Let's Make "Chambercore" A Thing

Diego Caicedo, Seven)Suns, and Harry Stafylakis

Diego Caicedo’s Seis Amorfismos, one of two new releases on Burning Ambulance Music, is out this week. (Buy it!) It consists of a six-part suite for electric guitar, extreme metal vocals, and string quartet, followed by three pieces for solo guitar, and sounds like nothing else you’ll hear this year. (Here’s a really nice review from Avant Music News.) So here’s a short intro to Diego, and to the music, in his own words.

“I was born in Bucaramanga-Colombia on August 6, 1977. Music attracted me a lot since I was little. And metal attracted me much more. The first vinyl I ever bought was Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. From there, many more followed: Voivod, Anthrax, Slayer, Metallica, Sodom, Celtic Frost, etc., etc.

“My first instrument was my mother’s acoustic guitar. At the age of 14 I had my first private teacher who taught me the basic chords. At 15 my second private teacher taught me more chords, various scales and techniques for electric guitar. We made a band with my high school friends playing covers of AC/DC, Metallica, Pantera, Alice In Chains, etc., etc.

“When I finished high school I entered the university, in the music department, and I studied music theory, counterpoint, harmony, history, classical guitar, classical piano and jazz guitar. I focused on composition and orchestration and I was lucky enough to study with maestro Blas Emilio Atheortúa (1943-2020). He had been a disciple of Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, where he studied with the great composers of the second half of the 20th century: Dallapicola, Maderna, Messiaen, Malipiero, Xenakis, Copland. I spent a large part of my university studies attending his classes. At the end of my studies I did a diploma in composition with Atheortúa too. I did a workshop with musicians from Barcelona who came to Colombia…and then I traveled to Barcelona to study at L’aula Del Liceu, where I stayed for three years.

“I stayed in Barcelona; I’ve been here for 21 years. I am part of the free improvisation scene and I work in a music school where I teach guitar and theory. In addition to metal/extreme metal, I am passionate about so-called “classical music,” about jazz, free jazz and free musical improvisation.

“Seis Amorfismos arose as an aesthetic exercise based on my passion for chamber music by great composers and my passion for extreme metal, and at the same time, as a matter/question: could a string quartet work with an electric guitar as a chamber quintet within an extreme metal (death/black) metal aesthetic? The main hurdle was the rhythmic aspect, how to replace the drums and how could I solve it with the quartet itself. I solved it with rhythmic/technical aspects for the bowed strings.

“I devised the harmonic aspect based on the polyphonic composers from the 11th to the 15th centuries: Perotín, Leonin, Di Vitri, Machaut, Dufay, Dunstable, Des Pres, Ockeghem, Willaert, Hildegard Von Bingen, etc., etc. The harmonic base arises from an almost minimal material and how this material can be related to a group of four voices in the form of polyphony/counterpoint with a harmonic/homophonic base.

“Another obstacle was in the relationship between the written/set music and the improvised parts. The Six Amorphisms are written for friends, great improvisers with whom I have worked on many projects over many years.

“And finally, the lyrical/textual aspect arises from the readings and films that I returned to over and over during the gestation process: Carl Jung’s The Red Book; Psychonaut, Liber Null and Liber Kaos by Peter J. Carroll, The Book of Pleasure by Austin Osman Spare, El Ombligo de los Limbos by Antonin Artaud, The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin, The History of Ugliness by Umberto Eco, The Beauty and the Sinister by Eugenio Trías, the work of William Blake, and above all Aullándolo, which is a collection of poems by my older brother Jorge Caicedo.

“Films: all of Roman Polanski’s works, all of David Cronenberg’s works, all of Alexander Sokurov’s works, all of Abbas Kiarostami’s works, all of Alain Resnais’s works, all of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s works, all of the work of Luchino Visconti, all the work of Federico Fellini, all the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, all the work of Sergei Parajanov, etc., etc.

“I wrote the voices for my friend Carlos Jorge, with whom I have worked on several projects, especially with my project called MALIGNÆ. I decided to do a kind of guttural vocal chorale for him.

“Right now I’m working on the second part of this project. It will be similar, although with a more ‘filmic’ structure, to put it one way.”

Seis Amorfismos is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard. When Diego emailed me to ask if I’d release it, I said yes immediately. You really must buy one.

