STR.. just want to give a bit of background because I am always interested in the roots of things and how they grow. This is how it was from the beginning..

 The reason Mike Ciasullo and I started Sunken Temple in 2018 was to put out the Helen of Troy demos on cassette. They were lost for sometime, as was I. But like myself, they resurfaced. It was time for them to rise from the dead, like I had been doing in some ways, simultaneously. I think it's a shame that so much of the material bands create gets lost in the ether when they disband, regardless of plans and potential release, my own band included. Mike and I now had a vehicle to salvage these songs into some tangible form, Sunken Temple Records was born.

Documentation, whether it be music or any artistic form, has always been important to me. Acts of creativity and passion that are conducted in a lifetime need to be preserved for the future, and for the aliens so they can know something about our era of existence and the things we lived to make and do in our small pocket of time.

With some vigor and the addition of Dalton Ryan to the body of this thing, STR was Live and we hammered out the H.o.T. cassette while gathering steam and planning the next release.
The concept had come full circle.
It was time to dredge up all of the beautiful, brilliant exhibitions that we and our friends let sink into the abyss of time.

Rich Muller (The Last Crime, Vice Massacre, The Third Kind) and I have been friends since the 90s. I heard the songs Man Vs Shark and Operate Medicate when The Last Crime recorded them in 1998 and I was blown away and wanted to release them back then. Fast forward 20 years and those amazing songs are finally available in physical format. Documentation..

Mike Ciasullo played bass on The Last Crime recording and was also in (in my opinion), the most brutal band from Long Island:
The Fifty Two X.
It was only logical that we should release the long-shrouded Liver Damage EP and complete that documentation.

As this thing is a labor of love, we began reaching out to our friends and loved ones to see what other gems we could resurrect from the depths, along with jewels present and past to showcase within the Sunken Temple. Now C.R., Rahim, Christ Head and Fake Piss are part of the family, with more additions on the horizon.

Fast forward to 2022, my dear friend and brilliant artist Jess Rosenberg has been the image and layout master for STR over a year now and things have never been better. We did our first LP release and double cassette release together: A Piece of the Beast 12” compilation and the Rahim 2X cassette respectively. The future is very bright and we have quite a few very exciting releases coming up this year so stay tuned.

We have only just begun.
If you are here, I appreciate you.

— Messina