The debut album of Umbilicus was released in September. Can you introduce the band a little bit more?
Paul Mazurkiewicz: Yeah, I was extremely excited that we were closing it with the release date on September 30th. The band consists of myself on drums, Vernon Blake on bass guitar, Taylor Nordberg on guitar and Brian Stephenson is our vocalist. The three of us, Taylor, Vernon and me live in Florida – we're all from the same Tampa area and Brian Stephenson is from Ottawa, Canada. It makes things a little more challenging at this point right now where we're able to possibly do some shows or debut, ironically enough we've never even jammed together as a full band because of the whole pandemic thing here. With technology of course you're luckily able to record things like that and you don't have to be in the same room these days. We started jamming together in 2020 probably around May or June after Cannibal Corpse was done recording the album "Violence Unimagined". I talked to my buddy Vernon and we actually had a project about 20 years ago. It was myself, Vernon on bass and Jack Owen, one of the original guitar players in Cannibal Corpse. It was around 2000 we started a rock project. It was a kind of break-up to death metal and all that kind of stuff and to play the style of music that I really love which is 70s rock which is Umbilicus pretty much. Jack Owen had the same kind of taste that I did so we decided to start this project. We ended up playing two shows in Tampa around that time in 2000 in a smaller bar. We wrote all originals and we had maybe about 15 songs written and we could just never procure a proper singer that we were looking for. The band unfortunately I guess fell apart and nothing ever became of the songs we wrote. We made some demos but nothing of any quality to one will be released. I always like to say fast forward twenty years and when this opportunity arose like I was saying with the pandemic in '20 and me actually having more time again, not knowing what was gonna happen with touring and all with Cannibal Corpse, I talked to Vernon and asked him if he wanted to get that project and the band back together. He was all for it and the thing was that Jack doesn't live in Florida any more. He is living in Illinois now and we really didn't think he wanted to be part of it anyway. So what happened was that Vernon and I started playing actually some of the old songs because we had to start somewhere and we really like the songs that we wrote back for the original project which was called "Path Of Man" by the way. We learned some of the old songs and just him and I played bass and drums and then we figured out that we needed a new guitar player. We needed to kinda start fresh in this project and that's when Taylor came into the fold. We had some mutual friends that suggested we try him out. So we did and the first practice we had was just magical. Taylor learned one of the old songs that we had from the other project and he jammed it with us and we just started somewhere. It was awesome and it was a lot of fun and we gelled right off the bat and he was totally interested in wanting to move this forward as well. What we ended up doing though is we were considering using some of those old songs but the fact that Jack really had a good hand in pretty much writing most all those we said to start fresh. Taylor is a great creative force, a great artist and somebody in so many different capacities and a great songwriter so he ended up writing the bulk of this material pretty much all of it. The last piece of the puzzle was getting a vocalist. We toyed with the idea that it would be nice to have somebody local just to be able to play and to be able to be together all the time. We didn't want to admit ourselves at the same time because maybe the right guys weren't gonna be here and Taylor suggested Brian. Taylor is in another band with him and we said why not, we'll give it a shot! We sent a couple of songs to Brian and when we heard back after he only had one or two songs for a couple of days and he just slapped something together it was just like "wow, this is unbelievable!". He was the missing piece. We know he is in Canada but he is such a great vocalist and we'll make it work. So Brian was brought in at the end there and all the music was already finished actually. We had all the songs completed and they were actually recorded. It was just a matter of what we gonna do here – Taylor was gonna try to sing there a little bit first but we figured if we get somebody that is gonna be mind-blowing, somebody that's a vocalist – Taylor would give it a shot, he has a great voice but he never sang in a band before like this. So it made sense to bring Brian in. I mean the songs are incredible, you've heard the three that we already had out, and he took the songs to the next level. That's where we stand right now. It's been a couple of years in the making and we're ready to release the whole record and we're very excited for everything that's happening with us right now.
From: https://metalbite.com/interviews/1622/umbilicus-with-paul-mazurkiewicz-drums
