One night roughly 14 years ago, back when Pioneer Square’s weekend meat-market Trinity was still the Velvet Elvis theater, Greg Anderson graced the tiny stage as the singer/guitarist for Engine Kid. Their dynamic set culminated with a cacophonous climactic finale. With amps at full volume, drum heads pock-marked from repeated battery, and audiences’ earplugs wedged deep into ear canals, Greg pulled off his guitar, set it on the floor, pulled out a package of firecrackers, and set them off on his instrument. The racket was immense. My mind conjured images of Jimi Hendrix on his knees, dousing his guitar with lighter fluid, and beckoning the flames as his amp roared behind him. But Anderson upped the ante with explosives.

With the benefit of hindsight, that destructive moment seems less of an homage to Jimi and more of an embrace of the 20th century’s obsession with the happy accident. What exactly does a packet of firecrackers sound like when it’s amplified through a Marshall half-stack? There’s only one way to find out, and why not unlock that mystery in front of an audience? In the realm of music, perhaps the most noteworthy employers of this spontaneous venture are the jazz players. Kerouac mythologized Charlie Parker’s impossible blunder, that incorrect note that bred Bop, and that limitless world of pushing for chance discoveries and new sonic territories. Of course, it’s doubtful that Anderson had The Bird in mind when he blew up his guitar, but I wonder if the course of history would still have led him to shove a pack of firecrackers in his back pocket on the way downtown if Parker had never bleated that twisted note.

Fourteen years later, Engine Kid is long gone and Anderson has moved on to other projects. As the owner of quintessential metal label Southern Lord, Greg has championed a bevy of loud and abrasive artists. But the label doesn’t seem particularly interested in conventional metal. With the Southern Lord roster, the precision and dexterity that accompanies the genre’s biggest names takes a side seat to raw unbridled power. Anderson seems to be one of the few cultural rainmakers in the metal world that acknowledges his scene’s modernist failings. Metal’s nihilism and rage should translate into unrefined sounds. Artists with such high degrees of supposed malevolence should be less focused on nailing their arpeggios and more concerned with beating the shit out of their instruments. The form is all too often compromised for the sake of perfecting the content.

It’s no surprise then that Anderson’s latest two artistic endeavors are sufficiently rough around the edges. The first release is a collaboration with Gentry Densley (axe man for Salt Lake City’s experimental jazz-punks Iceburn) named Ascend. Promotional materials for the debut record, Ample Fire Within, make numerous references to jazz—specifically Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the Brotzmann family, and jazz labels ECM and Impulse. There are certainly moments of fretboard noodling and a few chord changes that owe more to Blue Note than Blue Cheer, but Anderson’s name-dropping is a better acknowledgement of the album’s playfulness and spontaneity than it’s tonal attributes. If anything, the record is one of the most listenable recordings Anderson has performed on in years. While his work with doom-droners SunnO))) is certainly his breadwinner project, Ascend could easily surpass his other band in popularity if they stick around long enough. The hooks on Ample Fire Within are more prominent, the song structures are more defined, and the sonic range is much broader. For anyone that’s struggled to understand the appeal of SunnO)))’s glacial-paced low-end minimalism, Ascend could very well serve as the Rosetta stone to unlocking that mystery. Songs like “The Obelisk of Kolob” and “V O G” feature Anderson’s signature sludge riffs, but demonstrate more economy than anything he’s done in the last few years. The addition of occasional horns, organ, and gravel-throated Waits-inspired growling lends more meat to the bones. While SunnO)))’s epic compositions succeed at creating tension and hypnotic trances, it’s refreshing to hear Anderson’s guitar playing on something with a bit more focus and editing.

Anderson’s other recent offering is essentially SunnO))) under the pseudonym of Pentemple. Featuring Anderson’s longtime partner in doom wizardry Stephen O’Malley and frequent collaborators Oren Arimbachi, Attila (of Mayhem fame), and Sin Nanna (of Tasmanian black metal band Striborg), Pentemple documents a one-off live performance from Melbourne, Australia. Consisting of two tracks, the Pentemple album poses an interesting question: at what point does this kind of music cease being a daring new approach to reaching new extremes in heaviness and simply become just a few dudes playing guitar really loud? This question was initially borne from recent experiences with seeing SunnO))) in the live setting. The expansive, tempo-less nature of those performances begs one to wonder how much pre-determined structure exists within their material. With many of their supplementary musicians joining in as schedules and proximities allow, it’s quite obvious that Anderson does a certain amount of conducting during the performances. A friend mentioned catching them at a show overseas where Greg was leading the band by pointing to the frets of upcoming chords. Pentemple is an effective document of that spontaneous aesthetic. It’s not driven by a desire to craft songs as much as it’s trying to convey an idea through the way it’s played. The expression isn’t contained in the melody, but rather in textures and dynamics. It’s looser, busier, and perhaps owing to the live nature of the recording, even less refined than SunnO))’s albums. However, repeated listening help the record come together into a more cohesive whole. This is not cut-and-dry metal. These are people less concerned with hooks and more concerned with capturing an essence. It may be a bit indulgent, particularly in the volume department, but it’s effectively moving. This small community of musicians has more in common with the jazz scene than they might realize. While Ascend deliberately states that connection, Pentemple inadvertently embraces it. All of the players are capable musicians who are able to come together and play off of each other to create an unholy yet palatable racket. The result is a record could easily sit alongside some of the more frantic free jazz records from the late ‘60s.

Ultimately, both records are very satisfying on a purely basic level. But they’re even more successful as examples of how the metal world can intensify the dark nature of their music. While there is certainly a place for Meshuggah’s studied precision or Dragonforce’s campy ADD perfection, Anderson’s modernist take on metal provides a whole new dimension to a genre based on extremes. By taking notes from an artistic nemesis, the jazz player, he’s made metal that much more passionate and urgent.