First off big shoutout to Andrew from Deadstare Audio for recording us on our first EP. Dude is amazing at what he does and with an insane catalog under his belt it was an honor to work with him. The recording process for Tragedies of Western Existence was pretty straightforward to be honest, it wasn’t like some crazy week-long process with some insane story to tell. At this point in time we weren’t really an official band, just helping Diego and Abe record these three tracks they had wanted to record for a while. Goat wasn’t even an official member; this was like his third time playing bass in AA and he was there because Abe plays with him in Barrio Slam and recommended he help record since Diego couldn’t find a bassist in time.
Goat learned the songs in a day the week before and next thing you know he’s playing for the recording. But recording itself was cool it was my first time ever recording like that so it was nice to see everything play out. Goat brought out a small bottle of tequila at like 9AM and said, ‘Whenever I record, time doesn’t exist.’ And he was right – you really didn’t feel the time pass in there. Abe was the first one up and laid out the drums from like 10:30-2 after mic setups, testing, etc, etc. Diego followed with the guitar, Goat followed with the bass, I finished up with the vocals.
Funny enough I was pretty sick the day of recording. The night before we had practice my voice was shot, I sounded very congested, and I was scared coming into recording, but it came out the way it did and I’m happy with it as I’m sure the guys are as well. We recorded those three songs in a single day in March, in like a week or two they got mastered by Townsend Mastering, and then the rest was history. The EP got dropped kind of randomly – Diego just fucking slapped our logo on the cover picture you see and dropped it. I was driving cross country with my brother and sister to Chicago since my brother was moving out there and my friend Jose texted me a Bandcamp link asking, ‘Is this you guys?’ I was a little shocked cause it was just a random drop on a random Monday in April lol.
I met Diego through a mutual friend of ours either at a show or a hangout, I’m not too sure what it was exactly. We later met each other again at Ground Zero’s World Peace show in January at Bad Dogg and followed each other on IG. After a few weeks, he hit me up asking if I knew a vocalist and bassist; I just said no but I’d keep my eye out. At the time I was quitting my old band as a vocalist and really just didn’t wanna do music for a while. I admittedly lost the passion for it all so I just kept my mouth shut lol. Two weeks after that in early February he asked me if I had heard anything and I said no, he was kinda stressing about having to do bass and vocals himself on top of guitar so I showed him a rough recording of my old band’s song; he asked if I could come to practice and try it out.
Admittedly I was a little hesitant cause we aren’t a hardcore band. We have some elements of it along with grind, death, etc, so it was something out of my comfort zone too. I go to practice and that’s when I met Abe for the first time. At the time it was just us 3 and at the end of that practice day, Abe brought up Goat. I think Goat came to practice the following week after that, and we met. What’s funny is the weekend after the practice Goat and I met again at Mosh For Youth 3; Goat was working doors and I had to go in and out of the venue a few times ‘cause I was looking for a restroom to shit at so it was just a constant awkward smile when I would pass by him – honestly, I’m really bad with names and faces so I wasn’t sure if it was him even if we had just practice like two days prior haha.
The scene has shown us a lot of love. Like, a lot. I can only speak for myself here but it’s love that I personally feel is underserved. I mean, our first show was with Scalp at The Haven, otherwise known as Aladdin Jr’s. That’s an insane first show. Our second show was a show booked by SOS Booking with Snuffed on Sight, Bodybox, and Corpse Pile. Big shoutout to X from SOS cause there’s a ton of bands here in LA and surrounding areas he could have asked but he threw us a bone. Shoutout to Andres from 5.7 and God Awful for always showing us love, Dev from Scalp, IEHC, Vic, all the IE bands… We’re not even from there but they’ve shown us love from day one. And shoutout all my friends for always pulling up and getting things active.
It’s very humbling to know people fuck with us and I’m eternally grateful for it, but at the end of the day I have to take a step back and be like, ‘Woah, do we deserve this so soon?’ The last show we played with Jack-Knife at The Haven I was told by some friends they saw a girl that knew our lyrics word for word and was rockin out heavy – our lyrics are only on Bandcamp (I think?) so to hear that was like ‘Damn, she fucks with us enough to go out of her way and read the words to the songs we’ve written.’ Seeing the dogpiles from Heretic Psalms is such an insane feeling every time. This is only my second band and seeing the reaction we’ve gotten and love we’ve been shown has been insane. I can only really say thank you every time someone tells me they like what we’re doing.
-David, vox for AUDITORY ANGUISH.
https://auditoryanguish.bandcamp.com/
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