Interview with death metal band from California - DECAYED EXISTENCE.
Answered Harry Rocco (drums, vocals), Jeffrey Ke (guitars), thank you!
Recenze/review - DECAYED EXISTENCE - The Beginning Of Sorrows (2024):
Ave DECAYED EXISTENCE! Greetings to California. Hope you're doing well. I'm just listening to your new release "The Beginning Of Sorrows" again this year and I'm thinking how great it is that after so many years on the scene you can put together such fresh and interesting material. How did the new record come about and what were your feelings going into the studio?
Harry Rocco - Well the new album came about with writing from two of my favorite writers Jeffrey Ke and Jason Davis. We threw some ideas together and it was a great collaboration and we felt really confident going into the studio with Andrew Giordanengo.
Jeffrey Ke - I felt like we were pretty confident going into the recording of this album. The tracks were solid and I think we had some unique songs going in.
I guess like any fan, I have it set up so that I listen to the album a few times first and then either come back to it or not. This year it was a bit more complicated with you. I feel like there are more layers to the record and that some of them come out after a longer period of time. The sound contributes a lot to that. The Beginning Of Sorrows strikes me as a dark record. Where did you record the album and who is responsible for the mastering? How do you perceive the shift in sound?
Harry Rocco - Yeah it's somewhat of a dark record but we are definitely in dark times with a lot to write about. We recorded the live stuff just in my garage in the jam room throwing around ideas. For the five songs we went to Andrew up in Yreka and threw those five songs down, the ones I like the most and he did a very good job! The sound shift you know it all sounds like Decayed. Decayed has different eras, we've been through many players and had to say the first five sound more modern. The last three songs which were live in the jam room are more of the old school Decayed back in the '90s hence Jason Davis being thrown into the fold as he was one of the original members. I thought it would be fun to have him write a couple songs.
With my favorite bands I buy the CD and the t-shirt straight away. "The Beginning Of Sorrows" has a classic cover. It's got undead floating around an old church. Is that a reference to a horror movie? How did the cover come about and how does it relate to the music itself? Who is the author and how did you guys get together? Speaking for myself, I have to say that it makes me uneasy, it's interesting.
Harry Rocco - Well if you notice on the cover of “Eulogy” there is a corpse outside the church and as in the cover of the new one The Beginning of Sorrows the same concept. You see, a lot of little lyrics I write comes from being a Protestant Christian. In fact I don't really go to church, I believe that we're two or more gathered in his name that is the church. I think the world trivializes church and religion whereas I would rather preach from a relationship standpoint through music. There's no references to any horror movies and Blast Art did the cover but yeah relates to the music as we try to write outside division or denomination we just write from the Bible and from our life experiences.
Please take us through the lyrics on the new record? Who is their author and how were they created? I'd also be interested to know where you got the inspiration for them.
Harry Rocco - Most of the songs like “Mind Wars” are about you know the struggle that we're going through as a country. What to believe, what's the truth… where there's a bunch of fact checking where the truth is lost in the sea of content. You can find whatever it is you think the truth is which to me is very scary. I Harry Rocco the author of the lyrics and since I'm the drummer it's a lot easier for me to place the lyrics as far as timing. Majority of my lyrics I get from life experiences and the Bible because the Bible has got me through so many things in life. I should have been dead a hundred times over but here I am in my 50s playing music doing what I do so there's some merit to that and above else. I thank Jesus and I hope that you can see the message by faith through grace there goes I not any denomination or anything that divides but by faith.
What I like about you is that even after all these years I still feel an enthusiasm for your music, a kind of hard to describe tingle. Your death metal has an old patina to it, but also energy and power. How do you compose new material? What process does a song have to go through before it is considered final?
Harry Rocco - Well we record everything we write on a Tascam, and if it hits on the Tascam then I'll write lyrics and you know it kind of has a mind of its own. I couldn't tell you really there's no process if I feel it and it inspires me then lyrics come quick, that's how we do it.
