Red Rot: Dealing In Discomfort
Davide Tiso has always been drawn to discomfort. Best known as the sole constant in Italian avant-garde metallers EPHEL DUATH, he’s spent the past two decades or so pushing against the notion of what should and shouldn’t ‘work’ in extreme music – both with that band and a host of other respected projects. For Tiso, there is much to be gained from leaning into that which unsettles you, and in the case of his latest project RED ROT, that rings true in more ways than one.
“Pushing myself is one of the reasons I keep writing albums,” he explains. “It thrills me to be constantly engaged and hungry for new doors to open. To start RED ROT I had to basically reinvent my approach to playing guitar. I love to learn new things but I’m more fascinated by the reason why certain aspects of life throw me off. Discomfort is fascinating to me, especially if it’s not that easy to figure out why that specific person or experience is such a negative deal. My point is that there is always a lesson behind a blockage: I’m naturally inclined to figure that lesson out.”
In RED ROT’s case, the initial blockage in question was a relatively minor one: a particularly thick guitar plectrum that Tiso found at his practice space. “My playing was getting severely affected by that pick and that factor was becoming a matter of pride at that point,” he muses. “Instead of throwing the pick away and forgetting about it I kept going at it. When eventually I tried downpicking something clicked. I had never tried before a pick that was more suited for such a technique. It was just a matter of days for me to get completely obsessed by this new revelation. After I wrote the opening riff for Dualism I felt that a possible new direction was opening up to me. So I bought 50 of those picks and RED ROT was born.”
Of course, next on the agenda was finding something that few artists can do without: collaborators. Having lost touch with many of his former bandmates since his relocation to the US in 2009, Tiso offers that the pandemic offered him a chance to “freeze” and ponder on who really mattered to him. “In 2020 I reached out to EPHEL DUATH members I hadn’t talked to for years. Lucio and I started talking regularly, sharing music, talking about collaborating on something new. We set up right from the start to get an old school kind of band going and we firmly wanted RED ROT to be anchored into extreme metal. After writing a few riffs we felt we had a clear direction and the excitement grew, positively affecting the writing process. Songs were coming at avalanche rate.”
From there, Tiso explains that “everything clicked quite rapidly”, recruiting his friend and former BOTANIST bandmate Ron Bertrand on drums, who in turn suggested contacting Ian Baker for bass duties. Their line-up complete, Tiso emphasises that what followed was very much a product of collaboration, one in which no single voice was more important than any other. “One of the turning factors of this first album experience has been letting go of creative control,” he suggests. “I write the guitars and the song structures, I help with the drum parts but I let the other members of RED ROT come up with what they think fits the songs the best. The more I get surprised by the outcome the better the songs sound to me.”
“Isolation is a very dear thing to me,” he continues. “I simply need that to be creative. What I’ve learned thanks to RED ROT though, is to let go of the songs after my part is done and let collaboration and an open mindset do the rest. The result is vital and dynamic, it’s the sound of a formed idea more than an intuition forced on others – a choir made of different voices rather than the same one multiplied.”
Working in this manner, the four members of RED ROT have produced in their debut full-length Mal De Vivre a record that defies easy categorisation, instead tipping its hat to everyone from CONVERGE and MORBID ANGEL to VOIVOD and PARADISE LOST while only ever really sounding like RED ROT themselves. Returning to that theme of discomfort, it’s a dark, bleak record, its visceral ferocity an ideal vehicle for Tiso’s explorations of mental illness, psychological deviance, rage, gloom and paranoia. Once again though, Tiso is keen to remind us that embracing the uncomfortable can produce far more nourishing fruit than one might expect.
“The darkness of RED ROT should be approached like a purge more than something infectious,” he concludes. “Our music is not thought to be a downer on the listener’s mood, rather an opportunity to have some sort of a cathartic release, a physical workout for the mind. I want the listener to pound their fists against their daily problems through these songs and have a crazy, liberating laugh afterwards. The daily problems will remain there after a few spins, but hopefully, in letting go of some anger and sweat, those problems could be seen from a more neutral and less engaged perspective. It’s a way to gain some personal insight through a purging process, to steal some weight from everyday issues. The right heavy music does that to me and I hope that RED ROT could offer that to some.”
Mal De Vivre is out now via Svart Records.
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