positions in the genre. There exists a preconceived notion that girls can’t play guitar, let alone Death Metal because its difficulty levels exceed a traditional three chord structure. Women’s involvement is restricted to either bass under the assumption that it is easier than guitar (White Zombie, Bolt Thrower) or in some instances vocals However this is dealt with as a novelty; Angela Gossow from Arch Enemy providing a viable example. Whilst an anti-hegemonic, anti-establishment ideological position is maintained in Death Metal, for women who transgress the boundary between audience member or “girlfriend” of a band member, to performing Death Metal, the liminality of experience means occupying a patriarchal space at the same time as transgressing sexist and sexualised gender tropes. Whilst it can be noted that men within the Death Metal scene do not necessarily knowingly ascribe to societal gender constructs as an overt operational paradigm of behaviour, seeing as no single person can divorce themselves in totality away from contemporary cultural texts and practices, fundamental gender codes underpin interaction on and off stage. For women who perform Death Metal, the choice to either accept or deny constructs of femininity and ‘sexiness’ exists as polemics; to acknowledge the male gaze or to reject it can act as primary signification of manoeuvrability within the scene. This paper seeks to deconstruct notions of gender performativity, subversion and extreme metal in order to present a narrative on liminality, sexualisation and corporeality. Megan McCarty: Aesthetics of the Brutal: The Voice, Listening Practices and Affect in Extreme Within metal studies literature, the sounding voice has been figured as a varied aesthetic and material phenomena. From a sociological perspective, the distorted timbre of the growling and screaming metal voice functions as an integral aesthetic and cultural sign, demarcating genre as well as social boundaries. For those inside the scene, that often means the assumption of a particular stance in relation to, and against, the mainstream and popular music. This oppositional aesthetics of the brutal and the extreme is also reflected in how some insiders discuss the defining aspect of the voice and genre: through learned vocal techniques the human vocalist achieves access to the inhuman, the demonic, and the industrial. By contrast, the significance of the voice can be seen as limited by the structural importance of noise and the guitar riff itself: the voice is “just” another instrument and the vocals “conform to the instrumental style.” Furthermore, some argue that the extreme metal voice denies the traditional representation role of the sung voice in popular music in favor of the pleasure of the voice as sound; in this perspective, the voice does not typically function as a vehicle for identification or communication. The practice and evaluative aesthetics of the extreme metal voice as well as its associated listening practices, however, have yet to be explored. What makes a voice “good” or “bad”? What is the role of technology? Taking a cue from cultural anthropology, what circulates with, and in, voices, anyway? How do listening, the body, and mishearing function in such an aesthetics? What are the stakes involved – for the producer and vocalist – in the voice and its studio production in extreme metal? This paper will address these questions through fieldwork, in the form of oral interviews and listening sessions with amateur vocalists as well as producers, in the greater North Carolina extreme metal scene. In doing so, I hope to show how certain voices and bodies come to index particular values, and through their affective, material sounding – whether through growling, screaming, or singing – communicate relationality and sociality in complicated ways. Lewis Kennedy: Conceptualizing Performance in Contemporary Metal Music Recorded performance is foregrounded within contemporary metal music, serving as the focus of studio albums, music videos, play-through videos, and live DVDs, as well as figuring prominently in common perceptions of metal culture. These presentations constitute distinct types of performance, variously highlighting technical precision, exaggerated gesture, and hyperreal live performance events. Taken from a larger analytical work examining presentations of performance and gesture in metal, I explore the dynamic relationship between three categories of ‘performance artefact’ (studio, video, live) to better understand the role of performance in constructions of musical meaning. Incorporating elements of gestural analysis and performance studies, I analyse the interaction of artefacts as contributing to perceptions of ‘the work’, the artist, and metal music more generally. Drawing on work by Walser (1993), Berger (1999), and Kahn-Harris (2007), this paper investigates how performance artefacts combine to articulate oft-cited tenets of metal music, including violence, transgression, aggression, and control