Interview with death metal band from United States - CHAOS INCEPTION.
Answered Matt Barnes (guitars, songwriting), thank you!
Recenze/review - CHAOS INCEPTION - Vengeance Evangel (2025):
Ave CHAOS INCEPTION! Welcome to Huntsville, Alabama! I don't know if you still remember, but we were interviewed together for the Fobiazine website in November 2012. At that time you mentioned in one of your answers that you had 100 new riffs ready for your next album. Yet it took you a long thirteen years to come up with a new record? Why? You weren't heard much, what were you doing?
Hello, my friend. The band never fully broke up and I actually recorded the rhythm guitars for the album about 6 years ago. I had most of the album written in 2013. Mixing and mastering took months, the artwork took over a year, the timing of the release added another year. We never had a gap in rehearsal. It was mostly bad luck and bad timing and then there wasn’t a real need to rush things. Let’s see – I also played a lot of shows with Monstrosity and recorded 5 albums in that time period: 2 with Monstrosity (one not released yet), 1 Diabolic album that I co-wrote and played all rhythms and 90% of the leads, this Chaos Inception album where I played all the guitars and wrote everything, and a Quinta Essentia album. Personally, I am very busy with music and thankful for the opportunity to do so much.
I'll admit it without torture. When I got the echo from your label Lavadome Productions that you were going to have a new record, I was excited like a little boy. The previous album "The Abrogation" is still very much at the front of my collection and I revisit it often. Where did you want to move to? The new album still feels wild, complicated and raw to me, yet it feels a bit more accessible. It's easier for me to absorb. It also has more memorable songs. Even though it's still a total brutal massacre. How do you feel about your new album as a writer? Did you have a vision of where you wanted to go?
Thank you for the kind words. I tried a few new approaches. It’s important for us to stretch the boundaries of what we will do, but not break the mold. It seems to be the cool thing to do now to do a mash-up of styles, like combine trip hop, OSDM, SDBM, more buzzwords, acronyms, black-gaze but mostly when you do that, to me, it is cheating. It’s more difficult to write something new in the same style. There is horror, anger at the world, frustration and exhaustion at the process of the creation of the album, but there is more light shining on this album than any other. It is challenging to convey something like joy and celebration in music on a 7 string distorted guitar with a constant blast beat and some monstrous vocal belches. I was listening to the song Thymos Beast just yesterday. When will someone realize that the song is like a Manowar song or a Maiden, Flight of Icarus type song, and is not at all a hate-filled, angry, and brutal blast? It’s the happiest and most triumphant death metal song I could imagine. It has a Chuck Berry and Billy Gibbons inspired solo. So we stretched it – I admit some of it sounds like Azagthoth but Azagthoth never played a ZZ Top solo over a blast beat. We laughed every time we played the song at rehearsal. I really tried to write some feel-good songs and create an album that was not pure dissonance and depression. Maybe I am just happier now than I was 13 years ago.
Lance Wright and Brian Elliot were behind the sound of the last album. Andrea Petucco from MSTR Sound Studio was in charge of the new album. Why the change? Personally, I see a shift in the sound to a bit more clarity. The new stuff sounds old, hellish, uncouth. It's a massacre that when it first got into my head, I almost fell over. In short, Andrea Petucco has done a great job. Still, I'm wondering, why did you change a proven team?
Jan from Lavadome had worked with Andrea before and he hooked it up. The studio in Huntsville closed and it was no longer possible to work with Lance. He still records bands but outside the studio environment. Working with Andrea was a lot of fun for me, but he might have some interesting stories about it. I had to push to get more distortion on the guitars because he was going for a lot of clarity. I had to push for distortion on the bass guitar, and I finally gave him instructions to make the bass sound like a zombie dripping goo and gore with the eyeball dangling from the optic nerve, or something like that. I told him the album should sound like Covenant and Blue Oyster Cult’s Fire of Unknown Origin, which is probably an impossible combination. Neither of us could find a single new album that we agreed we liked the sound of, so it was going to sound ancient in that sense. Everything sounds like dance music now. I was scrolling the new metal releases on Spotify a few weeks ago and the black, death, nu, power, whatever – all the metal sounded like dance music, Spice Girls or something, with huge bass, played with metronomic precision, and utmost clarity. There is no edge to it, no blood, no madness. But anyways, Andrea is a real genius and saved our asses from some very egregious recording mistakes and he’s very affordable so I recommend any band contact MSTR Sound Studio.
