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MONSTROSITY – Dark Matter Invocation
Anthony Morgan
September 2018


Monstrosity 2018 (l-r): Mark English, Lee Harrison, Mike Hrubovcak, Mike Poggione and Matt Barnes


Florida-based death metal outfit Monstrosity began authoring compositions for a sixth full-length studio album during 2011, a demo rendition of ‘Eyes Upon The Abyss’ being the first to emerge from said writing sessions. It wouldn’t be until seven years later that a fully realised platter would emerge, the resultant September 2018 affair titled The Passage Of Existence.

“I did a demo of ‘Eyes Upon The Abyss’, and then I sent that off to my other guitar player, Matt Barnes,” continues Lee Harrison, drummer and co-founder of Monstrosity. “Then I started working with Mark English on the second song, which was ‘Kingdom Of Fire’, and pretty much worked on that in the band room. We wrote it and then sort of tore it apart, like ripped up the parts a little bit, changed stuff around, and then came back to it a little later. We did that like three or four times, and then that song was finished. From 2011 to about 2015 is when the songs were written.”

Eleven years separate the respective issues of The Passage Of Existence and April 2007’s Spiritual Apocalypse, causing fans to wonder as to the reasons behind the length of time taken. “Nothing really special took long with the songs,” the sticksman divulges. “Part of the problem or the issue was the way we recorded the album. I did the drum tracks, which I spent about a week on. I spent two days getting tones, and then another four days getting the tracks and just making sure everything was good. Then we did the guitars in our home studio. So, we really weren’t pressured by the clock so much.

“That dragged things out a little bit, but at the same time, it also made it a better album because we had a little more time. It also dragged things out, though. Then the artwork, things got dragged out with the artwork. There was more time spent working out the label situation, and doing all of that. It just kind of all added up. We normally take four years between each album. This was obviously a little longer, but it really didn’t seem like it. It just seemed like time flew by a little quicker this time, but there was nothing in particular that really happened which slowed everything down. It was kind of the way that it all worked.”

Eleven years seems like a great length of time. “Yeah, sure,” Lee understands. “Like I said though, we’re not super-worried about time constraints. There are no deadlines. We’re not worried about that so much. The bottom line is we want a good record; we got that by taking a little longer, but it’s the end result that matters.”

Songwriting contributions for The Passage Of Existence included the involvement of various band personnel. “For ‘Eyes Upon The Abyss’ for example, I did a version with me where I play everything – the bass, the guitar,” the rhythmist cites. “I didn’t do the vocals, but I did everything else, basically. I did a scratch track for a guitar solo just so I can hear what my ideas are, for example. I gave that to Matt Barnes, and he ended up taking the riffs. They still have the same flavour, but they’re just a little more beefed up and a little more intricate, a little more technical. He’s a better guitar player, and I wanted the guitar riffs to be solid. He does, too. He’s the one who’s got to play the guitar parts live, so I want him to be happy, and that’s just how we did it.

“For ‘Kingdom Of Fire’, we did some demos, but it was mostly just me and Mark. I didn’t play any guitar on those demos – Mark did all of that. It kind of depends on whose song it is. For example, Matt Barnes sent ‘Cosmic Pandemia’. He sent rhythm tracks with a click, and then I imported them into my computer. Then I added a drum machine version of kind of what I wanted to do, and then me and Mark took it to the band room. We played it, and made some minor changes maybe. For the most part though, that’s kind of how it was for that song.


“Once we had that, then I sent those songs up to Mike Hrubovcak, the singer. He’d have lyrics for them, do a demo, and then he’d send that back. Right before we recorded the final album, I ended up going through, just kind of double-checking the lyrics and making changes here and there. I was just making them as best as we could; I tried to shake them up, and trim the fat so to speak.”

Although The Passage Of Existence marks the first Monstrosity full-length to include the services of guitarist Matt Barnes, Matt Barnes’ entry into the ranks dates back to 2010. “With Spiritual Apocalypse, we used several guitar players when we did the touring,” Lee remembers. “We had Mike’s brother J.J. – he did some shows on second guitar – and then we had a guy named Matt Moore, who was from Absu. He also plays with Rumpelstiltskingrinder out of Philadelphia, and he was also a friend of Mike Hrubovcak’s, the singer. That’s how we got in touch with him, but then pretty much Matt Moore was going to Absu. They were going to be doing other things, so we needed another guitar player.

