Chaos Inception Interview (Matt Barnes)

Chaos Inception is one of the few bands that follow that aggressive and violent concept that Death Metal should have, which can be brutal without the need for a polished sound or high doses of ideas like Suffocation in between, because it is not like that, this band went that way more Angelcorpse, Diabolic, Blastmaster, Hate Eternal, Internecine and many more bands that without the need to step on Brutal Death Metal rhythms, this smells like a red-hot machine that only begins its journey in a steamroller, being that Death Metal exquisite and for people who only want live nonsense, and do not expect anything else. That was always the conception of this band since its inception in 2008 with its two productions "Collision with Oblivion" (2009) and "The Abrogation" (2012), just music that guts your ears and nothing else. So now we have their third studio album called “Vengeance Evangel” and released through Lavadome Productions after 13 years of silence.

Para leer la entrevista en español: Entrevista a Chaos Inception  

Metallerium: Welcome to Metallerium's pages! It's a pleasure to have this conversation with you, and we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. First of all, how are you doing, and how is the band doing? As this might be your first interview with us, could you briefly share the history of Chaos Inception?

Chaos Inception: Hello Metallerium readers! We are in good spirits and have a new album released. Chaos Inception consists of two members – Gary White and Matt Barnes. We met early on in Huntsville, Alabama but we had a few run-ins before that, before we knew each other, for example at the Milwaukee Metalfest around 1998 when Gary saw me get waylaid in the pit during Mortician’s set. He still laughs at that one! Anyways, around 2003 I moved to Huntsville and was playing guitar in a thrash band. Gary was playing drums in a death metal band, Convergence From Within, and they blew our asses off the stage every time we played with them. So, my goal was to get in a band with Gary. I eventually joined Fleshtized and then since no one ‘made it’ and everyone got older, they pretty much fell off and that left an opening for Chaos Inception to form. Cameron Pinkerton and Chris White were in the band soon after and we did a few albums. More disagreements came and it is back to the core of Gary and me playing blasting psychosis.

Metallerium: Talking about the new album. Why are you presenting new material after approximately 13 years? How do you know when it's the right moment to create new music?

Chaos Inception: It’s just what we do. There is no financial or sensible reason to do another album. We created most of the music many years ago. We have rehearsed together fairly consistently the whole 13 years. There was no time off from the band, but there were many struggles with losing band members and in our personal lives. It’s not like I haven’t done anything in the interim – I have written and recorded 5 albums with Monstrosity, Diabolic, and Quinta Essentia and done many shows in that time. In the end, I guess you could say we crazy or are just too legit to quit.

Metallerium: Do you usually work on new music continuously, even while touring, or do you prefer to stop everything and dedicate yourselves to working on new music?

Chaos Inception: We don’t really have a touring line-up now, but I can say for myself, I split my time writing and practicing guitar. I am also in Monstrosity who does tour, and yes, when the tour comes up the writing ceases. I will practice things for a while then take some time to write. I can’t say this is a great method for productivity. I have improved a lot on guitar in the ways I wanted to improve, but it is getting more and more difficult to write songs. We are very picky about what constitutes a good riff or song, and together we reject 90% of the stuff I come up with.

Metallerium: How did you choose "Vengeance Evangel" as the album title, and what can we expect regarding the lyrics and music on this new album?

Chaos Inception: One thing I had in mind during the whole process was this question – when I got into underground death metal, what would I want to hear? First off, I got most of my underground stuff through Full Moon Productions mail order. They put out a catalogue with just the album title then a short comment in parenthesis such as “(AAAAAARRGGGH! Blasting insanity for fans of Morbid Angel and Deicide)” OK, I better pick that up. So you’d see Angel Corpse – Hammer of Gods, Krisiun – Black Force Domain, or Centurion – Choronzonic Chaos Gods with that description and I’d start saving pennies to buy that. I wanted Chaos Inception song titles to sound like that. I wanted the music to be like that. We are in the tradition of that style, but we do not rip off bands. It’s not a tribute to those bands exactly, but rather to the spirit that dwelled within us that drew us to that. If I saw Chaos Inception – Vengeance Evangel, and saw the cover, and saw that it was described as sounding like Krisiun, I’d get it. We write under the banner of Chaos Inception and that is the limitation of what the sound is. We have stretched the sound in different ways, but it is consistent. We have rejected many modern production values. I rejected a compositional approach to solos and embraced a more chaotic, improvisational approach. We rejected the posing as professional musicians trying to get the next break, adopting some of what sells currently and instead made this is a total DIY affair and a middle finger to liars and tyrants.

Metallerium: What can you tell us about the album cover? How did you choose it?

