Interview with death grindcore band from United Kingdom - MALEDICTION.
Answered Rich Mumford (guitars), thank you!
Recenze/review - MALEDICTION - The Soil Throne (2023):
Ave MALEDICTION! I guess we can't start our conversation any other way than by welcoming you back. I can't tell you how much I've been looking forward to hearing new music from you. I belong to the generation of old fans. So thanks a lot! But I have to start by asking... Damn, what took you so long?
Hey mate, thank you, I’m glad there were people out there who were actually waiting for this to happen!
Doing more Malediction has been on the agenda for us for quite a few years. I think we originally agreed on it probably seven or eight years ago, this was when Shaun was still living and working in the US, we were going to do some new long-distance recordings, the plan then was to do a new 7“ with two songs on it or something.
Anyway, both Mark McGowan and I had since then tried to come up with some new Malediction material without much success. I had loads of new riffs but couldn’t quite get them to work together for a new song. Some of these riffs were what ended up becoming “Black Narcissus.” Anyway, during the pandemic, mid-2021 I tried an experiment and challenged myself to write something completely new in one week from scratch and this worked and got me out of the terrible writers block I’d been suffering from. “The Omerta Masquerade” was the song and this then helped me to finish “Black Narcissus” as well although that took a couple of attempts before I was entirely happy with it. I then quite quickly wrote some other new stuff as well as completing new arrangements for the old songs that are also on the new EP.
It took us a long time, and finishing the EP also took me a long time for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, but it was finished and now it’s out. I’m happy. I’m also happy be able to tell you that I am writing new material faster than I ever have done and we are on track to be able to record our debut album in 2024.
I popped the news into the player, got comfortable, and after half an hour was bouncing around the room like I was seventeen again. The family was looking at me, the kids were tapping their foreheads. But I can't help it. The new EP is short, but it's really good. Death metal, grind, but also unmistakable atmosphere and your signature. Well, beautiful! Can you tell us how the new EP was made? Did you change your approach after all these years?
A conscious decision was made with the new material to keep this direct and to the point and not go off into the 6-7 minute realm we explored in some of the later stuff we did in the 1990s. I think “Black Narcissus” was at the time the shortest song I’d ever written. We didn’t want to outstay our welcome and made the songs work in shorter timescales. “The Omerta Masquerade” is a bit longer, but mainly due to the outro riff.
Secondly, the EP was made with the awareness that this was the relaunch of the band and that we couldn’t rely on anyone remembering us or knowing who we are, which is why we re-recorded “Infestation” and the other old songs. We wanted people to have new versions of those songs, but we didn’t want them to be on a debut album, hence they’re on the EP. The second side of the EP is also a kind of celebration of thirty years of the “System Fear” 7”.
The cover art is tinted green and I think it's really hilarious. Daniel Bechthold from Germany painted it. Why him? How did you guys get together? I confess I don't know his work that well, could you tell us more about this very talented artist?
Me and Shaun were throwing links at each other, trying to work out who we could ask to do the cover art and Daniel was in the mix. We both really liked the piece he did for Leipa for their “Reue” release. Shaun messaged Daniel, found out he was a cool guy and interested in collaborating with us and we took it from there.
I really like what he came up with and it’s grown on me even more.
Raw, dark and cold sound is the basis. This year he was really good. You recorded with Dan Mullins, who is also the drummer of MY DYING BRIDE. That's a completely different kind of music! I really have to bow down to the ground because the new EP literally kills. It reminds me of old productions from somewhere in the late 90's. How did you achieve this sound, how did the recording process work?
We recorded the drums first in early August 2022 at Vibrations Studios here in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. Dan engineered the drum recording and him and Jon our drummer cooked up the drum sound between them. Everything else was recorded in my home studio between August 2022 and March 2023. Most of it was recorded in August and September 2022. I had a bit of a wobble with my health in the middle of it, which meant I didn’t finish until early March 2023. The only things that were really left to do were the guitar solos, but I was really struggling with my confidence over doing them so ended up writing and recording them all in a week, which wasn’t ideal, but it got the thing finished.
Dan Mullins did the final mix and mastering and was sending us rough mixes throughout the process. He sent a rough mix of “Black Narcissus” that absolutely blew me away. I find it hard to be objective about my own stuff and couldn’t really tell from listening to it whether it was any good or not. But when I heard this mix of “Black Narcissus” it totally blew me away. I was like “this is the sound that the EP needs.” Dan did some re-amping of the guitars to add a bit of an HM-2ness to them. I’m very proud to say that the bass sound is pretty much all my own work. I learned so much doing this EP. Experience that you can’t buy. We’ll be doing the album in the same way, and we’ll be working with Dan again on that too. The brief for the EP was “modern, but with old-school sensibilities.”
Once we had everything recorded, I went over to Dan’s a couple of times, and we mixed and edited together to get it across the finish line. It was a great and extremely collaborative process.
Yes, Dan drums for MDB bit he also drums in his band BLASPHEMER who are a lot more straight down the line death metal. Their new EP “Marked for Death” on Macho Records is killer!
Also, times have changed a lot. Today's technology is different. Artificial intelligence, the cloud, you know. How do you as musicians deal with these changes? It must be very different from 30 years ago. Do you follow new trends?
Yes. I’ve had to. It’s been necessary to record in the way that we have done. The only way this new recording was ever going to see the light of day was if it utterly smoked all of our old releases and to do that, I needed to become producer and engineer so that I could be really deeply involved in all stages of the recording and mixing process.
