Mudrian's latest book, Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces (Da Capo Press, $18.95), offers a behind-the-scenes look into the making of some landmark albums. The book is a compilation of band interviews from the "Hall of Fame" column in Decibel, the extreme-music magazine of which Mudrian is editor-in-chief.
Speaking by phone from Virginia, where he was visiting his girlfriend, Mudrian maintained that while his anger-filled youth was well behind him, his passion for metal never waned.
"Once you get bitten by the metal bug it's got you for life," he says. "That adrenaline rush is still there when you listen to something that is super-fast and super-aggressive. This music provides a bit of that release, that escape from things."
A native of Wilkes-Barre, where he would later attend King's College, Mudrian fell in love with metal early on.
"I was a bit younger when I first started getting into metal," he says. "It wasn't really until I got to high school that I fell into the trap of death metal and black metal and grindcore - which is a great way to make friends in high school, by the way."
As he became older and more acquainted with the music industry, Mudrian noticed a dearth of publications devoted to his interests. So, in 2004 he started Decibel with the aim of covering the music he loved with the depth he felt it deserved. Today, the monthly magazine, with just a few staffers, claims 4,200 subscribers and a circulation of 50,000.
Mudrian, who still sells all of the magazine's ads, says that one of the original goals of Decibel was to put a more professional face on the scene while giving fans a sense of the music's history.
