Welcome to Demo:listen, your weekly peek into the future of underground extreme metal. Whether it’s death, black, doom, sludge, grind, thrash, -core, heavy, speed, progressive, stoner, retro, post-, punk/, etc. we’re here to bring you the latest demos from the newest bands. On this week’s Demo:listen we hear some shit we’ll never un-hear from Atlanta’s Cryptorchidism.
“For years,” Justin Stubbs says, he’s wanted to spawn a brutal death metal abomination such as his latest prophecy fulfilled, Cryptorchidism. “I’ve tried my hand at doing everything myself a few times (programming drums, etc.) and it never came together like I wanted it to,” Stubbs admits.
Stubbs, AKA GHOAT, already leads, or at least provides full cooperation in such malign frontiers as Father Befouled, Encoffination, Rituaal, Chasm of Nis, and so on. He is prolific, seemingly death-obsessed, and, as his design company hints, he is also restless.
Inspired by his favorite bands of the brutal death metal underground, such as Malignancy, Guttural Secrete, Haemophagia, Disgorge (MEX), Cenotaph (Turkey), Condemned, Cephalotripsy—just to name a few, Stubbs recently decided to turn to his network of friends.
“I finally had some time and I sent out a message on Facebook looking for drummers that are interested in playing that style (LOTS of blasting, technicality, and groove), and have the ability to multitrack themselves on their own. I got a few responses and Dylan hit me up. I’ve known Dylan a couple of years when my other band(s) Father Befouled and Encoffination went on tour back in 2015 with Ghoulgotha from San Diego, Dylan was their touring drummer (their full time drummer broke his wrist 10 days before tour). I never even thought of him because he most definitely does not listen to this kind of ultra-brutal, obscene nonsense. But he’s a good sport and an amazing drummer. He teaches music for a living and can adapt to anything. I sent him a bunch of bands to check out and he fucking nailed it.”
He goes on to detail finding a vocalist in a similar way.
“So then, I put up a teaser video of me recording guitars in Instagram and kind of offhandedly mentioned that I need a super gurgly, guttural vocalist. I can sing low (see my other bands), but I cannot do that gurgly guttural stuff that this kind of death metal calls for. So a couple of days later I get an email from Paulo. He was the singer in Copremesis, one of my absolute favorite bands of this style. Turns out he’s the guitarist in a new band called Myxoma, and I did some graphic design work with them, but I was dealing with their drummer the entire time and I had no idea Paulo was in the band. We even met at MDF this year and I had no fucking idea it was him. So I was floored that he wanted to be a part of this.”
“My friend told me about Justin looking for a brutal death metal vocalist and I responded right away,” says vocalist Paulo Paguntalan. “I wanted to work with Justin because he’s simply awesome. He’s legit, he’s an embalmer who plays death metal. That’s the absolute coolest shit ever. He gets it. There’s no way I would pass up the opportunity to work with him.”
Thus Cryptorchidism was born. We’ll save you the trouble: It’s a condition in which the testis are, um, reluctant to descend.
“Haha it’s this term that stuck with me from one of my Pathology classes in college,” explains Stubbs. “It has the word ‘crypt’ in it, which sounds cool and the entire word just reeks of evil, haha. Apparently it’s a painful condition as well so it just fit the style. The songs are all based around perversion and pathology and deformity.”
Both Stubbs and Paguntalan are familiar with playing in bands that never actually meet up to rehearse. Says Stubbs: “We work kind of unorthodox: I asked Dylan to just record some drum tracks with nothing to go by. It just lends even more to how great of a musician he is. He sent me three songs that were just blistering and brutal, perfectly in time and everything. Then I sat down and wrote riffs to all of the drum parts and recorded the guitars secondly. Then sent it all to Paulo and he did lyrics/vocals. Then I took all the individual tracks and mixed and mastered everything.”And how long did all that take?
According to Stubbs “two weeks or so . . . from the first conversation between me and Dylan to a final mixed demo.”
Nor will we have to wait much longer for a physical copy of Cryptorchidism’s three song demo Articulating Perversity.
Paguntalan says he emailed the pressing plant about the demo tapes only yesterday and reckons they’ll be available in “4 – 5 weeks.”
While, according to Stubbs, Cryptorchidism “have aligned with Sick Chainsaws Productions (Thailand) for a full length release.” The trio will begin working on that “very soon.”
Get the demo when it’s available from P2. Don’t let this thing catch you sleeping.