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Intermission! There’s a piece in the New Yorker which makes the very silly argument — while praising his work for its undeniable brilliance — that Rubén Blades has somehow fallen short of the mark because his music is not embraced by white American listeners. The author argues that “the biggest surprise of his long, prolific career is that Blades, a major figure of New York City’s cultural life for more than half a century, who brought a New York-born musical style to the world at large, has still not been accepted into the American canon.” She writes, “Blades is a major Latino cultural figure in New York City, where he has resided most of his life, and also a well-known political figure in his native country of Panama. And yet, [Latin academic Frances] Aparicio told me, ‘Anglo America doesn’t see him.’ In that sense, she said, he embodies Latinos’ ‘struggles to find success in this country.’” No, he fucking doesn’t! He’s Rubén Blades! He’s a huge fucking star! The fact that he doesn’t have a white audience means nothing! Why should he want one? Why is white attention the standard for having “made it”? A whole lot of people in the culture industry (and in politics, where white working-class men are routinely portrayed as the absolute most important category of human, especially come election time) cling to outdated frameworks that perpetuate attitudes of inferiority and victimization. Rubén Blades didn’t need white people to buy his records to become a legend. Are white people welcome to listen to his music? Of course. Everyone is invited to the party, but the party doesn’t stop just because some people choose not to come.

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Seven)Suns (L-R: Fung Chern Hwei, Adda Kridler, Jennifer DeVore, Earl Maneein)

Seven)Suns is a string quartet — Earl Maneein and Fung Chern Hwei on violins, Adda Kridler on viola, Jennifer DeVore on cello. Maneein’s an Internet friend, and I reviewed their first album, For the Hearts Still Beating, back in 2017. I sent him Seis Amorfismos to see what he thought, and he loved it; in a Facebook post, he coined the genre name “chambercore” to describe it, as well as the latest Seven)Suns album and the debut by Haralabos (Harry) Stafylakis.

On their first album, Seven)Suns arranged the Dillinger Escape Plan song “43% Burnt” for string quartet. Their new release, One of Us is the Killer, pulls the same trick with DEP’s entire 2013 album of the same name. Transforming the band’s ultra-complex post-hardcore/math-metal songs into instrumental chamber music pieces works quite well. Maneein’s violin often takes the vocal melody, as Hwei and Kridler tackle the band’s stacked layers of guitar riffs and DeVore handles the low end. The pieces have a lot more going on than your typical rock or metal song — it’s not just a matter of a verse, a chorus, repeat. Passages of feedback and sculpted distortion are here replicated with long dissonant drones; there’s no percussion to match DEP’s relentless final drummer Billy Rymer, but the music chugs along nonetheless. It’s recorded in classical style, with everyone playing together, unlike metal records, which are tracked instrument by instrument; at the end of some pieces, you can hear everyone laying down their bows.

Haralabos (Harry) Stafylakis is a composer whose work combines symphonic classical ideas with progressive metal. His debut album, Calibrating Friction, offers five of his compositions performed by a group of musicians that includes Stafylakis himself on guitars and programming; producer Adam Pietrykowski (aka Van Tilburg) on guitar and electronics; guitarist Javier Reyes of instrumental tech-metal band Animals as Leaders; and various other folks contributing piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass, flutes, clarinets, bassoon, French horn, trombone, drums, and percussion. Fung Chern Hwei of Seven)Suns plays both violin and viola on the album.

This music is much more complex and even romantic than Diego Caicedo’s or Seven)Suns’. Where the previous two records have a starkness that verges on hostility, Stafylakis’ is happy and exuberant, somewhere between Italian power metal and video game soundtracks. “Flows Obsidian” alternates between whomping guitar riffs in a post-Dream Theater mode and gentle puffs of flute, and when the whole orchestra comes together as one, it sounds like something from a Tim Burton movie. (There are also times when it reminds me of Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, a big band who have been known to deploy loud electric guitars as needed.)

Classical music and metal have been intersecting and combining in all sorts of ways for decades, from full-on metal bands hiring orchestras to beef up their sound (Metallica, Dimmu Borgir) to metal musicians composing for chamber ensembles or even larger groups. And sometimes those experiments can go pretty far afield; I remember a musician telling me, “Black metal already has enough Wagner; we’re trying to add some Xenakis.” Each of these three records is pushing forward, testing boundaries, and in the process carving out entirely new musical territory. I recommend you buy all three…though of course I think you should buy Diego Caicedo’s album first.

That’s it for now. See you next week!