Australian tech and math metal upstarts The Schoenberg Automaton have unveiled their new music video, ‘The Stone Face of Piety.’ Taking influence from Marble Hornets and the indie game Slender, the video features frontman Jake Gerstle trying to evade a mysterious faceless figure. Directed by Col B Cadell, the video was shot over two days around Brisbane. Watch the video below!
Last month, Sumerian Records acts Born of Osiris and Upon a Burning Body toured across the great “down under” that is Australia. Resident photographer William France was there for the first show of the tour at the Tempo Hotel in Brisbane, Queensland to capture the show, along with local support act and Heavy Blog is Heavy favorites The Schoenberg Automaton. Photos after the jump!
Acting in charity to raise money for Autism Queensland, a selection of some of the finest metal that Australia has to offer united at Bloodline Festival this month, featuring headliners Psycroptic and Ne Obliviscaris. Resident Aussie photographer William France attended the show to document the evening, and came back with photos from the sets of the fest’s headliners as well as The Schoenberg Automaton, Lynchmada, As Silence Breaks, and Down Royale. Check out the photos below!
Lorelei are a band that needs much more attention than they should be getting. Their symphonic/progressive deathcore sound is fantastic, and theoretically everything I’d ever want out of the genre of deathcore. We’ve talked about the band before when they dropped their last single ‘The Dunwich Horror,’ but now they’ve released another new track titled ‘Masque‘ that tickles all kinds of Heavy Blog fancy. Engineered by Jamie King (Between the Buried and Me, Last Chance To Reason, etc) and mixed by Nick Scott (The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza), the song not only slays musically, but is sonically massive. Stream ‘Masque‘ below:
The Schoenberg Automaton – VelaIn a time when the word “math” has largely been misattributed to the various Meshuggah djent clones, there are still bands that are making sure that the genre of mathcore continues its legacy of melding the chaos of hardcore, the brutality of death metal, and the oft-shifting time signatures of technical and progressive metal. Keeping in the recent tradition of the resurgence of mathcore via the likes of Car Bomb and Dissipate, rising Australia stars The Schoenberg Automaton eschew trends with their debut album Vela. While their myriad of influences are shown on their sleeves — the trudging stutterred riffs of Gojira, the schizophrenic chaos of early Dillinger Escape Plan, and the forward-thinking technical battery of Between the Buried and Me are all plain as day — their sound wears more like a continued step in the genre lineage rather than shameless mimicry. The Schoenberg Automaton go beyond channeling just the aforementioned bands, however; throughout Vela, the band do well on adding in flavors of traditional death metal and even black metal influences, namely on tracks like leading single ‘Ghost of Mirach’. Even early moments reminiscent of Solace era Ion Dissonance are apparent. All of this comes together in a seamless fashion that Schoenberg have spent many hours perfecting, both setting them apart from the average internet band and giving them a hodgepodge prog/tech sound that is strangely all their own. Make no mistake, The Schoenberg Automaton will be a force to be reckoned with out of the already impressive Australian metal scene if their first offering already hits this hard. – JR & AD
The Schoenberg Automaton is one of Australia’s shining lights of extreme metal, having shared the stage with the likes of Between the Buried and Me, Veil of Maya, and Sybreed. The Schoenberg Automaton’s Gojira-meets-Dillinger-esque trudging mathematics takes the band’s name in a more literal sense, painting them as a wild and mechanical force of forward-thinking metal. The band’s new song ‘Ghost of Mirach‘ has been made available, and it bodes well for their impending debut album. Stream the track below:
The Schoenberg Automaton’s forthcoming album Vela will be out January 21st on Myriad Records.
- JR
Hot on the heels of its immensely successful Progfest tour, which showcased many of Australia’s best up and coming progressive rock and metal bands, Welkin Entertainment returns with the Sonic Forge Festival, which will be held across three stages at Melbourne’s Esplanade Hotel on 15 December 2012. Welkin Entertainment is the brain-child of Ne Obliviscaris violinist, Tim Charles, and, well, the line-up he has compiled for Sonic Forge speaks for itself. Co-headlined by Ne Obliviscaris and Be’lakor, Sonic Forge is set to also unleash the likes of Dreadnaught, Alarum, The Schoenberg Automaton, A Million Dead Birds Laughing and recent Heavy Blog favourites, Gods of Eden, in what promises to be nothing less than an onslaught of awesome Australian metal.
The full list of bands that will be tearing the Espy apart on the 15th is as follows:
Ne Obliviscaris
Be’lakor
Death Audio
Dreadnaught
Alarum
A Million Dead Birds Laughing
The Levitation Hex
Gods Of Eden
Decimatus
Hours In Exile
EnvenomedThe Schoenberg Automaton
Eye of the Enemy
Myraeth
Subjektive
Orpheus
For more information on Sonic Forge, visit Welkin Entertainment on Facebook.
- GS
Internet-based progressive/technical deathcore band Slice The Cake has inked a deal with burgeoning record label Myriad Records. The band and label have decided to announce their new partnership through Heavy Blog, and you can read statements from the band and the label below as they detail the impending releases (yes, plural!) and stream the band’s new track ‘The Siren’s Song.’
