No one has or will create death metal like Suffocation. Taking the muffled hard-stop strumming of speed metal, mixing it in with the structural cryptograms of death metal, and amplifying the intensity, Suffocation innovative the percussive death metal that spawned the goregrind genre and countless imitators. Drummer Mike Smith was kind enough to give us an interview on the state of the band and its future.

You’ve said in the past that Suffocation was inspired by the heavy metal of its time as well as the hardcore punk that was contemporaneous. A lot of the Suffocation sound however seems influenced by the speed metal bands like Exodus, but taken to a new extreme. Is there any truth to this, and how did you arrive at this fusion?

It was a natural progression of all things unaccepted in the mainstream. It started with metal, we rebelled like punks, and were driven by the speed or thrash metal that was at the time.

Suffocation is what we choose to be at any given time. If we chose to do an album of gloomy doom metal we’d differ from most at that too. It depends on how we feel and what kind of attention the world is paying.

In the Effigy of the Forgotten group photo, a Morpheus (now Morpheus Descends) tshirt is visible. Did this band influence your style?

No, our influence into music started way before that. It was just a shirt of a band we knew and hung with at the time. There was no special meaning behind it.

When you write songs, do you start with a concept for the whole song, or do you accrue riff ideas and fit them into a narrative? Do you conceptualize the song in lyrics first, or write music and fit lyrics to it?

When I write personally, I start with the guitar rhythms first and maybe a topic so as to work in a chorus. The song then gets built over time.

The feel and approach of the songs are also built on what emotion I want to portray on stage to the fans or to my self at the time.

I usually have the song complete with riffs, drums and a definite lyric direction before I submit it to the others. It can be done in days, or take months.

It depends on my mental state at the time. When things are good, things flow, when I’m stressed riffs and concepts take their time to form.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks. Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.

– William Gibson, Neuromancer

Is there a relationship between how an artist sees the world, and the type of music he or she will then make? Do people who see the world in similar ways make similar music?

I suppose your experience in life dictates your music. But one who wants to murder someone or cause mayhem could write a death metal song as well as blues or Grunge. For example, Kurt Cobain had a successful life in music but still chose to expire early, but the grunge music didn’t dictate or preach the message of suicide.

So it is what it is, the skill you have as a musician will dictate the type of music you play. Even though you may be a member of Satan’s circle you could easily sing bubble gum pop because you have no special skills musically.

What distinguishes art from entertainment, and if they overlap, is there a difference in goals between the two?

There is no difference. The artist usually is looking to speak or release through their choice of artistry first, if the world happens to catch on then thats a bonus.

I would still be a musician who speaks through music if no one knew of Suffocation.

Do you think death metal has a distinctive worldview different from that of “normal” people? Can people interpret that worldview from the sound of the genre, and does this make them converge on musical communities?

First you would have to show me what a normal person is. I dont know of any or why they would be considered such.

I know plenty of dummies though. The communities they choose depends on the path their life experiences took them.

Some have said that death metal and black metal use “narrative” composition, where a series of riffs are motifs that evolve toward a passage between states of mind for the listener. Is this true, and if so, how is it reflected in your songwriting?

To each his own, some bands write with no goal or direction.

Suffocation chooses to have a purpose to the way the riffs, tempos and impact come across.

We hope to stir a certain emotion. We start by writing to draw the emotion within ourselves first, and hope the fans understand the idea.

Although your music is technical, you have taken pains to distance yourselves from technicality for technicality’s sake. What is the difference between technicality, progression, pretense and good (death metal) art?

The difference lies in the person listening. Technical to some could be as simple as a Sesame Street song to me.

My version of technicality is to be unique and unpredictable, without confusing the listener. Classical is completely intense and technically composed, but its purpose and direction is crystal clear when listened too. It just wasn’t created for the unskilled to pick up and play to like alot of the top selling crap.

The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus.

(It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.)

– William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Have the values of metal music changed from the early 90s? How, and what does it make you think?

The values in the music haven’t changed. The value in the industry and those with the power to help it grow has changed for the worst and most likely its demise if left in their hands much longer.

Those with the power to promote it don’t have the skill to write or create it, so they should do more listening to the direction of the musicians instead of trying to shape and mold the artist to what they think the world needs.

Breeding the Spawn followed a massively successful debut with an album that reached farther but seemed less complete as a vision. How did you learn from this, and how has it influenced your later work?

We learned that we need to record with who we wish to record with, and let the label take what we give them, when we give it to them. For BTS we followed the direction of our label which led to an unsatisfactory outcome that won’t happen again for Suffocation. We write record and produce our own. No one knows better than us what we are looking for so we’ve chosen to stay self contained in many aspects.

