It's Friday night, 1990. Your homework is done. There's no school tomorrow. Bedtime is nonexistent. You pick up the Nintendo controller in one hand and rummage through the pile of games on the floor with the other. You grab one and jam it into the cartridge tray, slam the lid closed and hit the power button. The start up menu flickers on and immediately crunches to a halt. The screen fractures into a scramble of pixels and the music falters into an metronomic stutter. Your heart drops. You quickly hit the power button and flick open the lid to the cartridge tray. After ejecting the game from the console you start blowing vertical passes into the bottom slot of the cartridge. You replace the game, hit power and Double Dragon begins as normal.
Much like the excavation of Atari 2600's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial video game from a landfill in 2014, Zmajevdah's Zmajevdah v.0 has recently been unearthed from the pay-to-play download purgatory that is now Jay Randall's Grindcore Karaoke Bandcamp page. The former "free-net" grindcore label is now a subscription service after starting up again last year having previously been on hiatus since 2014. This makes free listening of the GK back catalog impossible and finding the bands involved nearly as hard. Not wanting their material lost and believing grindcore should be free for people and posterity, Zmajevdah have taken matters into their own hands and created a Bandcamp page compiling the band's own discography. Thus, insuring free listening to those who would be so inclined.
Originally meant as one half of a split and later released alone, Zmajevdah v.0 appeared on GK in 2012 and was one of many digital-only releases that padded the label's numbers. Zmajevdah is an E-grind/cyber-grind/grindcore band from Croatia and is the one man solo-project of the human entity known as Zmaj; the influential engineer behind the highly respected webzine Cephalochromoscope and is author to several releases and collaborations. As a band, Zmajevdah is an assemblage of many influences and the band's future material would go on to expand further from there. Foremost among those influences are dissonant grind bands Discordance Axis and Gridlink as they are cited many times and the sound is very evident. The latter of the two bands is even covered on this album. But not to merely be cast off as a Chang/Matsubara homage band, Zmajevdah v.0 stands on its own with competent songs and a distinct identity.
Right away my favorite song "Tachikoma" starts off Zmajevdah v.0 with a quick dust up of notes and blasts that abruptly stop right before some hyper palm-muting that would make Ministry's "TV II" turn its head and take notice. Then it's full tilt into some rapid fire tremolo picking and CPU programed blast beats that set precedent for things to come. The frantic and frenetic guitar work churns over on itself endlessly from song to song. Conflicting chords beget tremolo riffs that beget legato scales that speed away through solos that spin out into needling sirens and guitar dive bombs that crash land into the occasional melodic spell. Noise, chaos and raw skill are shot to pieces by ceaseless blast beats. Our only reprieve is the track "Search." The noise track is a quiet slow burn that pulses with heavy breath. Slowly huffing its way out of the darkness like the stirring of some 8-bit wyvern that then crescendos into a buzzing static fire. But, honestly, flowery writing aside, it sounds like Bowser from Super Mario Bros. for the NES, breathing fire throughout the castle levels. And the staticky bulk reminds me of portions of Konami's Top Gun for the same system. (If you're too young to know what I'm talking about, there's Youtube.) But that's the thing, Zmajevdah v.0 is very much of the retro-tech sound. The distortion and tone of the guitar can quickly shift from Takafumi Matsubara inspired speed riffs to MIDI sounding synth melodies that are definitely throwbacks to old school gaming and Japanese chiptunes. Tablature for the album might as well be "up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right, B, A, START." It definitely puts you in a vibe. A vibe not totally out of the blue in cyber-grind, but the difference here being that Zmajevdah is more analog sounding than most bands in the subgenre, at least on this release.
Zmajevdah v.0 definitely wears its influences on its sleeve: obsolete dead-tech gaming, Japanese Anime culture, Gridlink, Discordance Axis, Hayaino Daisuki, etc. Vocals on the album can also be drawn back to Jon Chang adoration and his ultrasonic screams. But Zmaj offers up his own blown out, battery acid scarred version of them. Not to mention that they fluctuate from foreground to background in the mix depending on the song. Very much like the mixing of Psudoku vocals, although not as distant and never as spacey. The cover of Gridlink's "The Jenova" is the culmination of Zmajevdah's tribute paid proper. The musicianship is matched pretty well, byte for byte. This time featuring drum contributions by Twitch Savant, as programmer I'm assuming. Which puts fans into a John Henry ballad-type scenario. Forcing us to listen as Bryan Fajardo defends his blast beat chops against "the machine's." It's very good and very entertaining.
In addition to the digital reissue of Zmajevdah v.0, earlier this year Zmajevdah's Bandcamp released IDIOThetic for the first time. IDIOThetic is a combination of two recording session from 2010 and 2011 and marks the band's full entrance into avant-grind. The guitar playing is not as amateurish as heard on Zmajevdah v.0 and there's a bunch of experimentation. These batches of recordings have songs doubling in length and borrowing styles from outside of grindcore. Flavors of jazz, pop-punk, emo, alternative rock, world music, Swarrrm, Sigur Ros, Yoshi's Story, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, even The Misfits to name a few, all make appearances. Think of it as the Nintendo 64 next generation console version to Zmajevdah v.0's original 8 to 16 bit platform. This might not be every grind fan's cup of tea and Zmaj will be the first to tell you that, but the noise and blast beats still have their moments. These latest rounds of recordings show Zmajevdah's longest reach into its repertoire and the alchemy can be polarizing. But I have it from the highest authority that new material is on its way and shall be a return to the grindier sounds that Zmajevdah v.0 brought us yet still experimenting with new ideas.
Zmaj has a couple other projects as mentioned before. He is one third of the "sketchgrind" band
Kikurachiyo, consisting of the international efforts of members from Croatia, Japan and Canada. As well as being active brain trust member and writer at the Cephalochromoscope blog/webzine. Which has been reviewing and sharing grind/noise related releases since 2008.
The Zmajevdah discography offers up a varied mix of music depending on the release. But always tends to lean towards the extreme side of things and might have a little something for everyone. Especially for those who aren't afraid of synthetic music or getting a little weird. But for an audience looking for a more traditional, admittedly noisy, grindcore experience, Zmajevdah v.0 is your best bet.
Cephalochromoscope: https://cephalochromoscope.blogspot.com/
Zmajevdah: https://zmajevdah.bandcamp.com/music
Kikurachiyo: https://kikurachiyo.bandcamp.com/
FFO: Psudoku, Sete Star Sept, Gridlink, Hayaino Daisuki
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