Get Your Hands Dirty in Dipygus's "Wet Market" (Early EP Stream + Interview)
Extreme metal band Dipygus (pronounced “dip-eye-guss”) are as strange as they come. Named after a severe body deformity that duplicates the legs and pelvis, and sometimes grows additional organs, the band creates filthy, chaotic death metal with lyrical themes and words that encourages the listener to expand their vocabulary.
Dipygus’s grotesque approach to songwriting and frequent use of disturbing samples is just as demented as their band name. Formed in 2013 in Monterey Bay, California, the current lineup features bassist Dayan Weller, the appropriately named drummer Bog Stomper (Colby Metzger), vocalist Clarisa Bermudez-Eredia, and dual guitarists Sam Boodt and Dustin Ponkovilnius.
After releasing their MMXV demo and a Long Pig Feast EP, Dipygus finally released a debut full-length album Deathooze in 2019, creating a generous buzz within the underground death metal scene. Its 2021 follow-up album, Bushmeat, garnered heaps of praise and proved that this band was onto something wonderfully bizarre.
On their new album Wet Market (which the band labels an EP due to the album’s shorter duration), Dipygus’s amorphous sinew of soot and grime compliment the band’s eerie guitar harmonies, well-placed-but terrifying, indecipherable vocals, skillful rhythmic syncopation, and a knack for generous storytelling ripped straight from a Marine biology lab manual. Guitarist Dustin Ponkovilnius recently spoke with us about the band’s strange fascination and passion for apes, oceanography, and anthropology, the new album, and what the band has in store for its next album. Stream the whole new EP below as you read.
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What does the new album title Wet Market signify, and is it an LP or an EP?
I came up with the title around the same time I came up with Bushmeat, all pre pandemic. A couple of people have asked me if it has something to do with Covid, and it doesn’t. It’s just supposed to be this gross vibe. It’s just the darker side of humanity and the stuff that fascinates the Western world and all its grossness. It’s an EP. I say that mainly because it is not quite the length that we would put a full-length out on. It’s a miniature LP, which makes it even more confusing. This was never intended to be a single release, we had a bunch of splits that were going to happen. As splits tend to go, communication breaks down and bands get different deals, and it’s just hard to make those happen. It’s not another full-length in terms of themes or anything like that, but it’s playing on the themes of Bushmeat.
Your lyrical themes are rather educational. How do you construct your songs and what are some of your inspirations for this album?
Clarisa writes most of them and to be honest, a lot of times we come up with song titles that seem sick. Me, Dayan and Sam will write the music and then we’ll have a song; the riffs and the song structure comes out and then we let the song title and the theme of the song come more naturally. I just give it to Clarisa and say, “This is what it’s about. Do your work, fuck it up, get gnarly, and write the sickest lyrics you can.” I have written a little bit of lyrics myself and there is definitely a quasi, outdated, anthropological motif going on with the lyrics. Dayan and I both studied anthropology in school. And I say outdated in the sense of… just antiquarian, fucked up shit like that and stuff that is like 1800s/early 1900s anthropology. It’s not supposed to be academic in the sense that there’s a meaning or a statement behind any of it. It’s more just supposed to evoke a sense of horror, but within this box of outdated, darker sides of anthropology and cryptozoology.
How did your fascination with organisms, sea life, and apes begin?
The sea life thing I think comes from growing up on the coast; you’re exposed to a lot of marine biology. Growing up in Monterey, we have the aquarium here and we have this really cool super deep trench in the Monterey Bay. There’s all sorts of sick conspiracy theories about Grey Alien Bases in there. It’s just the darkness, and we don’t really know what’s 100 percent in the ocean. Also, just growing up and going and looking for UFOs was a natural thing. That would really go with this kind of death metal thing we were going for, instead of just talking about gore. To talk about cryptids and the stuff where you don’t really know what’s going on. It’s all this urban legend, and all that kind of meshes into this vibe of really dark and mysterious phenomena. There’s kind of a go-between among the cryptid thing and the anthropology stuff because it’s all very Group A; seeing something that they don’t understand and it just completely changes their outlook on life. Even if they’re two completely different things. The cryptids and the dark anthropology stuff, it breaks down the concept of civility and what we know; aliens, lizard people, and all this shit. As it’s not necessarily what we believe in, it does evoke a certain sense of creepiness and uneasy feelings.
