Bellum infinitum - the tenth anniversary
posted on 24 Dec 2009 under category History
Sadly, this post can’t be accompanying an announcement that some sort of special release is now available to commemorate the event, but in a little under a week it will be ten years since I unleashed Rampage’s Bellum Infinitum on the underground. It seems like a long time, and feels like it in many ways, but there are some details about the writing and arranging and recording that stick with me as if it were yesterday.
If you want to talk about song genesis, some of it is 13 years old, or even older, as is the inspiration, but I always connect it with that early time for both Rampage and Unsung Heroes Records, the year 1999, when I started to have a vision for doing things beyond just my home studio and the people I knew who liked metal. The year 1999 started with me having just put out the Misogyny EP and This End Up the year before. This End Up was particularly new, as it was just released on Halloween, and I spent a good deal of the next couple of months making copies for people and talking it up in every online spot I could (and, hard as it is to believe, there weren’t that many back then). I had a few pen-pals from the old paper days, and the Internet was just another way to connect with a few people, not a primary means of distribution.
I rang in 1999 putting the finishing touches on a couple of random covers and “Doom Metal”, the first song on what would have been the upcoming doom metal album Rampage was working on. It was my third time around doing recording sessions, and I was getting a lot better at recording things quickly and at improving sounds and tracking and such, making things sound better. The amount of growth from Misogyny to TEU didn’t prepare me for how much better “Doom Metal” sounded.
Really, after finishing TEU, I could have gone either with Doom Metal or Bellum, but I thought that Bellum, being more intricate musically, would require me honing my craft by recording another album first. However, as anyone who bought Monolith… already knows, Doom Metal (the album) wasn’t finished yet. But when I heard the quality jump in that one song I got impatient; I thought I could make Bellum work. As it turns out, however, I DID get another album out first - the fake live album Cummin’ Atcha Live - which leads to how I rethought the Internet as a publicity tool. And it all comes back to Jason Gortician.
Jason was one of those ‘net people who turned into a penpal/tapetrader in the embryonic stage of UHR and Rampage. He heard lots of the boombox demo stuff and I heard the same kind of thing from Gortician. He was one of our biggest champions early on, giving us positive reviews of even those crude boombox things and then glowing reviews of Misogyny and TEU. I knew he was chomping at the bit to hear Bellum, but in the meantime he was also at work publicizing his band Gortician, exclusively through online media BLITZING. And I do mean blitzing, relentlessly hitting every Usenet group and chatroom he could, using the infant-stage MP3.com as a soundclip host - he had it down pat. So, when he managed to get KCUF internet underground radio (a podcast before the word ‘podcast’ was coined) to play Gortician live on the air, I knew I had to do the same thing - and thus the first half of 1999 was spent with me planning and tracking out the fake live album. Not that it’s not related to the current story, of course (and I’m glossing over a lot - but there will be future posts on that), because I used the live album as a guinea pig for more advanced recording techniques - live micing the guitars and bass, different vocal recording techniques, running the drums in stereo instead of mono from my pre-direct-X soundcard… It took longer than I wanted it to, but the experience was well worth it.
And so July came around, the recording hard drive was now empty, and the tracking for Bellum began, and carried on throughout the rest of the year. It was the first thing I recorded with my (then-)new Jackson V, and I ended up using it on every guitar track. I remember bass problems (both tonal and intonation) causing me to have to trash most of my first-take basslines. I remember also that planning out the multiple guitar parts was mostly painless - I had been planning them in my head for so long that I knew exactly what I wanted, and by then I’d been playing for so long, and gained all that experience with the previous recordings, that what I recorded in the first two takes or so usually matched up with what was in my head.
Sadly, my mixing notes are now gone, but I think I had finished the recording by Thanksgiving that year, and so given that I released something as soon as I had a final mix I was happy with I suspect that I spent a month mixing. The details of that are sketchy, in some ways, but I remember the process with great clarity. Because my PC and software were so primitive I had to mix down to an external source, and the only decent tape deck in the house was in the living room, about 10 feet from my PC. I bought special cables just to string my PC-sound-out all the way into the living room to do mixes, and I’d have to run to one room, hit play, go to the other, hit record, and hope that I left enough lead time to make it. Then, when a mix was done, I spent the next few days listening to it in my shitty walkman in the car while driving to work. Even though it’s been years since I’ve driven the I-675-Moreland Avenue corridor in SE Atlanta, when I play Bellum I can recall exactly the various car parks, junkyards, landfills, and truck yards along the way. And even the Moreland Drive-in Theater, where decades ago my brother took me to see the remake of Night of the Living Dead.
The rerecording (to be released, eventually, as Bellum Aeternum) is itself about four years old now, but despite the warts on the original version I’m still pretty proud and pleased with how Bellum Infinitum turned out. If you’ve got it, give it a spin on December 28 and tell me what you think.
(In mid-2009 I realized my old Livejournal blog was moribund, and for some reason I became unhappy with the posts and similar lack of direction and updates on my personal blog on Blogspot. I got the bright idea to recast my Blogspot blog as a music blog (titled after the line from the Sabbath song Megalomania - “A Trip Inside a Separate Mind”), deleting most of the content there that I was unhappy with. I didn’t update that Blogspot music blog as much, but the articles I wrote there were longer and more in-depth, as you can see here.
As for the content of this particular post, again I have to smirk at my optimism in getting Bellum Aeternum released, and of course wonder about what to do with those rerecordings…)