What influenced the choice of Latinate language and structuralist phrases in song titles and lyrics? (Epitaph of the Credulous, Anomalistic Offerings, Liege of Inveracity — a beautiful use of language)

The need to be different, unique, and think out of the box of most at the time.

On Despise the Sun, you mixed more fluid phrasing — fast tremolo strum, fewer hard stops — into what was otherwise percussive, or based on syncopated patterns of hard stops, music. What prompted this change and how have you developed this since then?

An unfocused Suffocation prompted the change. Some wanted to stay as is, others lost focus of our originality and chose to try and follow what was the trend. The band called it quits soon after.

Here are some revealing excerpts from an especially vivid hacker manifesto: “The Techno-Revolution” by “Dr. Crash,” which appeared in electronic form in Phrack Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.

To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we must first take a quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a group of MIT students built the first modern computer system. This wild, rebellious group of young men were the first to bear the name ‘hackers.’ The systems that they developed were intended to be used to solve world problems and to benefit all of mankind.

As we can see, this has not been the case. The computer system has been solely in the hands of big businesses and the government. The wonderful device meant to enrich life has become a weapon which dehumanizes people. To the government and large businesses, people are no more than disk space, and the government doesn’t use computers to arrange aid for the poor, but to control nuclear death weapons. The average American can only have access to a small microcomputer which is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it. The businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment away from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high prices and bureaucracy. It is because of this state of affairs that hacking was born.

– Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown

You’ve got a best of collection out on Roadrunner and two post-reunion albums that lead the subgenre of percussive technical death metal. Where to from here?

The new album is in the works. It is titled BLOOD OATH. We expect our first DVD to be out very shortly as well.

Then we plan to make only the right choices in touring and biz associates to ensure that we finally reach the level we truly feel we deserve to indulge in.

20 years has been long enough to prove that we aren’t an overnight success or a basement idea. We mean what we say, show and promote, and I dont expect it to change anytime soon.

Thanks for all the great music, and I appreciate your taking the time to answer my questions, as will our readers. Hope to see you on tour!

No doubt, no problem, take care.

In all avenues and aspects of creative expression, different levels of effort produce different results. Moderation, pandering, or creating something merely unique enough to warrant attention result in transience; conversely, truly going for it” and channeling an inhuman energy to produce a horrifyingly powerful result results in a longer lasting relevance. This is the essence of extremity. In roughly three energetic bursts of activity throughout the past two decades, Profanatica (or its shadow project, Havohej) has created some the most “extreme, black, and ungodly music imaginable,” reducing metal to its most atavistically energetic and trance inducing form. We were able to catch up with Profanatica guitarist John before a most impious performance to discuss amongst other things, the band’s motivation in writing their full length Profanatitas De Domonatia as well as the relationships between art, philosophy, and religion.

Is art different from entertainment? If so, how?

To me, art and entertainment can be one in the same, but art should be one’s personal expression. Entertainment is looking into someone else’s expression. In essence, art is doing and entertainment is observing.

Can heavy metal/black metal be art?

Absolutely. Creating music is art and should be about the realization of the best of your true self and to a certain degree, your sense of uniqueness.

Does entertainment imply passivity from the listener?

Yes. Those being entertained, the observers, they are like parasites. They aren’t moving their own energy out. They’re just feeding off other people’s creativity. Of course, the exception is a live performance where the audience can add to the experience of “the art.”

So everyone should give the world everything they have to offer and create in any way they can?

Right. Everyone should express their true self to the fullest extent that they can. Although, not everyone is capable or they might believe they don’t have anything to express. they rely on others. So, it’s like a passive versus aggressive situation. Aggression, art, is letting out your own energy, as much as you can. The passive aspect, being entertained, is taking from what other people put out.

The unconscious egoism of the individual in the crowd appears in all forms of crowd-behavior. As in dreams and the neurosis this self feeling is frequently though thinly disguised, and I am of the opinion that with the crowd the mechanisms of this disguise are less subtle. To use a term which Freud employs in this connection to describe the process of distortion in dreams, the “censor” is less active in the crowd than in most phases of mental life. Though the conscious thinking is carried on in abstract and impersonal formula, and though, as in the neurosis, the “compulsive” character of the mechanism developed frequently – especially in permanent crowds – well nigh reduces the individual to an automaton, the crowd is one of the most naïve devices that can be employed for enhancing one’s ego consciousness. The individual has only to transfer his repressed self feeling to the idea of the crowd or group of which he is a member; he can then exalt and exhibit himself to almost any extent without shame, oblivious of the fact that the supremacy, power, praise and glory which he claims for his crowd are really claimed for himself.

