“All Shall Scream”: Transposable Lessons from Pierre-Luc Senécal’s Hate.Machine for Growlers Choir

This chapter 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. To analyze vowel expression, I introduce the Smial-graph, a musical genre space of vowels for the analysis of extreme metal vocals. I show how vowels function in Hate.Machine in parallel with high and low frequencies as well as loud and soft dynamics. I also show how Senécal uses them to create a sense of intensifying power, variation, and closure. 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.