In the spring of 2024, Colin Marston moved out of Menegroth, the Thousand Caves, the New York recording studio where he’d lived and worked for the past 18 years. During that time, Menegroth — located in the quiet residential neighborhood of Woodhaven, Queens — not only served as home base to Marston’s bands, including Krallice (whose self-titled debut was recently inducted into the Decibel Hall of Fame), Dysrhythmia, Behold… the Arctopus and Gorguts; it also became a destination for extreme-metal acts from all over the world, from Defeated Sanity (Germany) to Deiphago (The Philippines). This summer, as Marston was regrouping while scouting for a new home for the studio, he took some time to reflect on the transition and take stock of the Menegroth experience as a whole. —Hank Shteamer
Now that you’ve had a little bit of distance from it, how are you feeling after the big move?
Very confused maybe is the best answer, because there’s a sense of relief, obviously, of just getting out. I had so much stuff and I knew it was going to be such a process. I moved the last of my stuff out, put the synths and the stuff I was bringing with me to practice for [Krallice’s summer 2024 tour] in a U-Haul and drove up to [my brother’s place in] Boston in horrible Friday rush-hour traffic. It took me seven hours. So I get all that in his house, I sit in his backyard and I’m just like, “I did it.” I’ll never forget the way I felt in that moment — just, like, “Oh, wow, I’m gone. I’ll never set foot in that place that I lived for 18 years ever again.” It hit me real hard.
So what does this next phase look like for you?
What I’m looking forward to after the Krallice tour is something that’s both very comforting and also terrifying, which is that I basically decided I’m going to move back in with my parents in Philly. There’s probably going to be a lot of looking at [new potential studio spaces], and there’s a lot more work to do on that front. In some ways it’s great because I love my parents and it’ll be nice to see them, but nobody wants to have to move back in with their parents.
My parents are the most accommodating people imaginable. To give you an example, when I was a teenager, I had [drums] set up in the living room, and I would just make all the noise I wanted and basically never got any shit for it. And now coming on 42, I was like, “Yeah, I don’t know if there’s going to be enough room in my bedroom. You might have to get rid of this old, shitty couch you have in there.” And my mom’s like, “Yeah, you can just set up in the living room; that’s fine.” Just like, “Who are you people?!”
What were the exact circumstances behind you having to leave Menegroth?
So the guy who owned the building for up until 2018 when I first moved in was an asshole. He just sold it and walked away, and we got basically a notice taped to the door that there’s new owners. I had signed a five- or 10-year lease when I moved in, and then I had extended it twice. So I was in my second lease extension that was going to be good till 2024 and the building sold in 2018. I was like, “OK, this sucks, but I’ve got six years to figure it out.” Finally, just two months, or something, before the end date, I just get a message taped to the door saying, “We will not renew your lease.”
What were the last couple months there like? Did you feel like you wanted to really savor that time?
I wanted to get in doing the new records of these bands that are friends of mine and that I feel like are important records that I really want to be involved in. So that was especially the Defeated Sanity album [Chronicles of Lunacy], Imperial Triumphant — I really wanted to do their new record; I worked on all their stuff. Dysrhythmia [Coffin of Conviction] was late last year. Krallice [Inorganic Rites] was right at the end.
And then also, we had Gorguts [playing Maryland Deathfest] at the end of May, like a week before I had to move out. I was like, “Luc [Lemay], this is the worst possible timing you could pick.” He’s like, “Oh, but it’ll be really good.” So I had to sort of clear a week on either side of that. Basically, I just planned the Imperial recording for the beginning of May, so I was like, “All I have to do is that record, move out, practice for the Gorguts set and do that.” So the Imperial record was the official last record — Kenny [Grohowski] was the last drummer I tracked in that room.
Throughout those sessions, was there an element of saying goodbye?
