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

I’m beginning to notice that there are lighter and heavier bits in “Ven”. And I begin to detect in the lighter bits a sense of humor, maybe references to things known in the garage that we don’t necessarily know.

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. I suspect at this point he’s pan-metal.

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

Do we detect a bit of the antiestablishment, and anti-specactacle energy, mentioned above? As opposition, it’s very much in the game; it has a game other than plowing endlessly into the unending rabbit hole of Death. That *being in the game* cuts in another direction than the memento mori blade.

“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 (Bollingen) 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”

There are forms that are coin of the realm – conventional, and acquiring the currency of the allegorical – consistent with the conventions of lyrical poetry. Form keeps us from the potetially infinite allure (what Broch means by identification-mysticism) of free verse or pure sound. I’m not sure but I think my line on this matter is equivalent to Broch’s: *form discontents the contents* is my cute line.

Death metal – what Broch means and what I mean is in the designation, “death metal”. The musical thing can have great power over us. What I’m observing about Kyle’s “Ven” is that by being more free, less formal, it’s scarier.

“Wavering Radiant” gets its radiance by mastering its scary content. The content, in places, is just as scary, but the *discontenting* holds the scary at arm’s length.

The Broch discussion would not be unfamiliar to Aleister Crowley, who, like Yeats and Lorca, would tap into esoteric traditions to express much the same thing. Crowley, Yeats and Lorca share a vocabulary. Crowley is the unexamined link between Symbolisme and Led Zepplin and such.