Matt, you're the sole author of all the music, the riffs, the melodies. I forgot to ask you on the last album, how do you actually make music? You're also in MONSTROSITY. How do you actually differentiate between the two bands? When do you say to yourself, this is for CHAOS INCEPTION? I'm interested in the process. I understand that you lock yourself in a rehearsal room, or you just go home and create. Do you have to be in the mood? Be in a state of mind? Like, when you're pissed off about something, you go out and implement a bunch of wild new riffs? I know bands that are basically only in alcohol intoxication:). Where do you get your inspiration from?
Well, it helps that Chaos Inception is the only band I’m in that uses 7 string guitars. I am usually thinking crazy Brazilian death metal and having weird guitar blurs in the riffs when it’s Chaos Inception. Monstrosity is a more straight-forward band with thrashier riffing. Lee Harrison writes most of the songs in Monstrosity and I will dress them up a little bit, adding more technical notes. But I try to write riffs for all my projects and usually there is not much overlap. Quinta Essentia is more a mystical, dark metal with epic songs. I want Chaos Inception eventually to have 3 minute songs. I am writing new Chaos Inception riffs now that I am trying to do the impossible and create an album that people care about that is not the most dissonant, the most brutal, the most extreme thing ever, but it is a fast death metal album with 8 good, original songs on it. I challenge the world’s greatest composer to do it! I mostly write on caffeine, early in the morning when my wife and kids are asleep. I will sometimes write in the rehearsal room because I come up with different things when I am blasting an amp into my face as opposed to sitting down at a computer with headphones. I use the Amplitube plug-in and write out all my songs in Powertab before I record any demos. I have to stop practicing guitar and go into a writing-mode to write, then once I’m in writing mode I will start hearing stuff during the day that I will try to remember the pattern, or I will have to run and get a guitar to get the sound. The best riffs come that way – the most generic, throwaway riffs come from just the fingers. It has to come from the imagination and usually it’s so blurry there that I can’t really recreate the sound. Sometimes it sounds like a machinery malfunction or a car engine running in my head. You must use every trick you can think of to write a bunch of songs like these, every approach possible, and any inspiration, and since it’s death metal it has to have some horror movie inspiration. But in Chaos Inception, once I have the riffs I take them to the rehearsal room and have Gary play some beats over them to see what he thinks and see if they’ll work. He’s a tough crowd and calls out any bad riffs – for example, one riff I wrote he called The S.R.E., which stands for Shittiest Riff Ever. I had to change that one after a few weeks of hearing it referred to as that.
I like it when bands pay attention to the lyrics. Somehow I can't concentrate if the music is great but I get distracted by "lyrics about nothing". What I always liked about CHAOS INCEPTION was that you had an idea, an opinion in the lyrics. What are the lyrics on "Vengeance Evangel" about? Where did you get the inspiration for them? Who is the author? Is it you as well, Matt, or did you leave it up to singer Gary White?
I’m glad someone is paying attention! One prominent theme on the album is lies and the damage they cause. And it’s also about the power to overcome lies and slay the dragons. I think we might have been witnesses to unprecedented events in history, and no society in history was ever lied to with as much fervor and persistence as we were from 2019 to today. We were told not to believe our own experience, not to believe your neighbors, not to do your own research, and just to react violently and immediately to whatever the authorities said. Falsificator, Empire of Prevarication, and The Omegaddon are about these events.
There are some lighter topics to balance out the rage that was expressed through those songs. The idea for the song „Vengeance Evangel“ started with a book that I found in a junk store. It was a Penguin Classics book from some African author I have since forgotten. The characters‘ dialogue sounded unique, often comparing some person’s behavior to something more enduring from nature and I just tweaked it into a death metal context: „See the mountain sit unmoved, as we repose through your cries of doom . . .“. That song is a feel-good, metal brotherhood song. I would be lying if I said some of the lyrics weren’t about revenge on imagined people who don’t like our band, kind of like an old Black Flag or Circle Jerks idea. Even if we just make it up, it’s motivating to think that some losers are saying your band sucks. A lot of lyric and riff ideas come from that perspective: „Did you hear those assholes from Chaos Inception have another album? It’s about time. I wonder how bad it’s going to suck this time . . .“ Suddenly, the poseur’s speech is cut off by a machine gun blast beat to the face. „Gotcha, bitch!“
Speaking of vocals... am I understanding correctly that on the last album Gary beat the drums and his brother sang? But how did he get on the mic after that? Anyway, the vocals are pretty beastly and I have to say he pushed the new album even further into hell. I'm just thinking that if the two gentlemen are really brothers, I wouldn't go to Sunday lunch with them. Because if they had a fight, I'd probably burst head:)) from their screaming.