Oh, for sure — in all of these sessions, we were all talking about how it was the last time, for sure. And then we even had a Dysrhythmia practice just to have a last practice in the studio. Even though we weren’t going to have to play until October, and just having one isolated practice in April or May wouldn’t make that much difference, we just wanted to do it.
How were you feeling knowing that the moving day was approaching?
It just felt bittersweet. I mean, dude, there were so many days over the 18 years I was there where I just woke up and I was like, “I can’t believe I have this place. This place is so sick.” And it wasn’t perfect in all sorts of ways, but I was like, man, to have found that place after only being a full-time studio engineer for a year and a half and actually take the chance on it, and to build it into something I actually could afford and felt comfortable in, I just felt perpetually kind of like I didn’t deserve it, or it was too good to be true, or something.
So at the end, I was really feeling that heavily because I was like, “I might just never have a place like this ever again.” I mean, I’m determined to have one that’s even better, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
Some people might not know that Menegroth was actually your second New York studio. How did you originally find Paincave, the home studio you had from 2004 through 2006?
Both Paincave and Menegroth were random Craigslist finds. Paincave, [Behold… the Arctopus guitarist] Mike Lerner found. I was like, “Oh, cool. I never thought I’d have my own studio. I guess I could see what that’s like.” And before I knew it, I was quitting my temp job, and I was just doing that, and I was, like, remastering the Atheist catalog right away, and recording the new Zs album. These were superstars to me, even though Zs were local friends of ours and Atheist were this band with this history, at the time, at my age, it was like, “Wow!”
And I know it’s all relative, but in Paincave, we started working on the Byla/Jarboe record. I got to work in person with another musical hero. I worked on [this] fucking Glenn Branca 100-guitar record with [Flying Luttenbachers leader and former Behold… the Arctopus drummer] Weasel [Walter], the one that got canned. [Branca] didn’t like the recording, so he just deleted it. He was, like, sitting down there in Paincave with me chain-smoking cigarettes — without asking, of course. Typical Branca. But yeah, it was heavy hitters right away, man.
What do you remember about walking into Menegroth for the first time?
Well, I remember being like, OK, this isn’t quite what I want, ‘cause it’s two control rooms and three iso booths, and I need a live room. But I walked into that first control room and I was like, oh, this is big enough to be a live room, good to go. So it was really just like, oh, shit, this place is affordable, this is bigger than what I would’ve imagined ever having, it’s already set up as a studio, all the rooms are isolated. Like, this is too good to be true.
What was in that space before you moved in?
It was at least two studios before it was mine. It was called Bayside Sound, when [“Informer” rapper] Snow recorded 12 Inches of Snow there. So, yeah, where I sat mixing records, presumably, if that was the live room at the time, that was where he was saying “diggy boom-boom down,” or whatever the fuck.
What were some of the milestones in the history of Menegroth where it was like, OK, this is really leveling up?
Early on in Menegroth, I got to produce Jarboe’s new solo record at the time, Mahakali, and she brought in Vinny [Signorelli] from Unsane to play drums on it. And who else was on it? Phil Anselmo and Attila [Csihar]. They didn’t come to the studio, but everybody else did.
Oneida, who I’ve been lucky to work with for a lot of years, they really like to collaborate with people, and they and [their drummer John] Colpitts [a.k.a. Kid Millions] have brought in all sorts of famous musicians. So I got to record all the members of Yo La Tengo singing on one of their tracks, and they did a whole collaborative album with Rhys Chatham that I actually got to track and mix. And [Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer] Brian Chase is a good friend of John, so he’s been in.
Álvaro [Domene], guitar player, he organized a session with Weasel on drums, me on bass, and then him and Elliott Sharp on guitars. Elliott Sharp is a guy who I had a CD by back in college just because I found out about him as an interesting experimental guitar player. So to me, he’s another sort of larger-than-life experimental music figure.
