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Greatest Hits: Has the Internet Killed Regional Sounds?

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Without a doubt, one of my favorite Invisible Oranges articles is “Has the Internet Killed Regional Sounds?” published October 16, 2009. One of the more scholarly articles on the site, this piece has been a major influence on my way of thinking not just about metal but about the world. If you look at reviews I later wrote about bands like Panopticon, Agalloch, or about movies like Slow Southern Steel, there’s a serious debt of influence to this article. When Cosmo Lee wrote it seven years ago, it was at the moment at which the internet had truly become ubiquitous within the music and metal worlds. By 2008-2009, the internet was no longer disseminating scenes like deathcore or metalcore, it was disseminating sounds. This was about the time that the HM-2 and Powerviolence revivals began in earnest, as sounds began to be carried by the internet across both space and time. With bands from America aping 1990s Gothenburg, it was easy to note that the day of the regional sound may have been numbered. It was Cosmo who first put this idea in my head, and since 2009 it has not only germinated but, to my mind, been vindicated over and over again.

—Rhys Williams

Read: ‘Has the Internet Killed Regional Sounds?’

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