NEW SEASONS IN THE ABYSS...

In the era of Romero's zombies , pierced the cannibalistic reality in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and in "The Silence of the Lambs", rock appears as a changeable creature, able to understand all its derivates. As in horror movies, this means of expression opened on to every possible contamination, in a lapse of time from "The Night of the Living Dead" to "The Lawnmower Man". It is as if, in the darkness of a movie theater, during an imaginary marathon dedicated to the horror films of the last thirty years, we went through the harmless gothic horrors of Hammer Film to the sick splatter of "Zombie" or "The Last House on the Left". Nowadays rock forgets about the punk's slogan of "no future" that at least had an action prelinary inside anarchic nihilism. The contemporary musical equivalent of movies' splatter, currents like hardcore, thrash and, above all, death metal and grindcore called for a deep uneasiness, and expressed a dissent culture which seemed to introduce further turmoil of apocalyptic dimensions. Instead of putting some order in this confusion, currents like grind worried about sistematically destroying all sound rules and aesthetics.

CENOBITES OF METAL...

At first, there were the Venom, with their blasphemous sentences and rituals, on albums like "Black Metal" and "Welcome to Hell'. The term 'black metal' became the label of all those groups, mainly British, that found their musical inspiration in Black Sabbath, mainly regarding the dark side of existence, a scenery crowded with demons, witches and wizards, heaven and hell, magical rituals and evil shows. Among the public, this phenomenon involved only a minor number of headbangers, mocked or pitied by the ones who still preferred a joyful and vital representation of street life and the good old philosophy of "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" to upsided down crosses. Nevertheless, punk nihilism left its mark. in a few years, it came back under the destructive and radical fury of hardcore, that soon eroded the surface of the most traditional metal. Crossover gives rise to thrash and metalcore, the themes and styles closest to the world of horror are resumed and developed producing new labels. Phenomena like death metal, grind core or splatter rock were, a few years ago, at the center of attention, thanks to a large number of new groups, not only British, but also Continental, coming specially from the cold scandinavian lands. The new metal gave rise to a new tendency that went beyond the boundaries established by death metal, and it was impatient to compete with both the sound and the most extreme image of rock. Grind joined together the hyper speed of bands like Slayer or the early Celtic Frost, with the wall of industrial noise reality like the Throbbing Gristle. The Frankenstein lab of the situation, to use a suitable metaphor, was represented by a small independent British label, Earache, which promoted and distributed groups like Napalm Death, Godflesh, Carcass, Morbid Angel, Entombed and Nocturnus. These groups have soon reached a cult status, radically changing this musical current.

Grindcore story finds its origin in the summer of 1987, when Earache publishes the first Napalm Death's album "Scum", a record with supersonic flashes of thirty seconds average length, which soon earns the attention of the critics and a significant amount of sales, bringing out a new interest on the part of the public. Napalm Death deserve the credit of having introduced metal hardcore general outline and code into an accelerator. Let's not forget about the fact that 'grind', in England, is synonymous of 'thrash'. As a result, their music was the product of the natural thrash evolution, at a hundred miles an hour speed. Napalm Death and Carcass, the other promoter of this current, soon started to extend the lenght of their songs. Carcass, by merging sordid grindcore with anatomically correct lyrics, had included in their repertory some of the most ferocious titles in the history of rock, like "Cadaveric Incubator of Endoparasites", "Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency" and "Excoriating Abdominal Emanation".

"When we started, in the early 1987, there were a lot of bands with songs defined 'gore', but their inspiration came mainly from horror movies and that kind of stuff. Of course, we had to work with our fantasy because some of these ideas are really extreme. But at the same time, it has its roots in reality, and that is why we use medical terms. In addition, I'd like to think that there is some humor in all this. We are not afraid of laughing at ourselves sometimes".

Grindcore could be decribed as a very heavy musical holocaust, running at a chaotic speed, without any melody or harmony, in which the songs consist of beastlike guttural snarls and last, on average, not more than thirty seconds. Little by little it became contaminated with the most extreme tharsh. In two years, like a strong virus, grind infected the musical scene of different countries planting its evil seeds from the humid and unhealthy marshlands of Florida to the cold lands of Northern Europe. Even John Zorn, the daring avant-garde artist who would experiment anything, got involved with grind in a record entitled "Torture Garden" (1991). In this album the crazy saxophonist mixes and distorts grindcore, free jazz and noises, giving life (or death) to a winding and experimental piece. Going back to the historical fathers of the movement, the British Carcass and their first record, "Reek of Putrefaction" (1988) represents a remarkable sound and visual shock. The cover shows a collage of photos coming from the best forensic medicine treatises and from police portfolios: images of mutilated bodies, burned fetus and other similar pleasant things. A sticker on the cover warned eventual buyers with highly threatening sentences: "A bloody dish of audio-torture, anatomically corrected, which erodes your bowels, it is the debut of these disemboweling amanogogies of a fanatic and grotesque brutality. Twenty two pieces of stinking fetishes and sticking stories that will make your gastric juices burn your stomach". The gruesome music inspired by these visions of death and physical deterioration, which impregnates the record's tracks, runs parallel to the cover.

