40 Years of Chaos · EP.13 — Mastro and the Live Quintet

Right after the recording of Icon of Sin, Mauro Pacetti made a decision that changed the band's live face: he dropped the bass and dedicated himself solely to vocals. The new album's sound had become too complex, too cerebral to handle as musician and singer at the same time, and the vocal writing demanded full attention — interpretation, dynamics, stage presence. Mauro kept writing the bass parts, but from that moment on he handed them to someone else.

That someone was Andrea Mastromarco, known to everyone as Mastro. Bassist of Infernal Poetry, a technical death band from Ancona rising in the same circuit, he had known Mauro since high school. His technical sensibility and his desire to join AydrA did the rest: he accepted with enthusiasm, and the prior acquaintance guaranteed immediate chemistry.

AydrA became a quintet — Mauro on vocals, Francesco Olivi on lead guitar, Marcello Lammoglia on rhythm guitar, Mastro on bass, Nicola Raffaeli on drums. Between 1999 and 2001 this was the most solid live line-up in the band's history, and the golden stretch that took AydrA out of the local scene and into the European death and grindcore flow of the early 2000s: opening slots for Napalm Death, Avulsed, Sadist, Infernal Poetry, Dark Lunacy and Disease.