Victor Arduini

Victor Arduini — American guitarist — was one of Fates Warning's founders and the guitarist on the band's first two records. Fates Warning emerged in Connecticut in the early 1980s and is considered, alongside Queensrÿche and Dream Theater, one of the creators of progressive metal as a genre. Night on Bröcken (1984) and The Spectre Within (1985) show the band still close to British heavy metal, but with irregular structures, changes of metre and a harmonic approach that no longer fitted the traditional format. The guitar in this context has a double task: to keep metal's weight and at the same time perform arrangements that do not follow riff-chorus-riff logic. It was a vocabulary under construction — there was as yet no reference repertoire for what those bands were doing. Arduini left the group in 1986. Decades later he returned to recording in projects of his own. His contribution lies in the founding phase of a band whose influence on progressive metal is acknowledged by practically every later group in the genre.