I love the word “frisson”. It’s one of my favourites. Like “denouement” and “emolument” it’s a word that we get from Latin via French and to my ears they all have some kind of intrinsic sonorous beauty. Because mine is a very specific kind of idiocy, whenever I think about the beauty of language I think about two things: A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. While I’m far too proudly disordered a thinker to ever be a Kantian, there is something that has always captivated me in the way that Kant describes the sublime by saying that:

“the feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy […] aroused by the fact that this very judgment, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate.”

The experience of the sublime is of being a small figure on the shoreline staring up at a monstrous tidal wave; unable to perceive the entirety of it, afraid (and not afraid) of its power and destructive beauty. In my attraction towards the ineffable, I find myself drawn to the word “frisson” – “fever, illness; shiver, thrill” – a visceral embodied reaction, madness shooting through the limbs – again and again to describe what I feel when I listen to Sylosis. For example, when the vocal line in Altered States of Consciousness proclaims “Death is here and he’s been clawing at my thoughts again” I always get chills. A fever, a thrill. Something arrives or something leaves and you triumphantly celebrate or mournfully reflect respectively. Frisson.

Sylosis’ new album Cycle of Suffering was released earlier this month and, except for occasions when I’ve been listening to a particular piece of music to remember a particular set of texts or thoughts, I’ve had the album constantly on repeat. The songs are all infused with a curt brutality that announces itself proudly (I have arrived) all resplendently inflected with the speed and technicality that have always drawn me to the band. The songs are monstrously powerful when performed live and when I saw Sylosis at the Islington Assembly Hall a few days ago I could not help but reflect on why I am so fond of their work.

Sylosis on stage at Islington Assembly Hall – 13th February, 2020.

When asked to describe why Sylosis is my favourite band, I often comment that Josh Middleton writes the songs that I would write if I were a better musician. This is no slight praise because I write music that I like, in keys/scales that I like, at the tempos that I like, in arrangements that I like. To say that someone else can write exactly the kinds of music that I love, penning the songs that I wish that I was skilled enough to, is something not only significant but at least a little absurd, particularly because Sylosis’ compositions aren’t particularly complex. This isn’t free-form jazz or that particularly perverse form of prog that has many time signatures and tempo changes for the sake of it; it’s mostly 4/4, mostly high bpm, mostly minor scaled galloping and shredding. Yet, almost every Josh Middleton release has met me at a time in my life when I was trying to do the same thing that it seemed to me that the person writing the music was trying to accomplish, whether this is the robotically fast and precise musicianship of Edge of the Earth (my favourite album of all time), the dark atmospherics of Dormant Heart, or the heavy groove and complex sludge of the Passages project (Eternal Solar Flare has my favourite crescendo in any piece of music), each time I was trying to write something similar into my own music.

There is a kind of perverse(?) experience of parasocial relationship/kinship to Josh Middleton as a musician at work here which is at least a little ironic given my extant critiques of the subject. More broadly my fascination with the musicianship of Sylosis means that there is a redoubling of focus on the personhood and embodiment of the musician who must play compositions of at times absurd difficulty that test the boundaries of the possibility of skill, precision, and endurance. In my amateurism, Sylosis songs are physically painful to play because of their speed and as my fatigued fingers fumble over my fretboard trying to make it through just one, I can’t imagine playing an entire hour of it in a live show, to say nothing of the fact that I play bass (or bass as rhythm guitar – as any Not Above Evil song can attest) and the lead guitar parts (which I can’t actually play) are much more difficult. There is a feeling of a certain kind of shared sickness somewhere in the vicinity of an imagined mutual self-inflicted suffering – I write music that hurts to play, why would someone else do this to themselves?

Deleuzian writing about music tends to wax lyrical to the point of being incomprehensible (as I’ve been doing), the exception being the inimitable Ron Bogue, whose work on heavy metal remains exceptional. In Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics, Bogue describes the electric guitar as it appears in heavy metal as elevated to the level of “electric industrial machine” (p.40); entangled in the production  of all kinds of deliberate othering of the conventions of sound, the nature of the guitar deliberately distorted and rendered as a monstrous other to itself. Heavy metal as a genre has been analyzed to Death (ha) based on its transgressive nature (of gender norms, of musical convention, of aesthetics etc.) but few come close to Bogue when he describes “heavy metal” itself as aptly named:

“for both words convey something essential about the music. It is heavy in that it is emphatically percussive, “thick” in texture, and highly amplified in the lower registers. It is metal in that its sound is dominated by a particular gamut of high-distortion, low-frequency “grinding,” “crunching” timbres produced by amplified solid-body electric guitars.”

This description itself has a kind of beauty (and humour, imagining Ron Bogue, who I’ve always known as the kindly paternalistic figure of the Deleuze Studies community, nodding along to Cannibal Corpse with his notebook out, tracing the various musical becomings of a “Hammer Smashed Face”).

There is indeed a certain kind of becoming-sonorous, a resonance, an endless corporeal reverberation that is produced in the moments of a live heavy metal show when the sound is so loud that hearing stops, feeling is overwhelmed, sense is revealed to be inadequate and one simply becomes musical, an undulating part in an affect producing and agglomerating machine. I always find this difficult to describe. It is perhaps like being swallowed up by something that one cannot quite see, something thick and amplified, from the deeps of musical registers, grinding and crunching your body through a feverish sickness that one can’t quite make sense of as it occurs beyond the limits of thinking. Sylosis does this for me better than any band that I know.

I’ve been interested in an idea for some time: music as a concept, a tool for thinking, or a mode of engagement with thought beyond thinking. There are echoes (ha) of this in different places in Deleuze and Guattari’s work (e.g. the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus) but I’m still working on this. What is certain for me is that I’m going to think about it while listening to more Sylosis…