Northern Virginia’s Ikkadian release their debut album, “Of Alpha and Omega” today. The album features 10 songs totally nearly 50 minutes of crushing blackened death metal. The entire album is offered as a free digital download from the band’s web site, www.ikkadian.com. The band features Michael Arcane on drums, John Cornnell on guitar and bass, and Donny Doss performs the vocal duties.
The album starts off with “Adversary”, which was released two weeks ago in their music video directed by Tommy Jones at The Studio in New Jersey. It then progresses through several tracks including “Relentless March Towards Apocalypse” featuring guest solo work by James Murphy (Death, Obituary, Testament, etc.), and culminates in the title tracks “Alpha” and “Omega”. Brave Words Bloody Knuckles review calls the album, “Definitely worth checking out for death metal fans, and definitely a band that will get snatched up by a quality label in no time.” “Here, on their debut, the band play this stuff with the confidence and ease of a band three or four albums into their career” scoring the album an 8.5. And UK-based Project Alpha TV says “The over-all production quality of the album is second to none, and these guys are very tight on every aspect, no notes are dropped. You can sense how much hard work and rehearsal time has gone into producing this album.”
Ikkadian is an independent band, and produced the album themselves. The entire album was recorded, mixed and mastered by drummer Michael Arcane. On the album, Mike plays his DW Exotic Collector’s kit (Twisted Olive) with custom shell ply configurations.
The kit itself features the following shell sizes/configurations:
- DW 8” Tom/X-shell
- DW 10” Tom/VLT
- DW 12” Tom/VLT
- DW 14” Tom/VLT
- DW 16” Tom/X-shell
- DW 18” VLX
- DW 14” Snare/VLT
- DW 20” Kicks/VLX Plus (x2)
- Pearl 10”x5” Firecracker Snare
Mike explains, “DW’s shell technology is just out of this world right now. They configure the direction of the internal plies to help you get the sound you want. I’m not an official DW endorser, but I still got to a DW engineer who recommended specific shell configurations to help me tailor the sound. That’s customer service, that’s custom. And the drums sound deeper and bigger with more tone than any I’ve ever heard.” Furthermore he points out, “The drums you hear on this album are the drums I play. There is no sound replacing or oversampling at all, except the kicks, and those are sampled from my DW kick drums. All you hear are natural drums, EQ and compression. No ‘out of the box’ sounds from some other kit.”
The cymbal layout for this album is rather expansive, featuring a wide variety of sizes and manufacturers:
- Bosphorous 14” Traditional Hi-hats
- Bosphorus 13” Antique Hi-Hats
- Bosphorus 20” Pang Thang
- Meinl 19” China Crash
- Meinl 21” Byzance Serpent’s Ride
- Sabian 18” HHX China
- Sabian 17” Vault Crash
- Sabian 18” Vault Crash
- Sabian 20” HHX Studio Crash
- Istanbul Agop 9” Traditional Splash
- Istanbul Agop 14” Trash Hit
- Istanbul Agop 20” Signature China
All of it is mounted on a Gibraltar Rack, using DW, Yamaha and Sonor hardware.
Mike plays Axis A Longboards with the A21 mod, and Axis Bullseye beaters. The sticks used on this album were Vic Firth Ahmir Thompson and Jack Dejohnette signature models.
The drums heads for the recording were all Remo Ambassador for top and bottom, Remo Coated Ambassador for the snare, and Aquarian Superkick 2 for the kick drums.
Mike’s studio setup evolved throughout the process. “I think I built this studio once, and then ultimately rebuilt it for the final recording. It was trial and error, with an emphasis on error. The lesson here was, don’t go cheap, it just ends up costing you twice. And gear-wise, unfortunately when you have a huge kit, you need a lot of mics and inputs. Ultimately, we ended up recording with the following gear:”
- Cubase 5.5 and Waves SSL plugins
- Custom StudioCat DAW by Purrrfect Audio
- Two Steinberg MR-816 interfaces (16 simultaneous firewire channels)
Drum Mics:
- 3 Shure SM81 (Overheads)
- 1 Shure SM94 (Ride)
- 5 Sennheiser e904 (Toms)
- 1 Sennheiser MD 421 (18” Tom)
- 1 Audix i5 (Snare top)
- 1 Shure SM57 (Snare Bottom)
The Kick drum sample is a blend of an Audix i5 inside, close to the batter head, and an Audix D6 just inside the air hole on the resonant head. The i5 is EQed to provide the slap/click, and the D6 EQed to give only the thump/low end. The levels are then easily set for each song to get the right balance of both.
The guitars were all recorded using an Engl SE amp through a Mesa cab, using just an Audix i5. “Overall, I like the Audix i5 more than the SM57, as it is brighter, less dull.” The (active) bass was recorded through a Radial JDI passive DI box. Finally, all the vocals were recorded using a Neumann TLM-103 microphone.
Below is the official video for"Adversary" released on September 4th by the band, who you can also keep up with at their official Facebook page.
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