Ahead of the Face of Collapse deluxe reissue on SKiN GRAFT Records, the drummer looks back and forward.

Transmission 416: Interview with Dazzling Killmen

There are bands that get filed under hardcore because nobody has invented a better drawer for them, and then there’s Dazzling Killmen, a St. Louis trio (later expanded) who spent the early Nineties turning that drawer inside out. Formed almost by accident, when Darin Gray taught Nick Sakes guitar and the pair stumbled onto a teenage drummer named Blake Fleming during a jazz band break, the group fused free improv, prog’s angularity and hardcore’s violence into something that still refuses easy description.

Title: Face of Collapse
Artist: Dazzling Killmen
Release Date: 2026-09-18
Genres: Math-rock, Noise Rock
Label: SKiN GRAFT
Description: Dazzling Killmen drummer Blake Fleming talks reissues, Steve Albini, new songs and the band's unlikely 2026 comeback.

Dig Out the Switch (1992), engineered by Steve Albini and produced by Jeff Tweedy, sounds like a controlled explosion caught mid-detonation, all jagged geometry and barely restrained panic. Two years later, Face of Collapse pushed further into the void, stranger, sparser, and somehow even more claustrophobic, cementing the band’s status as a secret handshake among devotees of Craw, Shellac and Blind Idiot God. Now remastered, reissued, and reactivated for a run of 2026 shows across the US and Europe, with new material reportedly on the way, Dazzling Killmen’s music remains one of those rare things: genuinely dangerous to listen to, in the best possible sense.

What were you listening to before making music professionally?

I grew up in a house that had all kinds of music being played in it. My family weren’t musicians necessarily, but they were music fans, they loved music. I actually have a brother who is a musician, but the rest of the family were just fans. So I was getting old country music from my parents, 50s and 60s rock and roll from my parents. I was getting punk rock and new wave from my middle brother. I was getting classic rock and prog rock from my oldest brother. All of those things were going through my head. By the time I was probably five, six years old, I was hearing all this stuff. Not to mention the stuff I’d hear on the radio. Then I had my own little record player that I would sneak my brother’s records onto and listen to on my own turntable. So it was a mixture of stuff. I was lucky in that way.

What brought the four of you together in St. Louis? And where do you know you had found something different?

It started very organically. Nick and Darin were hanging out together, old friends, and Darin was teaching Nick Sakes how to play guitar. Nick was 25, 26 years old and decided, listen, if I’m going to be in a band, I should probably do something about it now before I get too old. So at the ripe old age of 26, I believe, is when he started playing guitar. Those early Dazzling Killmen songs were just sort of almost rudimentary exercises on guitar that eventually turned into material for the band.

Then I was playing with Darin separately in a community college jazz band. Darin was going to college at this community college and I was playing in the jazz band there while still a high school student. Darin and I started jamming during one of the breaks during a big band rehearsal. We started just kind of playing some dub and funk and just sort of improvising, and quickly realized that we locked in pretty well together. So Darin told Nick about me and was like, hey man, I met this kind of young kid drummer who I think is really good, we should maybe get together and jam with him, and you can try out some of the stuff you’ve been learning on guitar.

So we got together one night and it was apparent immediately that something special was brewing, because we all three looked at each other with this sort of holy shit kind of look as we were playing these early songs that Darin and Nick were working on, as a way of teaching Nick how to play guitar. But it was absolutely immediate and undeniable that, whoa, the three of us had a certain chemistry all of a sudden when we played music together. It was pretty powerful.

Did the band sound click into place suddenly or evolve gradually?

A little bit of both. It was immediate, like I said, in some ways. But then from going from, say, early singles to Face of Collapse, there’s a definite progression. We’re all progressing musically. We’re growing as people. We were growing as a band, as a unit. So there is a definite progression as well, but it locked in and it felt pretty realized from the beginning. It felt like we had formed something almost complete, but we had done it immediately like that. It did have that feel to it for sure. But then, of course, like I said, we had a lot of growing to do, in which the band did finally progress into something that made Face of Collapse.

Were you consciously avoiding genre categories or did the sound just come out that way?

I don’t think we were avoiding anything in the beginning, because originally the band started as a three piece, and the three of us were just music fans. We loved music, not really genre specific. Darin and I definitely had more eclectic taste than I would say Nick did maybe at that time, just because Darin and I were also kind of jazz geeks and we were getting into classical music and avant-garde music and free improv music. Nick was coming more from punk rock and new wave and rock, which we all had as well. But Darin and I got into more academic sort of things as well.

