Miscreance are in the Meet The Band spotlight this week. The Italian death/thrash group, whose lineup includes vocalist/drummer Andrea Feltrin, guitarists Andrea Graunaro and Tommaso Cappelletti and bassist Emiliano Zina, just released their debut album Convergence. Let’s meet Miscreance.
Chad Bowar: Give us a brief history of Miscreance.
Miscreance is a project born in 2013 under the name of Atomic Massacre. Under that name a demo and an EP Dark Sadistic Path were released, influenced mainly by the ancient great ones of thrash metal as Kreator, Slayer, Dark Angel. At the end of 2017, we were realizing that the songs were going into a more complex and intricate style, so we felt the urge to change our name and since then we’ve published the From Awareness to Creation demo tape (reprinted on vinyl by Danex Records in 2021), a split album with Australia’s most wanted death metal assassinators Vile Apparition issued by Desert Wasteland Productions, (which features 3 old songs for the first time on tape) and now Convergence, our official debut album.
Describe the songwriting process for Convergence.
The album itself was written in approximately 3 years and it has been ready for 2 years. We started when we were 17/18 years old and now we are 23, so we changed a lot of things and songwriting is one of these for sure. During the songwriting process, we wanted to reach our limits as (young) musicians with complex songwriting and riffing, and to recreate the old sound of the early ’90s technical death metal which is a genre that has been almost ignored since that period and never played again in the same style.
What will be your strongest memory of the recording of the album?
Certainly all the crap we said or did during the recording sessions. To exorcize the tension we’ve practically become clowns and we’ve almost been kicked out of the studio because our sound engineer almost had enough of our stupid jokes (Marino we love you!)! However, we think the moment when we were all in the studio hearing the record that was finally completed was the most memorable, after all the time we had been working on it.
How would you characterize its style/sound?
Sounds like a million stars catching fire in self-combustion and falling in a primordial vortex of dead brain cells and abstract thoughts of once-alive inhabitants of dead planets.
What lyrical topics do you cover?
Given the current trend in covering certain topics we would like to specify that we are not yet another death band talking about cosmic space. All our lyrics come first and foremost from our imagination and are visionary, abstract but with a “real” approach at the same time. We don’t want to be explicit, but if you want to find out, why haven’t you bought the record already?
How did you come to sign with Unspeakable Axe Records and the other two labels that are releasing the album via vinyl and cassette?
At the beginning, we only were sure of the vinyl release with our long time friend Danex Records (who gave life to the From Awareness vinyl edition), then we mailed several labels to see if someone was interested to release our album on other formats and of all the responses we’ve got, we were stoked to see that Eric from Unspeakable Axe responded and was super interested to release the album on CD, since we’ve followed his label for a long time and played on repeat mode most of his releases! Then we asked Sean from Desert Wastelands if we could work with him again for the tape edition, after the lovely work he did for the split album handling all 3 formats.
What are your goals and expectations for the album?
To reach as most people as it’s possible and to play, play and play live gigs! We’re 100 percent satisfied with the final result, we talked and thought a lot on what this album should have looked like, and the way it came out is exactly as we imagined it from the first moment!
What has been your most memorable Miscreance live show?
Before the current name the band was called Atomic Massacre and with this moniker we managed to play quite a lot around Italy even with important foreign bands such as Darkness (Ger) and we’ve got good memories with all those gigs. Unfortunately as Miscreance we had the opportunity to play only two live shows so far, due to the constant lineup changes. However with the first one we got to play with Messiah in Florence and that’s certainly not a small thing!
What are your upcoming show/tour plans?
We have already scheduled a date in Florence for the Convergence release party, from now until next year we hope to be able to promote the record around Italy doing as many live shows as possible. On the European side we are planning together with the Chilean Ripper a tour in May but we are still in the definition phase for the moment.
How did you get started in music?
For all of us it was someone else that introduced us to what we like to listen to (well not actually what we listen to now…). We all started playing at a young age and we all had several bands before this project, mostly with questionable results
Who were your early influences and inspirations?
As mentioned before, we all started with classic thrash metal of the ’80s with big names like Slayer, Sepultura, Dark Angel, then as we evolved our daily listening and discovered new bands from the obscure world of ’80s/’90s thrash metal, we also developed our musical style and way of playing. Big influences are for sure (as everyone can notice): Atheist, Obliveon, Nocturnus, Death, Invocator, Pestilence, Disciples of Power and in general all the late ’80s/early ’90s technical death metal scene.
What are some of your non-musical interests and hobbies?
We are a lot into horror movies, sci-fi readings and retro/vintage stuff that nobody cares about.
What’s currently in your heavy musical rotation?
Dark Angel of course, but also Human Remains, Ripping Corpse and Angelo Branduardi.
Anything else you’d like to mention or promote?
In addition to the release of Convergence we have ready a single that should see light on a compilation of technical thrash/death bands from all over the world, and most importantly a sort of concept album of which we are about halfway through the composition phase. It will be a crazy record with off-the-wall themes, faster and much “darker” than Convergence, but still in our style, we can’t wait!
Follow us on our social media: Bandcamp, Facebook, Instagram.
(interview published September 24, 2022)
Listen To Miscreance – “Incubo”
