Hard Rock and Heavy Metal have always evoked ironic fondness among both street level hipsters and academic post-modernists, but in the early '00s a much more sincere interest in '70s stoner rock and over the top '80s Metal grandiosity became apparent among audiences otherwise interested in styles more easily defined as "experimental." For me, this disconcerting development made programming the newest music paradoxical: to move forward, we had to regurgitate the very music that Soundlab was birthed to transcend. Sunn O)))), with its nods to stoner metal and drone minimalism, made it possible to connect the dots, and groups like Rhys Chatham's Essentialist, which reconfigured the No Wave Minimalist's guitar symphonies in the context of the new drone metal made the exercise academic.
Still, I must admit I never fully understood the sonic connections, outside of ironic appropriation of the genre, and even though the sheer power of the above mentioned groups at Soundlab was impressive, I couldn't shake the sense that I was hearing the music that gave me reason to leave the soundtrack of my youth behind.
The following article, from a previously unpublished essay commissioned for The Wire's online 300th issue celebrations, doesn't do much to help me understand why I should care, although it does trace a subterranean history of Metal as it parallels the experimental magazine's own gradual embrace of it:
When The Wire published its first issue in 1982, it is doubtful that founders Anthony Wood and Chrissie Murray foresaw a future in which Heavy Metal – then derided in 'serious' music circles as an emotionally retarded, mongrel form of popular music – would share space in its pages alongside jazz, free improvisation and contemporary composition. After all, this was some time before the genre would begin its association with the 'avant' tag, and any dalliances with electronica, Ambient or musique concrète, though they certainly did take place, were not recognised as such by the post-punk firebrands of the music press.
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