The debut album from The Dillinger Escape Plan, 1999’s Calculating Infinity, was a mathcore masterclass in aggression and technical experimentation that changed the face of heavy music. Brutal, breakneck and unique, its progressive fury spewed out equal measures of brains and bile with animalistic fervour.
Forming in 1997, the Morris Plains, New Jersey quintet had already released two EPs, their self-titled debut and its follow-up Under The Running Board – their first for Relapse. Towards the end of 1999, the band recorded Calculating Infinity with producer Steve Evetts at Trax East in South River, some 40 miles away.
While much of the album was written by Weinman and vocalist Dimitri Minakakis, but Jim Fear is credited solely to the guitarist.
A typically uncompromising, bloodied nose of a song that howled into the void, this song – all two minutes and 22 seconds of it – gave the hardcore scene reason to stop whatever it was doing and make this band their new figureheads. But its inception goes all the way back to Weinman’s childhood, when a chance encounter with a troubled soul set him on the path to artistic independence.