First off, we’re proud to announce our signing to Myriad Records!
Myriad is a great independent label with some real ethics fueling them, rather than being an exploitative machine that destroys artistic expression. Some other great bands that have worked/are currently working with Myriad are The Schoenberg Automaton, Bleeding Skies, Friend For A Foe & Ever Forthright. Myriad’s a great little family of musicians and we’re stoked to be joining them!
Leading on from that, we shall be releasing our next album Other Slices through them, first through all good digital distributors and on CD + 10″ Vinyl Picture Disk soon after. For this album, we wanted a release from the thematic intensity of our previous work, an opportunity to bring in some guest musicians, and a chance to show people what gets left on the cutting room floor.
Though that’s not to say we think these songs are somehow lesser works than anything we have released to date, but rather this album is a collection of songs we felt were great that just didn’t fit into our previous releases for a variety of reasons. Some of it was written after the release of The Man With No Face, some of it before, some of it is a drastic departure from what we’d usually do, some of it is more traditional, but we think you’ll find it all equally delicious…
The tracklist is as follows:
1. Blow Up Voodoo Doll
2. False Illumination
3. Nebulayer Cake
4. The Siren’s Song
5. Fractal Exam Sequence
6. A Dance With Dragons
7. 4th Dimensional Obversation
8. Cleansed
9. Genghis Tron, Come Home, We Miss You!
10. The Great Migration
11. Kow Otani’s Castle in the Sky
And to satiate your appetites, here’s the first slice from our incoming collection of baked goods…
Since Other Slices is mostly about looking back, we felt it important to give our fan base some insight into where we’re headed, so we are also happy to announce our next conceptual pieces “The Man of Ash and Rust” and “The Man of Stone and Silver.” This duo of EP’s will expand upon themes we have flirted with before, while adding to our own conceptual cosmology that was given life with the Cleansed and The Man With No Face.
Musically, they will be a big departure from anything you have heard from us previously and will have far more organic production (and real drumming!)
We don’t want to say much more about these for now, but more information will be coming soon…
Here’s a statement from Myriad Records owner Jaime Gamble:
“To have a band of the calibre of Slice The Cake on Myriad is great, just listening to their previous work it’s clear to see the talent on offer, they’re an incredible band, and I feel this is a huge signal of intent on our part, we’re here to get the cream of the crop to have on our label, and in my opinion, these guys are the cream of the crop in what they do.”
Be on the lookout for Other Slices, due out December 21st on Myriad Records. For more information on Slice the Cake and Myriad Records, visit them on Facebook.
Friend For A Foe have sort of always been in the background, rustling about with hints of music and news for the last couple of years, making waves when they landed ex-Periphery vocalist Chris Barretto as their frontman. At long last, a much anticipated release is on the horizon that is sure to bring them into the spotlight, as they’ve signed with Myriad Records for their debut EP, Source of Isolation. Myriad, current home of Australian experimental and technical death metal band The Schoenberg Automaton, will be offering a free/pay what you want download of Source of Isolation on their Bandcamp page Saturday, October 1st.
Founding member and guitarist/producer Chris Purvis had this to say:
After over a year of recording and rerecording the same songs, dealing with equipment issues, managing the day to day trials and tribulations, and juggling my military service, we’re pleased to finally release our EP to the masses in partnership with Myriad Records! We’re very excited to release this EP through them as they’re the offspring of our management company Demise Management (so it keeps everything “in the family”). They have a solid business structure and are ethically sound in that they don’t suppress creativity for the sake of scene or encourage “cookie-cutter” writing just because “it works”. These guys really do work for the band vice the band working for them so it has been an absolute pleasure getting to know and work with the guys and I personally recommend other bands check them out. They’re an up-and-coming label that is sure to be a force to be reckoned with down the line so stay tuned for what the future holds for them!
Despite this only being an EP, we’ve had more issues finalizing our first release than most band’s have releasing a full-length album, but it just goes to show that persistence and patience pays off. We sincerely hope everyone enjoys our first release and we can only recommend you keep listening as new material we’re already working on is even better!
01. Intro
02. The Sky & The Fall
03. Idle Hands
04. For Less
05. Vultaggio
06. Niacin
07. Fallout
It won’t be too long before you can hear this thing in its entirety, but we’ve been kindly hooked up with a pre-production version of their track “For Less” for streaming/sexing below:
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited. Be on the lookout for Source of Isolation when it drops October 1st on Myriad Records!
- JR
Our much beloved prog nerds Last Chance To Reason have debuted their new music video for “Upload Complete” yesterday at Metalsucks. It’s a pretty cool video featuring performance shots of the band (peep the The Binary Code, The Contortionist and The Schoenberg Automaton t-shirts being rocked) and some video of their video game.
Level 2 has been out for some time, and it is one of the best releases of the year. You’ve got to hear the album if you haven’t already; it’s a progressive metal concept album about sci-fi warfare going on inside of your computer. Give it a spin and catch them on tour with Animals as Leaders, Intronaut, and Evan Brewer starting TODAY.
- JR