“We were talking with Rand Burkey, formerly from Atheist. He doesn’t read tablature, and we really didn’t want to sit there and teach somebody the songs. In the meantime, we had given Matt Barnes the tablatures, and he learned the songs. He pretty much came in knowing the songs, and that was the difference between him and Rand Burkey, for example. Rand Burkey, we would’ve had to have shown him the songs riff by riff. This guy does his homework in his own time, where we don’t have to sit there and spend some time on it. It was just easier, and just made it an obvious choice.”

That obvious choice in the shape of Matt Barnes lent an important contribution towards The Passage Of Existence, as did each of Monstrosity’s members. Of the record’s various facets, meanwhile, the percussionist is particularly enthused regarding its production. “To me, it’s the best production that we’ve done,” he compliments. “We spent a lot of time making sure that everything is good. For the last albums, pretty much all of the Morrisound records were done in 12-hour blocks, like the drums. We were just a little more focused on the time. Usually, we spent maybe six hours, maybe 12 at the most, just getting the drum tones from the room before we started recording.

“For this album, we spent two days, maybe three days before we really started tracking. We would record a little bit, change our toms, change our cymbals, record a little bit more, and then really fine-tune the cymbals and the drums that we were using. We tried all kinds of different tom configurations. We had two Yamaha kits that we used basically, and mixed and matched those together. If one tom didn’t sound good, we’d try one from the other kit, and just made sure that everything was sounding good. We’d record a little bit, listen to it, listen to the old version, listen to the new version, compare them, see what’s good, see what’s bad, and change out anything that we didn’t like. So, that’s kind of like a little trial and error.

“Trying to do that, it takes longer. It’s the most tedious album I’ve ever done, for sure, as far as changing things, and trying to deal with just nuance and detail. That’s kind of how that worked. For this album, Jason Suecof – the engineer and owner of the studio – more or less gave me a deal. I gave him a set price for a week. We had a week to do the drums, but then if we needed more time, I could go over. For the most part though, it was done in a week. It was the same way we did Terrorizer (Caustic Attack, due in October 2018). You’re not crunched by time; you do a track, go back to his house for a while, watch a little TV, chill out and relax with the air conditioner, and then come back and do a little more. It was a relaxed atmosphere, instead of being stressed out and trying to do everything in one day. That was one of the main differences.

“As far as the songs themselves, Spiritual Apocalypse was me and Mark English mostly. With this album, we had Matt Barnes in there, so there was that third element. We pretty much shared the songwriting equally. I had three or four songs, Mark had three or four songs, and Matt had three or four songs. We’d kind of make changes here and there on each song, but for the most part, mostly everything kind of stayed the same. We made some small changes here and there though, and that’s the difference – just being a little more open to other people’s ideas. That’s pretty much it.”


Monstrosity 2018 (l-r): Mike Poggione, Mark English, Lee Harrison, Mike
Hrubovcak and Matt Barnes

Certain nuances exist within the framework of each and every track. “We just want people to be able to listen to it and hear everything,” Lee reasons. “Me and Mark English in particular, even Matt, we’re just gear heads. We’re all about whatever the latest gear is; the latest pedals, the latest drum sounds, and production things. We’re all about making a really good sounding record. To me, that’s half the battle. If it sounds good, it sounds good. From there, with the songwriting and everything else, it at least has the chance to be taken seriously. I just notice when bands don’t concern themselves with the production, sometimes it can affect the songs. The songs are a part of the production. Even though it’s a different element, that’s why I think that the production is so valuable. That’s why we spent so much time on it. To me, that’s half the battle.”

