chaos motion

"Vital Vision Void": Chaos Motion and the Motions of Chaos

chaos motion

There’s a clear difference between so-called “tech-death” and technical death metal — it’s a hard one to pinpoint with words, but a definite one if you’re using your ears. I don’t think there’s any right/wrong to this division, either, sufficing it to say that each style is definitely technical and definitely death metal. The dividing point I think comes down to listenability as a matter of musical construction: are the structures used familiar, or alien? Again, both options still allow for innovation (shame on you if you think all “tech-death” sounds the same), but the pathways to creativity are separate. To write great tech-death, you must innovate within externally imposed boundaries, just like poetry. To write great technical death metal, you have to define (but ultimately stick to) your own boundaries. And such does French technical death metal outfit Chaos Motion achieve with their upcoming debut full-length Psychological Spasms Cacophony. Check out a new single below.

Disjointed, angular, and oftentimes imposing, “Vital Vision Void” spells out what you need to know about Chaos Motion: they sound like the motions of chaos. The band’s creative boundlessness lies with that subscription to entropy — for Chaos Motion, the “death” in death metal comes from their music’s seeming lack of human-imposed direction, almost as if it was machine-generated. This is different from tech-death’s “sterility,” i.e. roboticism, which comes down to simply copying and pasting identical formulas. Here, with Psychological Spasms Cacophony, Chaos Motion create technical death metal’s signature machine-like feel without sterilizing the music altogether; what’s more, this uncaring, unforgiving force feels at once ultra-powerful, more powerful than even death itself, if you want to take the metaphor that far. In any case, this band makes a textbook statement, so to speak, about how to ditch the textbook altogether.

Psychological Spasms Cacophony releases October 18th via Transcending Obscurity. Stream two other singles via Bandcamp now.

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