Ron Jarzombek is a name that’s too seldom heard outside of progressive metal circles, despite his extensive metal legacy. Sure, a handful of people may be familiar with Blotted Science — the so-called “supergroup” of which he is a part — but by and large, even those who know Blotted Science are unfamiliar with the man himself.

Jarzombek began his musical work with the underrated-yet-incredibly-influential prog band Watchtower in the 80s, then delved into the realm of technical instrumental music with Spastic Ink in the 90s and 2000s. Blotted Science’s debut, The Machinations of Dementia, was released in 2007, and  also featured Cannibal Corpse’s Alex Webster (who is still in the band) and Behold… The Arctopus’ Charlie Zeleny (who is not).

That band is now back after four years (with a new drummer, Obscura’s Hannes Grossman, to boot!) to release The Animation of Entomology, an EP centered around bugs and horror — so much that the songs were actually written to already-existing videos as kind of horror movie scores. You can see the video for the first one, “Cretaceous Chasm,” here; the second one, “Vermicular Asphixiation,” is here.

I Skyped with Ron last week to discuss the new EP and ended up learning a lot about Jarzombek’s musical history, Blotted Science, Jarzombek’s views on the current metal scene, and ESPN exercise videos.

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MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Colin Marston from Krallice and Behold… The Arctopus…

Colin Marston is one of the youngest guitarists on our list, and his primary creative outlets (Krallice, Dysrhythmia, Behold…the Arctopus) haven’t yet reached the legendary status of so many of the other bands graced by the other 24 inductees. But in terms of his stylistic breadth and the scope of his abilities, Marston is in a league of his own.

There isn’t a signature Colin Marston guitar sound or style. Instead, Marston expertly adapts his talents to fit the project in question. On one end of the spectrum is Byla, the ambient guitar duo that Marston shares with Kevin Hufnagel; the project is all about abstraction and texture. On the other end is Behold…the Arctopus, a band that thrives on over-the-top virtuosity, deployed in the wackiest of ways – and let’s not forget that Marston executes all of Behold…’s atonal tone rows on a 12-string Warr guitar, which means he’s essentially shredding on two instruments at once. Somewhere in between those two poles is Krallice, in which Marston’s guitar lines intertwine with Mick Barr’s, creating ever-shifting harmonic patterns that tickle the ears like few black metal bands do. No matter what the guitar idiom, Marston has mastered it. No wonder that Luc Lemay asked him to join Gorguts as bassist. By the looks of the live footage from Gorguts’ 2010 mini-tour, it would seem like Marston’s fitting in just fine.

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Colin Marston of Behold… The Arctopus, Krallice, Gorguts and Dysrhythmia is one of those incredibly talented dudes who does it all and makes my jealousy bones fill with tension. Aside from being an incredibly accomplished guitarist and bassist and a member of FOUR (!) sweet bands that are all active, he runs his own studio in Queens, NY where he and his Newsted have recorded, produced and mixed countless metal albums. Whatever assclown is on the cover of your favorite guitar magazine this month, he probably isn’t half as talented and versatile as Marston.

The Deciblog has premiered a video of Marston taking Scion A/V on a tour through his studio, and since we delight in this kind of nerdery and know you will too we figure it’s highly worthy of a re-post. Colin talks about his guitars (look at that Warr!), his amp setup, how his studio is set up and his thoughts on the digital vs. analog recording debate. I recommend full-screening this video for maximum dorkery.

-VN

It’s been three years since Blotted Science released their one and only album, the erection-inducing The Machinations of Dementia, and one could be forgiven for fearing that we might never again hear from this actually-as-cool-as-it-sounds supergroup. But fear not, my fellow lovers of extreme music! Metal Injection tells me that Ron Jarzombek has revealed that the band is working on a new, four-song, twenty-two minute EP! And while a full-length would obviously be preferable, at this point I think I speak for all Blotted Science fans when I say, “We’ll take what we can get.”

But wait! There’s more! The group has a new drummer! Says Jarzombek:

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I was catching up on my Deciblog today when I came across the below video for “And Clash and Clash of Hoof and Heel,” by Sailors with Wax Wings. The outfit is apparently a side-project for Pyramids’ R. Loren, so I now have to admit that although our friend Corey Mitchell is a Pyramids fan, I really don’t know much about the band and can’t comment on them. But I can say that between the quality of the below song and the list of guests who apparently appear on the Sailors with Wax Wings album (including but not limited to Katatonia’s Jonas Renkse, Swans’ Ted Parsons, My Dying Bride’s Aaron Stainthorpe, and Colin “Best Haircut EVER” Marston from Krallice, Dysrhythmia, Gorguts, Behold… The Arctopus, and a million other bands), I plan to check this record out ASAP.

As for the video itself, well… it’s pretty bizarre. I kept expecting there be some kind of “twist” or whatever, but, nope. Just pure, unadulterated strangeness. Still, I was never able to take my eyes off of it… I find it oddly compelling. Hypnotic, even. And, like I said, I dig the music.

Check this out, then weigh in with your thoughts in the comments section below.