Assisting with the likes of gear and so on as it related to the drumming department was producer Jason Suecof, as the musician referenced, with those respective parts being tracked at Audiohammer Studios in Sanford, Florida. “Definitely more relaxed,” he judges of working with Jason Suecof. “Like I was saying, we weren’t pressed for time in the studio because of money. That was kind of the issue the last time. When we did Spiritual Apocalypse, we had two rooms going at the same time. We had the A room where we were recording bass, in the B room we were recording vocals, and then we were doing some guitar leads. So, it was kind of like a rush. We had a little more of a deadline with that because we had to go to Mexico, and so we were a little more time conscious. We were a little more pressed for time on that particular album.

“With this album, like I said, we just had more time. We had more freedom to kind of make sure that everything was good, and we were really happy with everything. This album, we mixed with Mark Lewis. It was done at the same studio, but he’s a different engineer. The way that we did it with him was basically once we had the drums, we had the guitar tracks, the bass tracks, and all of the vocals, everything. We emailed that off to Mark Lewis, and then he would do the mix on his own. Then he would send us basically mp3s of the mixes to check out, and then we could make changes from there. That was kind of nice. Normally at Morrisound, you end up sitting there through all of the tedious stuff. It takes time to go through each track; you have to cue it all up, set the panning, and set the volumes, and set everything right. You can kind of get bored, and you kind of lose your perspective of how things are supposed to sound.

“Even on the first album, Imperial Doom (May 1992), when we did that album, they had the killer speakers that they would play us the songs through. It sounds great when you’re in the studio, but then when you get home and listen to it on your home stereo or whatever. It just doesn’t sound the same, but it’s just natural that things go like that. For In Dark Purity (May 1999), I actually brought a little radio from home that I’m used to listening to. We’d listen to it, we’d mix it in, and then we’d listen to it on my little radio. I could just judge it better, that what I’m hearing is what is actually on the tape. It just wasn’t like that on the first album. What I was hearing sounded great in the studio, even Millennium (August 1996). Millennium sounded phenomenal in the studio, but once we got it out of the studio, it just didn’t have that fullness of the bass response that I was hearing in the studio.

“That was one thing with this album. It made it nice, because I was hearing it on my own speakers and I could trust what I was hearing. It cut me out of doing all of the tedious work. That made it nice. To be honest, those guys understand what we’re trying to go for. So, it pretty much came in almost finished, but it wasn’t totally. Most of the time on mixing, it was actually dealing with the bass, the guitar. We wanted to make sure that with this album, the bass was definitely heard and had its own voice, instead of on the previous albums. A lot of times the bass player played the guitar riffs in kind of unison, and so when you turn that up, all you’re doing is adding the bass but it’s not really going anywhere.

“It tends to make the sound just a little bit more muddy, so with this album, we wanted to make sure that the bass player (Mike Poggione) was playing different parts from the guitar parts. We wanted the bass lines to be their own thing; play with the drums more, play with the kick-drums. By doing that, it makes it so that we can turn up the bass a little louder, and it doesn’t crunch the guitars and it doesn’t step on the guitar frequencies. So, we wanted the bass to be loud. At the same time though, we didn’t want it to be a totally bass album, either, We didn’t want it to be too loud, so a lot of the detail on the mix was spent dialling in the bass. Everything else seemed to be okay, so that’s where the time was spent on the mixing.”


Monstrosity 2008 (l-r): Lee Harrison, Mike Hrubovcak, Mike Poggione and
Mark English

A dark tone smothers the lyrical content penned for The Passage Of Existence. “‘The Proselygeist’, that’s one of my babies,” Lee references. “That’s basically the word ‘proselytize’ and the word ‘ghost’ put together. Basically, you have a preaching ghost; it’s about a preacher that is a false prophet, a preacher-type guy. That’s what that song is about. ‘Eternal Void’ is kind of something similar; it’s about cults and that kind of thing. There’s ‘Radiated’, and ‘Cosmic Pandemia’. ‘Cosmic Pandemia’ was about a virus coming through space, heading towards the earth. That’s kind of the main gist. Monstrosity lyrics are about Armageddon, the end of the world, war, that type of stuff. It kind of all falls within that. It’s a little more cerebral, a little more thoughtful; trying not to be just gore, or Satanic for the sake of being Satanic. We like it dark, but we don’t want to be an overly Satanic band. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what you’re into. We like it dark, but we don’t want to be a preaching band. We’re not preachers in that respect, but yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

