Exclusive Interview With Jason McMaster Of WatchTower

Mark Pruett 2–3 minutes

Jason McMaster. This is a complete sentence. It causes the earth to tremble and amps to spontaneously combust at 11. That’s right… Pastor McMaster of the Church of Disaster is here to drop a sermon like none other.

In late 2024, Ignitor (with McMaster at the helm) unleashed “Horns and Hammers”, a NWOTHM triumph forged in fire and sharpened on the anvil of everything that makes this movement roar. It’s a record that hits like a war cry from a new generation, but for McMaster, it’s merely the latest spark from a furnace that’s been burning white‑hot for decades.

https://youtu.be/HO_9eM5VPwo

Frontman? Vocalist? Living Legend?

Sure, but let’s face facts. He’s a force of nature, a walking archive of riffs, a high‑octane prophet of the loud and the unholy. Now, he is fully ascended… he has been anointed as the High Priest of the Church of Disaster, presiding over a congregation of distortion, sweat, and glorious chaos. Throw the horns in the air for Papa McMaster!

His legacy is a labyrinth of bands that reshaped the landscape of heavy music. Watch Tower rewrote the rules of progressive metal before most bands even knew there were rules. Dangerous Toys swaggered onto the scene and set MTV ablaze. Broken Teeth, Gahdzilla Motor Company, Evil United, SA Slayer, Hot Shot, Night Terror, Sad Wings… the list reads like a roll call of every subgenre worth raising a fist for. Each project still alive, still snarling, still orbiting him like planets around a star that refuses to burn out.

And because the man apparently exists outside the laws of mortal biology, he also co‑hosts Talk Louder, one of the most essential metal podcasts on Earth. Insight, humor, history, and pure rock‑and‑roll storytelling. He and “Metal Dave” Glessner deliver it all with the ease of two legends who have lived ten lifetimes in the trenches.

But even with all that, this interview holds something deeper. Something sacred.

A revelation that feels like a relic from the vaults of Metal Valhalla itself.

Years ago, a rock legend (an icon whose name carries weight in every corner of the metal world) penned lyrics specifically for Jason McMaster. Handwritten. Personal. Unrecorded. They’ve hung on his wall like a secret prophecy waiting for the right moment. Who wrote them? And will Jason ever bring those words to life in the studio? That’s the mystery at the heart of this conversation.

So, step inside. The torches are lit. The pulpit is shaking.

Papa McMaster is preaching, and the sermon is molten.

Don’t miss this wildly beautiful, thunderously human conversation with a man who has earned his place in Metal Valhalla a dozen times over. He shows no signs of slowing down and that’s a damn good thing.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialWatchTower

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/official_watchtower/

Website: https://watchtowerband.com/

#BrokenTeeth #classicHeavyMetal #HeavyMetal #hornsAndHammers #Ignitor #JasonMcMaster #NewWaveOfTraditionalHeavyMetal #NWOTHM #thenwothm #Watchtower #WatchtowerBand

Blast Chips with This BBQ Lighter Fault Injection Tool

Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don't have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill.

If you don't know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state.

EMFI tools are commercially available -- we even recently featured a kit to build your own -- but [rqu]'s homebrew version is decidedly simpler and cheaper than just about anything else. It consists of a piezoelectric gas grill igniter, a little bit of enameled magnet wire, and half of a small toroidal ferrite core. The core fragment gets a few turns of wire, which then gets soldered to the terminals on the igniter. Pressing the button generates a high-voltage pulse, which gets turned into an electromagnetic pulse by the coil. There's a video of the tool in use in the Twitter thread, showing it easily glitching a PIC running a simple loop program.

To be sure, a tool as simple as this won't do the trick in every situation, but it's a cheap way to start exploring the potential of fault injection.

Thanks to [Jonas] for the tip.

#securityhacks #toolhacks #emfi #faultinjection #ferrite #glitching #ignitor #piezoelectric #reverseengineering #toroid