Disma Talks Death Metal, French Moshing, and Chicken Suits in the Circle Pit
Categories: Concert Preview, Interviews
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But no matter how quickly the 305's calendar fills with assorted acts, flown in from all over the country being to melt faces, empty bowels, and inspire at least a dozen bangovers, the question remains ... Is Speedfreek faster than Shawn Eldridge, drummer for New Jersey death metal troupe Disma?
Keeping with his band's ultra-prestigious pedigree (which includes, most notably, ex-members of death metal icons Incantation), Eldridge does his part to set a breakneck pace while also adding flourishes from more recently popularized subgenres like grindcore and sludge.
See also:
-Hibernus Mortis's Ralf Varela Talks Florida Death Metal and His Band's Legacy of Brutality
Crossfade: The tag thrown around a lot for Disma is death metal. Some bands champion their subgenre like an ideology or belief system. And others shy away from descriptors. How do you relate to genre?
I don't think you can call us anything but death metal. We don't put anything else with it. Some bands are "technical death metal." Some are "old-school death metal." We just kind of play what we think of as death metal. It works.
What are the key things that distinguish death metal from other extreme music styles like black metal or grind?
The lower tuning. A lot of the Swedish and Finnish bands, on their demos, tuned really low. And then they all started tuning up. So that was something we wanted to keep: We used a lower tuning. And not having everything just fast. Having a sense of dynamics that maybe somewhere along the line got lost with certain bands. Parts that are simply slow and not just blast beats in every part.
Did you guys come up in a punk, hardcore, and metal scene? Or was it more of a metal scene?
The four other guys are a bit older than I am. Daryl grew up in more of a punk/hardcore scene. And so did Randy, our bass player. Bill Venner definitely came up more in the metal scene. Craig started in the metal scene and got involved with the industrial scene also. But there's always been some metal coming up from the band's members. I grew up with metal and punk equally.
There was an era when death metal was the dominant paradigm. But these days, the most popular and/or critically acclaimed falls on a spectrum of lumbering sludge, stoner, and doom pitted against black metal, dbeat, and crust. At this point, is death metal a throwback style?
We're not intending to do certain things, like, "the old way." There are elements of grind and sludge in our music. There's not as much of a difference between genres and fans anymore. Everyone listens to a bit of everything.
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Churchill's Pub
5501 NE 2nd Ave., Miami, FL
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