METALLIAN - Godless Enthropia

Tetracyclic Dominion – 2018 – Symbol Of Domination

Members

Vocals

Ethylic Disorder, Eisenmenger, Bloodstain, Traktor Grinder>>Davide Ponzetto

Guitar

WAEL BEN HALIMA – Lou Quinse, Beyond The Unholy Truth, Abnorma>>SIMONE CAVALERA>>Abnorma

Bass

Corroosion, Beyond The Unholy Truth, Gotland>>CLAUDIO COLLA>>Gotland

Drum

Lou Quinse, Beyond The Unholy Truth, Abnorma>>Simone Cottura>>Abnorma

History & Biography

Members of Beyond The Unholy Truth in Italy founded the band in August 2012. Dystopian Metaphors was the 2013 demo. The group lost its singer Fabio and guitarist Stefano. The band uploaded a couple of songs about right-wingers and corporatists in Italy, namely Whores And Politics and Palace Of Fornication, in 2014, but otherwise went dark. Symbol Of Domination signed the band and issued its debut album.

Vocalist Davide Ponzetto died in October 2022. The band was recording material in the middle of 2023. The band uploaded two instrumental songs in 2024. The line-up read guitarists Simone Cavalera and Iacopo Colonnelli, bassist Claudio Colla (also in Gotland now) and Arrigo Salvatore on drums.

Reviews

GODLESS ENTHROPIA - TETRACYCLIC DOMINION - SYMBOL OF DOMINATION
Grindcore albums are becoming more and more scarce, but here is one and it is a special one. This is a technogrind band that does everything just right. The band's music is brutally grinding so much so that playing this and, say, a Death album makes this sound like heavy metal to Death's pop/rock. The grind is accentuated by diversions and variety, but one instance of lame clean vocals aside never at the expense of the heaviness. The band is just adept and uses it to create a variety of riffs and time signatures. The drummer can blast and the singer can hurl vokills, but then the guitar tapping and acrobatics kick in and propel this album a notch.
The band's monicker and more obviously the album title hint at the technical nature of things. In that sense the band could be described as a cross between Man Must Die and Desecravity, but not quite as fast as the former or as clean sounding as the latter, but quite close. Here is the bottom-line: Godless Enthropia is all upside in the heaviness and speed sweepstakes and there is not one dull moment on the album. Just dispose of the clean vocals next time, boys. - Ali "The Metallian"

Interviews

Godless Enthropia is a new name to many listeners. That should change with the release of Tetracyclic Dominion through Symbol Of Domination. The band means serious business and if you do too you owe it to yourself to buy it either for your aural pleasure or to play it loudly at home, work or school in order to torture and kill off every Drake, Celine Dion and Justin whatever his name is fan. The album has the power and brutality, but also encompasses subtlety, which means it was time to invite two key members into the hallowed halls of Metallian Towers to dig deeper. – 05.08.2019

METALLIAN: Welcome to Metallian Towers. Could you take our readers back? When, how and why did Godless Enthropia come together?
CLAUDIO: Thanks very much. Once the band Beyond The Unholy Truth split up the guitarist and composer, the drummer and myself decided to pick it up from there, throw in some of the upcoming ideas we were coming out with for our former joint and worked on them with a different approach. We wanted it to be more detailed, more professional and featuring a big deal of care for our song arrangements Then followed many line-up changes mostly due to mild disagreements on which path to pursue. Here we are: More alive than ever.
The very moment Godless Enthropia were born, on paper at least, was August 23, 2012, as far as I can remember.

METALLIAN: How would you describe your music were you to review it?
CLAUDIO: Definitely a blend of death metal, both modern and old school, progressive, modern thrash metal and a bit of grindcore too as you appropriately pointed out in your review. With some kind of melodic death metal feel: a tad of it, at least, based on the fact that most of us have roots in ‘90s’ legendary releases such as At The Gates’ The Red In The Sky is Ours, Dark Tranquillity’s The Gallery and In Flames’ The Jester Race. Influence-wise, we’ve been linked to a ton of famous bands, out of which that is more frequently mentioned one is Gorguts. It is quite an honour, when you are told you give out the vibe of such a glorious act.

METALLIAN: Godless Enthropia!, what is the meaning behind the monicker?
CLAUDIO: I came up with it. I wanted to pair the rational and the chaotic, simple as that. I am kind of hinged on the doppelgänger concept. Since this take on the ‘godless’ concept might be confusing, I must point out I wasn’t looking at the god and divine entity concept from an Aristotelian mind-set, i.e. deeming it a simple bringer of cosmological order and regulation. There’s much more to that, and the god concept alone is a dual one, per se. The monicker is more about a suggestion, like an instant glimpse of a daydream, more than a full-rounded rational process. Anyway, the main suggestions for this sort of stuff, including some of the lyrics of Tetracyclic Dominion (and for our previous work) come from David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Shinya Tsukamoto, Takashi Miike, that kind of cinema. Fascinating and inspiring, that’s all.

