Rotgod chronology: 2015

In early 2015 I had just turned 17, I was fourth year in high school, I listened to extreme stuff all day long, and the idea of creating a raw, ultra-fast thrash/death/crossover band had already been settling in my head for quite a few years. I was already writing tons of riffs, but most of them ended up in the bin 'cause I instantly got sick of them (some rare exceptions: the main riffs that would blossom into "Sybaritic metal" and "Organic machine", years later).

It was around that time that I met Nfernu at a concert. At the time, he was very active within the sicilian underground scene, and was busy with his own (now defunct) black metal project Radix Malorum. We chatted and realized we had a lot in common in our music tastes, and he expressed some interest in creating a project that crossed halfway between a death/thrash formula à la Necrodeath/Merciless (two names I held very dear as well) and shorter, more chaotic songs in a primordial grindcore vein: a musical direction that was very similar to the one I had been developing in my mind for quite some time, and that finally gave me the kick of adrenaline to officially start writing proper songs.

After some sloppy, clumsily written riff sequences that were almost instantly discarded, on the night between april 25 and 26 I finally birthed my first full-fledged song, "Denial of nature", which Nfernu dug a lot. That motivated me to write even more - and within a few months, I laid down more songs such as "Reawakened too late" (still in a very immature, awkward-sounding form), "Without dogmas" (originally titled "No dogmas, no values"), "Sardonic face", "Hell from within", "Empty idealism", "Terrorists" (written right after the Bataclan attack), the acoustic instrumental "Hellish heaven" and even a few soon-to-be-lost tunes that already utilized some riffs that would later be re-used for other songs: the track "Pallid skeleton" featured the riffs that would later form the bulk for "Organic machine", the track "The missing piece" featured a few riffs that would later be used for "And evil smiled at me", while the track "Bordering on death" did already feature the main "Sybaritic metal" riff (though far less enhanced than it would be on that later song) and even one riff that would be recycled years and years later for "Sado-death" (a track that would only be released post-"Sonic degeneracy").

At the same time, along with the death/thrash component represented by these songs, we also started envisioning the more grinding, mayhemic, sometimes humorous component of the project (Nfernu proposed a "You suffer" style track titled "E i marò?", inspired by one of the most popular italian memes at the time), along with an occasional noise influence (a genre I had just started diving into) on some other tracks such as "Hell from within". The idea I had in my mind was to create the craziest, richest, most diversified demo I could possibly imagine, taking inspiration from some ultra-primitive 80's demos where you could really find "everything and the kitchen sink", as the saying goes.

With this attitude, I started writing some short blasting tunes such as "Hipster death", "Great recession" and an early version of "T.W.H.", all of them soon to be lost and forgotten (and maybe, based on what I can recall about those songs, that was for the better).

At the end of 2015 I finally gave a name to this project, with Nfernu's full approval: I chose the name "Rotgod" 'cause it represented the project both sonically and conceptually (the nietzschian idea of "divine putrefaction"), and drew the logo on my school desk. Definitely, something more productive than sleeping on that desk, as I generally was inclined to do.

Index • 2016

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