I think it’s like an alchemical thing when you get certain personalities together. When those personalities are just being themselves, but they’re being themselves all at the same time as a collective, we become a sum greater than the parts. And I think that’s what happened. It was pretty natural because we were all just kind of doing what we felt like we could bring to the music. Somebody would initiate an idea and then what everybody else would contribute to that just happened to be in a language already that worked. It wasn’t really predetermined. It’s one of those things, finding the right people in general and in life is difficult, right? But finding the right people to create with, that you can be musical with, that you can be creative with, that you can stand to be around also at the same time, it’s a rare combination. So when it does happen and it’s good, you try to hold on to it for as long as you can, because I have found, I started playing in bands when I was 14, 15 years old and I’m 53 now, and I found that it is so rare to find a combination of people that you really enjoy on multiple levels. If you can, if you get along and you love playing music together, man, that’s one of the greatest things.

Were there other bands in St. Louis at the time you felt any kinship with, even if the sound was different?

I don’t know if we ever felt a true kinship between certain bands. We definitely had bands that were friends. Uncle Tupelo were friends of ours. They were coming up, even though they were very different than us and quickly progressing much further ahead than us. But they were peers and also supporters and friends. There’s an Alton band called, Alton is the town where Dazzling Killmen is basically from, Alton, Illinois. There’s a band there called Judge Nothing, who are old friends of ours that are a real staple in the alternative music scene of the Midwest. They toured with The Descendants a lot. They toured with Joan Jett. They were really, really well known in the area. I still listen to their records today. They were a local band, coming from a similar place as us as far as just a love of punk rock, but their approaches to it were very different than ours. But I guess we felt a certain kinship, though a lot of times, man, to be honest, we kind of felt like we were on our own. It was that time where things were sort of shifting. Alt Country was being born because of Uncle Tupelo, and that was a huge thing around St. Louis. There’s a lot of bands that splintered off from there. There were some harder bands like us at the time, but a lot of it, where we were mining stuff from, say, King Crimson and Black Flag or something, some of the other bands were sort of mining stuff from grunge, or just classic rock. That was a thing where we were starting to mix Black Sabbath with punk rock, and Dazzling Killmen were that interested in that. We loved Sludge. We loved stoner rock. We toured with Sleep. But when it came to how we approached music ourselves in a heavier sense, it was always more angular, more agitated, faster, typically. I think we were young and agile musicians as well, and we took a really physical approach to what we did because it felt good in our bodies and it kept pushing us further and further.

Did the lack of a local scene push you towards something more insular and experimental?

I think so. I think we probably would have gone in that direction anyway, because it was just sort of a natural outcome of our personalities. But the fact that we felt more on our own leads itself to more of a gang mentality, it’s like us against the world. That can sometimes be a really productive state to be in, when you find the right people, as long as you’re smart about it. If you’re delusional and you’re kind of a dumb ass and you think it’s us against the world, you’re just going to lose out. You’re not going to really get anywhere. But if there’s a bit of mindfulness behind that, it can be something that’s really galvanizing to a group of people. I’ve had that in most of the bands that I’ve been in, kind of. Maybe fortunately and also unfortunately, because it was there by necessity, because we were just sort of on our own a lot of times.

I tend to make music that is super, super niche, even though it doesn’t sound that way to me. That’s the crazy thing, like I remember thinking, in Laddio Bolocko and even in some songs that Dazzling Killmen did, say like “Go Slim” or something, something early on, where we thought we were almost making pop music. It’s so far from pop music, but our filters are colored in such a way that we think some of this crazy shit that we’re doing is actually pop. But clearly it’s not. It just places us more and more into this corner. I’m still trying to work my way into the mainstream somehow. I want my music to get out there to more people, but I’m just not that kind of an artist, I guess. I’m just not always in step with the time. I’ve marched to the beat of my own drummer, no pun intended, but that really seems to be the case. It started very early on with Dazzling Killmen. We were just very much our own thing, and it wasn’t necessarily that we wanted to be, we just were.

We had a group in Cleveland, Ohio called Craw that were friends of ours, that we discovered after a year or two of being a band already. Nick discovered them because I think he was doing some work out there for his actual drafting job. We were like, oh my God, these guys are about the closest to our aesthetic as we had found, even though completely different. But we really did feel a kinship with them. And they, like us, felt like, Jesus, man, we thought we’re out here by ourselves, it’s like interstellar space. Yeah.

