Interview with Blotted Science guitarist Ron Jarzombek

Blotted Science is an instrumental, technical metal super group of sorts comprised of guitarist Ron Jarzombek (Watchtower, Spastic Ink), bassist Alex Webster (Cannibal Corpse) and drummer Hannes Grossmann (Obscura, ex-Necrophagist). I recently had a chance to speak with Ron Jarzombek about the band’s newest EP, The Animation Of Entomology, a disc that is literally scored and written to bug movies. Hard to believe at first, but if you sync up the songs on this disc to various bug movies found on the internet the result is absolutely amazing. The EP stands on its own as well though thanks to the incredible talent of all three members. Here’s what Jarzombek had to say about this truly unique project.

Now that your new record The Animation Of Entomology is complete, how do you feel about it and are you satisfied with the outcome?
Ron: Well we set out to do the scoring of bug movies and I think it came out very close to what I had envisioned from the very start, so yeah. We were going back and forth with about twenty different movies to try and score and we picked a couple of them that we thought worked best and they ended up sounding a lot like Cannibal Corpse, Spastic Ink and Bugs Bunny cartoons.

I did not realize you actually tried to score to bugs movies. How did that come about?
Ron: I have always been into scores and when I was young I used to try and figure out all the notes in Bugs Bunny cartoons. When we sat down to write this EP I wanted it to sound like a song so that people wouldn’t know it was scored to a movie and they would see it still had some resemblance to real songs with structure and everything. But we had to write to what was on-screen so rather than having verses and choruses every character that appeared on-screen had a theme. These themes would appear and disappear at different times and the music had to follow what the characters where doing at those different times. All of the music makes sense when you start watching the movie.

So each character had its own voice then?
Ron: Yeah, they each had their own theme. Every time a specific thing was on screen a specific theme would come along, sometimes a theme would be three counts long and sometimes it would be twenty-seven counts long so that is why the arrangements of the songs sound so erratic because they had to fit what was on the screen. The bottom line is that the EP contains nothing from the movies, it is just the audio for them and you can sync it up.

I know you said you guys wrote this to the movies, but what was the process like? Were you all together or were you recording in different locations around the world?
Ron: I had to do all the syncing where I took out the parts and sectioned things out to Hannes and Alex. We were all using the same software, but I did all of the syncing so the tunes matched up to what was on the video, otherwise it was a collaborative effort.

Are there any tracks on the disc that are personal favorites or that have good stories behind them?
Ron: Musically I like the last track “A Sting Operation.” It is chopped up into four parts, it is longer and there are 22 musical themes scattered throughout the song that pop up in different places. Sometimes they appear in the first part of the song in one key and then they appear later in a different key, but with the same note pattern. So I think as far as song construction, this track is probably my favorite.

Check out the ‘The Animation Of Entomology’ EP teaser

I listened to this disc a few times before this interview and it seems that every time I did I found some new parts I had not heard before. This is some pretty intricate stuff.
Ron: Whatever was on the screen we tried to capture. So if there was some frantic thing on-screen than the music had to be crazy in that way as well. Everything was written specifically to match what we were watching.

Do you plan on doing anything live with Blotted Science?
Ron: Right now Blotted Science is just recordings. I wish it would get to a point where we could take it further, but with Alex in Cannibal Corpse and Hannes doing his own thing in Germany it would be hard. Plus it is a self-financed thing and with a guy that lives in a different country if we were going to do any rehearsals it would have to come out of my pocket; it is not like we are on a label and can hitch on with another band in some kind of a pairing or something. Plus Blotted Science is not a thing where everybody can re-learn all the parts they recorded and put it all together live.

If we were going to do it we would have to hire another guitarist to play other parts and I am not going to go up on stage and play four guitar parts at the same time and half-ass through it. If it is not done right then we just shouldn’t do it. It would be great if we could take Blotted Science father and for me that is the frustrating part. I don’t really have a main band – Blotted Science is the main musical thing that I am doing in my life. We hit this plateau where we recorded it, we are doing these interviews to promote it and then that is it just stops. I am at the point now where I don’t think I am going to do any more Blotted Science unless we can take it further.

Check out the song “Cretaceous Chasm” in 12-tone fragments