Recording on the next Fireaxe CD, "Food for the Gods" is finally completed. It has been a long hard road, over two years in the making and at least a year before that planning and compiling a solid digital home studio. At times it looked like the final day of recording would never come, especially when my own body decided to try and kill me, but the last note has been put in its place and my guitars, keyboard, and microphone are once again at rest. Mixing, mastering, and a whole lot of drawing remains, but the hard part is finally done.

A lot has happened between the beginning of recording and now. I started laying down the tracks for the first song in August, 2001. The song was about ancient Assyria and I had decided to add a strong Middle Eastern flair to the music and vocals. Not long after I started recording came the world shaking events of September 11th and all of the sudden all things Arabic were a target of derision and suspicion. Now, most of what I record goes directly into the sound card of my Mac. I play the guitars through an amplifier simulator to give them body and the drum sounds come out of a machine, so none of my neighbors can hear what I'm doing, which is important since I live in an apartment and I would be kicked out if I insisted on playing a real drum set and belting out take after take of guitar solos through a Marshall stack cranked up to 10. However, the vocals I cannot record direct, and since my singing style is what could be called 'operatic' I need to sing as loud as I can to get the sound that I want. Over the years my voice has become very strong and it carries considerably beyond the walls of my humble studio. So here it is in the days and weeks after 9/11 and I am doing this Arabic wailing at the top of my lungs for all to hear. I half expected the FBI to show up at my door after one of my flag-waving neighbors reported me for performing suspicious activities. I can imagine them overhearing me and saying "Listen to that! Holy Shit! We got one of them Muslim terrorists living right next door!" Fortunately nothing happened.

Another similar test came when I was recording the lyrics for the song "Atrocity". As the title suggests this is a horrifying song, and I pulled no punches with the graphic nature of the lyrics. It is utterly brutal. The lead in paints the initial picture and it gets darker and darker as it goes on:

"No atrocity is complete without a witness to my crime.
Take and innocent child, open his eyes, and fill them with such horrors."

I live in an apartment complex with plenty of young children running around whose parents, at least some of them, are rather paranoid about child molesters. So here I am singing these gory lines about rape, dismemberment, and sadism, over and over again at the top of my lungs, trying to get them right, and wondering all the time when the police were going to come and take me away in handcuffs or a straight-jacket. But still, there were no knocks at my door. My neighbors must be deaf.

The last song I recorded confirmed this theory. There's this wonderful chorus I have in "Storm the Walls" that the legions of damned souls chant in preparation for an attack on heaven. It goes like this:

"Kill, kill, kill the righteous.
Burn, burn, burn the holy.
Spill their blood. Devour their souls.
Smash them, crush them, kill and destroy!"

I had to repeat the chorus four times on five tracks plus numerous extra takes to get exactly what I wanted. How could it not sound to anyone nearby like I was performing some sort of Satanic ritual or I had completely lost my mind? And some of the lines in "The Rape of Heaven" would curdle the blood of anyone save for those who listen to Black Metal music while reading Alistair Crowley. Still, not one complaint. In a way it was disappointing. Has the world become too calloused? Perhaps I'm just not nearly as graphic as I think I am. I mean, modern music has become very brutal. After a few decades of the heaviest bands one-upping each other trying to be the nastiest band in the world, some seriously sick shit has been produced. So portraying a man getting his entrails pulled out of his body during the inquisition is probably just minor league stuff these days. The big league bands can get away with seemingly anything, but then they are backed by highly paid industry lawyers and it's also somewhat hard to understand what they are singing in the first place. In Death and Black metal it is the accepted style to sing as if you were Cookie Monster with a mouth full of Oreos. You can't tell what the words are nor even what language is being sung, which works to the benefit of the many European Black Metal bands. In Gangster Rap the vocalist is usually talking in a rhythm an octave below the normal singing range and gets drowned out by the deafening percussion. In stark contrast to those two styles I enunciate every word, sing in a clear and penetrating tone, and put the vocals up front in the mix. I feel that the words are an important part of Fireaxe music so I make sure that you hear all of them. So when angels are getting their wings ripped off by rampaging demons, you'll hear all about it whether you want to or not. And even if you miss out, it will all be printed out on the lyrics sheet in every gory detail. But as brutal as it is, I know that there will be critics out there who will be disappointed that I didn't go far enough. Sure, nobody rips off Christ's head and shits down his neck, so if that's what gets you off then you should look elsewhere. Perhaps Liberia is a good place to start.

