By the mid-’90s, Chuck Schuldiner had spent more than 10 years shaping the death metal genre into one of music’s most important underground movements. With Death, the ground-breakers that he founded in 1983, the singer/guitarist still had much to say – yet he was ready for a change.
Creatively, the allure of traditional metal was a powerful beacon. Schuldiner’s idea was to infuse old-school metal with the concussive force of death metal and the melodic possibilities of prog. That idea blossomed into Control Denied: Schuldiner’s far less abrasive side-project, whose single album, The Fragile Art Of Existence, remains as majestic now as it did when it was released 25 years ago.
