“I read an article about the Pink Mass, an event in which the Satanic Temple’s national spokesperson, Lucien Greaves, performed a ‘gayification ritual’ and draped his nuts over the gravestone of the Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps’s mom, thus turning her gay in the afterlife,” she recalls. Formed in 2012 as a progressive, socially conscious alternative to LaVey’s venerable Church of Satan, the Satanic Temple has gone on to forge a much more inclusive and activist form of Satanism. “Over time I eventually simmered down and grew out of LaVey’s angry diatribes and settled into a more active and well-rounded variant of Satanism, the Satanic Temple,” she continues. The philosophies LaVey espoused regarding freedom, self-worth and vital existence were so at home with me, I became a Satanist on the spot. And as an edgy, depressed, angry teenager at the time, it felt almost as though I could have written the book myself.
“My girlfriend at the time recommended I read Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible. “I discovered Satanism on Independence Day of 2016, the same year Katalysk was formed,” she recalls. Satanism also factors into Katalysk’s daring music. Naturally, the songs are peppered with plenty of vicious blastbeats, growled vocals and tooth-drilling solos that define the genre of death metal. It’s also a concept album, one that weaves an apocalyptic saga involving political corruption, mass murder and the awakening of ancient evil. Instead, the album’s ten songs probe the extremes of human existence, metaphysics and musical daring. With Stibbs on guitar and vocals, Phillips on bass and former member Nathan Sampson on drums, Luciano wields her ax like a surgeon with a scalpel - only the goal isn’t to heal. The group’s debut album, Incessant Awakening, was released in 2020, and it’s as accomplished as it is brutal. “The result was one of the cleanest, most devastatingly powerful death-metal projects I’ve ever had the pleasure to work on.”Įvan Semón Luciano is boastful, but she backs it up. “William Stibbs and Garrick Phillips, two other metalheads from my high school marching band, bonded over our shared musical interests and eventually started a band of our own,” Luciano explains. “The Stars and Stripes Forever” may have been on the opposite end of the spectrum from the technically stunning, hellishly visceral form of metal that Katalysk would one day conjure, but it was amid those squeaky-clean tubas and timpanis that Luciano began to meet like-minded musicians - and there a plan was hatched to flip their script and head in an infernal direction. Still, while a student at Smoky Hill High School, she started out playing in a far less sinister cabal: the marching band. “I have been listening to metal since I was very young,” Luciano says. One of Iron Maiden’s best-known songs is the 666-centric “Number of the Beast,” and that cemented in her soul the unholy union of metal and Satanism, two things that remain her obsession and passion. The Denver-based musician and organizer - who plays guitar in the local death-metal band Katalysk and co-founded both the Satanic Temple Colorado and the Death Metal Consortium - was blessed to see the legendary group Iron Maiden headline the first metal concert she ever attended. When Diama Luciano fell in love with heavy metal, it made sense that Satan was present.