Ischemic - Ischemic

Ischemic's Stagnation and Woe would naturally be a difficult follow up. With the weight of Ischemic's debut album on their shoulders, Ischemic would have to reach far, be memorable, be pensive, and be brutal to have even the chance of usurping what became a cherished recent release in my listening the past year. Ischemic's self-titled follow up meets the challenge stoically. There are moments of greatness here, particularly the epic closer, "Scattering Garden." Opener "Scabs" is a fine torch-bearer for the album, though does not quite shine as brightly as "Witchcraft". To a certain extent, I understand the reallocation of Ischemic's "Crawl out of Hell" as the song slides in nicely with the other three tracks, however I would have preferred something with wider melodic range to contrast the heft of the death doom present. All in all, I will come back to this record for "Scattering Garden". Ischemic have not yet reached the pinnacle of what they are capable of. Some highlights with my interview with Adam Korchok below:

CTP: Thanks for doing this interview and more thanks for the excellent music you have been putting out with Ischemic. To get the necessary question answered, what is the history of the band’s formation? The lineup has remained fairly stable over the band’s existence.

Adam Korchok: Hey thanks man! Ischemic formed around 2012 in Toronto after our vocalist Isabelle put out an ad on kijiji looking for people interested in doing death/doom music and I (Adam) bit! We pulled together Ty Bontje on second guitar a few months after the other guitarist Mike left to focus on his other band Saprophyte (which Ty was also in) and Anthony came in about a year later. After our first drummer Collin left shortly after the first demo in 2013, we got Chris Orr in on Drums and he would be our thunder god on every other release, leaving after the Stagnation & Woe shows to focus on his family sometime in 2019. That's when Kamble of Mors Verum, a friend of the band for some time, stepped in on drums being our new thunder god for the self-titled album!

CTP: When the band was first formed, what bands or artists were generally discussed as having been an influence and are those same bands still the predominant influence? What new influences or inspirational foci have played a part in Ischemic’s ever advancing sound?

Adam Korchok: At first I would say the bands Autopsy, Katatonia and Hooded Menace drove the direction the band wanted to go in, wanting some of the sinister and violent OSDM vibes of Autopsy, the melancholic melody of early Katatonia and the girth and gloom of Hooded Menace, hoping to balance the various different traits that the genre of death/doom can encompasses. Since then the bands Paradise Lost, Agalloch, Ahab, Conan, later Celtic Frost/Triptykon, Thou, and Krallice have had their influence wiggle into the band's style."

CTP: The songs on Ischemic are long. Longer on average than your other albums by quite a bit and the twenty-two-minute-long final track, “Scattering Garden,” is one of the longer death-doom tracks I can remember of late, matching up with tracks from Ataraxie’s Resignes in terms of length. Did these tracks just get written this way naturally or did you purposefully want to have an album of extended tracks?

Adam Korchok: With the track Scattering Garden, there was definitely a concentrated effort to remain slow, however, its length was really a product of just wanting to have various parts of the songs resolve properly while maintaining that pace. If we had allowed some tracks to go full-throttle blast, and have black or death metal passages like we usually do, I think the length would come down quite a bit. Funnily enough with Scabs, we had the opposite intent- a quick, in and out, Death, Death/Doom assault! Crawl as a re-recording was already pretty long and Illusion of Humanity was already pretty much written when we finished Stagnation and Woe, so it just sort of fell into place at that point as opposed to wanting all the songs to be very long.

CTP: What was different in terms of composition for Ischemic than previous albums? Were you hampered by the Covid pandemic in any way?

Adam Korchok: The pandemic was definitely not helpful, but as most of the songs were written prior to the lockdowns, it only really affected the recording process from my memory, delaying it by 2 or 3 months.

CTP: The cover to Ischemic is a mask. In an interview with Dreams of Consciousness Podcast, Adam said that he felt that the cover symbolized Ischemic as a band. What is your thoughts on this perspective? Can you give some insight into how the cover came about and why it was chosen as the cover?

Adam Korchok: We got the idea for the cover after playing a house party show with the band Greber at the house of a friend of ours, Marcela. She's a great plaster, mask artist and she displayed a lot of her work along her walls, and when we saw her masks in the shadows amongst the smoke from weed and smoke machines we fell in love with the concept. I still agree that it represents the ugly elements of Ischemic: the crushing heaviness, the unsettling gloom, and the disfiguring violence.". You can even buy a copy of that mask off https://www.marcelasbrainjuice.com/

CTP: Isabella and Tyler both provide some of the vocal elements. Who determines vocal parts? Does Isa as Frontwoman take the lead in arrangement for vocals or is this a more collaborative role?

Adam Korchok: Tyler only provides backing vocals, so it is entirely Isabelle you hear on all our records, with Ty adding some backdrop very occasionally.

CTP: Speaking of Isabella, I would feel confident in saying she’s the most impressive female vocalist I’ve heard in an extreme metal band for quite some time and she gives even the best male vocalists in death metal a run for their money in terms of intensity and range. There’s not really a question here. I just wanted to say she is a diamond in the coal mine.

Adam Korchok: Absolutely agreed, although I find it more impressive that she is that guttural despite being super tiny!

CTP: What is next for Ischemic? Will you be touring the US? New music? Any plans to come down towards New Jersey or New York City?

Adam Korchok: Currently working on reviving Frigid Descent and writing music for an EP we plan to record some time in the summer. We definitely would love to make it to the US and New York would be an easy one, but I think we're waiting on seeing how the pandemic balances out, if it does at all, before we start planning any cross-border shows, unfortunately.

Full Interview Available in Upcoming Issue of Contaminated Tones Zine.