Good day guys! Finally, a new album is out! How do you feel about it?

Great to finally have it out. Taken a while fucking about with things, but people seem to like it. We are pretty happy with it, lots of stuff that we could have spent more time on but fuck it. Most importantly, it sounds like us, very little studio trickery other than editing. If you came to a gig, it will sound pretty much the same. And it also kinda means we can move forward and concentrate on new shit.

So “Celebratory Beheading” is finally here, but can you provide us with more details? How much time did you spend on it? How much beer did you drink, during brainstorms and recording? And what was the most difficult song to make?

It feels like a long time between the first album and this one, but we played tons of shows and recorded for a couple of split 7”, played with all our other bands and shit. Everything was on hold for 18 months or so during the pandemic where we couldn’t jam, and we are not the kind of band to be sending files and doing things remotely/online, its kind of in person or not at all. Other than one or two songs that we sat on for a while, the bulk of it was written in a year or so. We recorded it in about 5 days at Toyland Studios here in Melbourne. Then Mark recorded the vocals abit later. Our friend Xavier mixed it for us on and off over a couple of months. The same as the first album, he worked on it as he had time, we are not exactly a high paying priority client and we were not in any kind of rush. Bit of time to put the art/layout together and send it off to Blood Harvest who had it back and ready for release in maybe 4-5 months. Vinyl takes a fair while. Same deal, we were playing shows all through this so it didn’t really feel like a long time to us. Plenty to drink/smoke but of course we are very professional! I dunno about most difficult, probably “..At the end of a shank”, just to get it vaguely tight (and vaguely tight it remained ha) cause of all the wild blasting punished Christoph!

There must have been some special moments in the recording then. Those moments where you know something really blasts? Tell us about it, please.

It was great to do it at Toyland. Adam is a good dude and knows his stuff, and a bunch of really great classic Australian stuff was recorded there, like Damaged, Abremelin, Blood Duster, Captain Cleanoff, Fuck I’m Dead etc. Bit of an institution here in Melbourne. Recording is kind of stressful and expensive and you kind of want to get in, do it and get out, or I do at least. We spent way more time in the jam room making sure it’s all arranged and ready to go. It didn’t get mixed there and that’s kind of the time when you get pumped for something, when you start to hear how its actually going to turn out and you haven’t wasted a wad of money on a piece of shit. But we could tell straight away that the drums sounded rad and how we wanted and we were pretty stoked on all the songs.

What is the most fulfilling for you: composing the songs, recording them, or playing them live?

For me its composing them. Nailing the song the full way through for the first time and thinking “yep, that’s done”. We spend a lot of time putting things together in the jam room, and throw away tons of riffs, forever forgotten. Who knows it may not seem like it but we do put in a fair amount of effort to getting things out the way we want them. Live is great but it’s kind of a different beast. We haven’t had too many real bad shows, but you never know how it’s going to pan out.

10 years, it’s pretty damn long! All these years you’ve seen a lot, that’s for sure. Tell us a few of the best stories that Contaminated has experienced.

Shit, yeah nearly 10 years. We have had plenty of good times. We love a good road trip. To go to nearly any other city in Australia to play outside of our home town is a full day of driving at least, and we dig stinking out a rental van with our filth and blasting tunes all day with our mates. We did a trip to New Zealand a few years back with our friends in Reaper which was a wild few days. A recent gig we did on a metal boat cruise thing on Sydney Harbour, with our old chums Alters and Faceless Burial and Mortiferum was a cracker. All those folks are champions who we have known for years, and to hang out on a fucking boat with them and a ton of booze cruising up the bay past the fucking Opera House and Luna Park playing death metal and shit was pretty mad!

Who made that wonderful art for you? Does this painting have any hidden sense or message?

The art is from a French movie called Queen Margot, a pretty beautiful historical drama. I don’t think it really has any real hidden meaning, I think we had the title from a song and it matched the image. A few people have moaned about it, “it doesn’t suit the music”, everyone says “oh its none so vile” and I guess it’s kind of similar and we were expecting it. But we already had a few releases with very typical kind of “death metal” art, and its only as similar to that Cryptopsy album as every other cover with a burned out apocalyptic landscape with a gnarled figure in the foreground and some kind of big titted tree monster with lava and shit is from the next one, that shit has been done a million times more. The inside art Mark did, and we would be lying saying we didn’t acknowledge that to have a cock in the art wasn’t slightly there to rub dumb arsed metal dude attitudes the wrong way. Rubbing the cock the wrong way as it were, creating a boneless mass!

You’re pretty active, so Contaminated is not your only band. Tell us about your other project, as far as I know, you have a lot of different grind projects.

Everyone has other bands, lots of grind and metal. I can’t even remember them all. Internal Rot, ESP Mayhem, Doubled Over, Rawhead, GBS, Vile Apparition, The Nhilistic Front, Derailment, probably more. Its kind of chilled out a bit from a few back, where everyone was so busy doing all kinds of shit that it was hard to get anything done.

Ok, so finally, do you have any recommendations of good reads or records to feed our creative souls? Which 3 albums inspired you to make new songs for Contaminated?

We all listen to all kinds of shit. When we were writing this stuff, we were all listening to the last Concrete Winds album, Nakay, Miasmatic Necrosis, Zonal, Vomi Noir, Gowl, old shit that we have all loved for years like Infester, Hemdale, that kind of stuff. There is so much shit released every week it’s hard to remember. Been reading plenty of Sci-Fi and fantasy and occasionally nerdy biographies and whatever. I’m gonna read Dave Vincent’s autobiography next, that should be a laugh!

Who released this LP, and who will distribute it around the world? I know that you got your band copies already.

Blood Harvest released this album again. They have all kinds of distro networks and it seems to get sent out everywhere and they do a great job. We have a good thing going with Rodrigo. We send him the stuff, and they make it and flog it off to whoever wants. We got a bunch of copies to sell here in Australia, it goes to our bandcamp, and Terrible Mutilation and a bunch of shops and we sell stuff at shows.

I know that you’re fans of lying on a couch and watching horror movies, and so am I, he he. What’s your top-5? What do you think about the situation of current movies? I think that good horror movies nowadays are as rare as honest politics)

Jeez, a top 5 horror movies is pretty tricky. Id say off the top of my head it would be, all-time, maybe Dawn of The Dead, Blood on Satans Claw, Reanimator, Evil Dead 2, Suspiria. Not exactly obscure. So many great films came out over the last few years, bit of a resurgence in horror. Talk To Me was pretty good. Malignant!

A serious one. What do you feel the independent music scene really needs now?

For everyone to just shut, mind their own fucking business and not to put every thought they ever have on instagram/facebook. That’s what grumpy me would say. Otherwise, dunno, it keeps on trotting along doing its thing. Fads come and go. I kind of wish bands would put out more full-lengths. Cause records cost too much, and it sucks to pay all the $$$ and get 12 minutes of music.

Does Australia have any creatures that don’t want to kill you?)

Most of the spiders here won’t kill you, just slow your heart rate till you ALMOST die and maybe lose a limb. But she’ll be right mate. Australians just kill with their GRINDING DEATH!

And that’s it! Thank you guys, I believe many people will dig this album and you will get new fans! Cheers!

Cheers Alex ya champion. Next up our first US tour in May, and hopefully record another split 7” with some friends not long after that. Take it easy!

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