Now on their second album, “…And They Shall Take Up Serpents”, released by Prosthetic Records, West Virginia’s technical thrashers Byzantine are ready to step up to the next level. Acting as main support for God Dethroned on the International Extreme Music Festival tour, Byzantine will take that step and bring their brand of metal to a wider audience.

OJ: Well, we know we're main support on this tour, so if we could play to fifty to a hundred screaming fans every night, that would be awesome because we've been busting our ass for about two years in the trenches and this is the first tour that we've really looked at like, "this is our debut to the metal community". So we're just hoping to get out there and to play for solid crowds every night and hopefully album sales will go up and people will start to really turn their ear towards our band.

Skip: I go into everything expecting nothing, that way I'm never disappointed. (laughter)

OJ: Okay, this is what happened: our booking agent called me about two months ago and he was like, "okay, we've got this tour coming up, the International Extreme Music Festival", but Hell Within wasn't on that yet. But he said, "what bands do you want to go out with a month before?". I sent him a list of bands like Diecast, A Life Once Lost, Hell Within; everything fell through, so it was just us and Hell Within pretty much. So we were like, "yeah, let's go out with 'em", 'cause we know they're a good band, they've got a good label behind 'em, so this was actually put together before they got on the IEMF tour. Then when we started getting this one rolling, their manager got them put on the IEMF tour and pretty much it looked like we're going to be rockin' and rollin' for the next eight, nine weeks together. (laughter) It's been cool; they're good guys and they're a great band and I'm sure they're going to represent Massachusetts well on that tour.

OJ: The significance of that is, West Virginia, where we're from, well Skip's from Pittsburgh, but he's Appalachian as well, there's a lot of snake handling churches and back in the 1800's and the early 1900's, that was really predominant around there. We have a knack for writing a lot about West Virginia history and heritage, we just thought it would be something cool to bring out to people who don't know much about it. While we did that, we were like, it has this religious connotation and it also has this sort of evilness to it, know what I mean? So we just put that out there and I was able to write a couple songs revolving around that. We found and album cover that fit that really well; we always like to tie in our albums with themes revolving around our state, so it turned out pretty good.

OJ: (laughs) That's just my take on it. I got freaked out in there a couple times. About halfway through the recording session, I quit pissing inside the studio and would only use the bathroom outside. The studio was a daycare center and it was an active daycare center; our producer's mom ran it. So on one end of the school, there was this kickass studio, you go through one door and there's kids down there having playtime, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sleeping and stuff. But at night when we were recording, like twelve, one, two o'clock, there was nobody there, but we could hear kids running around the place and it freaked us out. We would go down there, lights would turn themselves on, we'd turn them off, they'd turn back on. The school was like two-hundred years old, so maybe they had some weird ghost thing going on. But one night I went down to the bathroom, I saw the bathroom door shut, there was a lady's and a boy's, I went into the boy's and when I opened it, the girl's bathroom door opened and then slammed. I bolted the fuck outta there and I said "I'm not pissing in this place ever again". So I'm pretty sure there was some little kiddies there that wasn't happy that we were writing a metal album there. (laughter)

OJ: It was crazy; even our producer, he's like "every night when I'm here by myself I have to go down the hall and clean up papers 'cause they're knocked off my mom's desk" and stuff like that, so it was crazy.

OJ: It's weird. Luckily, we recorded both albums there, so we're really comfortable there. But it's really weird because you're in the studio and it's a total, fully functioning studio and you walk out one door and there's little lockers and little magic castles. The cool thing is, we got to go down there and raid the cafeteria every night, so we were always drinking little things of arrange juice and eating Jello, (laughs) eating chicken noodle soup. But it gave us a pretty cool vibe because we knew we could if we were busting it out and gettin' evil, we could walk in there, take a breath and everything was cool.

OJ: I was looking up words that are synonymous with complicated and Byzantine was one of the synonyms and I knew of the Byzantine empire, which succeeded the Roman empire, and I was like "that'd be a good play on words, a band building an empire", so I did some research, found out no one had ever used it as a heavy metal band and we just picked it up. Luckily, it's stuck with us and everybody kind of digs it. Plus, we didn't want a name like "Skull Can Full of Maggots" or nothing that throws people off. It doesn't give you any lead towards what we sound like.

OJ: (laughs) Actually no, I'm pretty sure our other guitar player was; he reads all the time. But we recorded at this one guy's house and his name was Pistol Grip; craziest mother fucker I've ever met in my life. When we were recording, he'd be snorting lines of Zanax off the board, (laughter) "do another take, man, I'm still not high enough; I ain't feeling it". So, he owned this arsenal of machine guns…

Skip: I understand he had an AK .47 and a .44 Ruger Redhawk, like the biggest is two feet long and it is noted that that is what they use to put down elephants; that gun is ridiculous.

OJ: So he had like three or four of these guns and every time we would nail a good take, he'd be high as fuck and he'd just be like, "all right; let's go shoot!". (laughter) So we would run out there and he would throw a fuckin' machine gun in my hands and he'd stick a pig's head on a stake and we'd just blow it away. (laughter) So, a lot of the time, he'd feed us, we would be eating the pig, but the head we'd take our aggressions out on. We've got some funny stories. (laughter)

OJ: Cool, man. Thank you, bud; I really appreciate it.