A proud moment for me was after handing over all the tracks I’d recorded and engineered to Dan, I asked him whether what I’d done was of sufficient quality for him to say that the work was “exceptional”. But everyone knocked their contribution out of the park on this, Jon kills on drums, Shaun has never sounded better. I’ve never played as well as I have on this recording. The only people we were in competition with was ourselves and I personally think that we exceeded all of our aims for this recording and that absolutely never happens.
Of course, it’s a double-edged sword because the album has to be even better!
I'm an old dog too, and like everyone I like to remember my youth. I'm sure our readers will be interested to know how did you actually put the band together back in the day? If I'm not mistaken, you were originally called NEUROSIS. Will you reminisce for us please? When and how did MALEDICTION was formed?
That’s correct. The band started in 1989 and I wrote “Infestation” that year. We were just messing about initially with the first lineup.
Myself, Shaun, and Mark Fox knew each other at Teesside Polytechnic, in the Northeast of England and had talked about starting a band, I don’t think we thought it’d still be a thing thirty-four years later though!
Then during 1990 things got more serious, Alastair joined on drums and Darren on second guitar, and we took it from there. We recorded the “Infestation” demo in August 1990 and the “System Fear” 7” later in 1990 and things just progressed from that point on.
It’s cool to have a legacy from back in the early 1990s, but this new version of MALEDICTION has been really about not repeating the past. The legacy is extremely helpful and has given us a bit of a leg-up since we reformed, but for me it’s very much eyes forward, what can we do next, how can we improve.
I remember in my younger days waiting for long hours in line outside the store to buy a new record. My friends and I didn't have money, so we would copy tapes and then argue for endless hours about which band was better. It was a great time, of course. How did you get started in music? Who was your role model? When did you first pick up an instrument? What about your first gig? And the first live performance? Tell me, exaggerate...
I have quite diverse influences, some of the guitar bands of the mid 80s inspired me to try to learn to play. I then progressed by getting into prog rock, a lot of the 1980s new prog/prog revival bands before I got into metal. Thrash bands really appealed to me in a way that traditional metal bands had not up to that point. I liked the “street” attitude, just their wearing every-day clothes and I loved the fact that their songs were about the real world, not dragons and wizards.
I started playing the guitar in 1986, so it wasn’t long between my starting and forming this band, three years or something.
The first gig I played was the first Malediction gig. We weren’t very good, but you have to start somewhere.
You're from Middlesbrough. What's your background in underground music? Do you have any clubs? Or do you have to go to London? I'd be interested in the current state of your scene. What about gigs? Fans? How many people do you get when you play somewhere?
The band was based in Middlesbrough because we were at Teesside Polytechnic (now a university). There wasn’t much of a scene, it was mainly hardcore punk bands. We had the perennial problem of being to punk for the metallers and too metal for the punks. But we got one, we played with punk and crust bands, it was fine. I only ever went to a couple of gigs in London, not somewhere I went.
We just headline Dead of Winter Festival in Glasgow, Scotland. This was our first gig back since reforming. The festival featured eleven underground death metal bands from the UK, we felt extremely fortunate to be asked to play this festival, let alone headline it. The festival sold out and we played to a three hundred capacity crowd.
We have another show coming up in March with BLASPHEMER who are great guys and then in May we’re playing Incineration Festival in London, which is a huge opportunity for us. We’ve not been short on offers to do gigs, in the quality of the gigs is very high, it’s not like in the old days of playing a random pub to a handful of people, these are bigger shows for us. It’s been very gratifying to be organically invited to play prestigious shows in the UK capital.
A very important question for us fans! How and where do you want MALEDICTION to go in the future? We want a first full-length album! No seriously, what are you planning in the near future?
Debut full length will be recorded in 2024 for sure. I have the album sketched out, I have four new songs that I’ve written for it and they’re the best stuff I’ve ever written. We’re going to revisit 2-3 old songs and I’m hopeful that Mark and Rik will also have at least one new song each on it. We’re aiming for 9-10 tracks, 40 minutes max. We’re in a good position, we have more material than we need, so we’ll record a bunch of stuff and choose the best. There might be a new EP in there too that could follow the album closely.
What does music mean to you? Why did you start playing death metal and grindcore in particular? How does music influence your life and world view? What has music given and taken away from you?
I listen to a lot of music from a lot of different genres, but DM is special to me, and it’s been a real pleasure in the last few years to re-immerse myself in the scene and get to know some of the current bands. I think I’ll always be a metal musician; I love other genres, but my skillset was really mostly in metal and its various subgenres.
I got a lot of my worldview from artists that I have listened to, music has been helpful to me in developing an ideological and political framework for my life. Some of my earliest exposure to ethical issues was via the music I was listening to.
On the negative side, music is demanding work and often for little or no reward. We spend hundreds and even thousands of hours honing our craft and spend thousands of pounds on gear to what is often a disinterested world. The tortured artist may be a cliché, but it’s a quite accurate cliché for the most part.
It was a great honor to interview you. I wish you all the best for the new EP to sell out worldwide and for you to have a gig packed to bursting. May you do well in your private life. You know what? I'm gonna go play "The Soil Throne" again! Massacre!
It was my pleasure to answer your questions, sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you. Thank you so much for your kind words about “The Soil Throne” EP, it is very much appreciated!
If anyone wants to get in touch with us, they can visit www.malediction.co.uk which has links to our Bandcamp and all our socials.
Recenze/review - MALEDICTION - The Soil Throne (2023):
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