ERIK RUTAN JUST SAID THE MAGIC WORDS

At my first Nile show, I was spirited away to a magical, sleepy land where the passage of time was marked by snare drum hits and all active cognition existed beneath a syrup of washed-out guitars. I experienced a dream in which I serenely but doggedly was attempting to correct the contrast on an old TV mistakenly left among a display of ancient Egyptian artifacts. By the fourth song, a tug at my sleeve and nod toward the parking lot disrupted my slumber. In retrospect, it's a certainty that Nile was hamstrung by the awful Vic Theatre's awful sound design. But it was enough to put me off the band. Hey I'm a busy man and ours is a one-shot world. But fates conspire to bring Nile back into my life; first, guitarist Karl Sanders is quoted in Decibel:

[Behemoth frontman] Nergal is a really nice guy. When we toured England together, I got horribly sick. I had this awful flu -- I probably should've flown home and gone to a fuckin' doctor, but I didn't. I tried to tough it out. Every day, I would wake up in my bunk so fuckin' sick, and Nergal would be right there, giving me medicine and trying to help me. The dude went way out of his way and I didn't know him from nothin'. So we started calling him Dr. Nergal.

Ok, if restoring the health of Nile's mainman is important enough to distract Nergal from his march toward world domination, then it's probable that Nile deserves a proper day in HooM! court. But I'm lazy so it'd take a second ringing endorsement from a reliable Metalist, someone in the position to improve Nile's iffy production, like oh say awesome death Metal guy Erik Rutan. Rutan also spoke to Decibel mostly about his engineering work on Nile's forthcoming sixth album, and uh-bup-bup-bup what's this about Hate Eternal?

I’ve wanted to do another Alas record for a long time. But between Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal and having a studio, I haven’t had time. The last five years I’ve done a lot of production work. Alas just didn’t fit. I’ve been writing music. Slowly. I’ve finally had a couple of weeks to focus on it. That’s the luxury of having a studio. I can pretty much mic everything up and start pre-production. After two weeks we had 10 songs. It’s like, ‘Holy shit!’ I also have a good chunk of the next Hate Eternal record ready.