Scottish Progressive Metal

Releasing Maritime, Man Made Origin take another step in their evolution, offering a taste of the record to come. Maintaining their signature character while presenting ideas with greater focus and clarity, the material is more restrained, allowing the weight, atmosphere, and emotion to hit harder and stay with you longer.

True to their love of the concept album, the new material is set during the height of European colonial expansion, exploring how imagination, adventure, and ambition sit uneasily alongside greed, cruelty, and exploitation.

Funded by the Scottish Arts Council (Creative Scotland) and produced by Scott McLean (h e a l t h y l i v i n g, Ashenspire), Man Made Origin’s third record takes the listener through the world of the Crusades, examining their violence, contradictions, and consequences. Charting the dark history of the First Crusade 1096-1099, the record creates an incredibly atmospheric and emotional soundscape, brimming with supernatural menace and earthy Eastern textures, which brings together idyllic soft passages with crushing extreme metal and soaring melodic vocals.

Accessible, yet offering many layers of depth to the listener, the record reflected a new level of music production in partnership with Scott McLean. Offering a crucial final touch for the band’s vision, Cult of Luna’s Magnus Lindberg mastered the album, before it was released and distributed world-wide on Contagion Records, in 2016.

Man Made Origin‘s second outing was a push into far more diverse and progressive space. Opening with Faith of the Verse, a fan (and band) favourite, the record plays out a progressive journey which culminates in the 20min-long epic, Into the Darkness. An Incredibly ambitious as a concept album, the record is set in an alternative sci-fi history, where the Roman Empire has continued into the far future, going beyond Earth. Centred on the collapse of belief in an empire and the unintended consequences of revolution. Through the journey of General Titus Cassius and the influence of a hidden egalitarian movement, the record explores power, ideology, and how efforts to create a better system can ultimately produce something far worse.

This story and a range of other short stories written by A.N. Milne (author of White Scars across the Firmament [Otherworlds Inc]) and Donald Carrick, were included as an eBook – ‘Tales of the Verse’.

The band’s debut was recorded and released in within a year of the band forming. Perhaps closest to a ‘blacked death metal’ record in sound, the album also poured in the band’s influences from thrash, rock and progressive metal. Recorded across three one-day sessions at Seagate Studios, Dundee, it captures all the energy of the initial years of Man Made Origin, whilst ‘Lament for Tomorrow’ hints at the direction to come.

A concept album, it captures how a post-nuclear apocalypse would realise Thomas Hobbe’s concept of ‘State of Nature – where life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” in the absence of government.