Mike Hrubovcak stepped behind the microphone for his second full-length as Monstrosity’s frontman, with the recording of The Passage Of Existence. “With Spiritual Apocalypse, we did the vocals at Morrisound when we were recording, and that was cool,” the lyricist tells. “That was our first time in the studio together. Everything turned out great with that one as far as the vocals, but with this album we did the drums over in Sanford. Then we did the guitars and the bass at our home studio (Ascension Sound in Tampa), but then the vocals we couldn’t really do at our home studio because there are tile floors, and there are big, sliding glass windows. It’s one thing when you’re going direct into the computer straight from a guitar, but with a live room, you need some sort of acoustics and deadening – stuff on the walls to absorb the sounds – which we didn’t really have.

“Obviously, I’ve been working with Obituary on and off with their project, the Tardy Brothers project, and I’ve played with Obituary. I’m good friends with them, and they offered the studio any time I needed it (Redneck Studios in Gibsontown, Florida). So, I pretty much took them up on that offer, and we did the vocals over in Obituary’s. We were a little rushed with that – I wish we had a little more time. Just because Mike was down, we did some Florida shows. We did it after the Florida shows, but we were just kind of rushed for time. He had to go home and do his thing back there, but I wanted to be with him when he did the vocals. We just ended up pumping it out, making sure that it was done, and there were a few things that he fixed back at home. For the most part though, I’m happy with how everything turned out in that respect.

“We have a good relationship as far as no egos or anything, about who’s doing what. He understands that it’s my band, that I’ve been doing it for a long time, and that I have a certain way that I write. He understands that I want to keep that up, so yeah. That’s kind of how it worked this time. Who knows about the next album, or what’s going to happen in the future. We’ll just see how this album goes, and see what happens in the future. We’ve got a good situation with Jason Suecof, so I think that the next album will go quicker. I’ve already got four songs written for the next album, so I think it should go quicker. I always say that and it never happens though, so who knows?”

The collection of 12 tracks was christened with the moniker The Passage Of Existence following the conclusion of sessions. “Sometimes, the obvious choice is to have a song title be the album title, but for this one I had the word ‘passage’ kind of floating around in my head,” Lee discloses. “I was going to call it The Passage. Then it was going to be called Rites Of Passage, but I thought that that was kind of generic and not really original. I just kind of kept thinking on it, and finally I came up with The Passage Of Existence. It just kind of fit, because it seemed to work. It worked with the artwork – my idea with the artwork. That’s how that came to be.”

The Passage Of Existence’s cover artwork passed through the hands of several. “The artwork was originally my idea,” the performer informs. “The original idea was we were going to have the guy from the Horror Infinity artwork, the original demo (1990) – the little skull, antler guy. We were going to have him kind of turned sideways, blowing into his hand. Dust comes from the hand that he’s blowing, and the dust becomes planets once you actually see it. The planets were creating the universe, and on the other side of that is the wormhole, black hole type of thing, and the planets are going into the wormhole, black hole – whatever you want to call it.

“That was my original idea, so I called Mike Hrubovcak, since he’s an artist. He’s done artwork for Six Feet Under, and he’s done artwork for Sinister and so on. Since he’s an artist, we were going to have him to do the artwork originally. He did a version of my idea. Then we were contacted by a guy named Zbigniew M. Bielak, who did the new Deicide. He’s done all of the artwork for the band Ghost, he’s done Paradise Lost, Entombed, and some other stuff. He offered to do our artwork for us, so we were going to have him hand paint it – the idea that Mike Hrubovcak did. That’s kind of how we got to having hand-painted artwork done.


Monstrosity 2013 (l-r): Matt Barnes, Mark English, Mike Hrubovcak, Mike
Poggione and Lee Harrison

“Basically, to cut a long story short, we ended up having Zbigniew do it. He took too long, though. He went on vacation for a month to Africa, and took another month or so before we heard back from him. Then finally, we got a sketch from him. It was just taking way too long.

