The first time I saw Hemotoxin perform live was back in 2013 opening up for the thrash metal band Havok at the Red House in Walnut Creek, CA. I remember watching a fearsome group of young and hungry death/thrash musicians put on one hell of a performance. Since then Hemotoxin has continued to excel and push themselves as musicians, thus establishing themselves as one of Contra Costa County's most exceptional metal acts. Their most recent album, "Restructure the Molded Mind," is a technical onslaught of mind crushing brutality that I highly recommend checking out. The band's guitarist/singer Michael Anthony Chavez was nice enough to answer some questions regarding the album along with some other topics. Here is the full interview below...
Hello Michael! Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions pertaining to the world of Hemotoxin. The band has been around for almost ten years I believe, and even though you have gone through a fair amount of line-up changes, you continue to be a resilient and driven force within the Bay Area metal community.
Michael: That’s right, this year marks ten years since I wrote the first Hemotoxin “Biohazard” on my old Yamaha drum machine. And yeah through the decade we’ve had quite a few people come and go, thankfully I’ve been lucky enough to still have the same writing partner through those years in our drummer Brandon. Having him as a consistently productive member of the band has been a big reason for our longevity. We just strive to make awesome music for ourselves, we wanna satisfy ourselves first and then deliver what we think is sick to our audience, and hopefully they agree, that’s something we’ve been doing together even before Hemotoxin, I really believe in our chemistry.
I wanted to begin by talking about your most recent album, “Restructure the Molded Mind,” which is an album that I really enjoyed and one I had been looking forward to, especially coming off of your sophomore album, “Biological Enslavement.” Now that, “Restructure the Molded Mind,”has been out since March of this year, what are your thoughts on the album overall? How has the feedback been from the fans?
Michael: I’m glad you enjoyed it and feel that way in comparison to Biological. I’m extremely happy with how it came out, Restructure the Molded Mind is a 28 minute frenzy of vicious technical riffs played by musicians with insane ability and thankfully people really enjoyed it, minus the bad timing with covid I was really happy with this release and the response from people, overall it’s been very positive.
Now I remember talking to you at the Morbid Angel show last November and you had told me a bit about the recording process for the album and I was wondering if you could give the readers more detail on how the album was recorded? Also, take us through the songwriting process and did you have all the tracks ready to go before you started the initial recording?
Michael: Having all of our songs prepared before we hit the studio is a big deal for me, especially in this case when people had been waiting to hear a new record from us for a while I knew whatever we did had to be extremely deliberate and on point. Songs like Unreality I actually had written before Biological Enslavement, but I had always had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do with the song past the first riff, so it never made it to that album, but others like Acrimony I had written a month before we began recording. Execution was like my magnum opus, the song where I could combined every element of what makes us Hemotoxin and pushing that as far and hard as I can.
The recording process, I hate to admit was very rocky. We ended up having a falling out with the engineer which is why there’s no studio or engineer credited, because he requested his name not be listed. We actually had two mixes done which resulted in two tracks we had intended to have on the album being eliminated due to bad track editing, our next release will feature these two tracks titled “Inherited Disaster” and “Desomorphine” (you can find this song on our KFJC set available on YouTube). So overall it was a good learning experience, we tried to cut corners to save costs but it ended up biting us in the ass, but at the end of the day we did the right thing and got a great sounding album out of it.
Being that, “Restructure the Molded Mind,” is your third full-length album to date, I wanted to know how you feel about the band’s evolution in terms of overall sound and musical direction. I remember first hearing you guys when I saw you open for Havok back in 2013, and I could tell you guys were a young and hungry band, but now you have really taken your style of progressive thrash/death metal to an even greater level. What do you contribute to the success and progression of the Hemotoxin sound?
Michael: I feel very proud of the sound we’ve developed over the years. When it comes down to it that I think at this point with the line up changes we’ve had I almost feel like that’s what defines our evolution. Since each line up has done one full length album each I feel like each one (Between Forever and the end, Biological and Restructure) has its own aura about it, although at its core it’s still Brandon and I the leads from our old guitar players Hunter and Rohwer gave the album a different flavor. I still feel that our evolution really reached a turning point with a track like Forgotten Faces, that one was written by Rohwer and it really forced us out to expand our sound. I think now we’re getting to a point where we’re self aware of our own ability and on Restructure especially with the addition of Shane I think that’s starting to show more and more.
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Current Line-up (Michael, Shane and Brandon) |
You, Brandon and Nathan were nice enough to contribute to the documentary that Yuvraj and I did about the Bay Area metal community a couple years back. In that documentary we talked about the Contra Costa County metal scene and I have always felt that Hemotoxin is without question one of the strongest bands to have come out of the area in recent years. I wanted to get your thoughts on the Contra Costa County music scene and how it has changed since you first started playing? Before this whole pandemic what stood out the most to you regarding the scene?
Michael: First I have to say I think the music scene we’ve had out here since the 80’s has been criminally underrated in the scope of the entire California scene. Bands like Sadus, Autopsy, Decimatus, Antagony and Cartilage among many many others came out this area and cut their teeth playing anywhere that could host shows from out doors, garages, backyards, pizza shops. CoCo County has always had a DIY attitude because it’s such a small suburban kind of area, I believe the first show Dio ever played with his solo band on the Holy Diver was at The Barn in Antioch literally inside of a barn. I’ve always been extremely proud to claim this area because of that, we have a rich history that I believe deserves more recognition than it gets.
Sort of touching on that last question when talking about the local scene, I wanted to bring up Red House, which was a live music venue in Walnut Creek that you guys played from time to time. I actually believe the last show I saw at Red House before it closed down was you along with Cartilage (At the time you were also playing with them), Dismembered Carnage and some out of town band that had a lead singer who threw a tantrum onstage. What are your thoughts on Red House being no longer around? What do you think were some of the positives and the negatives about the venue? Can we see another venue similar to Red House return to the area?
Michael: I absolutely miss the red house. That venue provided a bridge for young high school aged kids to have a platform to become a local band and allow a scene/community to build and for about 11 years that’s what red house did, it brought different groups of kids together who otherwise wouldn’t have met. The one thing I don’t think most musicians consider is the cost to actually put on a show, that requires lights, bar, bathrooms, staff and insurance after all the licensing and paper work of course. Red House gave us that every time we played there no matter if the shows were packed or not, what we failed to do is provide the audience that could help financially facilitate that platform to make it sustainable for future generations. Because now high school kids that form a band don’t really have any platform besides their backyard or something. You can rent a hall out and do it that way but the amount of money it takes to run one show is very expensive and not many people have the means to make that happen. I think/hope there will be another way for kids to get themselves out there, obviously we have plenty of online platforms that work perfectly, but I think people still need that on stage experience in front of an audience. I remember before Red House there were high school battle of the bands at the concord pavilion, my best hope is maybe one day that comes back especially with covid ravaging the tour industry it could be a good way for the concord pavilion to generate revenue, I guess we’ll see!
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Hemotoxin's last show at Red House |
This is truly one of my favorite interviews Robby. What Michael says about the lack of venues for bands in our area for young people is so true and sad. Hopefully, some day it will change.
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