Chuck Schuldiner

Chuck Schuldiner — Charles Michael Schuldiner, born in Long Island, New York, on 13 May 1967, died on 13 December 2001 — was the founder, singer, guitarist and composer of Death, and is recognised as the central figure in the creation of death metal. Raised in Florida, he put the band together as a teenager in 1984. Scream Bloody Gore (1987) is frequently named the first record of the genre: guttural vocals, chromatic tremolo riffs, drumming at extreme speed and lyrics of explicit horror. A vocabulary was defined there that hundreds of bands would use in the decades that followed. What makes Schuldiner exceptional, though, is that he did not stop there. With each album he rewrote what the band was. Human (1991) brought complex structures, changes of metre and musicians with jazz training; Individual Thought Patterns (1993) and Symbolic (1995) deepened the progressive path; The Sound of Perseverance (1998) arrived at something close to melodic technical metal. The lyrics followed the same course, abandoning graphic horror for introspective, social and philosophical subjects — in "Spirit Crusher" and "Symbolic" he speaks of loss, mediocrity and memory. That is why his influence exceeds the genre he founded: he showed that extreme music could have compositional ambition without losing violence. In 1999 he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Treatment ran into refusals from American health insurance, and musicians and fans organised fundraising to pay for it. He died in December 2001, aged thirty-four, leaving unfinished Control Denied, a metal project with clean vocals that he meant to carry forward.