Chaos Inception: It came about through long conversations with Jan Fastner at Lavadome. He sent over a lot of artworks, and we chose the artist, David Glomba, together. We had many conversations of what the music meant to us, and he brought up several themes that I kept bringing up, such as the arrow. So, the idea was hatched during COVID hysteria, and I started to see what I’d read in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish coming to light – it was Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Total surveillance of your life and the world was becoming a prison. This was when vaccine passports and microchip identification were being discussed (or have you forgotten?) We were ‘essential workers’ so we didn’t get locked down, but Huntsville was like a ghost town and very soon I overcame any fear of the virus. After that, it looked like pure insanity, seeing some of the government responses across the world. So, in the artwork you see the panopticon and you see a prisoner who has made the proper sacrifices to summon the strength to take a chance on putting an arrow through the eyeball to destroy that system. It’s a rejection of the world they are trying to create. It an acknowledgment of the hope that humanity will overcome any tyranny. Truth will triumph over falsehood. The full album artwork has more pieces from another artist, but I won’t spoil that surprise. Let’s just say, that was inspired by another youthful memory of seeing Raymond Pettibon flyers and album covers. By the way, 13 years goes by quickly when you wait for about a year for all the artworks.

Metallerium: Working on new music is complicated these days when people consume everything so quickly and don't listen to full albums but rather singles. What inspires you to create new music in this environment?

Chaos Inception: It is very discouraging, but you just can’t think about it. If we thought about it and weighed the pros and cons, we would not do this. I’ve never liked doing any promotion for the band. There was always someone else in the band who seemed to be more of a ‘people person’ who’d do that but when it just came down to me and Gary, we had to admit there would be no more promotion or sensible decision making. It’s funny that one of the first comments I received from the album stream release was a guy proposing to promote the band for a small monthly fee. That’s so far removed from what I’m thinking about. If you had any clue on how much money we lose doing this and what the gains are, regardless of the type of promotion, you’d laugh too. When you’re younger you think you might ‘make it big’ one day, but you have to be honest and humble. When’s the last time you saw a band of 45-year-olds hit the big time with an underground death metal album? We don’t measure success in those terms because we know it’s not possible. I can only hope that by word-of-mouth people can discover the album and then purchase a CD for the price of a hamburger.  

Metallerium: What are your plans after releasing the album? Do you have any tour plans or proposals for Latin America?

Chaos Inception: There are no plans besides staying the course. Gary and I will meet to rehearse weekly, and we’ll decide what the next step is. I do like touring in Latin America with Monstrosity though, and we will be on the road again with a new album this year as well.

Metallerium: How is your relationship with fans and digital media these days? Do you usually read comments or reviews online? Have you ever been compared to a band that isn't among your influences?

Chaos Inception: At times I’ve tried to stay in touch with fans, but there were so many false starts with this album that I just stopped. I would announce that the album was almost finished and then disaster would strike, and it would be another setback. The band ‘broke up’, I got a divorce, got remarried, had kids, my hard drive crashed, the studio we planned to record at went out of business, Covid happened, and all the while it became too physically challenging to play some of this without surgeries. So instead of boring fans and embarrassing ourselves with all the false starts I just stopped making announcements and just hit them with the album as a surprise. I do read reviews, but I often wish I hadn’t. I think the reviews should be like the ones I mentioned from Full Moon Productions and old school zines: “AAAARGGGHHH!!! Buy this or die!” Now you get weird reviews where they are trying to fix the band and say, well, they should do this or that, and then let’s see what they come up with on the next album. They think the intention is something other than what it is. They think the intention is to make it big and say here’s what they should do to make it big. Yes, we can stop playing this style altogether and start working on costumes and dance moves. Keep your advice, thank you. I thought we used to get called technical death metal and that isn’t my influence. I tried to make sure no one confuses Vengeance Evangel with a technical death metal album. To me it’s the raw outpouring of our heavy metal spirit. Technical death metal usually doesn’t have spirit. Everything must be perfect. No mistakes are allowed. You have to do playthrough videos to show off your hot techniques. Also, everything is so dour and inhuman. It sounds like it is being performed by a cyborg. It occurred to me that death metal like this has lost the ‘metal’ part. Metal should be empowering and uplifting. Isn’t that why we all got into it? It started to be too nihilistic and nonsensical that it lost touch with the source of the spirit of power and overcoming. 

Metallerium: In these times, hundreds of albums are released every week, and thousands of bands worldwide seek to make a place for themselves in the scene. Digital media and tools facilitate recording and distributing an album worldwide. What do you think makes you different from other bands, and what does Chaos Inception offer to stand out from the rest?