Still, I worry, probably far too much, about becoming the target of some fanatical Christian Crusader or the Department of Homeland inSecurity. There's more than enough content in "Food for the Gods" to make the paranoid believe that I am a threat to America. To all you non-Americans out there reading this I should explain a little bit about the state of things here in the US. Although the laws are in place which allow a police state, thanks to the USA PATRIOT act which was passed with little debate and even less knowledge of the contents by terrified senators and representative, we have yet to descend into one. Bush and Ashcroft have, and have used, the power to declare anyone, even US citizens, as "enemy combatants" who then lose all their rights to due process. They can be held incommunicado indefinitely and neither Bush nor Ashcroft need to provide any evidence of guilt. But aside from these few cases, the persecution of people who are anti-war and/or anti-Bush is openly condoned and occurs on a regular basis in the form of police harassment, job loss, and public ridicule in the media. All this persecution will be taken to more aggressive level should another major terrorist attack occur on US soil. The US is a country which is slowly losing it's sanity. The desire to "do justice" to any perceived wrong-doer in a severe way is growing more powerful in all Americans. For now this amounts to people yelling, insulting, and degrading each other on radio, television, and other media. There's no healthy debate going on, it's just people venting their anger, and the release doesn't make the basic problems go away. But in this environment of frayed nerves and vengeful desires something like "Food for the Gods" could attract a whole lot of negative attention in a big hurry. I doubt that it will seeing as how all the threats towards violent video games and movies have amounted to nothing, and as how an independently produced recording will likely never get any publicity, but if it does I am prepared to go to the mat with the lunatics who would try to attack and debase me.

On a lighter note I'm currently in the mixing stage of "Food for the Gods" and I am very pleased with the sound that I am getting out of my digital studio. All tolled I've spent less than five thousand dollars on equipment and software and in today's world of high-tech, high-priced toys that is a mere pittance. My amp simulator has produced a nice warm and full sound that a lot of people are going to mistake for a live recording. The keyboard and drum sounds are high fidelity samples and they sound great too. I'm also learning more of the tricks of the sound engineering trade and I've crafted a sound that is dynamic, rich, and strong. I can't say that it is as good as what you get from a CD produced in a million dollar studio, nor can I say that it will sound good on every system, but if you have a good set of speakers or a nice pair of headphones you can sit back and enjoy some spectacular epic metal music.

As annoying as it is I can't deny that sound quality is a big part of music. When I released "A Dream of Death", and had to endure reading review after review harping on the harsh nature of the mix on the CD, I knew that I couldn't fight the system. It's true that people are spoiled on the anti-septic sound of CDs and DDD recording methods. Modern techniques allow you to get a perfect bass sound with little or no distortion, produce clean and sonically isolated sounds for each instrument, and doctor vocals to the point where no human could ever produce such sounds but which grab the listener's attention and take his or her breath away. Today's CD sound can come out of any speaker, no matter how tinny or crappy, and sound rich, so no one bothers to get a good sound system anymore. As a result when you play something recorded decades ago, or something recorded at your local studio, after playing something recorded using state-of-the-art methods, it sounds weak. Your ears like the bright and booming sound of a modern CD much better than the muddy sound of anything that came before it. As a result, modern music has evolved to take advantage of modern methods. Hard rock bands pound away on the listener mercilessly. Every instrument is loud and in your face at the same time. Thrash metal from the 80's got crowded and impenetrable when they recorded intense songs, but 00's hardcore comes through in a way that is impossible to achieve in any setting save for a modern digital studio. Even live music pales in comparison to a modern studio recording. The difference translates into appreciation and sales which is why the major labels spend so much on production. Such is the way of the world.

But something is certainly getting lost in all the madness, and that something is the most basic element of art. Art is all about communicating emotions and meaning, and everything else added to the art form serves as a diversion from that central meaning. When your focus shifts to crafting a more wicked sound than everyone else, being more outrageous than the reigning bad boys, appealing to an affluent demographic, writing songs similar to your idols, or restricting yourself from playing styles that aren't macho, popular, or "in", a part of your message gets lost. Whenever I tried to write songs for reasons other than saying what I wanted to say they always came out flat, stale, and uninspired. Most of what I hear on the radio sounds like that. So instead I start with the message that I want to convey and let that message dictate what the music sounds like. If the storyline has an army approaching a town I put in a march. In the subsequent attack I put in parts that are fast and aggressively. In the aftermath I put music that is either glorious and triumphant, or sad and full of regret. The styles I play are constantly changing throughout the entire work, from ones that I've done in previous CDs, to many new ones I've never tried before. There's nothing new about this approach, classical music composers have been doing it for centuries, which explains why "Food for the Gods" sounds a lot like classical music played with modern instruments. I went where the story wanted to go and it took me to places I never imagined I'd go. I think I may have pioneered both Persian and Yiddish metal as well as added new possibilities for Christian and Black metal. The CDs contain diverse elements such as Arabic wailing, a Gregorian chant, readings from obelisks carved in antiquity, the "Lord's Prayer" and other verses from the bible, a vocal only "Malediction" to the goddess Kali, quotes from many historical figures as well as George W. Bush, two guitar solo duels, a church pipe organ, a brass and guitar section introduction, and all manner of vocal styles. Somehow it all comes together seamlessly, flowing from one style to the next on an epic journey from the ancient past to the dark future. Through it all the messages that I want to convey come through loud and clear since I never had to, nor wanted to, compromise on what I wanted to say. Rest assured that "Food for the Gods" is 3 CDs of 100% inspired music. There is no filler. It's all straight from the heart.