Technical Death Metal

Technical death metal (sometimes called tech-death or progressive death metal) is a musical subgenre of death metal that focuses on complex rhythms, riffs and song structures. Technical experimentation in death metal began in the late '80s and early '90s by bands such as Death, Atheist and Cynic. In 1990, Nocturnus released their debut album, The Key, which was followed by Sarcófago's third album, The Laws of Scourge, featuring a change in their musical style, black metal/thrash metal to technical death metal. Atheist's second album, Unquestionable Presence, Pestilence's third album, Testimony of the Ancients, and Death's fourth album, Human, were all released the very next year. Human and later Death albums have proven especially influential on later '90s technical death metal bands. In 1991, New York's grindcore-influenced Suffocation released the Effigy of the Forgotten debut album, which focused on speed and brutality with "sophisticated" sense of songwriting and subsequently became groundbreaking in the genre.

Phil Freeman, ex-editor of Metal Edge, has described the sub-genre of technical death metal as "the hidden side of its genre, having more in common with prog-rock and jazz fusion than with the mechanistic, Satan-obsessed grinding that's the music's dominant public image."

Read more about Technical Death Metal:  List of Technical Death Metal Bands

Famous quotes containing the words technical, death and/or metal:

    The best work of artists in any age is the work of innocence liberated by technical knowledge. The laboratory experiments that led to the theory of pure color equipped the impressionists to paint nature as if it had only just been created.
    Nancy Hale (b. 1908)

    Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
    Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
    I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
    And all my pleasures are like yesterday.
    John Donne (1572–1631)

    We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilisation.
    Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)