Man, it feels like 2024-2025 is the dawn of a experimental "slam death" renaissance. I've been buffeted by some of the most bizarre and wonderful blasts of freakoid brutal death metal over the past year or so, stuff like Crasse Intraveineuse, 7h.Target, and the absolute lunacy of ByoNoiseGenerator. This shit has been melting my brain at elevated levels of intensity. Sure, we've had bands like Dripping and Wormed pioneering this weirdness for years, but something has sparked more recently to produce a fearless approach to making the most gonzo, genre-shredding death metal , many of these bands blending elements of free jazz, electronic noise, New Age ambience, and experimental sound collage into barbarous, slam-infested heaviness and coming out with stuff that is inarguably psychedelic, mind-bending, and confusional in the best ways possible.

Of course, for whatever reason, a lot of the ultra-weird, ultra-heavy music on this path comes from bands made up of just a single person, which makes the berserk stylistic splicing and psychotic song structures even more impressive.

One of the more recent outfits in this field that I've recently gotten obsessed with is Cytoplasm, a one-man op from Zachary Rivizzigno out of the far-southern deserts of California. He describes his own work as "Technical Progressive Slamming Brutal Death Metal", and yeah, you get all of that stuff when Cytoplasm's music gets triggered in your immediate vicinity. But it's far weirder and more addictive that you might think. Cytoplasm popped up in 2024 and quietly dropped a digital album on Bandcamp on October of that year called Malfeasant Codices...I stumbled across it completely by accident, but as soon as "Intro: Traversing Dimension Gnosis" started playing, I was instantly sucked into the off-world lysergic strangeness that exudes off this complex, futuristic-sounding death blast. The music flows from fevered streams of lush cosmic synthesizers and monstrous gurgling, birdsong and rumbling frequencies, before viciously exploding in a kaleidoscope of absurdly complex guitar riffs, weird electronic bleeps and bloops, prog-damaged bass guitar, abrupt tempo changes into apocalyptic slow-motion horror, and horrendous knuckle-dragging grooves that sledgehammer the listener before flying back out the window into a storm of freaked-out serpentine hyper-shred, alien dissonance, and vicious skronk. Immense guttural roars stretch beneath continued eruptions of eccentric death metal, fucked-up sampling and sound-collage, pairing insane, riot-inducing ultra-heaviness with hallucinatory sprigs of Latin funk, soul, prog rock, record scratching, breakbeats and other, less identifiable anomalies.

It's something akin to hearing Otomo Yoshihide's Ground Zero fusing into the genetic structure of Malignancy or Defeated Sanity. But more raw, frantic, and seriously fuckin' freaky.

As Rivizzigno lays out in his album notes, this guy is coming from way out in left field. Naming bands like Dripping, 7h.Target, Nithing, and the aforementioned Defeated Sanity as ur-texts for his approach to bonkers death brutality all makes sense. But his references to non-musical influences like Surrealists Salvador Dali and Zdzisław Beksiński, as well as ambient trailblazers Steve Roach and Brian Eno, jazz guitar legends Pat Martino and Allan Holdsworth and the cult mathcore band Lye by Mistake all in the same breath as the René Laloux's experimental science-fiction animation of Fantastic Planet and esoteric cyberpunk anime like Serial Experiments Lain really point to how far out Cytoplasm is exploring the fringes of sound and thought. All while grinding your skull beneath the nutzoid heaviness of those riffs.

Naturally, I was compelled to document this first blast of avant-slam madness from Cytoplasm in physical form, so here you get Malfeasant Codices , issued on cassette tape in a limited-edition of one hundred copies, featuring wild, surrealistic hand-drawn artwork by the amazing Bryant Shields, and the demo version of "Tlakuani" as a bonus track.