About

It was the rock band Evanescence and the expressive power of Amy Lee's voice that suggestively alluded my mind the perfect style of music that I could not articulate or will into existence. There was something about the idea of the soaring female vocal paired with the elements of heavy metal to create something melodic, epic, and cinematic in the expression of ideas, concepts, thoughts, and dreams that remained constantly out of reach. It wasn't until I accidentally stumbled onto Within Temptation and the soaring vocals of Sharon den Adel that I felt I had found a piece of this singularly perfect genre. But even then, there was still a lot of stumbling around and searching on iTunes before I stumbled onto others in the subgenre, each unique, all different.

The problem was I only had small fragments of the overall picture. I didn't understand where this music sat in the universe of larger schemes of things or how it is that it seemed to suddenly come into existence. What was worse, I didn't understand that the genre of Symphonic Metal was actually the latest piece of a very large tapestry that was Heavy Metal music, pulling its influences from itself and everywhere else. It wasn't until I attended my friend and colleague Jeff Pearlin's MIT IAP class on Heavy Metal Music that I got the complete picture of the genre and understood how this sub-genre was created and where it stood in the larger evolution of Heavy Metal both in linear temporal progression and geographic space.

Aldous Huxley wrote that after silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Jewel Kilcher wrote that we should not follow other people's truths but to find your own truths and live by what is true to you, not anyone else. If I've learned anything in this life so far it is that when you find something beautiful, you should share it and help other people find it too. To that end, this site is a testament to the power of finding that which enables you to express the inexpressible.

Enjoy!

Albert