“Then in the meantime, I was talking with Pete Sandoval. I’m working with him on Terrorizer, and he was talking with the guy that we ended up using. His name is Timbul Cahyono. He’s from Indonesia, but he lives in the US now. He was doing the Terrorizer artwork, so we pretty much sent him the idea, the Mike Hrubovcak version of the artwork. Then he gave back the final version, and had that back within four days. It was just a no-brainer; the guy’s quick, he’s killer, and it’s hand-painted. It was our idea, my idea… Or, me and Mike’s idea, rather. It just came back good, and we’re happy. We ended up having Timbul do some shirt designs and a couple of things, so we are really happy with him on that end. Unfortunately with Zbigniew, we didn’t get to use him, but that’s just kind of how it went. That’s the artwork.”

On the subject of Terrorizer, Lee stepped into the guitar position for that respective entity during 2013. “Basically, I knew the riffs from like ’94,” he shares. “I forget why, but I was listening to the album back in 1994 for some reason. I was just learning a bunch of albums; I was playing a lot of guitar in 1994, so I knew the songs. I ran into Pete at a Fear Factory show. He was doing good – he was clear-headed. He had just gotten back from Spain. He was doing good and he was healthy, and so I asked him if he wanted to jam, because he wasn’t doing anything. We pretty much went in there and started jamming the World Downfall songs (Terrorizer’s November 1989 debut), just for fun. We started doing it weekly. I think it was on Wednesdays. It went really good, so we brought in Sam. I obviously knew him from Monstrosity, and the first thing we did was we did a full backyard party. It was something to start with, a fun thing to do.

“We originally called it Sandoval, Harrison And Molina. We didn’t use the name Terrorizer, because he still had his other line-up out in California and all of that. To be honest though, once we started playing those shows, everybody was calling us Terrorizer. They were saying ‘Why don’t you just call yourselves Terrorizer?’ Then at some point, it just made sense. Pete finally decided ‘I got a band here in Florida that can play, practice, and do everything, so why do I need a band out in California?’ That’s kind of how that happened, and we’ve been jamming ever since. We got Morbid Angel’s manager, Gunter Ford. Pete talked to him, and then he ended up picking us up. Pretty much that started the ball rolling. That’s how that happened.”

Fourth Terrorizer full-length Caustic Attack arrives in October 2018. “I can tell you all kinds of things,” the sometime axeman teases. “The artwork was done by the same guy that did the artwork for Monstrosity, Timbul Cahyono. We did it at the same studio, over there at Audiohammer. World Downfall, that was done at Morrisound, and it was a very acoustic-sounding record – a live sounding record, I mean. Then they did Darker Days Ahead (August 2006), and then they did Hordes Of Zombies (February 2012), which were okay records. To me personally though, they sound a little over-produced. They just don’t sound as natural and as live as the first album, so I wanted to kind of bring back and have that more live feel, that live sound, to Terrorizer.

“I think that that’s important, with Pete’s drumming. It’s just a personal thing for me. I just like it; I like things a little more natural than what went on with the second and third Terrorizer. So, like I said, we did it at the same studio over in Orlando, at Audiohammer, and it was just a really great drum room. There are 14 songs on the album, and pretty much I wrote all of the guitar riffs. Sam (Molina, vocals and bass) would write the words, but I ended up putting them in place, like the patterns, and that’s kind of how that went. It’s finished, though. It’s done. We’re just waiting on the label to put it out.”

A riff-based affair can be expected from Caustic Attack, due to lack of guitar solos. “Definitely,” Lee confirms. “That was a challenge. I’m older now and I tend to be a little more musical in my old age, but I wanted to keep the Terrorizer grind that everybody knows and loves. At the same time though, I wanted to push Pete in my own personal way. As a drummer working with another drummer, it’s always fun to push him harder. He was open to it. At first, when we first started writing songs, he would… I don’t know how to say it… question me, or whatever. We just spent a lot more time trying to work on it. After a while, after we got to a certain point, he started to trust what I was writing and everything, and things went a lot quicker as we moved on. We speak the same language, because we’re both drummers. Me and him are just happy with how it came out. It came out brutal; it’s killer. It’s some of Pete’s best work.