Jeffrey Ke - I would have to say on my end I do not do any lyrics and to be honest don't consider myself that good at it. Haha!. But I do a lot more of the riffs and ideas for beats. The songs “Beheading the Colossus” and “Escape the Dead” I wrote by myself with the big help of Harry Rocco doing the lyrics. So for me my process is I just come up with a beat in my head, could be random and then record that beat on my computer using a drum machine as filler and more of an idea of what I have in mind. Then I build off of it until eventually I get the basis for a full song and then present it to the band. We decide “yes we want to learn it” or no “we just don't feel it” but if we do all agree that we like it then we will build off it together switch up the drum beats if Harry has something better in mind and same thing with our rhythm guitarist Kyle Blasiger and bass player Ryan Brown. Early on when I first joined the band when I was 17 I had a lot more free time so me and Harry were able to hang out a lot and just write and write, now I'm like 31 working a full-time job and have a lot more responsibilities in my life and so I don't have as much time as I would like to do what we used to do, but I try to compensate with that by making music on the side and presenting it to the band.
The only original member of the band is drummer and vocalist Harry Rocco. The others have been added gradually. Is it hard to find like-minded musicians in California? DECAYED EXISTENCE has gone on hiatus several times. Why? How did you get together with the current lineup?
Harry Rocco - Yeah it is hard to find like minded musicians in this area for sure, some of them might not even be like-minded they just want to play music so they'll step in for a project here and there but they don't want to be long-term as they don't agree with the the Christian thing. I guess let's hope some of it rubbed off on them while they were with us is my hope. The current lineup is that I just looking into the past and try to pull up guys that I enjoyed writing with, Jeffrey Ke is one of the best, Jason Davis is a close second so I just wanted to get those guys and with my writing and throw it together and see what happened and I was very happy with how things turned out. I have an autistic son and I have to take time out to develop him as he is severely autistic and takes a lot of time but when everything gets settled I usually go back into the studio and throw down.
Jeffrey Ke - I would have to agree with Harry and say yes it's kind of hard to find like-minded musicians, I actually joined the band back in 2010 when I was 17 years old and still in high school. Around that time Me and two people I grew up with were like the only people that listen to Death Metal in my town. There were musicians but not a lot that liked metal and especially the extreme type of metal that I was into. So when I joined up with Harry in Decayed Existence it was awesome find someone that played a music style that I also played.
The formation of DECAYED EXISTENCE dates back to 1990. You remember the beginning of death metal in California. What were they like? How do you remember the old days? Who was actually your role model in the early days and how did the idea of playing death metal come about? Please reminisce for us.
Harry Rocco -Yeah do you remember Death Metal in the old days, I think some of it's called Thrash now but back in the old days Sepultura was Death Metal, now they're considered Thrash. A good example, everything for me I base off of the late '80s early '90s Death Metal as I lived in Santa Rosa and would frequent the Oakland's club The Omni as well as San Francisco's The Stone and I caught a gig at The Stone and it changed me I realized that's what I want to do. I was there to go see a band called DEATH and they had canceled but there was a band called Pestilence that filled in and the singer was a guy named Martin Van Drunen who I hung out with before the show and got to converse with. Then I saw them play and it blew my mind! Then I went home and bought the new DEATH which was an album called “Leprosy” and it fueled me and anything that came from Chuck Schuldiner after that was what I wanted to do. There was another guy with equal influence on me. It was a guy called Steve Rowe who's the front man for a band from Australia called Mortification, he had the best lyrics in all of metal! I really liked Mortification as they didn't just use one form of vocals they used the death growl as well as the thrash style and I liked that with each new mortification album I did not know what to expect. Is it going to be Thrash? Is it going to be Death? You didn't know and it inspired me to use both
Jeffrey Ke - I myself can't really comment on what it was like in the early '90s during the rise of death metal since I was born in 1992 haha. But I would have to say that early '90s death metal is what really got me into extreme metal and to this day Chuck Schuldiner from DEATH is still my hero / role model. The way he changed Death Metal and showed people that it can be more than just Cookie monster growls and singing about murdered. Kind of jealous of Harry in some aspects because I wish I could have seen some of the shows he saw back in the day! I was lucky enough to see Bolt Thrower on their last US tour in 2013.