– Everett Dean Martin, The Behavior of Crowds

I feel like some concepts, such as the Freudian notion of “Id”, are too abstract to be effectively communicated with words. They manifest in actions, expressed in the energy transmitted. Using music as an example, an artist can use the word “hate” in their lyrics and the listener might be able to comprehend on some level if they can understand these lyrics, but the idea would come across so much more universally and effectively if the music itself were to actually sound venomous, hateful, etc. I’ve always thought of Profanatica as one of the best examples of this; expression of raw emotion via the most simplistic possible means. How do you feel about all of this?

I agree with you. The energy of the music needs to match the lyrics. It should all be one unit. With Profanatica, a lot of it is about expressing frustration and hate, specifically with religion and morality. You shouldn’t rely on the ideas of others for your own idea of what’s “right” and “wrong”. You should make your own rules. Be your own god; make the world as you see it. To a certain degree, worship yourself. Treat yourself as a “god” or “goddess.”

This view seems to parallel Satanism, to some extent. In some forms of “Spiritual Satanism” and “Luciferianism”, all ideas pertaining to a god beyond the self are viciously blasphemed and rejected. The individual is then built up to be the one supreme being of its own reality.

I see your point. Simply put, I myself don’t like labels. I’ve always found them confining. Most humans have this “need to belong” and this “need for order.” I say it’s all bullshit. That’s why I say I follow no religion. Not Christianity or Satanism. All labels are man-made and are not natural. I am what I am. I believe in what I believe in and that’s it. I follow my own free will. To me, it doesn’t make sense to trade out one symbol, god, for another. After all, the concept of “Satan” is just a product of Christianity originally developed to inject fear into people. Very much the way the US government are using “terrorists” to inject fear into us. The fact is, fearful and needy people are much easier to control and manipulate.

The universe could be argued to be composed of tangible things, like substances, and intangible things, like designs or ideas or “natural laws” which are enforced through substance but are not substance. How do the two correlate?

It’s all interconnected. Ideas come at different times for different reasons. The universe wants you to do what’s best for you and to apply yourself to the fullest possible extent; to move everything forward as a whole. If you apply yourself, good things and good ideas will come to you. If you want something to happen, you have to go and do it yourself.

They have also those songs of theirs, by the recital of which (“baritus,” they call it), they rouse their courage, while from the note they augur the result of the approaching conflict. For, as their line shouts, they inspire or feel alarm. It is not so much an articulate sound, as a general cry of valour. They aim chiefly at a harsh note and a confused roar, putting their shields to their mouth, so that, by reverberation, it may swell into a fuller and deeper sound. Ulysses, too, is believed by some, in his long legendary wanderings, to have found his way into this ocean, and, having visited German soil, to have founded and named the town of Asciburgium, which stands on the bank of the Rhine, and is to this day inhabited. They even say that an altar dedicated to Ulysses, with the addition of the name of his father, Laertes, was formerly discovered on this same spot, and that certain monuments and tombs, with Greek inscriptions, still exist on the borders of Germany and Rhætia.

– Tacitus, Histories

Do you believe natural selection should have primacy over technology?

Define natural selection.

The idea that only the strongest members of a species will survive in the long run.

I don’t think the popular concept of natural selection is necessarily accurate. Whatever you want to achieve, you can. Strength is in the mind not the body. With that, the human species is not living up to half of its potential. This is what is lacking in the world. I think that’s why there’s a lot of hatred for mankind. A lot of this can be seen in black metal. I believe this hatred is because it (mankind) isn’t necessarily doing the “correct” thing. There is so much more that it should be doing. So many better things and that’s what’s frustrating. The problem is that we’re basically just not challenging ourselves enough and this allows a few greedy individuals to get away with bad choices that affect many. I believe religion is the catalyst for this numbing of the mind that’s been going on over the last 2,000 plus years.

Profanatica’s newest release takes the high-speed, long-riff, motif-based style (similar patterns appear across different songs) that had been pioneered with incantation, and adds to it melody like one might find on a Gorgoroth album; what prompted this change, was it what you always wanted to do, and do you see it as a fusing of constructive (melody) and destructive (rhythm) properties?

Interesting perspective, can’t say I really got into Gorgoroth. Musically I didn’t feel there to be any major change in what we’re doing, other than tuning down.

It’s all based upon feeling and being in the moment. I still draw my influences from the same bands I listed to in my earlier years. Paul and I wanted to pick up from where we left off.

Interview by Michael Dean