Technical metal album = now! Omnectomy – Pyrophrenesthesia

I made a metal album a few years back and have been making small adjustments to it ever since. It’s finally done and went live on Bandcamp last week.

WHY

Here’s the deal with this project: I have been in a love affair with Death Metal the better part of 20 years starting with Cannibal Corpse and Meshuggah and progressing to more obscure stuff from there. Arkaik, Psycroptic, Hour of Penance, and Archspire and their ilk have created some of the best recordings and live shows I’ve ever consumed.

WHEN

Realizing that I can kinda play some heavy guitar and bass stuff and program whatever I want on fake drums, I decided to write and record a metal album in the late hours of 2014. For the next couple years, I fiddled with the mix and thought about what to do with it while other projects took over. More recently, I’ve been playing with the guys from Austin’s premier blackened prog-death metal band Vex in their Jazz side project, The Mispronunciation of Eoghan McCloskey. So I got the notion to just plant a flag here and call it done.

WHAT

I don’t down-tune or have a seven string and I don’t have much motivation to write lyrics or do cookie monster vocals, so I don’t think I really was able to create “technical death metal” here. But tech-death is definitely what I was thinking about and listening to when I composed these 10 songs. When Sam tries to sound like something, it usually just sounds like Sam, which is what I really wanted anyway. Short answer: metally metal metalness

HOW

Odd time, odd textures, experimental structures, melody, frenzy, and groove. There are definite elements of my actual human bands here. And Greg Yancey from Opposite Day did an incredible job of mastering my dense 4+-guitar mix. He also helped with the original guitar recording, which I tracked at full volume at Opposite Day’s old rehearsal space. The drums are fake, but the amps are real. I realized I was basically just writing with the heavier aspects of Opposite Day’s vocabulary and turning that stuff into whole songs. So the influence of Greg plus drummers Ethan Herr, Pat Kennedy, and Eoghan McCloskey may be detected. And I enlisted Leila Henley (Stop Motion Orchestra and the Secret Keepers) to play the sax arrangements.

WHO

I don’t need your encouragement to do another one. I’m already planning that. But if you pay for this recording here, I’ll spend that money on the next one to make it better than it otherwise might be. And I’ll pay collaborators, illustrator (like Zach Hall who did the cover here), engineer, etc. and you’ll get some credit too. And how about that logo by Jon Zig?