THE SCENE: From SIT to the formation of Filth Wizard

"The three of us met at SIT when we were studying music/audio, and we bonded over our shared love for prog."

Invercargill group Filth Wizard is made up of Tyler Reynolds (Guitar), Hanna Ott (Bass), and Joseph O’Donnell (Drums). Hanna provides us with an insight into their journey and their music.

ARTIST: Hanna Ott (Filth Wizard)

What's your style of music? 

Progressive metal - we do a mix of thrash, stoner doom, and psychedelic metal, with touches of death metal every once in a while. We take influence from a huge range of styles (more below)!

Where did the music journey start? 

The three of us met at SIT when we were studying music/audio, and we bonded over our shared love for prog.

I (Hanna) had a recording assignment where I needed to produce an album, and I chose to get Joseph in the studio to record some of his songs.

Tyler joined to help out with some of the harder guitar parts. One of the tutors at SIT asked us if we'd be keen to play a gig, and we said yes, having never played live together before.

It became clear pretty quickly that we were a good fit, and so we decided to make it official and start Filth Wizard :)

Who have been your influences? 

Hugely influential for all of us are greats like Metallica and Megadeth, as well as prog legends Opeth and Mastodon, and stoner kings The Sword.

But we take bits and pieces from all sorts of bands - Carcass, The Mars Volta, Gojira, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Vektor, Porcupine Tree, Bloodbath, Tool, Rush. Joseph and Tyler are quite into funk as well, so that tends to creep in a bit.

I'm heavily into black metal and noise rock, which makes an appearance quite subtlety too. 

What does the creative process look like?

We're pretty clinical I suppose - whenever one of us comes up with a riff, we'll notate it in Guitar Pro, and then we construct songs out of riffs that go together or write additional parts around a riff that we like.

While we do make sure the riffs individually are playable, we only learn the full song once it's all written.

That can be really challenging as we do tend to write things that are only just within our skill set, but it pushes us to be better players and ensures that we put the integrity of the song first, rather than sticking to what we know we are able to play. 

What's been the most enjoyable gig?

We only ever play originals, and we've played close to 50 shows over the past 5 years.

Standouts have been Monkfest 2019 and Feastock 2020, just because it's an awesome feeling to play to that many people and also to get paid.

We've also had some awesome shows just locally though; we played a gig in Dunedin called Through the Wormhole in 2018, which was us, Koizilla, Ashes to Battle, and Russian Blue, who are some of our favourite local bands.

At the end of last year, we played a Christmas show at the Crown with Ashes to Battle (again), Blood Cauldron, and Tough Guy - that was just heaps of fun.

The music scene in the South Island is just super supportive.

What song have you attached below?

Red Eve - this is from our 2021 album Sleepeater.

How did that song come about, and why is it special?

It was the first song that all 3 of us wrote collaboratively, so it's quite special to us.

It's based on a riff that Tyler had had sitting around for quite a while, that all 3 of us happened to really like.

The rest of the song came together really quickly, which is kind of unusual for us. There's also just an emotional intensity to it that's hard to describe - I'm sure all of us have different attachments to it. It's one of our favourites!

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