"All of the UK is hostile to grind," agrees Luke, guitarist and general noisemonger for Newport, South Wales based grindcore extremists Atomck, "perhaps because it's seen as badly-played death metal: an attitude that exists 'cos morons don't know shit.Throughout our lifespan we have been predominantly booked to play with metal bands of some description, and more often than not as the opening act despite orders of magnitude more busy-ness than many of the other groups in our area. Even though recently there has been something of a resurgance in interest in grind and powerviolence it seems mostly in internetland and not reflected in any actual scene, pertinent examples of this would be us trying to garner support slots for bands like Wormrot and Soilent Green; the promoters tell you to get lost if they are even bothered to reply.
"It's like we are not taken at all seriously as a band other than perhaps offering a show opening distraction for no-one to jeer at, and it can be pretty frustrating," he says, adding, "The same must be said of approaching the national extreme music press hahaha."
Hyperspeed, hypertechnical and hyperirritating - Bristol's Atmock rattle the eardrums and liquefy the soft matter that you use for all your complicated sums and overseas dialling. Forming as a drum machine duo in the unashamed mould of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, they built a reputation for furious noise, and gained a drummer off the back of it.
"We'd been used to operating drum machines and the like in our previous bands,"recalls Luke, "so naturally we went about writing ANb style material using that technology, we thought it would be just a fun project but it gradually snowballed into us playing gigs with the programmed drum tracks on an iPod.
"Even though I stand by the performances and material from that period as things went on our music evolved away from the ridiculous 6666666bpm violence towards 'properly written songs'. At the end of 2009 the drum machine lineup supported Insect Warfare in Cardiff and afterwards this Czech guy who was in the audience appraoched us and offered to play 'real drums'. With Marzena in the mix Atomck were fully reborn as a real band and not some stupid rubbish, much to everyone's indifference."
With indifference reigning supreme at home, they've opted to hit Europe instead - riding Continental grindcore enthusiasm like a Luck Dragon alongside the Atrocity Exhibit, all the way through England and into France, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic - where they'll be returning later in the year for the the fist-in-mouth awesome of Obscene Extreme ("I am totally looking forward to it, as well as the community aspects and opporunities to watch the the other much better bands without having to pay for it, almost like we have been booked to support Rotten Sound which wouldn't happen unless they were playing my bathroom.") on July 15-17."The relative ease in which this year's euro tour has come together demonstrates to me that the interest for this kind of music is over there," he asserts. "Czech especially has an amazing music scene that is less concerned with genre tribal lines and more into getting together and rocking that shit. Touring Europe is an achievment for an underground band with precisely no support, and against my better knowledge I hope it will make things somewhat easier back here afterwards. I think audiences in the UK are increasingly lazy and uniterested in anything other than hearing their pals play Pantera covers, which is fair enough because those bands can play like three guitar solos and that, but don't complain when that's ALL you got."
Yeah, so either go see them, or shut up. On hand will be an extremely limited split cassette, shared with their tour buddies, but if you let that fly from your hands like a bar of soap - there's more to come:
"We have just recorded an EP for J Randall's Grindcore Karaoke net label, that should be mixed and mastered soon and good to go, we will certainly be open to offers regards putting that on vinyl WINK WINK WORLD, YEAH?
"After that we are booked into the rather excellent Rapture Audio in August, to record a big sexy LP that we will susequently take months to find interest in putting out. We are road-testing half the material for this LP on our prementioned tour, so hopefully that'll be six songs we can actually play by August. We will probably just make a load of shit up for the rest yeah, cos it's not proper music anyway is it?"
No comments:
Post a Comment