Interview to CHEMOPHAgE (Australia)

1. Hello my friend, pleasure to have you on Rotten Pages ´zine. How are you doing today? Let us set the scene first. Where do we find you right now? Please describe your surroundings.

Hello, I'm not bad, busy as always. I'm in my apartment, up late with a coffee and watching Tales from the Crypt as I finish this email.

2. Why you decided to rise up CHEMOPHAGE as a solo performer band?

I work as a researcher in chemistry and have recently moved from Victoria to Tasmania for a short contract of about a year and a half. I can't guarantee I'm going to live in the same place for long enough to organise a live band, so I use Chemophage as a way to get some tracks recorded.

3. When you was a young, when did you initially discover your love for metal, and how has your taste evolved up to present? Has extreme metal influenced or shaped your worldview/world perception in any way?

I first got into hard rock bands as a kid, with Kiss, Guns N' Roses and ACDC being my favourites. When I grew a little older, I learned about Iron Maiden and Metallica. As I got more interested in playing music, I paid more attention to riffs while consuming music and started listening to a greater variety ofbands. I came across Megadeth as a teenager and was blown away with how crazy some of the guitar parts were. From there, I  started seeking out similar bands. With time, my music tastes have grown heavier and more extreme. I don't think metal has really shaped my worldview in any real way I'm consciously aware of, although it is hard to tell. If anything, I think I gravitate more towards death metal, goregrind and slam as their over-the-top aesthetics fit my sense of humour. I see the subgenres as pretty self-aware, like a B-grade horror movie, which really appeals to me.

4. The production on your debut demo is really crushing. What can you tell me about the recording process and what kind of sound you were going for? Are you satisfied with final results?

The drums are programmed using Kvlt Drums II, but everything else I record from my bedroom. I recorded guitar and bass directly, first using amp sims(Klirrton Grindstein on guitar and Aurora Mammoth on bass) before re-amping through my MI Megalith Gamma. I blended the tracks from the real amp with the sims until I found a sound I liked. I was going for a sound somewhere between a big slam tone and something more old school. I wanted a lot of impact but still wanted everything to have a fair amount of grime and personality. The reference tracks I usedwhen mixing were Gutteral Slug (Megalodon), 10 to the Chest (Split the Fuck Open) and Cannibal Corpse (Evisceration Plague). I was pretty satisfied with the results given it was the first metal project I had actually finished. When it came time to record the next single, Metastasis, I thought the drums on Stripped for Parts were a bit too robotic and found the overall guitar sound a little mushy.  You can hear the differences with the guitars on Metastasis being a lot more clangy, clanky and metallic sounding. I like the textures a bit more and I think the drums sound more real.

5. Chemophage is usually mentioned as a slam death metal band, but subjectively some of your songs have some grindcore and gore influences – what are your genre preferences in thinking about musical influences?

Death metal, slam, thrash, goregrind and grindcore are the extreme metal genres I listen to the most. I really like to use a less repetitive structure when writing songs, like some of the work on something like Deicide's Deicide, Atheist's Unquestionable Presence or Megadeth's Peace Sells. These songs really take you for a ride, making the big moments really big and the songs more memorable overall. I don't like writing melodic stuff and prefer to jump quickly between riffs and time signatures for a more brutal chaotic feeling. Because I write like this, the songs come out short, aggressive and blunt. It's no surprise that they’e reminiscent of goregrind or grindcore.

6. Let´s talk about songwriting procedure, How do you guy manage the compositional work?

 I normally start with a riff, then see where it feels natural to go next and what I can come up with that makes the song a good journey. I like to jump between time signatures, types of riffs and tempos to keep the listener engaged. I start to get the bones of a song together by writing things down as a MIDI file along with rough drum parts. As I string a few riffs together, I mess with the arrangement a little bit to make sure the big moments hit a little harder. I like to finish my tracks by bringing back something familiar from the earlier in the song and changing it up. You can see this approach in both tracks on the demo, both ending on riffs that are constructed from their opening riffs. I come up with vocals last, although sometimes I have an idea of what I want the song to be about before writing riffs, which can help me come up with ideas.

7. As a musician, how mandatory is the process of coming up with new ideas or incorporating new influences as opposed to staying within the style you are known for or that you are most familiar with?

I don't think it's necessarily mandatory to shake things up with every release, but I do think you should always be trying to do better and trying to make something that excites you in some way. In such a saturated subgenre, sounding generic can make for a pretty pointless release. There's a real strength to being a one-man operation with regards to that, as you're not being second guessed with respect to songwriting.

8. So you play all the instruments and sing? Where and how were you taught?

I perform the guitar, bass and vocals, but the drums are programmed. I learned guitar in school at about age 10 and had lessons through high school, although I wasn't a great music student at the time. As a young adult, I learned a lot of songs from tab and slowly learned more from there. I play bass with a pick, very much like a guitarist playing bass. Vocals I taught myself, first learning off WikiHow of all places, practicing over the years and occasionally picking up new techniques from the Internet.

9. Music-wise, what are to you the most essential aspects for a death metal band? Some say it’s the rhythm of the guitars, some say it’s the drum beat, and others say it’s the vocals… Maybe it’s a bit of everything?

Maybe. I kinda think it's the riffs and drums that really define death metal, and the specific emphasis on impact more than anything. While things like heavy use of distortion and growled vocals make it easy to identify subgenres like death doom and progressive death metal as death metal, Once Upon the Cross would still be a death metal song if it was played on acoustic guitar and had no vocals.

10. If CHEMOPHAGE was an odour, what the fuck could it be?

 Something pretty pungent and probably pretty unhealthy. Something like a diesel exhaust leak mixed with cheap tequila.

11. You are coming from Australia, which for an American or European metalhead sounds like other world. How is the metal scene over there? Any interesting stuff that fits only Australian metal culture?

I'm currently in Tasmania, which has a pretty strong local metal scene. A few favourites I've been able to catch live are Pulverised Cranial Matter, Gape and Brickfest Bushrangers. I can't really think of anything that only fits Australian metal culture, although I haven’t been to any gigs outside of the country. There's a very laid-back take-the-piss attitude that some bands have in their banter that feels very Australian to me. That aside, Australian audiences have the tendency to try to make international artists do a "shoey",  which is where you skull a drink out of your shoe. I can't say I've actually seen it at a metal gig, though.

12. We have come to the last question of the interview. What are the last words for fans out there?

New stuff is in the works, and I'm hoping to drop an EP early next year. Apart from that, check out the sampler. There's some sick tracks on there, the Axiom Utopia and Primative Strangulator tracks are my favourites.

https://www.facebook.com/Chemophage/