Terrorizer (l-r): Sam Molina, Pete Sandoval and Lee Harrison

“I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just thrown together or whatever. We spent some time on it, and that’s another thing. Hordes Of Zombies for example, they wrote those songs over the internet. They just had him come out and play a bunch of beats more or less and then they arranged the beats to the songs, whereas these songs were written in advance. We spent time in the band room rehearsing them a bunch. He could really flesh out the ideas, instead of just going with the first thing that came to him. That kind of made things nice. Like I said, it’s a lot more of an organic record. Because of that, we spent the time and did the work. Instead of just doing it over the internet and the first thing that we finished was it, we did it the other way.”

Monstrosity and Terrorizer aside, the sticksman occupies his time with other musical projects. “Other than that, I’ve got my solo project Lavoizen,” he lists. “I’ve got the stuff that I did with former Crimson Glory vocalist Midnight (John Patrick Jr. McDonald), from 2007 to 2009. Basically, it was him, me, and Matt LaPorte from Jon Oliva’s Pain. He was contacted by Midnight, and more or less brought me in on it. I came in with a 16-track portable recorder or whatever, with all of my microphones and stuff. We came in, and just recorded a bunch of his stuff. We were fans of the Transcendence album from Crimson Glory (November 1988), so we kind of wanted to bring Midnight back to that style. He wasn’t really into it, though, because he had kind of moved on from that. He was more into kind of folk-y, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, type of a thing, so it was a meeting of creative minds on that. For me, trying to scale everything back so much was kind of a challenge in its own right.

“He unfortunately passed away in 2009, but we’re still releasing stuff of his. We released the Descending Into Madness album (September 2014), and we’ve got a covers CD that’s gonna come out pretty soon, and a DVD soon. Other than that, I’ve got a few other projects going on here and there, but those are the main ones. With the Tardy Brothers thing, I want to record something with the Obituary guys – just cut something with them in the studio. It’d be fun, I think, to record and write with them. So, that’s kind of on the table too, along with my solo album that I’m eventually gonna do.”

Lavoizen’s vocal duties weren’t originally going to be handled by Lee himself. “With that one, I pretty much had a singer guy that I was working with, but he flaked out on me,” he explains. “Then I started singing on my own. With that project, the original idea was to kind of go against my normal grain. It’s natural for me to write death metal riffs at this point; I can sit down and I can have three riffs for you in like ten minutes, so that’s not hard. The challenge for me was going in places like mellow, and doing something totally different. That’s kind of how that idea started. Lavoizen it’s called. I wanted the Lavoizen project to be different in that respect.

“Now, I’m kind of finding my groove as far as the songs. I want them to be really easy, catchy, nothing technical, and just rock beats. It’s more of a focus for my vocals rather than for my drumming, for example. Monstrosity is where I showcase my drumming. Terrorizer is where I showcase my guitar work a little more and the Lavoizen project showcases my vocals, so that’s where I’m at with that. Basically, I want to do a real big album with good production and what not, but I’m just kind of waiting until I can get it done right. Monstrosity ends up taking priority, and so it always gets pushed back it feels like. I’ve got about 16 songs written right now though, and am just still kind of writing here and there.

“I’m not really writing as much as I should. I’m writing a little bit here and there just to keep writing, and then when I do my album, I’ll pick my best ten songs at that time and get that out. That’s coming out, and I have a lot of fun with that. It’s just whatever I want to do. It’s great. I don’t have to answer to people, and that’s the whole deal. ‘Why don’t you want a singer?’ Well, because I don’t want a singer. I want to do it, and that way I can make all the choices and I don’t have to rely on other people. That’s the problem with all of these bands, is that I’m always relying on other people. Lavoizen is a good thing for that, because I don’t need anybody and I can do it my way. I don’t have to answer to anybody. So, there you go.”

The Passage Of Existence was released on September 7th, 2018 via Metal Blade Records.

Interview published in September 2018. All 2018 Monstrosity promotional photographs by Tim Hubbard.

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