The history of "Sonic degeneracy"

"Sonic degeneracy" was a very troubled, convoluted project that took nearly a decade to fully materialize. Truth be told - I was already envisioning the idea, albeit in a very rough and vague form, since at least 2012 (and some riffs for songs like "Sybaritic metal" and "Organic machine" were already starting to float in my head, along with the basic outline for the "Jesus Christ pornostar" suite). At the time, I wasn't even planning to make a double/triple/whatever-da-fuck-it-is album: I just wanted to make "the craziest demo ever", with no concern about format and presentation. However, when it came to the actual songwriting process, things would only set in motion around early 2015. So, let's have a look at the various phases, trials and tribulations the project went through during all these years!

The lost unrecorded demo (2015-2016)

The first song ever written for "Sonic degeneracy" was "Denial of nature", in a very rough albeit still fundamentally similar form to the final version. From there on, I kept writing and writing, experimenting and going nuts with all the different styles of metal/hardcore/noise I was eager to explore and mesh together, albeit still not being very well-experienced with some of them. Between spring 2015 and winter 2016, I wrote various drafts for songs that would end up years later on the finished album - such as "Reawakened too late" (still in a very clumsy, near-nonsensical shape that needed more than a few tweaks), "Without dogmas" (originally called "No dogmas, no values"), "Sardonic face", "T.W.H.", "Empty idealism", "Hell from within", "Terrorists" (written right after the Bataclan attack), "Surrogate", "Demagogy" and even the "Hellish heaven" instrumental. Unfortunately, I'd also write a few interesting tunes that would end up never seeing the light of day, despite bearing some very cool riffs from what I can remember. I still can recall titles such as "Pallid skeleton", "Bordering on death", "The missing piece" and "Biting the ill hand that feeds"; however, I would end up re-using some of the few riffs I still remembered from those tracks, later on. On the other hand, I was also attempting to write some short grindcore tunes that weren't really that great compared to the ones I'd write later, so I guess it's better to leave 'em forgotten - albeit titles such as "Hipster death" and "Great recession" did already reflect the same attitudes I would express later on.

By early 2016, I was planning to record a crazy, raw-as-fuck demo packed with 30 TRACKS. To be honest, some were still pending to be written - including: the "Jesus Christ pornostar" suite (at the time stupidly called "Jesus Christ blowjob"); the vaguely familiar titles "And the snake said", "Machine man", "Cult of fornication" and "Sonic nihilism"; the conceptually poignant "God is dead - yet his corpse still fuckin' stinks" (which could have been the demo's title-track, and was supposed to tie in with the whole concept of the "Rotgod" moniker in a very interesting, Nietzschian kind of way); last but not least, the gross dark humor piece called "Fucking your wounds" which I'm sure would have turned out hilarious.

However, all of my plans would be shattered by the 2016 hard drive disaster. As a result: Rotgod's first demo would NEVER be recorded, many songs written around that time would NEVER be heard by anyone (I can't even remember them accurately), and many song ideas I had back then would end up NEVER even being developed at all (and sadly, for some reason, those include the "Nietzschian-themed" title-track for the demo, which would've been a really cool idea).

The post-hard drive disaster rewrite (2016-2017)

One saturday night, early 2016, my hard drive crashed - wiping out a huge amount of my data, including nearly all my song drafts. Naive as I was, I had no backup at the time - and the only songs I could recover from the crash were "Denial of nature" and "Demagogy". Many of the songs I had written, I couldn't reconstruct just by heart: I had written them, then left 'em to rot, inside a hard drive from which they had now suddenly disappeared. As a result, so many great ideas had just faded into oblivion, never to be recovered.

After a short period of mourning and demotivation, I started writing again by spring 2016 - piecing back together the few songs I could still more or less remember (sometimes with vast improvements, such in the case of "Without dogmas", "Reawakened too late" and "Hell from within"), re-using some sparse old ideas for new song concepts (for instance: various riffs from "The missing piece" went on to form "And evil smiled at me", while a few riffs from "Pallid skeleton" ended up being used on "Organic machine"), and also gradually coming up with new song ideas while leaving behind some of the yet-to-be-written tracks from the aborted demo plan (a choice I do partially regret in hindsight, at least concerning the "God is dead" idea). Slowly but surely, the "crazy demo" concept morphed into a different, much bigger, even more eclectic vision - i.e. the "Sonic degeneracy" double album, even though at the time I hadn't chosen that name yet, and was using "WAR AGAINST SPIRITUALITY" (big words aren't they) as a working title. More full-fledged thrash songs such as "Uncertain future" and "Inner crisis" would start being added to the bunch, while in the meantime I kept going nuts with savage hardcore metal extremism in the form of "I'm so offended / Triggered!", "Law against christianity", "I don't believe", "Italy is doomed" and "Cult of fornication". Now feeling more confident than ever in mastering the thrashcore/grind/noise formula, by early 2017 I started writing countless noisy micro-songs such as "Social media misanthrope", "Teleological nonsense", "Idealism the fatal bug", "Legalized corruption", "Kill your hipster neighbor" and "Hipster holocaust".

Around summer 2017, I concluded the songwriting process for "Sonic degeneracy" with pivotal tracks such as "Sybaritic metal" (whose riffs I had left developing in my mind since at least 2012), "Fake news apocalypse", "P.S.S.", "New age mumbo-jumbo", "Salomé", "Jump into the void" and, finally, the "Jesus Christ pornostar" suite whose outline I had kept in the back of my mind for years by then, and now all of a sudden I had found the inspiration to flesh out entirely in just FOUR DAYS (!).