In recent years, getting to finally do this new Defeated Sanity record… I worked on their last album as well, but I didn’t get to record all of it. That’s been something I’ve been trying to pitch to them ever since I met those guys, I feel like, back in 2008. Every time they’d be through New York, they’d come and practice at my studio and I’d record their practices. I also got to do Virus when they were in town — they came and practiced at my studio.
The new Khanate record, I was involved in that. To me, that might be one of the hugest ones right there. I was such a massive fan of that band when they first came out. For that one, I didn’t get to mix it, but I got to record all the vocals, all the bass and all the percussion. And the percussion is not just percussion: Tim [Wyskida’s] percussion setup is like a whole orchestral setup with a concert bass drum and a symphony and a gong, and a giant thunder sheet and anvil that took up my entire live room. Actually getting to work on a Khanate record, that was far outside of anything I ever thought I would get to do, especially they were broken up for most of the time I’ve been in [Menegroth].
How much of an impact did COVID have on the studio?
It forced me to go totally remote, which at first I was scared about because I didn’t know if I could do it. Between spring of 2020 and summer of 2021, more or less, I didn’t have anyone in the studio. I ended up having a little less work overall, but still enough to be working almost every day just doing mixing and mastering and re-amping and stuff. And because I wasn’t doing any tours and I wasn’t leaving the studio at all and spending money on anything else, I made more money during that period than when I was doing my normal mix of stuff. So what’s good about that was I realized, “Oh, the studio can be anything. I don’t have to be in New York City. I’m not 100 percent a local business.”
The part about it that was really the best was that I was like, “Oh, here I am by myself in this recording studio with nothing but instruments surrounding me and more time than I’ve ever had to work on music.” So I started more projects, solo projects, collaborations, made more records, and then started releasing my own records, sort of started my own Colin label on Bandcamp and put out something like 100 records in a couple years.
I had this crazy renaissance as a musician and basically kind of became a keyboardist and a drummer again, and got real deep into this synthesis shit, something I never would’ve imagined, and got the Simmons electronic synth drums and started doing all these records with that. And I mean, that could have easily been the kind of thing I got played around with for a week, maybe did one record with, and then was like, “What the fuck am I doing?” But no, I’ve made 25 records with those. And the fucking ARP 2600, which seems like a ridiculous thing to own — once again, that’s on everything I do now.
And so I really became a different new musician in that period and really grew as a player, and I’m making all these more abstract, ambient records now, and that’s always been music that I’ve loved. I just feel like I kind of got sidetracked by this prog-metal thing for the last 20 years, and I finally got to go back and make music that had more to do with the stuff I was listening to when I was a kid.
Because when I was growing up, I did not like metal. I didn’t even like distorted guitar. I always liked Metallica, but they were this weird exception. The first music I remember falling in love with was R.E.M., Depeche Mode. Tears for Fears, Talking Heads. These are all bands with synths and jangly guitar and lots of chorus and grooves and all this shit that the music I’ve been making for the past 20 years does not have any remnant of, but that really is my musical starting place. That and classical music like Stravinsky and Bartok, and Eastern European folk music, and ‘70s prog: King Crimson and Yes and Univers Zero.
So I really feel like I did a very typical thing that you do when you hit middle age, where you go back to the shit you liked as a kid.
One factual thing I’ve never known: Where does the studio name actually come from?
Oh, that’s Tolkien. It’s from The Silmarillion, which is the nerdier prequel to Lord of the Rings, which is written in the style of epic poetry. So it kind of reads like the Bible, or Gilgamesh or Beowulf or something — Gilgamesh and Beowulf were my favorite books in middle school, and they’re so metal. It’s like fucking Morbid Angel, you know what I mean? It’s Formulas Fatal to the Flesh. Menegroth, the Thousand Caves was the ancient elven walled city in the forest. So I had [Queens’] Forest Park near, I had this big cave-like thing with tons of rooms, so the name seemed to fit. And also my previous studio was Paincave. So, keeping the cave theme alive.