Speaking of folklore legends, “Lizard-man of Scape Ore Swamp” is the leadoff track on the new album. It’s a folklore that’s not quite as fanatic as Bigfoot, but it contains a unique fascination just as well. Set in South Carolina, strange sightings began in the late 1980s. What made you want to tackle this subject?
A lot of this is just me scouring different cryptid stuff on the Internet and discovering sick song titles. I’ve got all these riffs, and “Lizard-man of Scape Ore Swamp” just sounds like a Dipygus song title. You’re right, that one is not nearly as significant as a Bigfoot or Mothman kind of thing. I think that one’s pretty much been debunked on the Mothman, where there’s still a lot of stuff that it could be legit. It was just a sick title. I read about it and I went to Clarisa and asked her if she could write some lyrics about it. And I don’t even know what the lyrics of that song are. I just know it was a sick title for a fucking death metal song. I’m sure she has some insight to that. We don’t print lyrics. We like to keep it kind of like the cryptids, only half showing what’s going on. We leave it up to the imagination a little bit.
One of the band’s most notable traits is its abundance of samples that sets the tone and atmosphere of a song. How do you go about creating or choosing your sound effects and samples?
Dayan does a lot of the sampling. He’s a huge movie buff and he’s really into horror and all that stuff. He keeps a record, when he hears something he writes it down. A lot of the samples don’t even have anything to do with the songs, but if they fall into the vibe that we want to put in with the song, it works for us. It doesn’t need to be logical. But if it touches on the vibe, then it’s perfect. Because that’s mostly what we care about with the songs, it’s not trying to be so exact about anything. Not trying to be so specific, but creating more of an eerie, gross, fucked up vibe. When I listen to extreme metal, it’s more of an atmosphere than about the specificity of the song. I’m listening to it for the risk and the atmosphere. And as fans of this music, I think that’s kind of what we’re going for, because we’ve noticed that in our own listening habits. The samples are just whatever I imagine he hears. He’ll write down where it’s from and find it. He runs all the sample stuff, too.
You were previously signed to Memento Mori. This new release will be through Frozen Screams Imprint, how did this current collaboration come about?
Memento Mori did put out Bushmeat and we are still working with them for European releases of some stuff in the future. But with this particular release, a lot of it kind of came down to the fact that we had plans to release a seven inch and then a handful of splits. Then some of the splits fell through and we kind of had to scramble and figure out how we wanted to release this. So, Headsplit Records is going to be doing the CD. John from Frozen Screams is going to do the tape. And then our friend Kyle at Expansion Abyss is going to be doing the miniature LP, which will be a 12 inch coming out. We don’t have an exact date on that, but it will be after the cassette and CD release. And it all kind of worked out; we just had to communicate with everybody (about what we wanted to do). As long as people are in communication and talking about it, it seems to have worked out pretty well. I’m pretty psyched that it’s coming out with a bunch of different people. I think it’s going to reach more listeners that way. And it’s just awesome to have different people with their hands in the pot.
The past production on Dipygus albums included Greg Wilkinson of Autopsy, Matt Harvey of Exhumed, and Dan Randall of Ghoul. Who is involved with the production this time and what were you going for sonically?
You pretty much nailed it, man. For Wet Market, we went down and tracked with Matt Harvey and Alejandro Corredor in San Luis Obispo. Alejandro was more of the engineer who set up the session and miked everything up, got tones with him, and then Matt ran the sessions and he did a lot of producing too. For instance, a lot of Dipygus stuff, we don’t go in with solos written. It’s all very much like we know where we’re going to do it, but we don’t have anything written. You’ve heard the music, it’s not exactly melodic. It’s a lot of just fucking guitar slop/shred/bullshit. So, it’s kind of cool to have Matt there to (tell us) what would work better. It was just sick to hang out at his studio and bounce ideas off of him. And it was a really awesome time. Then we sent it off to Greg to get it mixed. And Greg did a great job with that, he made it sound super thick. Then Dan Randall mastered it for all the formats. And that’s exactly how it went down with Bushmeat too. Again, it was building off a lot of the stuff we were already doing on Bushmeat. Because we’re all spread apart, for Wet Market Sam and Clarissa recorded their individual parts at PBR Labs in Oregon. Wet Market is a little bit unique in the sense that not all the guitars and vocals were tracked at the same place. And I think that makes it sound even more unique.
