DEDCHIMP Made a Career Inside the Machine. Now He’s Writing About What It Devours
Punk Head: You call DEVOUR a confession. What exactly are you confessing to?
DEDCHIMP: I think we live in an aware enough world now that everyone who doesn’t know what’s going on around us is actively choosing to ignore it. It’s not the 90s anymore where mainstream media had a stronghold on what we should be focusing on. Anyone can report on anything, and it’s been that way for a while now.
Devour, and a lot of what DEDCHIMP is about, at least for now, is about being complicit in the world around us, despite us all knowing that we are destroying everything we need as a species to survive. We eat it all, well at least there is a small group of people who eat it all, and we eat whatever they want to give us.
My entire adult life I’ve been complicit in this system. I haven’t shouted about what I believe in any meaningful way. I’ve yearned and worked for the very trappings that keep our heads down. I longed for the bigger house, the better car and the career status. I guess this whole project is about the stark realisation that being silent is exactly how we destroy ourselves.
Punk Head: If you're part of the system you're observing, can you really call yourself an observer?
DEDCHIMP: Well, exactly. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has spent their entire life watching our funny little systems in bewilderment, but also following the path they set out, despite knowing how hypocritical it all is. But I didn’t make those systems, and I’m not sure I’m in the position to destroy them. So instead, I’m just here to watch the world burn.
Punk Head: If DEDCHIMP is "music to watch the world burn to," what happens when the person watching realizes they're holding the match? Is that realization ultimately the point of the project?
DEDCHIMP: If you realise you’re the one holding the match, perhaps you have to ask yourself if the world is even worth saving.
We’re all setting it alight in some way, either metaphorically or literally. But the ultimate trick is to convince us that we’re the ones that are responsible for our destruction. It’s why the onus is on the individual to recycle, all the while there are a handfuls of people who are responsible for most of the destruction we see. There has been a lot of money spent to make us think that way. That goes with the destruction of environment, culture, society… everything.
We live in an ever increasingly insular society and it’s much easier to control what we think, what we do and what we say when everyone is only concerned with what benefits them. We’re all holding the match in some sense, but ultimately, we could all choose to not burn it all but there are those who come in with nuclear bombs.
Punk Head: You describe finding a "musical home" at Castle Party. What did that environment give you that the wider music industry hadn't?
DEDCHIMP: I’ve spent a lot of my career chasing paths that I believed were the only way to succeed in the music industry. I’ve ran the million pound studios, I’ve worked for the superstar music producers and I’ve been on the charting records. But all the while, I didn’t respect it, nor was I passionate about it. Friends and family didn’t really understand why I was working on Kylie Minogue, Shayne Ward or Mike Stock records. But I thought it was the only path in this industry.
Ultimately, it was going to LA and doing the whole Hollywood thing that really opened up my eyes to it all. I saw the passion from young musicians, but it was a passion for fame, not art. Most of all I saw how passionate the vultures were around these young musicians who were promising fame and fortune in exchange for some very healthy amounts of money. Only the rich got a look in. Talent and artistry wasn’t a consideration.
So I set out to be an independent producer after that. But it still took a few years to be able to work on records I was really proud of. It was working with Nobody’s Wolf Child and getting to produce her songs, go on stage and help run that project that reignited my passion for making music again.
We got to headline the second stage at Castle Party last year. I was playing at a festival with artists I loved. Carpenter Brut, Myrkur, Gothminister, Corpus Delecti etc. I met a tonne of interesting musicians who didn’t care for the mainstream music industry, playing to fans who didn’t care for it either. It set a fire in me to only create records with people whose music I’m intensely passionate about, as well as inspiring me to start DEDCHIMP.
Punk Head: You cite Nine Inch Nails, HEALTH, Deftones and Linkin Park as part of the DNA. What did you take from each of those worlds that you couldn't get from simply making another metal record?
DEDCHIMP: I think anyone making Industrial music today and not citing Nine Inch Nails as an inspiration is purposely trying to be edgy. What Trent did for the genre is somehow bring another level of craft, songwriting and artistry without watering it down. He’s always been unapologetically him, even if some of his fans today yearn for his angrier days. I think we as musicians could all afford to be more unapologetically ourselves and that’s what I’m trying to do here.
With HEALTH, I think it’s how completely individual it sounds. It’s heavy and dark without just bringing in a load of fizzy guitars. I’m a guitarist first but I didn’t want my records to sound like guitar records. There’s guitars in there, but I like trying to make them sound more like synths.
Then, having worked with pop musicians for most of my career, melody is important to me. Deftones and Linkin Park are bands I grew up with as a kid and they have that pop sense of melody, without necessarily being cheesy or too on the nose lyrically.
I didn’t want to make a straight metal record. There are some incredible bands doing that metal-core thing, such Spiritbox, Jinjer or Bad Omens and I did consider it, because I’m producing a few records like that at the moment. I like what they’re doing but that’s not my lane. I’m not sure I’m a good enough guitarist anyway to do anything that no-one else is doing 100 times better than I could. With a more industrial, synth driven sound I can create the world behind the story I’m trying to tell. I can put the lyrics first and not a flashy guitar riff.