Chaos Inception: Maybe I’m just listening to or hearing the wrong stuff, but death metal has gotten so extreme that it’s starting to sound like noise. I don’t even know if it’s possible to write a good blasting, non-wimp, melodic death metal song anymore. Most death metal sounds like a train wreck to me and has for a long time. So, we tried to have good songs without wimping it out. Most bands will have super extreme songs that don’t make sense, and everyone is going for the most dissonant sounds they can muster. We dabbled with that ourselves but over the course of 12 years I realized that I didn’t want to do that anymore. Why write an album full of metal songs that just show off your skills or give you a stomachache to listen to? Here’s an example: that new Behemoth song, Shit of God (or is it “ov”?). I think that probably sells well but that’s a shame. It is trash. It’s easily dissonant (“how about I play one wrong note in this power chord?”) for no good reason and there is a ‘cool’ blasphemous sing-along. Think about the mentality of a person who writes a heavy metal song where they dress up like a corpse and scream out that they are a piece of shit? Can you picture Bruce Dickinson or Lemmy doing that? And then picture 10,000 people at a fest also yelling out that they are a piece of poop? Hooray! No. I don’t want anything to do with that. That will affect your psyche in ways you don’t even realize. Behemoth would probably love to get sued over some kids committing suicide in their honor, because that would help their sales. It’s poison, and it’s not cool to try to poison good people. We’ve got the antidote for that. Songs that will decimate the whole universe of the tyrant and at the same time, under the guise of being a death metal song, an uplifting message to the good people who enjoy listening to it. It might be possible.

Metallerium: Is it possible to make a living from music, or what is your situation? I see that some members have other projects or bands.

Chaos Inception: No. Maybe if you lived humbly, remained childless and single, and worked constantly on music. Maybe if we’d taken the risk to all quit our jobs and load in a van much earlier on. But now, it’s not possible to make money. You make a few hundred per year but spend thousands. I read about all these old bands that sold 5000 copies of a demo tape and then got signed to a 7-album deal. Many of those bands sucked when they were signed if you’re honest, but there was money getting thrown around then. Yes they got ripped off but they kept going because they had the contract to fulfill. They had day jobs and supportive parents too, but not careers outside music. Then it was possible after 30 years of toil, to make a modest living doing extreme metal. I don’t want to diminish what I’m doing musically but it has to come second to making a living in the real world. While I don’t want to give up the feeling of turning into He-Man - plugging into an amp and hearing that blast beat is like a bolt of lightning and the power of Grayskull entering me - but other responsibilities take priority.

Metallerium: Changing the subject, Artificial Intelligence is advancing fast and affecting every aspect of our lives, including art like music. What is your perspective on this topic? Do you think you will ever use it in composition, recording, or art design, for example?

Chaos Inception: I tried some AI art as a joke and now I have as my screen saver a muscle-bound unicorn screaming and playing guitar in outer space with some blocks of cheese floating around.  My kids and I came up with that. I do have a rant that I go into sometimes about visual artists making money on metal albums while the band does 90% of the work and loses money. Paolo Girardi finished the last album cover over a weekend and we paid him around $400. The painting is awesome and that is a very reasonable price, but we don’t actually get the painting, and we spent years writing and rehearsing and probably $10,000 on equipment, studio costs, rehearsal room rent, etc. and probably got back $500 from CD and shirt sales. The artist seems to be the only person who comes out ahead. Sometimes it’s frustrating enough that you would consider doing AI art, but never for music. I would not listen to that. I want to know the biography and story of the musician that created it. I really want to know how they dreamed it up.

Metallerium: Regarding the previous topic, combined with how we move on social networks that know so much about us that they can manipulate us, and with conservative movements in many parts of the world, do you think your music and Metal in general might be subject to censorship? Or perhaps it wouldn't even be open censorship but using AI and its algorithms to make you and us invisible?

Chaos Inception: I’m not sure if the censorship comes from conservative movements. The censorship comes from government tyrants, whatever the politics. It might be interesting to see what kind of metal would be banned, because we know currently that pollution like Behemoth gets promoted. I think censorship of art always loses and would create more interest in what’s being censored. Government tyrants would sooner ban some kind of art that was good for an individual, maybe something telling them that they were not a slave and actually had some self-worth. You have to make the proper sacrifices and metaphorically arm yourself with the bow and arrow of spirit to strike at the heart of the tyrant. That’s always relevant, and it is very relevant to the current talk about the ‘wonders’ of AI.

Metallerium: Thank you very much for your time, and congratulations on the new album, which we have already reviewed and liked. Any words for your fans in Latin America and Metallerium readers?

Chaos Inception: We love all our fans across the world. We hope that our work will inspire and uplift others. If you are a rejected metal kid anywhere on earth in any situation, this album is for you. If you are a willful prevaricator, a duplicitous poisoner, a devious manipulator, or a tyrant we hope this album finds you so it can obliterate your world and leave you begging for forgiveness. Support Metallerium and the underground. Keep reading, listening, and creating.