-AR

As a writer for MetalSucks, I find it pretty shocking that there are pretty much no mentions at all of Ron Jarzombek. Many of you probably don’t even know who he is. So I feel that it’s my duty to enlighten those who don’t. You may have heard of Blotted Science, the supergroup composed of Alex Webster from Cannibal Corpse on bass, Chris Adler from Lamb of God on drums (who was later replaced by Charlie Zeleny of Behold…the Arctopus), and Ron Jarzombek on guitar. They’ve only released one album, The Machinations of Dementia, but it received a lot of praise and the band has said that they’re in the process of writing another album. But even though Blotted Science is the least prolific of Jarzombek’s projects, it’s the most well-known and the most recent.

Jarzombek has been making insane shred-tastic metal albums as a solo artist as well as in the bands Spastic Ink and Watchtower (among others) since 1987. He’s guested on albums by Obscura, Jeff Loomis, and Gordian Knot. Yet still, people don’t know about him. This has to change. Just watch some of the videos below if you don’t believe me – I’ve provided a few from his various projects.

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So Vince and I checked out Gorguts, Portal, and Krallice (and, yes, some of Bloody freakin’ Panda) last night… needless to say, it was an all-around excellent experience. I’m gonna try and get a review of Portal’s performance up later today, because I think they specifically deserve some attention, so unique is their stage show. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t show Gorguts and Krallice some love, too, ’cause those bands kill.

The good news/bad news of the evening was that Gorguts mainman Luc Lemay announced from the stage that while he and the rest of the group’s current line-up (which includes Dysrhythmia’s Kevin Hufnagel on guitar, Krallice/Behold… the Arctopus’ Colin Marston on bass, and Origin’s John Longstreth on drums) are working on a new album (as expected), they won’t hit the studio until “late fall” or “Christmas,” which means this release obviously won’t see the light of day ’til 2011.

But they did perform a new song, which, for now, is simply called “Number Three;” and they’ve been performing it this entire tour, I guess, ’cause our buddies over at Metal Injection have some righteous footage of the band playing it in Boston earlier this week. Check it out:

Gorguts, Krallice, and Portal all play Philly tonight and Maryland Deathfest this weekend. You absolutely should not miss them.

-AR

Prior to having my mind blown by Krallice at this past February’s Scion Rock Fest in Atlanta, I’d written off the NYC-based black metal quartet as Hipster Metal. Boy was I wrong. Anton OyVey and I stood in absolute astonishment as a band whose set we’d happened upon out of curiosity completely blew us away and stole the show of the entire day. That their brand new song has premiered on Stereogum doesn’t do much to dispel the “hipster” tag from much of their fanbase, but it doesn’t mean you should pay any less attention to them; Krallice are the real deal and they’re fucking fantastic. Besides which, I’m starting to doubt the very notion of “hipster metal” anyway; what about a band that writes music and lives together in the woods of the Pacific Northwest makes them any more genuine and qualified to write black metal than a band whose members grew up in the rough and tumble concrete jungle of 1980s New York? Both seem like perfectly genuine and inspiring influences to me.

Case in point: the 11-minute title track of their new record Dimensional Bleedthrough, out November 10th on Profound Lore. As Stereogum’s Brandon Stosuy says, “Such fucking riffs!”, and that’s exactly it. For those new to Krallice, the band features Colin Marston of Behold…the Arctopus and Dysrhythmia, Mick Barr of Orthrelm, Bloody Panda’s Lev Weinstein, and now full-time bassist/co-vocalist Nick McMaster. Stream the new track at Stereogum, then come on back here and tell us what you think.

-VN

Dysrhythmia are the Kevin Bacon of metal. The band’s connected to Behold…the Arctopus, Krallice, Spastic Ink and Gorguts within one degree of separation, Cannibal Corpse, Origin, Bloody Panda, The Red Chord, Orthrelm and Watchtower by another. Guitarist Kevin Hufnagel and bassist Colin Marston both have solo projects, and play together in the ambient guitar duo Byla. Try to draw a Dysrhythmia family tree, and you’d end up with a massive tangle of nodes and lines that resembles one of those three-dimensional diagrams of a complex molecule. Converted into notes, it would probably sound like the music on Dysrhythmia’s fifth album, Psychic Maps.

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It’s bloody amazing how much more accepted intelligent aggressive music has become, doncha think? Of course there are always still the outright pussballz in any audience who start trembling every time a vocalist strays ever so slightly away from straight-up singing into yelling, screaming, or dare I even say *growling* territory (I’m sadly lookin at so many of the GFs out there, mine included)–but it seems like these daze everyone and their mom’s moms–even the grimier-than-thou hipsterati–have caught on to rocking significantly harder than “hard rock”. And so it stands to reason that the smartie-fartie Encyclopedia Browns of the world, on both the musician and fan side of the monitors, are proudly representing brainiac metal with their hearts and (large) minds, even if the music is not always so accessible as a result of dem der smarts.

Take Intronaut, for example — who incidentally have a brand-new album, Prehistoricisms, out TODAY (look for my review later in the week) — in my esteemed opinion one of the most intelligent of the heady metal bands out there nowadays: skilled, fluid players who are comfortable grooving in all sorts of odd time signatures…these guys have been called “the future of metal” by Decibel Magazine (or Revolver, honestly can’t remember, please forgive me) and deservedly so, but really how far can the band’s scope reach with so much bloomin… headiness in tow?

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