METALLIAN: Specifically, are the lyrics occasionally inspired by the aforementioned sources or verbatim quoted?
CLAUDIO: Definitely more of an overall inspiration than verbatim quotes. More like some visual glimpses mixed with the lyrical narration.

METALLIAN: Have you watched Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe?
CLAUDIO: I haven’t seen that one yet, man. But I can tell you my favourite Sono film is Strange Circus or Kimyoo Na Saakasu, followed by Suicide Club and Cold Fish. I am not big on Exte. It is a bit too campy for my taste, despite Chiaki Kuriyama being a very good lead in it.

METALLIAN: You are right about Exte and its lead. Davide, you have been quiet thus far. Have you been in any other bands before Godless Enthropia? Where else have you sang?
DAVIDE: Well, I started growling at the age of 17. I am 40 now. I have a wife and two kids. I must say the will to growl is still alive and growing. Anyway, my first band lasted from about 1997 to 1999. It was a crust-grind-punk trio with my best friend on drums and my girlfriend on guitars. Our monicker was Ethylic Disorder. We recorded some sort of a tape EP whose songs were featured on two late ‘90s’ international DIY tape compilations, which included songs of many iconic grindcore bands of those years. We proudly used an ‘80s’ tape recorder, which definitely turned out up to the task. Then I had a sludge-grind band called Eisenmenger still with my girlfriend on guitar. That’s when I got to work in a professional studio for the first time for our first full-length. It was put out on CD by us and on tape by Zas! Productions. Eisenmerger tracks made it onto tape compilations as well. Then, in 2000, as usually happens in band-related romances, when my girlfriend and I split up, so did the act. I will always be grateful to her because she brought me into a band, instead of just staying put as a listener. One thing led to another, and our former drummer asked me to join his metal-hardcore band. I joined indeed and I even got to pick our monicker. I went for Bloodstain. We recorded a full-length album, produced by the well-rounded label Still Life Records in 2004, which printed 500 CD copies of it. We got to achieve and live the dream of playing some gigs abroad, namely in Leipzig, supporting Belgian act Liar and in London supporting no less than Caliban. Pay-to-play did not exist yet. While we were starting to work on our next full-length my bandmates decided to split the band. All of them, sometime later, were part of another act featuring another singer. That surely wasn’t the best news to discover. I quit singing until 2011, when with some old-time teenage friends we formed an old-school grindcore band called Traktor Grinder. We played many revival gigs and, to date, we have live recordings only. We were asked to support Godless Enthropia at the end of 2013. I enjoyed their live performance a lot. What I didn’t know is that the show was their last gig featuring the guy who was their growler and screamer back then. He was leaving the band just afterwards About one week later I was asked to join the band. Then, well, you know the rest.

METALLIAN: What was your former girlfriend’s name?
DAVIDE: Her name is Silvia.

METALLIAN: The band apparently disappeared for a few years. What was going on? Was that a hiatus?
CLAUDIO: Not exactly a hiatus. More of a rearrangement, including a substantial line-up revision. Our former drummer and I were the only remaining members of the original one and I am the only one remaining in the line-up right now. Moreover, yours truly started writing songs for the band and of course all the setup before the studio was done. We put the 2014 mini-release out when we were only three ‘official’ members in Godless Enthropia. We played many gigs in 2015. We started working on the album at MK2 studio afterwards in July 2016. It took more than a bit since we had to make each one of our schedules meet our sound engineer’s. We all have day jobs of course and throughout that span, due to non-musical reasons, we had to put live gigs on hold.

METALLIAN: Let’s fast forward to the current status of the act. How did the band obtain the current contract and how many albums is it for? Is the band signed to two labels?
DAVIDE: I had two goals for the album for me not to deem it a fiasco. It had to fully satisfy us, from a strictly artistic point of view, and I wanted it to be released without the need for us to pay out a label or a management group. So, between 2016 and 2017 I spent about one year listening to a ton of up-and-coming bands out there - mostly on YouTube. I was basically looking for suggestions and songs of bands to inspire us. Then I started checking to see which of the stuff impressing me the most was released by which label, which helped me write down a list of about 150 underground labels. When Godless Enthropia’s full-length was mastered I submitted it to all of them one by one. I got a message from Symbol Of Domination from Belarus when I was about to hit the 100th submission offering to co-release the album Tetracyclic Dominion, our creature, on a fifty-percent share basis. It surely was a big moment for all of us and I felt we were accomplishing what we wanted. I went on sending submissions of course pointing out we were already looking for a co-release. Shortly thereafter Hecatombe Records joined the agreement. Then my dream came true.
Music-wise, I often come to think about how and why our album was eventually released by a division of a black metal label together with a grindcore one. It’s kind of neat how your review just added fuel to it...

