DISSONANCE - LOOK TO FORGET (1994)

Is the term "proto-tech" already an accepted modifier in the parlance of the modern metalhead? Because it should be. There is a definite second wave that swept over death metal after Florida and Sweden peaked, crested, and were washed back out to sea on a mass of totally generic DM also-rans, a second wave that preceded the flood of million-note-per-second Brain Drill-worshippers that saturate the tech market today. The proto-tech weirdos took extreme metal in the mid-90's, inverted it, cut it up, and pasted it back together wrong, Burroughs-style, paving the way for a new generation to twist it up, smoke it, and shit it back out on us in the years that followed. And may the Ancient Ones bless them for it.

Dissonance are a magnificent but obscure entry in the proto-tech pantheon, and represent part of the same family tree that sports branches like Pestilence, None So Vile, Martyr, and Pavor. They hailed from Slovakia, and only released this one awesome, hard-to-find album--an album recommended to me by diligent IC reader Tyler H. They also had a really cool logo and apparently a policy stating that band members could not look directly into a camera.

An excellently angular, jarringly violent entry into any thinking man's metal collection. Proto as fuck!

Thanks Tyler!

Download HERE

Dissonance Metallum