I think the guitar solos and those eerie dual guitar melodies are one of the standout traits of the band. How do you and Sam go about constructing these parts?
If I wrote the song for instance, when I wrote the riffs and the composition for a song, I would know which bars are going to have solos over them. I know I want the solo to be a really shreddy kind of descending sound or really shreddy ascending sound. Or I want this one to be a little bit more held out with whammy abuse. And that’s pretty much the only composition at least for Wet Market we did. We wrote the whole EP really quick. (We wanted to) see if we could do another release a year after Bushmeat now that everyone had moved. I didn’t write any solos for it. I wrote a few solos on Bushmeat, but a lot of it’s just improvisation. I can’t speak for Sam, his solos are a completely different animal than what I do. But I think a lot of it too is that he has an idea of what he wants it to sound like, but he doesn’t have anything written out note for note. His solos do sound a little bit more composed than mine, so maybe he does do that. They sound sick.
The colorful collage motif artwork returns with this new album. How does the concept tie together with previous albums or the lyrical content, tracks, etc? I keep looking at it to see if there are clues to the song titles or lyrics. Did Dayan create the photo illustration/graphic?
Without giving too much away, I think you’re right about how there are references to past releases in there. And that kind of goes with the whole motif of dark history. A lot of the song titles have places, names and dates. I think that all is kind of a reference to that whole vibe of the past and whatnot. In terms of the cover of Wet Market, I think it’s just a sick collage that he threw together. And I think the fact that he did a collage and not a painting, or we didn’t hire someone to do a painting, is another aspect of the fact that we are referring to this as an EP. For an LP, I think we would want to do more of a painting. That’s kind of been our theme. The collage is just dark jungle, savage aspects of nature; kind of psychedelic, too. I think it’s a beautiful piece of art that he made for it. But I don’t think there’s any concrete theme to it or anything like that, as far as I know. If there is, he’s not telling us. I think it’s just supposed to evoke this kind of vibe that we’ve been doing for the life of the band.
You’re also in the band Vorlust. Your last album Lick the Flesh was killer. What’s the latest news on this band?
I’ve been jamming with those guys for a little over a year now. We’re doing a west coast tour at the end of June. We’re playing from LA to Vancouver, which we’re really psyched about. We’re just trying to promote Lick the Flesh. We released that album last summer and we’ve been playing a lot. We’re really active as a band, we’re constantly writing and getting ready to record more stuff. But it’s really cool to have an outlet to play live with Vorlust. Marcel, the bass player and vocalist, wrote all the riffs for that. Then me and Sonny got to write our own solos. Which was really sick because I think I mentioned to you earlier that I don’t really do a whole lot of solo compositions for Dipygus. The music of Vorlust lends itself more to having solos written. And so that was really cool for me to get to sit down and write a solo note for note, and not have any gray areas in them. It definitely made me feel like I stepped it up as a guitar player. And I was really psyched to have the opportunity to do it. I love playing with those guys.
What’s next for Dipygus? Is this a studio only band or will there be select live shows or full tours?
Nothing has been officially announced, but we are playing one show in August in Atascadero, California. We are currently writing for our third full-length, which we’re pretty much ready to record at this point. And we will be doing that around the same time as that Atascadero show. I don’t want to call it a “studio only” band because we do have the ambition to do more tours. We want to get on the road and play, it’s just the last couple of years have been impossible to do as a regular thing. We did an East Coast tour last spring with Coffin Dust. We had such a good time with those guys. If people haven’t checked out Coffin Dust yet, you’ve got to do it. That was the biggest tour we’ve ever done. I think we are going to be trying to play more shows in the next year or two.
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Wet Market releases on June 2nd digitally; cassettes (including a special edition) will be available for pre-order that same day at 12 PM EST via Frozen Screams Imprint. Headsplit Records will release CDs later this year, with a vinyl release via Expansion Abyss following as well.