Gary and Chris share the same last name but they are not brothers. Chris was on the first two albums and left with Cameron, the bassist, and they formed Black Hole Deity. I can’t really recall the discussions from when that happened, but it worked out for both of us. I don’t think we could’ve made this album if they were in the band, because there might’ve been two more people telling me what I ought to do. I had a lot of freedom this time. We were going to hire a singer to do the album but Gary had done some vocals with his previous band Convergence From Within, and he was excited for a challenge. So instead we hired Kevin Paradis to play the drum parts that Gary wrote because it was easier and less expensive than if we’d found a studio to record his drums. Gary added a lot more experimental stuff and guttural vocals and we had a lot of fun recording them. There were a lot of last minute suggestions where I‘d say, „Now this might sound crazy, but what if you made this noise here . . .“. He was mostly cool with any weird suggestions I had. He wrote the lyrics on a couple songs. If he wrote the lyrics he wrote the lyric patterns, and I did the same.
CHAOS INCEPTION was a four-piece band. But there's only two of you left. Even the drummer is only a studio drummer (Kévin Paradise - MITHRIDATIC, BENIGHTED). Does that mean you don't have a line-up for live shows at the moment? Why have there been such personnel changes?
The problem with live shows is that we never got any good offers to do them, so it was always a somewhat local thing. We were in talks about playing the Brutal Assault fest years ago but all we had to do was buy 4 plane tickets to Europe, play for 20 minutes at 10 a.m., and not get paid anything. No, thanks! We have fun playing shows but only very few memories of good shows with good crowds and packed venues, like a crazy show in New Orleans that we did with Epoch of Unlight. The shows would mostly have 20 to 30 disinterested people and over time it was not a priority. I played a show with Quinta Essentia recently that was in an antique store with about 20 people. Now that is truly underground and commendable to the people involved who put in the effort, but at the end of the night it is still depressing. We tried other members after Cam and Chris left but no one ever worked out, mostly because they tried to change the identity of the band. The band is Gary White and Matt Barnes and in some sense it always was.
Thirteen years ago you wrote that things were getting very good in Huntsville as far as death metal was concerned. But then came the covid, people got older. I see it around me. Everybody's struggling to make a living, and for a lot of people nowadays, a gig is quite expensive. We still don't have a lot of people going to see underground bands here. Moreover, the generation that used to really support bands is gradually getting older. Some of them are not even with us anymore. The only ones left are the heartthrobs and the faithful. Is it the same for you? What's the current state of the underground in Alabama?
Forgive me if I don’t reread the old interview to see what I was talking about, but I was shocked to learn that there are several underground death metal bands currently here in Huntsville and even more in Birmingham, Alabama. I don’t even think some of them have demos recorded though. I met some of the guys from Wretched Angel just to give them some Chaos Inception and Monstrosity merch and congratulate them for making something work. They changed their name and I’m not familiar with it now because I usually don’t go to all ages shows on weekdays. Going to the show used to be equal parts seeing the band and getting wasted. It was a lot of fun. I was even in my late 30s and getting in the front row and the pit area. Now I see crowds at festivals that are mostly in their 40s and 50s and they just sip an IPA and stare at the band, but then I’m up there, about the same age and expected to jump around and headbang!? Monstrosity played a show in Germany that was absolutely terrible, in that sense. Everyone was standing 50 feet from the stage and there were no drunken maniacs in the crowd. We need to encourage younger people to get into this music and not just sit around dissing their style or gatekeeping because soon there will be no audience left. I think I gave up on making a living doing music over 20 years ago. The fact that we are still doing this at all is a wonder, because nobody we know outside the metal underground understands why we do it. But to people we know in metal, it’s just common sense that we will never stop.
We've already mentioned the lineup changes. Are you guys still playing live? And let me ask you a little differently. Do you go to shows yourself? Do you go to festivals? I really like the relaxed atmosphere, when you're waiting under the stage, looking forward to seeing your favourite band. I don't go that much anymore, I've seen everything, but when I do go, I always enjoy it. Plus, I'll have a few beers or more. But I'll tell you what, you know. Do you have a favorite pack that you like to go to every time? Do you support?
I probably go to fewer shows since I am in Monstrosity and we play a lot of shows. Whenever we do play I try to check out as many bands as I can. Recently we played in Texas and I got to see Morbosidad, Imprecation, and Nasty Savage for the first time. Playing fests is great for that. We played Maryland and I got to see Sacrifice and Dismember among many others. I was rehearsing in Tampa with Monstrosity and saw Nocturnus and Perdition Temple recently. I went to the Suffocation show in Nashville a few months ago. Some bands I’ve seen so many times, that I can’t justify the cost of going to the show for the 15th time, but bands like Suffocation, Origin, and the real Morbid Angel, I will always put in the effort to see on tour. I can’t help myself but I always drink a few too many when I go to a show, so now I have to factor in the Uber cost to the ticket and the beers – I think beers at the Suffocation show were $18 each, because I can’t drink PBR anymore! Hopefully some newer bands will impress so I can keep going to shows. Even though I like some newer bands, like Cemetery Lights and Concrete Winds, I don’t ever see them on tour. Only newer bands that I don’t like have gotten popular enough to do tours in the US. Too dissonant, too much screaming, too many tortured souls.
