HOWITTOGRAPHY
(Under Construction)
Welcome to the Howittography. Here you will find a list of all of the musical creations and projects that I've been involved with, as well as links to each of the artist pages and social platforms. If you like what you hear, please give the pages a like and subscribe to keep up to date with new and upcoming releases. Thanks for listening!

SOLO PROJECTS
PAST BANDS & SIDE PROJECTS
HISTORY
Growing up, my parents would always listen to music on our road trips across Ontario which exposed me to the majestic sounds of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Neil Young, and Ozzy Osbourne to name a few of my early influences. As I got a bit older, I began buying my own cassette tapes from the local music store and ended up buying secondhand tapes by bands like Megadeth, AC/DC, Metallica, and Testament. After that I was hooked and started growing my hair long and became the kid in black. I wanted to start to learn songs, so my mom got me an acoustic guitar one year for Christmas. Unfortunately, I accidentally fell into it one day and it snapped the neck, which set me back from learning any instruments for a few years.
It was not until I entered high school when my friend Adam Newman re-sparked the interest to play music, as we were both metalheads and were always checking out the latest bands. We decided we wanted to start our own band, but we didn't have any instruments yet, so I spent that winter shoveling driveways until I was able to save up enough to buy a guitar. My foster brother Ryan Weaver played guitar, so I ended up getting a bass to even things out, and Adam wanted to play the drums which was the most expensive instrument to obtain before we could start jamming. Perhaps as a gift from the gods, I found a $100 bill on the sidewalk as I was walking to Adam's place, which is how much he was short from buying a used Pearl kit from a kid at our high school. I excitedly ran to Adam's and gave him the money, and he made the call to arrange to pick up the drums, and it was in 1996 that we started the first band I was ever in.
We named the band Reign and wrote a couple of originals, learned a couple of covers by Black Sabbath and Metallica, and found a couple of local singers who were much older than us at the time, but added to my musical influences by showing me black metal and industrial bands like Dissection and Skinny Puppy. We ended up getting a Supernova Battle of the Bands gig at the McIntosh Arena and only practiced with the singers Rob and Matt for a single jam session before the show. We talked about putting on an intense stage show, reciting Enochian keys and pounding steel drums ritualistically on the stage to create the darkest vibe possible. It worked wonders. I recall Rob biting a raw pig's heart and spitting out the chunks into the moshing crowd, and then he threw the heart off the stage, which ended up hitting my mother who was standing at the back away from the mosh pit. We ended up getting into a fight with a bunch of people after our gig, and my mother never came to a live show I ever played again. But it was worth it. I had a taste for playing live music and knew that it was something I wanted to pursue till the end of days.
A couple of summers later, I ended up on the streets of Kitchener where my girlfriend at the time was staying. All I had was a couple changes of clothes, my CD booklet and a CD discman. Music became my savior in many ways, keeping my soul alive during the hard times. My girlfriend ended up moving to Northern Ontario with her mother before the summer ended, and one day when I called her, she asked if I wanted to move up North to live with her and get me off the streets. It was a path to a new start in life, and I enrolled in school and made the trip to the small town of Markstay. It was there that I began expanding my interest in playing music and had the goal in mind to one day start another metal band.
After graduating high school, I moved to Sudbury, got a job, and met friends who had the same musical interests as I had. It wasn't long before we started jamming and writing music, and I ended up playing bass for a band called Haterix. We played a bunch of shows with local bands, including friends who were in the band Tyterium, and when their singer left the band, I replaced him and started singing guttural death metal vocals for them, learning songs by Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, and Sepultura to name a few. After writing some heavier original songs, we decided to change the name of the band to Fleshcraft and began playing regularly around Sudbury, eventually getting gigs in other towns and playing with many bands from Montreal, including Beneath the Massacre, Neuraxis, and Cryptopsy to name a few. We also played Ontario shows with bands like Napalm Death, Infernal Majesty, Misery Index, and many more.
In 2005, I was offered to sing for a new band that my friend Darren was forming called Wolven Ancestry. It was a black metal project, and he had wrote an instrumental album which needed lyrics and vocals. I wrote most of the lyrics for the first album "The Wrath of Gaia" in a single night, and we recorded much of it outside during a snowstorm using stolen electricity from the back of a furniture store. As I was recording the black metal screams, the police arrived due to a call that someone thought someone was being murdered behind the building, so we had to disassemble and I recorded the vocals for the remaining songs in my small apartment, which upset the neighbors greatly. But at least the vocals were recorded, and the album would soon be complete.
After self releasing"The Wrath of Gaia" on Myspace, Wolven Ancestry began getting some serious attention and we needed to find members to play the other instruments so we could start performing live. After finding a line up, we started playing shows almost instantly and gaining a huge cult following not only in Canada, but also around the world. One of our first tours was self-booked with the first Juno winner in the metal category, Woods of Ypres. I had played shows with David Gold prior when I was in Fleshcraft, and he was a fan of Wolven Ancestry, so we ended up hitting the road, including festivals in the United States, such as the Heathen Crusade Festival. After that, we ended up playing steadily in the U.S. and Canada, supporting bands like Rotting Christ and Negura Bunget on Canadian tours, and sharing the stage with bands like Mayhem, Ensiferum, Impaled Nazarene, Behemoth, Sigh, and many more legendary bands. I also started a record label called Archaic North Entertainment, which not only booked shows but also released albums from Wolven Ancestry, Eclipse Eternal, Empyrean Plague, Fractal Generator, Foret D'Orient, and Strings of Ares. I also started my own solo black metal project Amaranth, which featured guest musicians and improved my song writing skills as an independent artist.
Unfortunately, Wolven Ancestry disbanded due to differences in the band, and I decided to take a break from playing music for a while and ended up opening my own music venue in Sudbury called "The Asylum". Since I was booking lots of shows locally, including Canadian tours for bands like Incantation, Estuary, Goreaphobia and many Canadian bands, as well as hosting the local Sudbury Metal Fest events, it seemed like a logical idea to have my own place to host bands, and help tours that were coming through the area. It was hard work to make ends meet, and unfortunately when Covid happened, I had to close the business.
During the lockdown, I used the opportunity to begin learning other instruments and playing and singing at the same time, as well as sharpening my skills at recording my own music. Prior to that, I had only recorded joke songs for my controversial project Yetiface using Fruity Loops, but I wanted to take a more serious approach to it. I began to write my own dark folk songs, learning cover songs, and ended up experimenting in many forms of music, including hip hop and filming my own music videos. A few years prior, I was producing beats for local hip hop artists and was a member of the local rap group Horror Torture Clikk. Since I was already doing that type of music, I decided to write my own songs as "Slaytanic". I was also composing dark ambient, soundtrack and classical type music, which I released as Darkblood.
Since then, I continue to write music under the various projects and with the evolution into digital and streaming music, have finally been able to release all of the albums that never saw the light of day. Music will always be a huge part of my life, and the music I've created and bands I've been involved with over the years are a testament of musical growth and experimentation. I thank all of my fans for their support over the years and will continue to produce music that will be here long after I am gone. It is the "Impossibility of Musical Anhedonia".
LEGACY LINKS



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