How does hearing Face of Collapse restored to its original format compare to how you remember it?

The simple answer is it just sounds better. We loved working with Steve Albini. He was definitely a friend of ours, and we felt musically in alignment with him to a certain degree. I think Steve was definitely more closed than we were in some ways, but he was super busy at the time that we were working with him. When we did Face of Collapse, I think we had three or four days to do it, which is the longest we’d ever spent on any record. We literally felt like we were like Aerosmith or something at the time, some 70s stadium band, because we had, whoa, three or four days. This is how punk rock we were. This is how, even though Nick is not Gen X, we were very Gen X in some ways in that way.

It was still done pretty quickly, considering the scope of that record. All the music is basically done live, and then there’s a little bit of guitar overdub, and then the vocals. Other than that, instrumentally, you’re hearing live performances, and they were usually the first or second take, because we just didn’t have that much time. Like I mentioned, we also didn’t know a whole lot about the recording studio at that point in our lives. We were kids and we were learning. I learned a lot being around Steve and just observing and listening, especially when it came to tuning drums. He’s the first guy that really taught me how to tune drums, and man, what a person to learn from. Albini was known for his drum sound. It wasn’t just because of how he recorded the drums or who was playing the drums, because obviously, who’s playing the drums makes all the difference. But he knew how to capture a person’s energy sometimes, part of that is knowing how to tune the instrument. Definitely learned a lot from him.

Always thought that both of our records that we recorded, the LPs we did with him, could have sounded better, not necessarily just because of him, but because of us as well. We didn’t know what we were doing in a lot of ways when it came to the production side of things. We were just learning, and we didn’t even think about those terms a lot of times. We were just going for the raw energy of the music and making it all about that. Whereas today in 2026, you have to wear all the hats. I have to write the stuff, record the stuff, perform the stuff, distribute the stuff, promote the stuff, produce the stuff. But back then, it still felt like you could kind of just be a musician. You didn’t have to wear all the hats. In that way, perhaps the recording suffered a little bit, because we weren’t studio aces, and we didn’t know a lot about production techniques. As we got older, we started learning more about that.

I was very happy to have a chance to remaster both of those albums with my friend Andres, because I think they both sound better, especially Dig Out the Switch, the first album. There’s more detail that gets revealed through the remastering that we did, and therefore I think the audience gets more music to listen to in that way. There’s more information coming at them, which I think makes it more compelling. So listening to it then as opposed to listening to it now, I’m super happy that the remastering process took place. I’m really looking forward to the third pressing that’s coming out, that we’re going to have available for the European shows coming up in October. We will have Dig Out the Switch and Face of Collapse on CD and vinyl at the merch table, I’m pretty sure. We’ve got both CDs and vinyl in stock, plus we’ve got shirts and hoodies and all that kind of stuff as well, posters and stickers and all that good stuff.

In general, I’m very happy with Face of Collapse now. It’s a lot more pleasurable for me to listen to it. I think there’s an articulation in the drum parts that necessarily wasn’t there, that helps glue everything together a little bit more. I may sound partial because I am the drummer, but I think that for records like that, you need that sort of framework. It has to be powerful. I was glad to be able to bring that structure back to it sonically.

Was there unreleased material from that era that never saw the light of day?

I cannot remember, honestly. I feel like there is something that we maybe started on, that we were working on when the band broke up. But I could also be confusing that with Laddio Bolocko. I’m not sure. I bet you Nick Sakes would know the answer to that probably more than me. I have to say I have eight or nine different files of audio recordings from Dazzling Killmen, from live shows, from radio shows. I’m not sure what else. I’ve got to go through it. There might be something in there, but nothing comes to mind immediately as far as anything new. I could be wrong about that. Like I said, there was something new we were working on, but I can’t remember if it was with Dazzling Killmen or if it was with Laddio Bolocko.

Were there any books, films or art shaping the band’s atmosphere back then?

Darin was reading a lot of Henry Miller at the time and Charles Bukowski. And me being probably 16, 17 during that time, I’d never heard of those guys, so I was getting turned on to a whole new world of literature through what Darin and Nick were into, because they were older than I was. They were kind of like my brothers and like my mom and dad and like college professors, all at the same time. It was a real schooling for me. So there’s nothing specific that comes to mind, but there is, we were listening to avant-garde jazz. We were listening to avant-garde classical music. We were listening to punk rock and post-rock and all the iterations and all the sub-genres of that stuff at the time. We were reading a lot, anything from the classics, Miller and Bukowski and stuff, to, I remember this book that got passed around the van, it was called Monster, by Monster Cody Scott, who was one of the OG heads of, it was either the Crips or the Bloods, I don’t remember which. Somebody that we stayed with gave us that book and was like, hey, this is a great book for the van, you guys will all burn through it because it’s a real page turner. And it was.

