Description
Trapped Within Burning Machinery began as a one-man sludge project in 2007 when Zak Esparza (lead guitar/vocalist) needed an extended outlet for the ideas and riffs plaguing his consciousness. After recording a few demos, Zak recruited close friend Geoff Jones to play drums and Juan Rodriguez to fill in on bass. The trio wrote and recorded their raw, powerful first demo, Evolutionary Transmitted Disease, and self-released it in the summer of 2009. In January 2011, the band entered the studio to record their first full-length album, The Putrid Stench of Decaying Self, this time with new bassist Ernie Ballerz and second guitarist Robert Trujillo. TWBM then released the album through Black Voodoo Records on October 5th, 2012. In early 2014, the band released a limited split tape with Long Beach's bass-and-drums sludge duo Pigeonwing.
After a period of extreme discontent with life in general during the Putrid Stench Of Decaying Self-era, TWBM wanted to continue with the same kind of dark subject matter but from shifting perspectives. So, with the addition of a third guitarist, James Inglett, they began writing music and thinking of lyric ideas. One day, guitarist Robert Trujillo got inspired and blurted out something involving "the blue lady from The Fifth Element.” They had all been huge fans of the movie, and after pondering on it, became obsessed with the idea of riffing off of themes from the movie. One song about the Diva Plavalaguna turned into an hour long, doom metal space opera and they submerged themselves into it. Using the characters in the story as hosts, they found that they could write from many different angles and bounce around stylistically without straying from the core sound of the band. The idea of an ancient being traveling to future Earth in hopes of saving it from the epitome of evil really spoke to them, because, as said by Zak Esparza, “We're fuckin’ nerds and the lessons of love and compassion in the story really round out the negativity we usually spew in our music.” They got to write songs from the perspectives of characters that don't have much too back story in this two-hour film, so it gave them some breathing room to do their own thing without being confined to some strict canon or lore.
Ultimately, the marriage of sludge and lore comes together to create The Filth Element, a more hopeful-sounding record than ever recorded before by TWBM, though the sludge is very much alive and well—and the dark places are never far from the theme at hand. Recorded by renowned producer/engineer John Haddad (Intronaut, Exhumed, Phobia), The Filth Element will be co-released by Southern California labels Midnite Collective and Black Voodoo Records on double gatefold LP on July 21, 2015.
