Continuing with the momentum of celebrating their 25-year anniversary, Sweden’s extreme metal deviants MESHUGGAH proudly announce the upcoming fall re-issue of 2004’s one song EP, I, via Nuclear Blast. Album artwork & concept are courtesy of MESHUGGAH drummer Tomas Haake, who comments on the EP’s mutant resurrection:
“This 21 minute madness that is the song ‘I’ is something we’ve always been extremely proud of! Originally recorded for Jason Popson’s Fractured Transmitter record label, this was a ‘one off’ that NB gave us the go ahead for – as we were under contract with them. Our plan was to just quickly write a little nugget of a song to help our friend Jason to kinda kickstart his label. It wasn’t quick, however. We ended up spending a couple months on this thing as it just kept evolving and kind of took on a life of its own.
“This song is really different as it wasn’t ‘written’ in the normal sense, but recorded without anything more than very open guidelines/ideas as to what kind of style we wanted each part to have. For example: The initial 1½ minute drum fill is an excerpt of around a 15 minute recording of me just randomly going off on a kick/tom fill. Once we had chosen which part of it to use, we had to chart out the hits on paper and guitarists Fredrik [Thordendal] and Mårten [Hågström] then basically used sight-reading/Avista to get the hits right while recording.
“And this is how we continued through the whole song/process.
“We often get the question ‘When will you guys play I?’ – and though I’m sure it could be done with a lot of listening and hard work, it’s really too unstructured a track. It would take up too much time and effort to make sense.
“We’re super stoked now to have this be re-released under the NB flag. Distribution and access to this little demon of a song was never quite what we had wished back when this was released, so we’re thrilled to see it be brought back to life!!
“To further add value to this re-release, we added a couple live tracks and another weird little track ‘Pitch Black’ that some of our fans may have heard but probably not all, as it was only released in a limited number. Enjoy!”
I’s 21-minute title track has been re-mastered and includes two live tracks recorded during the 2012 – 2013 Ophidian Trek World Tour, plus an extremely limited studio track recorded in July 2003 at MESHUGGAH’s own Fear & Loathing studio in Stockholm, Sweden that has never previously appeared on a studio album.
The track listing for I is:
1 – I
2 – Bleed (live)
3 – Dancers To A Discordant System (live)
4 – Pitch Black