Yeah, Mike is a genuine talent who suffered greatly for his music, had the knack for it, but was extremely hard on himself and demanded a very rigid pin point result. DN released two, Messenger of Death and Riders of the Black wind EP and while EP was good it was more rooted in black metal/Dissection vibe while Messenger of Death was his vision, an extremely thrash oriented approach with heavy maiden and BM influences, the riffing is extremely dark, infectious, and evil sounding throughout entire release. The project kinda died and became a solo project he still puts occasional work into, but like Necrophagist we are still waiting for something new. A couple ideas have been spoken by the dude, and I've offered to help him along in the percussion dept, I'm certainly no greenhorn anymore, but as a dad of two running a business, he doesn't say much about DN anymore, and has been more vocal about our other project getting its first release.
I met with Mike a few years back, and we framed some new material, and dubbed ourselves "Stratagem" and a week or two later he came back to jam what we worked on and I had gone from concept to straight metronomic precision with fills, transitions, blasts, and marching orders for things I wanted to see with the song. I think two things hit him right there, A) he'd put his talents on the shelf to start a family and focus on a career too long and B) in the 5-6 yrs we hadn't been jamming, I had grown immensely as a drummer, like a guy who had been playing 25 years instead of 10, because he was basically open that he couldn't keep up and felt blindsided by what I was serving up. We worked on it but he had a 1st kid on way and eventually the jams stopped. Tbh, I was kinda disappointed and basically told him to take it seriously or I would rather just cover shit alone in my garage. I had just left a band for not caring enough about their roles as musicians and here was someone who influenced me to think that way making excuses why his hands wouldn't "do it" anymore. I wasn't having it.
So about a couple months ago, he messages me, and sends me some click tracks, guitar tracks, and some old material that never got released, and it was all our songs reworked, metronomically tight, his classically infused thrash riffing back or almost back up to point, and to say I was thrilled would be an understatement. So Stratagem will live again, I'm trying to convince him to meet up to expand what we got by framing out a few more songs, do a full length, or do a split with DN as I've heard some unreleased material that is either complete or near complete, but he has been adamant about sticking to four tracks and debuting with an EP.
Stratagem is like Deadnight mixed with Angelcorpse to a degree, the tempo is more rigid and meant for proper application of blasts, I'm a big believer in that style for intensity sake, but Im open to recording to a click of varying tempos for the final product if it affects the final result of how the guitar work feels. Obviously metal is almost always 4/4, sometimes riffing sounds altered by say a 220-240 blast, so I said as long as hes in good playing shape, compose to his hearts content, I work around him.
Playing live probably wont happen, but then again you never know. We both have responsibilities, he has a wife and 2 kids, I have 2 roofs to support, my own, and my nearly retired Moms who cares for my mentally Ill brother. It's funny, on top of that, aside from our very rigid but very compatible views about music theory, we also both share some anger and aloofness towards the local scene and just the city of Chicago where it'd make sense to play, we've both had too many instances where we were outright attacked, outnumbered and even arrested for defending ourselves. Honestly fuck Chicago. I stopped going to shows altogether, cant tell you how many times someone thought cause I'm on the manlet end of the spectrum it was time to beat me up because I accidentally bumped into them, or they thought I was looking at their girl, or some stupid shit. Cowards are a lot less tough after the lifelong wrestler in me puts them on their back, but then you got their buddy's and bouncers jumping on you and last time I wound up in a paddy wagon, and the CPD beat me up worse than the 3-4 bouncers had. But you never know.
I am not sure when material will be released, I'm either recording drums in a month or two, or we go back to work for construction for the summer, polish the songs up a little more along way, and record drums and he takes it from there next fall/winter. Either way, I'll shoot you the details when we got something if you're interested.
