Rotgod chronology: 2016

Around early 2016, I was writing songs like crazy, often staying awake at night. The musical direction of the project was getting more and more varied - between death/thrash, hardcore, thrashcore, grind and weird noisy shit: songs such as "Demagogy" and "Surrogate" were written around that time. Meanwhile, Nfernu was getting increasingly more busy with his main project Radix Malorum, along with some other darker-sounding projects he was working on at the time. This took his attention away from Rotgod, which by that point officially became a one-man band (with session members being possibly involved in the recording stage): this gave me even more freedom in the creative process, on the way to fulfill my vision for the "craziest demo ever".

I had laid out a list (shown in the picture) of the ideas I still wanted to develop before starting the recordings, complete with titles for the yet-to-be-written songs and some indications on the specific styles I wanted to explore on each track (also notice the presence of titles such as "Machine man" later re-named "Organic machine", "And the snake said" later re-named "The serpent's speech", "Jesus Christ blowjob" later re-named "Jesus Christ pornostar", and even "Cult of fornication")... in short, the songwriting process seemed to be finally approaching completion. Unfortunately, shit would soon hit the fan.

One night, my hard drive got severely damaged, losing a huge chunk of data including nearly every song I had written so far. At the time, I didn't have any backup: I barely managed to save "Denial of nature" and "Demagogy". So, I had to start from scratch, having lost tons of ideas I kept saved as demos but didn't remember accurately. I managed to reconstruct a few older songs by memory ("Without dogmas", "Sardonic face", "Hell from within", "Empty idealism", "Surrogate"...) making some small changes and perfecting some ideas (particularly in the case of "Reawakened too late"), but many other songs ended up being hopelessly forgotten. So, the original idea for the demo was almost entirely discarded.

While rewriting some older songs, I also started writing new stuff, sometimes crossing very weird musical territories. Some riffs from previous lost songs were repurposed for brand new tracks, as in the case of "And evil smiled at me". Around that time, I felt inclined to put the the grinding/humorous component aside (with rare exceptions such as "I'm so offended / Triggered!", a song that made fun of so-called "social justice warriors"), concentrating on the project's thrashier side (writing powerful tunes such as "Uncertain future", and ultra-raw bursts of speed such as "I don't believe" and "Italy is doomed"), while not forgetting the noisy/experimental side as well (showcased for instance on "Inner crisis" and "Cult of fornication").

Around late 2016 I started meeting more young musicians from the sicilian metal scene, including Sinistro (known today as the guy behind Skeletal Gore, Miseria and Lunar Light Records), and that gave me the motivation to start planning out the upcoming recording process. And yet, it would still take one more year...

2015 • Index • 2017

Back on top