Recording in DAN SWANO's Unisound Studio – Interview mit Andrew Goreds HUMANGLED (Italien)

I have always been a fan of classic Death/Black Metal, like Edge Of Sanity and Dissection, and if you are, too, Dan Swano‘s Unisound Studio in Sweden will mean something to you! So doing an interview with italian based Oldschoolers HUMANGLED (formerly known as Putrid Sequence) seemed the next logical thing to do since they just recently recorded their next output in Dan Swano’s famous studio. A bit of new-sounding Oldschool coming up – Enjoy!

Humangled, Italy

Cheerz, Andrew! Please be so kind as to say a few words concerning yourself as a person, where do you come from, how long have you been doing this as a band?

Hey Alex,

first of all thanks for giving us this space, it’s a good occasion for us to speak about the life of Humangled band before the release of our first album.

It all got kicked off, in our early beginning, as “Putrid Sequence”… interesting that you make us remember this stuff ! At those times (1992 or so) we were totally caught by the new sounds of industrial, bands like Godflesh, Scorn, Pitch Shifter catched our attention and we thought that it would be very heavy to “crossover” this kind of stuff with traditional death-grindcore of bands like Carcass or Napalm Death.

Andrew Goreds, Luke Scurb

Ah, those were the days…how would you describe the music of HUMANGLED, your band and how many Demos or Albums did you release until now?

After a demotape (“Inside Reeking Organs”) in 1994 we shifted this project to a live oriented band, with a bassist and drummer, and we totally migrate to Death Metal stuff leaving behind the industrial genre, keeping only few influences (for example fragments with sampled voices).

Up to now we have 3 releases: “Anatomic Butchery” in 1997 (that was a tape), a typical deathmetal work of that period, then the band was long time inactive – for personal reasons – till 2006 when Scurb and me rejoined from zero. In 2007 we recorded the “Refoetalize” EP, which was a mere come-back to say “Humangled is here again”, but the style was really experimental and showed our “under construction” state.

Then we moved forward to “Edge of Beyond” (2008 EP) which gave us the first approvals and made us a good number of listeners on Myspace, Itunes, etc.

With this background we are now ready to release our debut album “FRACTAL”.

Who is in the band besides you?

Luke Scurb has always done the guitarwork while I have always done the vocals, but the interesting part is that we worked 4 hands the majority of of the music we have written, starting from a single idea we discuss in common. We have been playing with different musicians for the rhytmic part in the years, lacking this presence only for the “Refoetalize” demo (in which we standed in with electronics), but now we are very satisfied with the present line up with our bassist Tat0 (Glacial Fear and Zora) and Raffaele Pezzella (Symbolyc) which give us a very skilled help !

HUMANGLED's Edge Of Beyond

On your myspace I see a lot of rather gory pictures, something I wouldn’t necessarily expect from an Oldschool-sounding band, who did this Artwork for you and how come you are such “Gore-Gourmets” (Thank you, Necrotic Flesh )?

We always liked the brutal stuff in movies like “Reanimator”, Romero stuff and similar. Early works of Death, Carcass, Cannibal Corpse, Dismember etc. showed the same kind of interest in the first half of 90′s, so it was totally natural for us to incorporate this kind of morbid visions in our artworks.

Despite this the lyrical themes like “Feasting on the slab” are rare episodes in Humangled music, because with gore we are used to exhume deeper meanings.

Please give an example!

Gore is used to underline and colour certain aberrhations of human society. I mean… we usually don’t speak about “dismembered corpses” for pure iconography or fun, but we can speak about “organs trade” (in our song “fruits of abdomen”)… that’s where the corpses, organs, blood and bones are involved.

HUMANGLED's Refoetalise

The artworks related to Humangled are usually done by other artists we know and whose works we specially appreciate for their “taste”. I would like to thank here Bonkoira for the “blood drinking man” and Devin Fernandez for the album cover. I believe that artwork expression should be on the same line of the musical and lyrics message a band wants to express, because that’s is really a very important factor to define and understand a band completely.

So as an Italy-based band – how is the scene in your area, are there festivals or gig opportunities, what about support in local media?

Well… regarding culture, places, food we feel totally italians, but we do not have any preclusion about future cooperations with US or other countries musicians. Before our bassist Tat0 joined the band we were auctioning Mike Poggione of Monstrosity for the band.

There’s not much of a local scene, we’re rather involved in the scene outside of Italy, because – frankly speaking – Italy is still not a country where you can find much support for extreme metal: Few places for lives, no support from medias, and so on. The underground bands here have to struggle a lot, and the italian main metal bands that went out to worldwide recognized exposure are Power / Gothic / Trendy stuff… i.e. much more mainstream than extreme proposals. But, thanks to internet, this is not a situation we feel much worried or frustrated like we could be 15 years ago.

I completely agree, in my opinion “Internet is the new Tapetrading” – so do you hang out a lot with other bands and fans in the Internet?

I like very much to hang out and talk “from scum to finest” subjects with other metalheads and bands. I would say that this exchange of ideas, not only musical, is what really keeps me alive in making music.

How’s the internet’s media reaction to your music?

We are getting good attention from digital medias, websites, webzines and blog like yours; printed press is also following us with reviews, we have a good number of metal magazines in Italy. On the other hand there’s no space yet in italian television for this kind of stuff, the logic of commercial music suffocates any different proposal.

What about your live gigging and touring schedules for HUMANGLED ?

At present we are not making gigs because of logistic problems (our bassist and drummer live 600 kilometers far away from us) but that’s not out of our plans after the CD is printed, and friends worldwide are asking us for that also… despite it will be difficult for us to tour as music is not our main job.

OK, guys, this is the first part of our interview with HUMANGLED‘s Andrew Goreds, stay tuned for part 2, where we will discuss technical details and issues of recording at Dan Swano’s UNIDSOUND Studio.

Part 2 of this interview can be found here.