There was nothing really too specific that I think really informed the music. I think a lot of that just had to do with our personalities and certain characteristics that were innate in us, that came out through our instruments. I don’t necessarily think it was through any other sort of art that we were inspired by at the time. We were all listening to different things, but there’s not anything really directly I can put my finger on. I use the comparison of Black Flag and King Crimson to describe our sound, but that doesn’t necessarily mean, I mean, we grew up listening to Black Flag, of course, and King Crimson was on the periphery, of course, as well. But that’s just a really basic way to get around a marketing question, essentially, like, oh, it was like Black Flag meets King Crimson. That doesn’t mean that’s necessarily what we were into. A lot of times my tendency is to listen to the opposite of what I’m doing musically. So if I’m in Dazzling Killmen, maybe I’m listening to T-Rex a bunch and the Velvet Underground. Maybe I’m listening to Teenage Fan Club and Big Star, stuff that does not sound like Dazzling Killmen at all. Maybe I’m listening to 60s Miles Davis, maybe I’m listening to Cecil Taylor. All of that stuff was being listened to. I like that approach. A lot of times if I’m involved in something musically, I always look outside of that for inspiration. Sometimes it might come from a book. It might come from a scene in a movie that inspires a riff or a piece of music. But in Dazzling Killmen, I think it was like all great bands, it was just an alchemical mixture of personalities.

Any plans beyond the reissues, new material, touring, other projects?

Yep, yes to all of that, actually. I will say that the reason all of this is still moving forward is that the band that we have, Nick and I tried to get the original Dazzling Killmen back together, everybody, the four original members. But two of the guys either wouldn’t or couldn’t do it. So we found new people. Now that we have the group that we have, we have so much fun together. We enjoy playing music and traveling together so much that we’re continuing to make tour plans. We’ve actually started working on new material. I say that cautiously because the idea of making new Dazzling Killmen material seemed rather daunting, and also something that I really don’t know if I even wanted to do. But when we got a group of people together that felt right, it became more about, I want to make music with these people, let’s see what this group of people comes up with now. We’re doing it under the moniker of Dazzling Killmen. We’ll see what that means. We’ve started writing quite a bit, actually.

So there are plans to do more touring. We’ve got a couple shows coming up in September, St. Vitus in New York City, and we’re playing in Philadelphia, I’m blanking on the name of the club at the moment, that’s on the 23rd and 24th of September. Then we’re doing a taping for an NPR PBS sort of little special on the 25th. Then on the 30th of September we fly off to Europe for almost three weeks, we’ve got two and a half weeks of shows there. Then we come back and we go to Texas and do a few shows in December. Right now we’re starting to outline 2027. We’ve got some people on the periphery that we might work with, perhaps in a production standpoint. We’ll see, I don’t want to say anything too much about that because it’s all up in the air. But we’re moving forward.

Nick and I have a new project out called the Fathom Codex. It’s just a studio project that came about because I had an extra track that didn’t make it on my last solo record, but it had piano and bass and stuff on it too, it wasn’t just drums. I sent it to Nick, he really liked it, he put some vocals to it, and we quickly realized that we still enjoyed working together after all these years. It had been a long time since we had, and that was in the fall of 2024. As we started working on the Fathom Codex, we had an offer for some Dazzling Killmen stuff come up. So we started talking about maybe doing that again, realizing that we liked working together. When we couldn’t get the other two original members on board, we asked if they would be okay with us finding two other people, and they said yeah. Like I said, there’s a belief in the music and there’s a belief in each other, I think. Nick and I have known each other for a long time, many, many decades, and we’ve laughed and cried and yelled and fought and all that. So we’re very real, it’s truly like family. He’s like a brother, that’s not hyperbolic. We’ve got a really good understanding of each other and we have a really damn good time. So that’s allowing us to keep moving forward with all this.

So, yeah, new Dazzling Killmen music, ideally, might be coming in 2027. We’ll see. More touring? Yes. And any other projects? Yes, we just have a new one called the Fathom Codex. There’s a three-song EP out on Bandcamp right now, fathomcodex.bandcamp.com. You can download it for free or pay what you want. And yeah.

Photos courtesy of © Dazzling Killmen

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others