Texas one-man mathgrind project The Sound That Ends Creation is a bit of a hidden gem that we’re doing our best to highlight wherever possible. Our very own Matt McLennan gave the new album Music Designed To Give You Ideas… Incase You Should Run Out Of Ideas a glowing review, calling it, “cybernetically enhanced and sonically pretty terrifying.”
The nostalgic mathcore throwback gives us the wild and (seemingly) careless sonic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink vibes that the genre at large provided in its heyday. Everything you liked about that whole early-to-mid 2000’s era of “false grind” and Myspace embeds is here in spades thanks to Chris Dearing’s cocophony; we’re talking a soundscape of intense carnival barking, throwing pianos down the stairs, and tapping up and down the fretboard with reckless abandon.
In his review, Matt cautioned, “it’s grinding, winding math metal bedlam from start to finish. There’s no real need for a real dissection of it. Those who know, know.” Despite his warning, we’ve reached out to main man Chris Dearing to get a rundown of the bands that set him on a path of guitar abuse and throat-ruining and to get a sense of his sonic lineage. You can read his words of musical exploration below.
Insidious Decrepancy – The Inerrancy of Profanation
You know how it goes when you’re in a band. You schedule a time for practice, then the drummer oversleeps, the vocalist forgot that he promised to spend the day with his girlfriend, and the bassist… well who am I kidding, it doesn’t matter if he shows up anyway.
The point is that in a full band situation you have to rely on people getting their shit together, not to mention make music that everyone involved likes, which means that unless you have a really open minded group of people, it’s generally something somewhat “safe”. There’s not much room for experimentation when you might be working with people that aren’t exactly on the same page to begin with.
This is the reason why I wanted to make music on my own, and seeing this guy pull of a professional full sound all by himself gave me the confidence to try it as well. While this style of music isn’t a huge influence on where I am now, I wouldn’t be doing this without this project existing.
See You Next Tuesday – Parasite
I was in high school when the whole mathcore scene was blowing up. But I was too busy being a metal elitist at the time. I would listen to Bathory and Suffocation and look down on the “scene kids”. I would laugh at their girl pants with carabiners hanging off of their belt loops, their straightened hair, and their large gauges, while I would wear extremely graphic tee shirts of obscure bands like Abominable Putridity and Circle of Dead Children and wonder why I wasn’t getting laid.
One day in 2016 (about 9 years later) I thought I would check out one of those scene bands and see if they were that bad. So I put on this album, and was completely blown away. They did basically everything, fast grind, slow palm mutes, lots of pinch harmonics, and the guitar slides…god damn the guitar slides. It’s a crazy rollercoaster ride and it drove me to look deeper in the scene.
Psyopus – Our Puzzling Encounters Considered
This is the album that made me realize just how much you can do with a guitar. Chris Arp (the guitarist) isn’t just harmonizing tapping passages or blocking his trem like a pleb. He’s doing things like striking a string with his finger while flicking the whammy bar (try this btw it’s awesome), or using the sound of his strings hitting his pickups. Just take a look as his playthrough videos, I watch them when I’m in my writing process to pick out some of his techniques. He’s definitely the most creative guitar player in mathcore, and probably in all of metal.
Daughters – Canada Songs
This is by far my biggest influence. While the songs are relatively simple to play, it’s the layering that really makes it intense. There are multiple segments where one guitar would play a riff and the other would play it backwards, or they would just be playing completely different things, all with this almost whining guitar sound. The production isn’t just about one aspect of the music, which is the case with most bands nowadays. It truly is about the entire production, and it has shown me how to meld different sounds in a more cohesive way.
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Listen to how these influences come together to inform The Sound That Ends Creation’s breed of chaotic mathgrind by streaming (and if you’re so inclined, purchasing) the new record below.