ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the formal and technical – namely, rules which operate on what he calls the “compositive level”, essentially referring to the music’s substance as well as rules relating to performance techniques and instrumental characteristics. It considers the ways in which the kinds of genre elements, specifically in the context of metal practice, have been re-configured as the result of a particular technological development – the digital audio workstation (DAW) – and the consequences of this for the genre’s identity. Ian Christe’s particular focus is on the affinities between metal and electronic music aesthetics that began to become apparent in the 1990s, for example in regard to the influence of 1990s techno-derived genres, such as Gabber. While djent can be regarded as a typically guitar-centered metal subgenre whose sonic characteristics were incidentally inflected by the DAW, other parallel developments illustrate a more thorough integration of metal elements with electronic music aesthetics.
