Red Liquid has been swimming around in Lee Cizek's head since high school—and we're not talking about blood here, although hopefully that's been doing the same thing for a lot longer.

"I started up Red Liquid in my head when I was like 17 or 18," Cizek says. "I had taught myself how to play keyboards and was dicking around on the piano, and I was really into Antioch Arrow at the time. I did some of it as a teenager, but it never really went anywhere. Then when I was 24 or something, I started it up again because I wasn't playing with anybody, and [was] married and home a lot with my kid. So I messed with some loops and samples and everything, did a recording, and then played some shows off that. It ended up sounding a bit like Black Dice or early M83. But Red Liquid—at least in this incarnation—started when my buddy Corey [McKinnon] and I were doing a band with Sean from Tit Pig. He and I lived together at the time, and we were called Black Tooth. We played three or four shows, and it was a total fucking disaster."

As I had exactly zero minutes to prepare for our interview, and had heard nothing but some rough demo cuts some time ago, I had to ask Cizek some pretty cliché, boilerplate crap. Example: "How would you describe your sound?" (Possibly the most annoying question a music writer could ask.) "Nick Cave meets the Swans doing futuristic murder ballads," he says. And based on the demos in existence so far, the man has a pretty accurate description there.

Adding a Moog Little Phatty and a Korg MS2000 to the traditional rock-band setup, Red Liquid create eerie, futuristic doom rock that's heated, sinister, danceable, and expansive. And although the idea's been around since Cizek was a wee high-schooler, they're finally making some progress in the record department.

"We have a tape coming out on Hanged Man, which is done by Mitch [Bell, aka the recording artist Thunder Grey Pilgrim], and it was something we recorded when we were drunk one night at practice. That should be out in early 2012—just stuff that was and is sounding passable, so we're putting some final touches on it right now."

In addition to the tape, Cizek et al. have been working with Brandon Fitzsimons, whose busy schedule allows him to squeeze the group into his home studio only sporadically. I predict that it will be well worth waiting a little longer for Red Liquid to ferment.