Now I had a finished, solid musical/lyrical/narrative foundation to build my record on - and all of these songs would indeed be recorded and end up on the definitive "Sonic degeneracy" album, the way it was planned.

The recordings (2017-2019)

The recording process was the hardest phase in the making of "Sonic degeneracy", without a doubt. I had a private place where to record (offered by a close friend of mine), I knew how I wanted the album to sound (very raw, organic and harsh, in the "80's underground" sense) - but I just didn't know what the fuck I was doing, and it took me a while to figure it out the hard way.

Recordings started in october 2017 and took TWO YEARS (!) to complete, amidst the most disparate misadventures. I had planned to involve different guitarists and bassists in the recording of many songs - but, given the lack of interest by many young musicians from the local "scene" at the time, I ended up doing most of the guitar/bass work by myself, with only a few helps from Sinistro, Jan Spasticus, Krosty, Nfernu and the insanely talented lead guitarist David Distefano.

When it came to the drums, it was a different matter altogether: I had spent so much time trying to find the right "old school" drum sound, starting to lay the first drum tracks only during summer 2018. However, drum recordings proceeded very slowly, still facing many problems and perplexities concerning the inconsistent performances from the drum mics - and, to make matters worse, one of the session drummers decided to quit without warning, leaving half of his songs unrecorded, and forcing me to resort to the most desperate measures. This, along with the exhausting vocal recordings, was really taking a toll on me - but I still kept on going somehow, if only very slowly and lethargically.

Recordings wrapped up in november 2019. "Sonic degeneracy" was finally approaching completion.

Mixing and mastering (2020-2021)

I took the lockdowns during the pandemic as a chance to better focus on mixing the album. During early 2020, I also re-recorded some vocal lines here and there - including an entire song for which I had rewritten the lyrics, which became "MeTaL iS dUmB (aNd I'm So SmArT)", a satire about hipsters and progsnobs infesting the metal scene.

The album's mixing took place between august 2020 and march 2021, while the mastering was done between april and june. Despite my intentions to make "Sonic degeneracy" sound as raw and organic as possible, I still had to compensate in the mixing stage for many shortcomings in the recordings - especially regarding the guitar tone, not to mention the inconsistent drum sound between one song and the other. However, the finished product was close enough to the trademark "Main frame collapse" rawness I had long searched for.

By summer 2021, "Sonic degeneracy" was 100% finished and ready to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting audience.

The early promo singles/EPs (2021-2022)

I started releasing early promo singles during summer 2021, following the schedule I had already planned while still recording the album. Responses were positive: the name picked immediate traction on the web, and the videoclips for "Denial of nature" and "Sybaritic metal" were especially very successful. However, I soon noticed that something more was needed, in order to promote such a massive body of work as the one I had prepared - thus, I had to slightly alter my initial plan. The first step of the "new" plan was to take the "Jesus Christ pornostar" suite and turn it into a separate digital EP, announcing it as some kind of "huge event" coming right around Easter 2022. This song was so crazy and packed with hilarious lore that it needed some proper attention as a work on its own, not just as one of the album's many tracks. Needless to say, the idea worked fantastically: around that time, the Rotgod name started gaining much more traction than ever before.

Step two of the plan would involve the "Sonic degeneracy" album itself.

The "Senseless selection" CD (2022-2023)

Right around early 2022, I joined forces with Barbarie DIY and Lunar Light Records to release the album's physical edition - or, as the subtitle goes, "a senseless selection from the insane complete work". The CD edition of "Sonic degeneracy" would indeed only include 12 tracks from the massive 50-track double behemoth I had cooked up in previous years - focusing on the more easily "digestible", conventionally "metal/punk-ish" songs (therefore excising most of the noisier, more grinding, less accessible material), taking some of the more successful singles released up until that point (primarily, "Denial of nature" and "Sybaritic metal") along with a bunch of yet-to-be-released tunes which could still serve as an accurate representation of the record's overall sound in its different facets: from the rigid, structured thrash of "Uncertain future" to the blasting thrashcore/fastcore of "Legalized corruption" - and even a small delve into the opus' harsher noise/grind side in the form of "Torn between two sides".

Unfortunately, from that point on, more tiresome waiting would be required: the CD was announced in late 2022, but would only materialize ONE YEAR LATER. Meanwhile, during that year, I had the time to release one more single as an appetizer, and even print an extremely limited DIY physical edition of the "Jesus Christ pornostar" EP.

The extended digital edition (2024)

A few months after the CD edition of "Sonic degeneracy" was released, I was finally able to do what I had waited for all these years: and so, my massive anti-musical, anti-trendy underground metal/punk/noise vision was unleashed upon the world in its entirety - in the form of the "extended digital edition" of "Sonic degeneracy".

Released in two parts on Rotgod's Bandcamp page between january and february 2024, this version would at last feature the tracklist I had originally laid out back in 2017, right after finishing writing all the songs for the album and just before starting the recording process. A total of 50 TRACKS, of which 48 are songs I had written between 2015 and 2017 (22 of them already released either as singles or as part of the CD edition) and the remaining two are Sodom covers (one for each of the album's two parts) - all coming together in the gargantuan opus I had been constructing over the course of an entire decade, first only in my head, then as proper tangible recordings. A challenging, insane experience for sure, both for me and for those listening - but you can't say I didn't take the time to present it properly to you guys!

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