SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA:-

Exhumed Lover (The ambient mix)

For years it seems that house music was to be forever confined to European shores, never to bridge across the Atlantic to an American market bred predominately on pop and rock. But in San Jose, America, "Septum" a Heavy Metal cross-over band are leading the way in merging what has historically been considered to be two diametrically opposed musical styles.

Dance music, which relies on repetitive computer sampled tracks and electronic programming recorded onto records and played by disc jockeys, or "d.j's", never found mass appeal in the American rock market whose fans preferred the more traditional heavy-guitar oriented rock band performances. Jon Jablonski, lead guitarist and singer from Septum explains "We always kinda got into the U.K dance stuff in the early days, but it never had any bite for us, it was always like, dude, where are the guitars? Where are the solos? I mean yeah you've got drums, but you listen to the regular dance tracks and there are, like, zero guitar solos."

Septum, who had up until recently been a 4 piece Death-metal band, decided to mix the American hard-core metal sound with uplifting trance, and in doing so created an entirely new sound. "No-one had ever tried it before," said Septum's bassist Dan Cortez. "So when we overlaid the monster guitar chords and Jon's lyrics onto the dance beats we quickly realised we had a totally killer sound." He continued "it was totally fuckin' rad." Following the advances of uplifting house, deep house, and U.S funky house, the band's amalgamation of styles has created an entirely new genre- Metal House.

Jablonski in G.J. solo

Fusing uplifting trance with screaming Death Metal lyrics and blistering high-velocity guitar work, Metal House manages to appeal to both the chic European Glam clubbing set and the American teenage black t-shirt long-haired death metal market. Cortez describes their sound as being like "Sepultura meets D.J Tiesto." The band secured a place in the American Top 10 charts with their first single “Exhumed Lover(The ambient mix)”, an uplifting hands-in-the-air dance anthem about a mans necrophilic relationship with his dead girlfriends rotting corpse (pictured above)

But creating their unique sound did not come without it's difficulties. Jablonski quickly realised he had a problem-how to simultaneously spin records and play the guitar solos. To help, the band commissioned the Gibson Guitar Company to build an instrument that would literally do both- the deck-guitar (pictured right).

With the ability to mix records and chords, Jablonksi claims that on stage he is now no longer simply just a guitarist, but possibly the world's first ever guitar-jockey, or "G.J". (Interestingly enough, Cortez, the Bassist refused to follow suit, declining to provide a reason)

Satanic - The new release by Septum

So what does the crowd think? We interviewed fans at a recent Septum gig, who were ecstatic over the new sound.

"It's awesome," said Dave Wyacek, a local San Jose resident. "I was, like, totally not into house before but these guys seriously kick ass."

"This house metal shit is the bomb" yelled a euphoric Jan Rodriquez, who was sporting the typical new look of metal-clubbers; a cross-over of fluoro yellow pants, smiley t-shirt, gothic black eye-shadow and black studded wrist bands.

And it seems that Jablonski has not been content with mere live performances, and has taken his groundbreaking guitar/ turntable techniques to a whole new generation of musicians, hosting solo-mixing workshops at Los Angeles's School of Music Technology.

Due for release next month are his two tutorial videos, "Monster Chops for the turntable-guitar" and "101 hot licks for the decks- learn to shred with the Masters"

Satanic, the album from Metal House Masters Septum, also due for release next month (pictured above)