Philippines Based Guitar Maestro Joey Dizon Talks To Us About Insane New Track

When our dude Joey Dizon drops new music, we take note. Literally, with a notepad and pen in hand analyzing the riffs, the arrangements and the overall songcraft. That’s how good this guy is.

He recently released a brand new single entitled Another Blasphemous Creation featuring a whole BATCH of insane musicians from the Filipino music community – many of whom we’ve written about on this site. The quality of this one track is so good that this is the first time we’re going to reverse the order of our posts by placing the track FIRST cause you gotta hear it, and then you’ll understand our excitement to ask Joey the following three questions:

1. How did you get the different parties involved on this track?
2. What was the inspiration for the song? (As you will hear – it’s a much more straight-ahead almost-D Beat like rager)
3. And lastly, after releasing such a mammoth track, we all want to know – WHAT’S NEXT?!?!?

So there you go…press play…listen to the jam…then read the following text from the man himself.

With this track you got a whole bunch of different people involved – how did that all come together?
Actually, the seed was planted many, many years ago when I ran into Ian [Tayao, of Queso/Wilabaliw fame…] at a show in Singapore. We got to talking, and we were both wondering why we never worked together on anything; I mean, granted we were all busy with our own stuff and we played in our own scenes, but it just didn’t make sense that a lot of us were friends but never did anything musical together. Fast forward to a few more years later, and I tried releasing some solo stuff with various other musicians playing on songs I wrote but nothing happened – mainly because I ran out of money for recording costs.

Then last year, I found the perfect opportunity – the shoe brand we all represented, Draven Footwear, was looking to do something interesting in celebration of the years we had been with them, and when I threw out the idea, everyone loved it. We called it Project: Altered Beasts mainly because it wasn’t a real band… it’s just a collection of collaborations that seemed far-from-happening. It’s not exactly a marketing thing as people would think, because as soon as we told them what we had in mind, they just let us do whatever we wanted and asked what resources we needed, and basically the only condition Draven had was a deadline.

We decided to get Jam [Bumanlag, of the band Even] involved because we knew that even though this was a cool idea, it’d be a logistical nightmare to deal with schedules and activities, and basically, getting all these musicians in one room to record. So we were designated as “team captains” – basically, we had to write, arrange and produce the songs, and act as project managers. We basically worked with musicians who were already part of the Draven roster for starters, and who we knew could rip it up in the studio quickly, and whose playing styles would fit certain songs. The product: an album that has so many varied styles under the heavy music umbrella: there’s some thrash in there, some industrial metal, some hard alternative/grunge, modern metal… everything! So each of us has three original songs, and the idea is to release a new one every month.

What was the inspiration for this specific track then?
To be honest, “Another Blasphemous Creation” was one of those songs left in the backburner from my Intolerant days: me, [drummer] Pepo [Gohu] and [bassist] Mic [Gallegos] were already working on it from years before and managed to do a few rough demos on it, but it just never made it out there. Then I tried assembling a new band with awesome musicians and we were working on it, then another curveball came up (mostly scheduling problems since the musicians I worked with had other bands…) and I almost gave up on it back in 2018. So by the end of 2019, when the Project: Altered Beasts compilation came up, I knew it would be perfect for it.

Dudes who know me know that my preference in music is pretty simple, almost cave man-ish: it’s gotta be fast, heavy and basically, something that’ll dropkick peoples’ heads in haha! I’m a simpleton, basically. So no question, I wanted [former Skychurch drummer] Robert Dela Cruz to play drums on it, Arcadia/Wilabaliw bassist Keith Francisco to provide the low end and some backup vocals, [Sickpig] guitarist Strat Ancheta to contribute a rippin’ guitar solo and Vie vocalist Rod Rodrigo to write the lyrics and sing on it, mainly because I think he has one of the best metal voices out there from the new crop of bands. And Normand Yu of Glasstone Studios understood what kind of sound I was looking for: drawing inspiration from thrash and hardcore.

Just off the caliber of this one song, there has to be more right?
Like I mentioned, there are a whole lot more songs to be released from Project: Altered Beasts so this is going to keep us busy for a while… and you never know, we might just put together a group that can perform ‘em live. But yeah… do watch out for the other songs coming from Jam and Ian – they’ve all got their own awesome flavor, and I’ve already heard some of ‘em. As far as my other tracks, I’ve got one with Marben Romero [of Badburn] of course (because he’s definitely a vocalist anyone would want on a heavy-ass track…) which is a cover/homage to seminal Philippine hardcore band Loads of Motherhood, and a hard grunge (!!!) song called “Ars Satanica” wherein I worked with Baguio-based band Ibarra’s vocalist Rohan Rimando, Even’s bass player Jose Siscar and this young drum whiz Kester Mark Dizon Sison who plays for Planes Manila.

Aside from this project, I’m back in the studio recording for another collaboration project which involves Mike from Shepherds The Weak and Fidel De Jesus of Xeno Devata Project, and still play guitars for another band Alex in Wonderland which is also busy writing and recording songs in the studio. I’m basically keeping busy musically because I love working in the studio and creating new music all the time. If I had my way, I’d just be in there all the time and writing music and collaborating with anybody and everybody who’s interested. It’s all very exciting.

Thank you UniteAsia for always supporting my shit!