DEATH ANGEL Singer Talks Bassist Change, Illegal Music Downloading

Australia's PyroMusic.net recently conducted an interview with singer Mark Osegueda of San Francisco Bay Area metal veterans DEATH ANGEL. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

PyroMusic.net: You have a new bass player now. How is Sammy [Diosdado] working out?

Mark Osegueda: He's great. We had another rehearsal just tonight and he's really nailing all the songs down. It's going to be awesome.

PyroMusic.net: You've worked with Sammy for a few years already in your other band haven't you?

Mark Osegueda: Yeah. We played together in ALL TIME HIGHS, so we've known each other for a while. When we put it out that we needed a bass player, we tried a few guys out and then Sammy decided that he wanted to try out. That being said, I love Sammy but I never brought his name to the table because I didn't want people to say, "You just want your guy!" (laughs) Andy [Galeon, drums] brought him in for the audition and even after that I wasn't the guy who said, "Let's bring him in." After he'd played, in all honesty, everyone said he was the guy they were most comfortable with, and I just said, "Yes!" (laughs).

PyroMusic.net: Now I want to ask you about file-sharing and stuff like that, because back in the early days of DEATH ANGEL — and particularly for you guys — that's really how you got established, probably even more than a lot of the bands that were playing around at the time. So what do you feel about online file-sharing?

Mark Osegueda: Well, you know, it's inevitable, so I can't really say I'm fully against it because there's still a part of me that will always be part of the tape-trading community. It was such a neat kind of thing. And, anyway, that you could make your name and get your music out there, to make it happen. Basically I'm from the old school of tape-trading, and that's what helped us get the name out there years ago. And so, to a certain degree, I can't say I'm fully against it because as long as you get your name out there, it's a good thing and it will make people wanna come out and see the shows. And one thing that's good about metal fans is that metal fans have always been the most true fans that, even though they might hear it first, they still want to have the artwork... they still want to get into the liner notes and the whole bit... things like that. That's one thing I'll always have faith in metal fans about, you know. One thing I do miss. The innocence has kind of gone. With tape-trading, you've heard of a demo, you've finally found an outlet or some way to get it, but you'd have to wait! You know, four to six weeks, maybe eight weeks before it arrived. And when it arrived, it was really something special! Now, everyone's just so used to immediate gratification, that kind of takes away from the innocence of it.

PyroMusic.net: When you finish [touring] Australia [with ARMORED SAINT in March], what do you do after that?

Mark Osegueda: Well, the goal for this year is to already finish writing the album. The plan is to play the Australian dates and then get writing the next album. Rob's [Cavestany, guitar] already started writing a few riffs and he's thrown a few my way, so he's really battened down to write some new riffs and get some basic structures down, and then he throws a few my way so I can come up with the melodies. But we'll probably end up doing some of the big summer festivals in Europe, so we'll take a bit of downtime then to go out and play live. And after that hopefully we'll have material for the new album written by late this year, early next year. Then get in the studio for a late spring release next year.

Read the entire interview from PyroMusic.net.