Cryptolith (2017)

This is a long post featuring multiple disciplines. jump ahead to my contributions in…

“Formed in 2016, Cryptolith is a five-piece band from San Luis Obispo, CA that plays unrelentingly fast, deafeningly loud, ugly music for ugly people. With a shared love for all genres of metal, Cryptolith explores the boundaries of extreme music and the darker sides of living in an idyllic tourist town.”

Cryptolith was the best metal band on California’s Central Coast. I know because I played bass guitar in the band. As easy as it is to make jokes about bass players, believe it or not, some of us are capable of doing more than just ‘playing along with the rest of the band,’ like our drummer may have suggested more than once. For this band I had a lot of duties: designing handbills, designing our logo, directing photography, and writing emotionally artful lyrics based off of Lord of the Rings.

When we decided to make the six song mini-album, I was able to contribute several of my professional skills by contributing logo design, album art design, and layout for the CD and marketing materials. Additionally, I was able to co-produce the album alongside another audio engineer and producer, where we were able to amass the ideas and contributions of individual band members to create a singular, self-encapsulated product that explores the band’s collective creative vision and thematic interests, often resulting in songs that sound like a melange of genres.

One goal that we did share was to write, record and produce and album in all our hometown, San Luis Obispo, and in that way we achieved what we were aiming to do. There weren't too many metal groups active in the area at the time. As a group of guys in our mid-’30s, seeing eye-to-eye creatively can often be a struggle, but after the coursework I took in studio psychology, we were able to navigate our way towards achieving our goal.

After a year of writing, we took them to our local studio, Saucepot Studios, where we spent several days recording drums, guitars, bass, and vocals. Eric Mattson engineered the session, while I produced the album, introducing the crew to my highly regimented system of assessing good takes, using detailed proprietary tracking applications, resulting in my earning the nickname “Spreadsheets.” Wrapping the album up, we reached our to a local visual artist to complete the cover art concept we came up with as a group. As we reached the date of release, I stayed busy recording basslines, producing the EP, and creating cover art for the digital and CD releases, after another visual artist dropped out last minute.

It was a fun experience being back in a proper recording studio after working in my home production studio for years. We wanted to capture drum sounds in an open space, and Saucepot’s main room was a great space for that. As a producer, engineer, drummer, and bassist, I was able to be a good go-between for artists and studio engineers, bouncing back and forth between the control room to monitor mic placement, tracking takes, and in the control room to provide feedback to fellow artists throughout the experience in film and games.

As a connoisseur of metal music and harsh self-critic, I can easily admit that not every song on this release is perfect. Nor are all of the songs even really that great in my opinion. However, I am confident that there is at least one interesting idea in each of the tracks presented on this brooding, and often moody metal album… not very often have I worked on a project where each member’s idea is portrayed clearly as an individual idea, instead of a mesh between them all.

Between several of the songs, we decided that adding soundscapes would be an interesting route in tying together our collective concept for the release. Luckily, having a voice actor in the band came in handy, and allowed us to get take after take of our wildest ideas. It was a great opportunity to flex some sound design skills I had been cultivating from years of audio production work, from my prior years of audio post production.