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Malignant – “Its unfortunate but it’s hard to hide your influences when we’re in the same genre of music, similarities are bout to happen”

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  • Band(s): Malignant
  • Interview Date: January 4, 2020

Although my discovery of Malignant and their debut EP “Purity Through Putrefaction” was a bit late, I do have to say I enjoyed their version of end 1980s / early 1990s Death Metal quite a lot. It could be possible you will hear bits and parts that are quite familiar, but these guys know how to honor the influences without being just mere copycats. But enough of my rambling…  (Ricardo)

The band was formed by Fernando Psijas and Kevin Castro who then recruited a mutual friend Antonio Arias as bassist. We all met in high school and we were all in different bands at the time. Years later we got in contact with each other again and decided to form a band. We wrote the E.P and had a friend do the session drums for the recording. Unfortunately Kevin ended up moving away shortly after the e.p was recorded so we recruited Marco Tocsain as our vocalist who then introduced us to our permanent drummer Ethan Ayala.

What inspired us were 80s horror movies and bands like Suffocation, Gorguts, Sinister, Carcass, Cancer, Mortician. We love love old school Death Metal so we wanted to recreate that sound in our own style.

You’ve released your debut EP “Purity Through Putrefaction” in 2018. Can you tell us more about it?
Basically we (Antonio, Fernando, Kevin) wrote the e.p at Antonio’s garage. We searched for a drummer but didn’t work out, we then got in contact with Arturo Acosta who runs Dark Cauldron Recordings, he did the session drumming on the recording, produced, mixed and mastered the e.p . He did a great job and were glad we got to work with him. We’re fans of Mortician so when we saw artist Bridget Lynch do a t-shirt design for them we reached out to her and commissioned her to do the e.p artwork.

Kevin and I (Antonio) worked on the lyrics together. We were smoking alot of weed and were watching the Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder”. We came up with the concept of a world where humans are domesticated and consumed by mutants. Set in flesh strayed from that and was semi influenced by a kafka short story in the penal colony where prisoners crimes are branded on their flesh. We put efforts into writing lyrics that have a story behind them.

We released the e.p digitally first through Bandcamp. A few labels reached out to us to make physical copies on tape. We’re really excited to release our music in other formats because tapes are becoming more and more popular like a collective item, especially throughout the world, along with vinyl as well .

As said in my review I heard some familiar parts in your songs, not in a bad way because the songs are very well written and played, but I just couldn’t mishear the drum pattern of Carcass’ “Corporal Jigsore Quandary” on “Forced Asphyxiation” to just name an example. Is this on purpose or did it just came out that way. Does it bother you as a musician to being compared constantly or is it just the way it is?
Yes, it’s been brought up to us before, it wasn’t intentionally, during the recording we realized the similarities. Its unfortunate but it’s hard to hide your influences when we’re in the same genre of music, similarities are bout to happen.

If my information is correct you are working on a full-length and it will be released by Memento Mori?
Unfortunately we parted ways with Memento Mori, our future releases will be through Sewer Rot Records based in California. Its run by our friends in Encoffinized and we plan to release our music in all available formats. If the labels we worked with in the past want to release our music we would be more than willing.

And what about future plans?
We’re always in the process of writing more music and plan to release it in 2020 . We also want to focus on more live performances and eventually touring in the future.

Any underrated and overlooked bands you would like to mention?
Yes, there is a couple bands in our list, one is Regurgitated Guts and Stench of Decay, we haven’t heard them get mentioned much and would love to hear some new releases from them.

Thanks for answering my questions!
Shout out to our pets and cats, thank you Chris and Max from Sewer Rot Records, all the labels that have helped us with releases in the past, and VM-Underground for this interview. Keep supporting Death Metal!

Malignant

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