Exclusive to the audiObelisk is this epic new track from Massachusetts metallers of stone, Black Pyramid. Culled from their forthcoming split with Kentucky duo Old One, “Illumination” stretches over 15 minutes in length and sees the trio — Andy Beresky (guitar), Gein (bass) and Clay Neely (drums) — push their mastery of the riffing arts into new territory from what was previously heard on their 2009 self-titled.

Black Pyramid‘s portion, rounded out by the track “Warswine,” was mixed by engineer Justin Pizzoferratu, and both Black Pyramid and Old One‘s tracks were mastered by Matt Washburn (Mastodon, Starchild). The Black Pyramid/Old One split is due out shortly on Serpent Records. Listen to “Illumination” here:

Illumination

While you listen, Andy Beresky fills us in on the goings on with the track:

The way the song relates to the album material is simple: we had finished with the album, and that freed us up to experiment and broaden our horizons a bit with our splits and sevens, so that’s what we decided to do. With the Old One split, we initially decided to go with the traditional “long song” approach, and have one extended track. Then the problem became writing it. “Warswine,” which became the second track on the split, was actually written first, even though it wasn’t originally meant for the split. It just took me a long time to approach writing a song that long, to figure out where to start. Eventually I just sat down and figured I’d have to start somewhere, and if I came up with a good beginning theme, then I could build off of that, and the song would just write itself. Well, that’s pretty much what ended up happening, but when I stretched it out to 20 minutes or so, I realized that about five minutes of it really was unnecessary and dragged it out too much, so we cut that and just went with the bare bones. Originally I had written a more ambient section between the tremolo picked section and the psychedelic Floydian part with the solo, but it just wasn’t needed, so we cut it, and that allowed us to record and use “Warswine” for the split also.

Lyrically, I’m not really going to get into what “Illumination” is about, but it’s kind of like a state of the union address, there are a lot of veiled references as to what I see going on at the time, take that for what you may. If you think a certain passage or phrase means a certain thing, then hey, chances are that it does. We want people to enjoy it for what it is: a longer song that we put a lot of thought and time into, rather than nitpick what the details of the song really mean. We like to think that the song as a whole tells its own story, and has its own unique perspective.

Tags: audiObelisk, Black Pyramid, Massachusetts, Northampton, Serpent

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 3:44 am and is filed under audiObelisk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.