This is the one-man project from Knife the Glitter/Burden/Normal Love/Inzinzac/Gun Muffs/(and a few more), drummer Eli Litwin, but featuring some brilliant guest stars: Between The Buried And Me’s Tommy Rogers, Chris Alfano of East Of The Wall/Postman Syndrome, Robert Meadows of A Life Once Lost, Jesse Korman of The Number Twelve Looks Like You, Jerry Jones of Trophy Scars, Travis Weinand of Burden/Tetsuo, Evan Moore of Gypsy Wig/Birth Screams and Ruston Grosse.
Eli Litwin was born in 1983 in Morristown, NJ. He began playing drums at the age of 9 and started his first rock band at age 11. Through high school he continued to play in a variety of rock bands as well as the high school jazz band. Eli chose to attend the Esther Boyer College of Music at Temple University where he studied drum set with Erik Johnson. Since graduating with his Bachelors of Music in Jazz Performance, Eli has remained in Philadelphia to pursue music on both the performing and teaching ends. Though his area of expertise began largely in metal, Eli has gained significant experience playing in jazz, rock & avant-garde idioms as well.
Intensus “I Gave Up” (feat. Robert Meadows) by Metal Blade Records
Intensus is a studio recording project created by Eli Litwin. Resident of Philadelphia for many years, Eli has had the opportunity to involve himself in the metal and underground rock scenes as well as the avant-garde/improvised music scene.
The purpose of this project was to take these different styles and combine them into a freely improvised extreme metal album with one goal in mind: intensity. The process began with one recording session in which Eli improvised drum tracks for the entire album, start to finish, in one take. Over the course of the next year, he simultaneously wrote and recorded guitar tracks to create songs out of the improvised drum parts. Some sections were first take improvisations as well, while others were fine-tuned and perfected within 5-25 minutes. The general idea was to keep everything very spontaneous. After all guitars were recorded, Eli learned it all on bass and went through the same process. Now that all music has been completed, vocal recording has begun. For this task, Eli has enlisted a number of friends. Also featured on the album, guitarist Alex Nagle of Satanized/ex-Normal Love and Jason Herrmann of Burden/Tetsuo delivering two guitar solos.
The result is an extremely intense, explosive metal madness which combine brutality of matchcore/metalcore with tasteful experimental, avant-garde elements and moments, contorted explorations. Each vocalist brings his own brand of intensity to the album, while the compositions range from short, brutal bursts of grind and death metal to complex technical and progrssive metal, from gloomy grooves and slow, but heavy doom-like crushing to exploding noise experiments.
Released on July 5th, 2011 via Metal Blade Records, this is definitively not an easy piece to swallow, but a quite interesting one to listen it.
Eli Litwin @ MySpace
Metal Blade |Records
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3qm9kEuYoY&w=500&h=305]
