Kyle Miller's "Ven"

Kyle Miller is from Long Island, one of the birthplaces of Death Metal. I understand that Long Island rivals Tampa for the distinction.

The center of it is Cannibal Corpse’s predecessor scene, but the real institutional hub was Vinnie Cianni’s studio and the “Long Island scene” clustered around a handful of bands in the mid-to-late 1980s. The two towering names:

Suffocation, formed 1988 in Centereach/Medford, Long Island — widely credited as pioneers of a specific subgenre, brutal/technical death metal, built on the alternating slam-and-blast-beat structure (“breakdown” riffing married to extreme tremolo picking) that became a template copied worldwide. Their early demos and Effigy of the Forgotten (1991) are foundational texts of the genre.

Immolation, formed 1986 in Yonkers/later based on Long Island — dissonant, atmospheric, technically intricate death metal with a darker, more anti-religious thematic bent, also hugely influential.

Beyond those two: Mortician (Long Island, notoriously slow/heavy “gorno” style), and the broader network of bands, labels (Relapse and others had early Long Island ties), and all-ages venues and record shops that let teenagers trade demo tapes in the pre-internet era — Long Island’s suburban geography, oddly, produced exactly the kind of bored, car-dependent teenage subculture that death metal’s other hubs (Tampa, Stockholm) also drew on.

Why Long Island specifically: scholars and fans of the genre’s history point to a few factors — proximity to but alienation from Manhattan’s media/music industry, a dense suburban network of practice-space garages and small clubs, and specific record stores/labels that functioned as scene hubs, letting a fairly small number of interconnected musicians cross-pollinate bands rapidly (several of Suffocation’s and Immolation’s members moved between lineups).

The point about Death Metal’s alienation from Manhattan’s media/music industry is something that I like about Queens College, where Miller & I met. It’s more immune from fashion, although Long Islad Death Metal may have its own fashions.

I heard some of Miller’s earliest works in which heavy metal redolences overwhelemed me, but at the same time, Miller’s wit and intelligence were already beginning to overpower the redolences of a vernacular music. “Ven”, a set of three electric guitar quartets goes much further in this process of overwhelming native roots.

The microtonal gliss at the end of “Ven: II. Flux” kills me.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psll9zkgc9c&list=RDPsll9zkgc9c&start_radio=1


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7io5Yjjz70&list=RDU7io5Yjjz70&start_radio=1



I’m beginning to notice that there are lighter and heavier bits. And I begin to detect in the lighter bits a sense of humor, gags that I imagine might be garage band in-jokes.

Miller never told me he comes from Death Metal. There are many, many kinds of metal, with many amusing names. Kyle is a engineer/producer and he works with every imaginable heavy metal strain.

“Ven” feels like a memento mori, such as Weiss’s Tombeau de Comte do Logy or Louis Couperin’s Tombeau do Blancrocher.

And yet there’s more to “Ven” than the memento mori. There might be a bit of antiestablishment, anti-specactacle energy. As opposition, it’s very much in the game. That *being in the game* cuts in another direction than the memento mori blade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7DnEkXP7_A&list=RDU7DnEkXP7_A&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psll9zkgc9c&list=RDPsll9zkgc9c&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUs_UOccxqs&list=RDdUs_UOccxqs&start_radio=1


“Bed of Creeks and Coils” is one of the most joyful works I’ve played.
“Wavering Radiant” is more edgy, but there’s an important point to be made about that. It has bits that are perhaps no less scary than “Ven”, but “Wavering Radiant” has a frame, the chromatic trichord begins and ends, and it has clear transitions that pop.

“Ven” is more like free verse and so its elements are not so contained in a form. I may discover its form (that arrangement of lighter and darker material, perhaps) and prove myself wrong, but I think it’s safe to say that “Wavering Radiant” is more like a formal garden. “Ven” is a rock garden.

Bed of Creeks and Coils is a straight ahead Passacaglia. It’s joyful in part becasue we do not get lost in it. we always or almost always know where we are.

Broch’s introduciton to the collected prose of Hugo von Hofmannsthal is indispensable here.

On page xxi, Broch says popular poetry “masters the lyrical shortening of symbol-chains in a natural way, in such mysterious simplicity that all the identification-mysticism of the aestheticists pales by comparison and disappears.”

“Ven”

Broch’s own argument, paraphrased: once a symbol has done its work repeatedly, the living connection between language, image, and object goes stiff — call it a freezing. That freezing then forces more and more symbols into service just to keep communication flexible at all, and the superabundance intensifies the very freezing it was meant to relieve, until the symbols are comprehensible only if fixed into an established, allegorical canon — the opposite extreme from a symbol’s original, direct communicability. Broch calls this shift “the transition from symbol to allegory,” and warns that allegory, being a process of paralysis, carries a homunculoid, lifeless quality, exposed equally to the danger of petrifying solid or evaporating into nothing.

That’s the passage checking the limitless — not lyric form (rhyme, meter) as I’d first thought when we discussed this days ago, but convention itself doing the checking, forcing an otherwise unbounded proliferation of meaning into a fixed, shared code before it either freezes solid or dissolves into incomprehensibility.