Hypoxia

Crushing death metal from a new member of the Burning Ambulance Music family!

A CYMCube

First things first: The object depicted above is a CMY Cube. It’s a surprisingly heavy, paperweight-like cube about the size of a racquetball, with tinted film on each of its six sides. Two sides are cyan, two are magenta, and two are yellow, hence the initials. And you can hold it up to the light like a prism, rotating it so the colors combine in several different ways, and see how it reflects onto the wall or just stare into it. It’s quite hypnotic and if (unlike me) you are a person capable of relaxation, I bet it could be very relaxing. The manufacturer sells various types of stands and holders so you can display it on your desk or put it by a window or whatever else suits you. They also make other, non-cube shapes that will be familiar to players of RPGs, as they look like 20-sided dice and the like. Buy it from CMYCubes.com. (Full disclosure: They sent me a free one. I like it a lot.)

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Justice for George Coleman: My latest Ugly Beauty column went up on Stereogum last week. The main essay is about tenor saxophonist George Coleman, who was in the Miles Davis Quintet for a year before Wayne Shorter joined. A new live box, Miles In France 1964-1964, helps make the argument that he was a great addition to the group, and that drummer Tony Williams, who didn’t like what Coleman brought to their sound, was dead wrong. Here’s the link; read, listen, and make up your own mind.

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Buy my book! WRTI’s annual Holiday Gift Guide, written by Nate Chinen, is out, and my book In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor is one of the items included. Nate writes:

“Given the singularity and sheer significance of the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor, it’s remarkable that no full-length biography of the man was published prior to this year. One challenge is the adamantine thrust of his music, which brooks no compromise; another is the complexity of a life that Taylor was content to shroud in myth and conflict. Into this fray charges Phil Freeman, who has achieved an impressive feat of biographical clarity and critical appraisal here, moving through the timeline with methodical precision, writerly restraint, and a deep affinity for the renegade aesthetic conviction that anchors his subject’s life and work.”

Get the book from Amazon or from the publisher.

More book stuff: the Free Jazz Blog published a really nice review, accompanied by an interview with me.

One more book thing: Miguel Abreu wrote another very positive review, this one in Portuguese.

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Hypoxia (L-R: Ryan Moll, Mike Hrubovcak, Carlos Arboleda, Carolina Pérez, Mike Poggione)

Queens, NY-based death metal band Hypoxia released their third album, Defiance, earlier this year. It’s their second release for Selfmadegod, a label out of Poland that’s put out tons of great records by Antigama, GridLink, Chepang, Takafumi Matsubara, Encoffination, and many more.

The band was formed in 2011 by guitarist Carlos Arboleda and drummer Carolina Pérez; on their first demo, they were joined by bassist Mark Sokoll and bassist John Pye. By the time of their first release, the 2013 Public Execution EP, Pye was out, replaced by Jerry Iovino. In 2015, they recorded their first full-length album, Despondent Death, with second guitarist Nadher Tabash, vocalist Mike Hrubovcak, and session bassist Mikaela Åkesson.

Despondent Death, released on Ultimate Massacre Productions, is a powerful collection of chugging, floor-punching death metal songs with squealing, dive-bombing guitar solos (check out “Infirmity Our Detriment” above). Hrubovcak, who’s also fronted Monstrosity, Vile, and several other bands, has a guttural, bearlike roar like a cross between Suffocation’s Frank Mullen and Cannibal Corpse’s George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher. The music has a thick bottom end, with plenty of bass and Pérez’s thunderous double bass drums blasting through the middle like machine-gun fire. Overall, this is a classicist but not derivative album that will make fans of Suffocation, Vader, Malevolent Creation and the like very happy.

In 2019, Hypoxia released their second album, Abhorrent Disease, on Selfmadegod. It featured almost the same lineup as Despondent Death, except that Michael Poggione, who’d been in Monstrosity and Vile with Hrubovcak, was now on bass. It was just as heavy as their previous work, but with additional production touches like the ominous atmospheric effects on “Condemned to the Abyss”. More importantly, they had broadened their musical palette, incorporating elements of traditional metal and heavy rock into their death metal, and the vocals were more intricate and layered.

The band’s latest album, Defiance, came out in February. Tabash has been replaced on guitar by Ryan Moll, but otherwise the lineup is stable: Arboleda, Pérez, Hrubovcak, and Poggione. The first two Hypoxia albums each had nine songs and a short instrumental coda; this one has both an intro and an outro, bringing the total package to 11 tracks. Defiance feels more aggressive than their previous work — the intricacy of past albums has been replaced by pure blasting. Pérez’s playing is particularly assaultive, with tons of double bass rumble, machine-gun snare and avalanche-like tom rolls, reminiscent of Morbid Angel and Terrorizer drummer Pete Sandoval. But there are some squealing, abstract guitar solos to break up the bludgeoning; “Drowning in Darkness” is a particular highlight. And they’ve made a video for the song “Pathway to Charon” that’s awesome:

Defiance was recorded piece by piece, since the band is somewhat geographically dispersed. As Hrubovcak explained in a recent interview with the Ukrainian zine Encomium, “Everything was recorded sometime last year by Carlos and Carolina, I think it was finished around summertime with 11 songs total. The majority of everything was recorded, mixed and mastered in Ohio by Noah Buchanan at Mercinary Studios [but the] vocals and bass were recorded in our home studios. I live in New Jersey unfortunately and Mike Poggione, my old bandmate from Monstrosity/Vile, lives in Florida, so he had to send his files in as well. Noah did a great job though making everything sound great and coherent and I’m happy with how it came out.”

Now, the exciting news: Carolina Pérez isn’t just the drummer for Hypoxia; she’s also a new member of the Burning Ambulance Music family! While most of the albums we’ve released have arrived fully formed, sometimes I have an idea and work to put it together. That’s how the Graham Haynes vs. Submerged album Echolocation came about — I reached out to Submerged about doing something with a horn player, he knew Graham, and we made it happen.

This time around, I wanted to take an existing project, the duo AM/FM, which consists of guitarist Ava Mendoza and violinist gabby fluke-mogul, and add a third element: crushing death metal drums. So late last year, I contacted all three of them, and they were all on board.

It took a while to get a session together, since Pérez lives in Ohio, but this past weekend, they went into Martin Bisi’s BC Studio in Brooklyn to record an as-yet-untitled album that will be out in early 2025. Everyone emailed me the next day, very happy with what they came up with.

As soon as the music is mixed and mastered, I’ll share more details about its availability. But I’m extremely excited about the project already, and can’t wait for it to be out there in the world.

That’s it for now. See you next week!