"All Shall Scream!": Transposable Lessons from Pierre-Luc Senécal's Hate.Machine for Growler's Choir

Description

Montreal-based composer and metal musician Pierre-Luc Senécal composed Hate.Machine (2020), a nine-minute work for metal band and growler’s choir, in response to a Fox news report on the violence of internet culture. Like many metal songs, its lyrics represent a social commentary on crisis, “portray[ing] a horrible machine, dedicated to the corruption of everything that exists” (Senécal 2020). Its unusual format for growling choir introduces an experimental context that draws on Senécal’s university training in composition. The Bandcamp website for Hate.Machine acknowledges contributions from Emploi-Québec and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. This common lyrical inspiration and unusual sponsorship thus scrambles the traditionally countercultural and the radically institutional in ways that metal scholars have recently argued represent a white-collar aesthetic within the genre (Smialek and St-Laurent 2019).

My presentation uses the unusual context of Hate.Machine’s experimental approach to learn about vocal expression more generally in extreme metal. I show how Senécal’s written score functions both as instructions for vocalists and as his artistic interpretation of the music. Directions like “Growl-nado, like a pack of wolves” provide hermeneutic clues that contribute to debates about the role of identification (Phillipov 2012) and beast mimicry (Smialek 2015) in extreme metal vocals. His passages with wordless texts demonstrate how vowel acoustics create expression and variety in vocal settings that do not involve lyrics or melody, shedding light on their role in extreme metal more generally. His techniques of varied repetition in the chorus show how combinations of voices in different registers interact with song form to create a sense of musical rhetoric. Each of these lessons transpose to metal more generally and provide a novel setting with which to observe how extreme metal performers communicate intensity and musical variation within a seldom analyzed vocal style.

Period	7 Jun 2023
Event title	ISMMS 2023 Tiohtià:ke [Montréal]: No Outsides: Metal in an Era of Contagion
Event type	Conference
Location	Montréal, Canada, QuebecShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International