With hardcore and metal as inspiring sources, Carcass' grind core was a sound experiment where noise and desorder dominated together with physical chaos, discord of the body and of the universe. The unrecognizable voice of the singer is deprived of any trace of humanity, and reduced to a blasphemous rumbling which recalls the unmentionable Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. In the album there are brilliant masterpieces of bad taste like "Regurgitations of Giblets", "Fermenting Innards" and "Necro Cannibal Bloodfeast". The second album of this group, "Symphonies of Sickness" (1989), follows the same steps. Compositions like "Excoriating Abdominal Emanation" and "Empathological Necroticism" were influenced by putrefaction and necrosis. With their third album, "Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious" (1991), the group reconfirmed its passionate love for autopsies and operating rooms, and continued to keep high the flag of sound putrefaction, together with the before mentioned Napalm Death, the other historical band of the movement. The repulsive sound reality of their first album, "Scum", is also found in the next chapter, "Harmony Corruption" (1991) and reappears, in a milder way, in "Utopia Banished" (1992). Grind has been a changeable organism, constantly submitted to transformations and evolutions. The last tendencies showed connections with thrash metal and the compositions were getting longer and more complex. The epigones have been represented by some bands who absorbed some language from the noisy and post industrial modern avant-gardes, like the Austrians Disharmonic Orchestra and Pungent Stench, the latters author of the record "For God your Soul...For Me Your Flesh'"(1991). In England there have been several followers of this kind. For example, Cerebral Fix, with their first "Tower of Spite" (1990), in which they payed their respects to Clive Barker with the song "Quest for Midian". Still in Europe, precisely in the Scandinavian countries (before the rise of black metal) we could find a lot of groups, like Deceased and General Surgery, with titles like "Pestiferous Anthropophagia", "Slithering Maceration of Ulcerous Facial Tissue" or "Grotesque Laceration of Mortified Flesh" . In the United States we can mention Massacre, with their singer Kam Lee, whose voice is really incredible. But the real news came from old Europe with the rise of bands like Godflesh and Fudge Tunnel. Their first piece "Hate Songs in E Minor" (1991) hit the listener with a heavy, hypnotic sound and lyrics full of cruel and twisted humor.

SOUNDS OF DEATH...
Close relative of grind core, death metal had an amazing number of followers, above all in the USA, and particularly in Florida, where this current was born. The culture of this state is a curious mix of sun and beach worship and satanism, a world of excess and obsessions that seems to hide behind its Disneyworld facade, where the Ted Bundy's imitators and the growing death metal scene have created real and fantastic horrors. For the local groups, the original inspirator of all "evil" rock was Chuck Schuldiner, the founder of the mythical Death, in 1983. Since then, Florida's marshlands have created several gruesome and deformed children. The Morbid Angel, for example, led by Trey Azagthot, author on the stage, up to a few years ago, of frequent self -injury actions. One of their most famous records, "Blessed are the Sick" (1991), opened the doors of hell to the listener and then shut them behind his back with sadistic satisfaction.

Deicide, another big death metal group from Florida, used to wear during their concerts some kind of armoured suit with nails and throw cat's bowels and other animal's guts to the public. As their leader and singer Glenn Benton enthusiastically said: "The whole place stinks of rotten meat and it is all so crazy, so real". Their songs proposed the usual satanic repertory, from sacrifice to suicide, Constantly threatened of death by extremist catholic groups, Benton seemed to believe in what he did. Apart from the scar on his forehead with the shape of an upsided down cross, his sense of gruesome humorism seemed to give the final touch to a very bizarre personality. "At home I have a vase of formaldehyde that contains my tonsils and my grandfather kidney's stones. But I would like to add sometehing new to my collection, maybe a placenta...".

Death metal and its closest relatives ( deathcore, splatter core and similar) have been, until few years ago, the other extreme territory of transgressive rock: a desolate land where you hear the echoes of sepulchral riffs, guttural voices, slow rhytms alternating to creepy accelerations, the ferocious description of mutilated bodies, love for any excess, exaltation for the negative side of life, a gloomy desperation, an extreme interest for satanism and anything else with negative values. Also, death metal brought back to attention the topic regarding censorship, expecially against rap, from the judicial events of 2 Live Crew to the "police killer' song of Ice T. In 1991 custom British authorities confiscated in Yarmouth a record shipment of Nuclear Blast, a label like Earache, that sponsored grind and death bands. The above mentioned shipment contained records from young death groups like Pungent Stench, Dismember, Atrocity and Deathstrike. It seemed like british authorities were struck by some record covers, the title of certain songs and the names of the groups. Songs like "Skin Her Alive" by Dismember and "Human Waste'" by Suffocation, ended up in court. The strangest thing was that a record by Pungent Stench, whose cover showed a split head of a man, regularly passed custom because that picture is shown in art galleries all over the world. The same fate happened to "Slowly We Rot" by Obituary, whose cover shows the image of a completely decomposed body. Already in the past, though, some covers inspired by snuff movies had made censors furious. We will only mention the case of an Autopsy's record, which showed a man lacerated by metal hooks.