Ugh, I'm kind of rambling, but you know, it's been a while. What are you and CHAOS INCEPTION going to do in the future? And don't tell me you're releasing another one soon albumJ). I'm in my fifties now and in another thirteen years, maybe I'll be deaf:)).
HAHA! Yes, I have 100 riffs. No, I have about 3 riffs for a new Chaos Inception album. I think I want to try one last experiment with Chaos Inception – 6 string guitar, 3 minute songs, and a guitar that sounds like a car engine. It’s a very vague idea right now, but that’s a goal. We have a good method to record now and a lot more experience from the calamity that was the recording of Vengeance Evangel, so we would just have to write the songs and come up with about $6000 for drum recording, mixing and mastering, and also get the artwork well in advance of completion of the album. So if we sell 100 CDs from this album we’ll have $1200 towards that, and the rest will have to come from stress and sweat at the day job. Monstrosity has plans to release a new album (it is complete now, except for the artwork) and we will tour for that. There are no plans for any other shows. I will keep noodleing on guitar and see what happens. If there is another Chaos Inception album, I would say to expect it in 4 years max, not 12.
Finally, my favorite question. What does death metal mean to you? Is it a hobby, relaxation? For me it's maybe a necessity, I like the darkness, the speed, the hardness, the tension, the mysticism. For me it's a curse. How do you feel about death metal and music in general?
Everyone thinks that everything in extreme music has been done, and then someone does something new or doesn’t, but it never has to end, because people simply need something to do. Why is it a priority to make music that has never been done? Why is it not considered original unless it is something silly and more a cut and paste rip-off of disparate genres – oh wow, heavy metal with a xylophone. It leads to a dead end where you are not creating enjoyable music, but doing a modern art project where the new album is a banana taped to the wall, or some other dumb shit that I don’t care about. I need good songs to motivate me to wake up in the morning or to drive to work. I need to sing a song in my soul that can get me through some hard times. Why would that have to be something never heard? It is one of the oldest stories in history. It’s a human need, and it doeesn’t make any logical sense. Bing-bong-boop. I need to hear a series of noises. I get goosebumps when I hear a certain sequence of sounds or a certain type of sound. With Chaos Inception I’d like to do death metal with the metal part still intact. The metal part is the power within, the motivation, the striving to overcome. That is what’s been lost in death metal. It’s depressing, it’s robotic, it’s too experimental, or it’s a cover band doing a nostalgic rehash of some old band. There is a narrow window to the bullsye of doing something original and good in this old, worn-out style. The ideal death metal album released in 2025 is like a ratty shoe – it has a function. That function is to get somewhere and while you’re at it, to kick the universe dead in its ass. To single-handedly dethrone the emperor of lies. When you listen to death metal, King Kong doesn’t have shit on you.
I’ve noticed that when I’m at a show, if I’m backstage the band playing never sounds as good. But when you get in the crowd and in front of the speakers it will blow your mind. It’s like with an album. We present to you an album that I can promise you – yes, you, the person reading this interview! - if you get in front of the speakers and get into it you can use it and you will like it. If you keep a distance from it and hear it like a critic looking for something new outside of the details, you might find a lot to criticize and you might not like it. If you didn’t buy the album then you have no investment in putting in an effort, so why do you listen to it on a free stream and feel compelled to review it? You’ve never really heard it.
Thank you for the interview, it was a great honour. It was great to hear you again after so many years. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the great music! Listening to "Vengeance Evangel" I always feel like I'm walking through hell itself. I wish you all the best with CHAOS INCEPTION and all is well in your private life. Thank you very much indeed. If you have anything else you want to say to fans, promoters or nice fans, here's the space! CHAOS INCEPTION RULES!
Thanks for the interview and thanks for investing the effort into understanding the band. It only takes a handful of real fans who get the message to give us the drive to create. Releasing this album and seeing it through the whole process has been one of the most difficult accomplishments in my life, but it really shouldn’t have been. We learned a lot about ourselves in that time, and we had to think every day about why we kept on doing this. We found our purpose and tried to inject that sense of purpose onto the album, which I think is unique on an album in this style. Here we have given birth to our dancing star. Deadly Storm Zine rules!
Recenze/review - CHAOS INCEPTION - Vengeance Evangel (2025):
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