METALLIAN: Congratulations on your attitude and success. So let us talk about the new album. What more was the intention with this record? Could you address the theme and the title? Safe to say that this is not standard-issue stuff and yet the band is not going soft anywhere to accomplish it.
DAVIDE: I asked my mates to name the album Tetracyclic Dominion and they accepted. What I envisioned as its main concept is our inability to balance all the opposite issues living inside all of us. Besides, how feelings and emotions have a hard time co-existing, both on a conscious plane and on a subconscious one, and how this ongoing and eternal struggle affects actions and communication for every one of us. The opposites’ theme is probably the most consistent one, both music and lyrics-wise. As a consequence to the feeling of being constantly torn, the need to fill your brain with therapeutic drugs comes up, so you can decrease the unstoppable sense of heaviness and anxiety about life. And you keep on perceiving being under the Dominion of chemistry, as a way to put that kind of sensitivity and empathy overcoming you on hold, at the very least. Besides, the word ‘Tetracyclic’ refers to the molecular structure of some non-psychotic agents.

METALLIAN: It clearly needed your explanation so thanks for that. The one thing we at Metallian Towers did not appreciate was the one instance when the clean vocals make an appearance. Why are they there?
CLAUDIO: Really? Some reviewers and listeners even pointed out how the track Solecism I was the highlight of the album. That’s some people’s call, at least. Anyway, I think we really enjoyed including something much different in Tetracyclic Dominion and contributing vocalist Fabrizio “Lord Jotun” Prelini did a terrific job. Though it’s not your cup of tea, let me tell you how I came up with the idea for that song. It was raining a lot and I was in my car close to the bus stop waiting for my wife. Our wonderful little guy - thanks to whom I’m the proudest dad who ever walked on this friggin’ Earth, wasn’t around yet - I was writing a lot of music back then, rounding out tracks for Tetracyclic Dominion, and I suddenly started humming a little tune. It got clearer and clearer quickly. I spontaneously threw some words on it and while the rain was still pouring cats and dogs outside I recorded a glimpse of it acapella , as a reminder, on my MP3 player. A bit like Twin Peaks’ Special Agent Dale Cooper, when he was talking to Diane through his old-fashioned recorder. And, before I knew it, I was putting ink to paper as a further track for the album after, of course, my fellow bandmates agreed on it. The clean vocals part was loosely inspired by a lot of listening sessions to the works of Vintersorg, one of the acts I am keener on. Besides, my favourite singer ever is Nevermore’s late Warrel Dane, and I enjoy a bunch of metal clean vocalists like Fernando Ribeiro, Jonathan Davis, the late Peter Steele, Chino Moreno, of course Maynard James Keenan among others).

METALLIAN: Tastes are personal and reviews are subjective of course. Artists should exercise their right to play, sing and compose as they wish. With that said, I am certain a number of the aforementioned names are not metal singers. To change the topic let’s talk about your home base of Italy. Are you proud Italians? I ask because we are not fans of nationalism here at Metallian Towers. Moreover, not only has Italy’s past been mired in racist and xenophobic fascism it currently suffers again from ignorance and stupidity. What is going on in that country? Any fascist right-wingers in the band?
CLAUDIO: Well, we’re kind of proud of what we do every day. Being Italians? Hell, it’s got its highs and lows. Like any nationality around, I guess. And, as you can infer from reading our lyrics Godless Enthropia doesn’t bend to the right-wing. However, we are definitely far from what would be defined a political band. We are rather inclined to deliver our subtextual messages through metaphors and allegories than through straight-on statements. Of course, each band member has his own political views. And, though I admire some full-on committed acts, such as Napalm Death and Rage Against The Machine, bringing that style into Godless Enthropia wouldn’t have been my cup of tea. We are not fond of populisms of any kind. That’s a bad mind-set which is surely a big part of the current Italian government to answer the previous question of yours.

METALLIAN: Thank-you for your time and answers thus far. Now for the question you have been waiting for me to ask. Why is Metallian the best website in the world? Everyone has their own explanation. What is your reason for loving www.metallian.com? Who wants to tackle this one?
CLAUDIO: Well, I must say your Tetracyclic Dominion review impressed me quite a bit. The “technogrind” thing is an interesting tag for our music, and, reading some other reviews, I like how you keep it short and clear. Besides, we were of course honoured to be named Metallian’s Release Of The Month. Since we are talking about awesome websites, why don’t you take a chance and take a peek at https://symbolofdomination.bandcamp.com/album/sodp107-godless-enthropia-tetracyclic-dominion-2018 where both physical copies and digital formats of our full-length are available? Also visit https://www.facebook.com/GodlessEnthropia/ where we deliver our little treats from.

There you have it. Claudio and Davide were welcome guests here at Metallian Towers where we enjoyed listening to their full-length album and look forward to it being played well into the late night many a night.

If you enjoyed this, read Monstrosity

Godless Enthropia