A lot of my older friends (I'm also part of the older generation of metal fans) complain about today's times. Downloading music, impersonal attacks on the internet, lots of ballast, chaos, everything is faster but also ephemeral. How have these things affected you as a band? Have you had to adapt in any way?
Harry Rocco - Well it has affected me, I'm an analog old school analog guy. If I had the money I would prefer to record on 2 or 1/4 inch reel to reel analog the old school way. But now everything's digital and I've seen the light and I've turned that corner but I still have a learning curve with all this internet stuff, I'd rather spend the time writing music than learning what a PDF file is and I really miss spending hours at record stores that now no longer exist. As far as how it affected us we just make music whether we got to uploaded or you know recorded on a tape doesn't matter as long as we're still playing.
It's not all about the internet, which has changed the whole world, but also about new technologies. Analog versus digital. The new processes, the equipment, the studios look very different today than they used to. How do you perceive these things? Is it hard for you to keep up with the times? Or do you like to use different innovations?
Harry Rocco - I do like the innovations and I do like all the things that technology has brought however there is a fallback and I think when you get into guitar tone they're all kind of getting similar whereas in the old days if you had this mic with that amp or you know any combination of things you can get a drastically different sound and if you get a good formula you kept it to yourself in the old days. Where now there's tutorials and everything you know I don't know if that's innovative or not but the technology definitely is, it's hard to keep up with the times when you were so in love with the old ways but like with everything you know you got to change with the times. Now I'm not saying write a disco song because disco goes big, we will always be Decayed Existence but we are now in the digital world and we have switched and it's surprisingly good so far “knock on wood”.
Jeffrey Ke - Since I grew up as a teenager in the digital age I can't really comment on analog music equipment but I can say I believe that with it all being digital nowadays and music equipment and recording software being a so accessible, it's made it a lot easier for people to write music and get their ideas out there.
I don't want to flatter you unnecessarily, but from the promo photos you seem like a nice bunch of guys. There's an air of detachment in your music, a chemistry between the musicians. Is it really like that in real life? Do you sometimes go out for a beer, party together, meet families, etc.?
Harry Rocco - I think we get along fairly well but you know I'm a lot older than the other fellas I prefer to hang out with my grandkids. I'm sure they like to get rowdy at times. I can only speak for myself but you know. We're all friends, we all hang out and go to concerts together and we all like the same music.
Jeffrey Ke - Yeah we hang out! I actually grew up with our player Ryan Brown since I was in middle school. As I've been getting older and having more responsibilities like working along with becoming a first-time father I don't have as much time as I would like to spend with everyone. But we are all friends and we all do hang out with each other and have a beer or two. Haha
Every time I interview an older band, I always have to ask. What does death metal mean to you, how do you perceive it and how would you define it? I mean now more in terms of its philosophy, mood, atmosphere. For example, I think that death metal must always be played from the heart, otherwise it's not the same.
Harry Rocco - I do I too, I think that death metal should be played from the heart. You know growing up in the '80s and '90s I hated a lot of things. MTV everything that was commercial just made me want to puke, I kind of still feel the same way even though metal has come to the forefront since then. You know I can't really be critical of the people, I definitely know what I like and what I don't but I have to say all these different genres are divisive in my opinion and it keeps the music from spreading. For instance I'm not a big Deathcore fan but I do like some Deathcore bands. Just because I didn't know there was a different genre I started listening to a band called Impending Doom. I like them they're great, like their message and everything but since they've been genre-ized into Deathcore I think it did them a disservice. I would have just called us Death Metal but that just me as far as my philosophy of Death Metal just keep it true keep it real.
Thank you very much for the interview. I really hope to see you live somewhere soon. I wish your new album as many true fans as possible and may you do well in your private life. And you know what? I'm gonna go play "The Beginning Of Sorrows" again!
Harry Rocco - Right on man we appreciate all you do and thank you for spinning our new record. Hails from California! much love and respect!
Jeffrey Ke - Thank you for your time! Hails and Cheers!
Recenze/review - DECAYED EXISTENCE - The Beginning Of Sorrows (2024):
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