The Sunday Silence Chronicles: Part I - The Beginning.

It was the summer of 1990, in a room in the home of David and Kay Seale, where a band would be created from the ashes of another band with a different name that wasn't as cool.  It was in this room that four young men with a little musical talent and a lot of optomism would join together to form the most extreme death metal band that Riverdale has ever seen!  Mike Seale, Brett Barrett, Alan Mason and me, your humble narrator, David Fountinelle, had already been jamming together for a while, and even played some parties and a couple talent shows at the high school, but we were looking to move in a more extreme direction musically.  With our new ambitions, we needed a new name, and that's where Mike's dad, Dave, stepped in to help.  He presented us with a list of potential names - not unlike what friends do for expecting mothers - and we sat at the kitchen table and poured over the list.  So many possible names for our soon-to-be-epic band... Pale Horse... Malachi... Breast Fed (my personal favorite)... but one name stood out from the rest, and that name was Sunday Silence.  Little did we know then that Sunday Silence was also the name of a winning race horse (see what happens when you live before the invention of Google?) but no matter, we were now ready to melt people's faces off with unholy hellfire!

We practiced 3 times a week for the next 6-8 months, building up a catalog of songs, until we finally had enough to record a full-length demo.  We went into the studio - which in this case was a converted guest house in a dude's backyard, although it was actually very well made and pretty professional in terms of equipment and setup - and recorded the groundbreaking "Where Evil Dwells".  This was, of course, a legendary demo, containing such classics as "See the Blood Spill", "Die a Slow Death", the title track "Where Evil Dwells" and, of course, the epic "Human Consumption", which contained some of the greatest, completely improvised on the spot, Al Mason lyrics ever - such as "As I eat the remains, I get a tummy ache" and "I have eaten everyone, I shall smile!"  It was pretty obvious that we were ready to do big things, in a big things kinda way.  That's when we met a fellow by the name of Donnie Johnson...

Donnie was the singer of a band called Morbus, who had been grinding it out in the Fresno underground metal scene for a few years, and he had built up a rather impressive scene of fiercely loyal extreme metal fans by putting on shows everywhere from backyard parties to whatever meeting halls would be willing to rent to a guy who looked like Anton LaVey's scarier brother so he could host a bunch of crazy metalheads and bands playing songs about Satan, chopping up bodies, sodomizing posers... you know, standard subject matter.  Well, he had heard of our little band of merry minstrels and was in the process of booking bands for a legendary festival of local extreme metal acts called "Monster Mosh", and he invited us to be on the bill as the opening act.  What's this?  Our first gig?  Oh hell yeah we'll open that bitch!  Just try and follow our HOT FIRE!  That first show was the start of an unstoppable freight train, loaded with highly flammable tanks full of pure liquid KICK ASS that tore through the central valley like a 2006 Camry on the freeway, no brakes, and nothing but screams and carnage.

After our humble debut at Monster Mosh, we hardened our sound even more - more brutal vocals, more extreme music, blast beats, grinding guitar madness - within a year we were one of the most popular and entertaining death metal acts in Fresno.  We took our show on the road, travelling to other cities, spreading the sickness wherever we could.  We started getting better and better bookings, ultimately getting booked at the biggest and best rock club in Fresno at the time - the legendary Cadillac Club.  In my opinion, the Cadillac Club was the best rock club in Fresno, ever.  To this day, no other venue brings in the volume of national rock acts that the Cadillac did, and we were chosen to open up for some of the greats of death metal - Grave, Abscess, Exhumed, Immolation, Fear of God... Every touring death metal band that came to the Cadillac, we opened for them, and we fucking rocked the house every time.  It was a sad day when the Cadillac Club closed, it was the beginning of the end for the Fresno metal scene, which had lost it's best venue for big shows.  Us local boys had to go back to playing keg parties and DIY shows, the crowds got smaller and smaller with each gig.  Eventually, internal conflicts and real-life responsibilities broke Sunday Silence up, and most of us went on to other musical projects, but there will never be another band like Sunday Silence, and never a greater time than those four years, from 1991 to 1995, when the Fresno underground metal scene rose like a mountain of dead bodies into the sky, and we reigned among the greats at it's peak.

Just soak this into your fucking ear pussies:

Merced, CA - 1992

The legendary Cadillac Club - This was our first headlining show there, and one of our greatest live performances, ever.

Suffer the stench of rotting poser guts.  Fuck the weak shit... only death is real!  Leave the kids at home, and if you're squeamish, stay home with em!  Slam hard and proud, mothafuckas...