Jeff Hanneman

Jeff Hanneman — born in the United States on 31 January 1964, died on 2 May 2013 — was Slayer's guitarist and co-founder, and the author of the compositions that defined the band. The music of "Angel of Death" and "Raining Blood" is his, the group's two best-known tracks, both on Reign in Blood (1986) — a twenty-nine-minute record that set thrash metal's limit of speed and aggression and remains one of the genre's most influential recordings. His musical vocabulary came from hardcore punk as much as from metal: short, chromatic riffs stripped of conventional melody, played at a speed that dissolved the distinction between note and noise. The solos he shared with Kerry King followed the same logic — dissonant, in no recognisable scale, functioning as detonations inside the structure. His lyrics, almost always about war, serial killers and historical violence, drew permanent controversy. "Angel of Death", about Josef Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz, was accused of apologism; Hanneman always answered that describing is not endorsing, and that his interest in the subject came from the collection of Second World War objects inherited from his father, a veteran of the conflict. In 2011 he contracted necrotising fasciitis, probably after a spider bite, and underwent multiple operations on his right arm. He never fully recovered his ability to play. He died in 2013, aged forty-nine, of liver failure.