Back in 1993, Demilich released a killer album entitled Nespithe. The album innovated consciously in every way possible. It took the audience a decade to warm up to it, but by the time Demilich re-united in 2006 for a reunion tour, death metal had fully bonded with this inventive act.
Fast forward a few more years and Demilich is finally getting the recognition it deserves through re-releases of its classic material. These were originally planned in 2006, but got delayed a bit as the wheels of music justice ground. Demilich has just announced the release of a limited edition box set with a 44-page booklet, sticker and new cover art.
The set comes with cover art by Turkka G. Rantanen, above, and a fold-out A2/B2 size poster with art by David Mikkelsen, below. The box set comes in 2CD and 3LP forms and is called The 20th Anniversary of Emptiness, available through Svart Records in late 2013.
Tracklist:
V34ish6ng 0f Emptiness / Em9t2ness of Van2s1ing (2006)
Emptiness of Vanishing
Vanishing of Emptiness
The Faces Right Below the Skin of the Earth
Nespithe (1993)
When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water
The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)
Inherited Bowel Levitation – Reduced Without Any Effort
The Echo (Replacement)
The Putrefying Road in the Nineteenth Extremity (…Somewhere inside the Bowels of Endlessness…)
(Within) The Chamber of Whispering Eyes
And You’ll Remain… (in Pieces in Nothingness)
Erecshyrinol
The Planet that Once Used to Absorb Flesh in Order to Achieve Divinity and Immortality (Suffocated to the Flesh that it Desired…)
The Cry
Raped Embalmed Beauty Sleep
The Echo (1992)
egasseM neddiH A – ortnI
The Echo (Replacement)
Erecshyrinol
The Sixteenth Six-tooth Son of Fourteen Four-regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)
The Cry
…Somewhere Inside the Bowels of Endlessness… (1992)
(Within) the Chamber of Whispering Eyes
…And Youll Remain… (in Pieces in Nothingness)
The Cry
The Putrefying Road in the Nineteenth Extremity (…Somewhere Inside the Bowels of Endlessness…)
Inherited Bowel Levitation – Reduced without Any Effort
The Four Instructive Tales …of Decomposition (1991)
Introduction / Embalmed Beauty Sleep
Two Independent Organisms -> One Suppurating Deformity
And the Slimy Flying Creatures Reproduce in Your Brains
Those of us who have had the fortune to hang around the music industry for a few decades tend to pick up a few ideas about what works and what doesn’t.
If you are trying to get your music out there, you’ll get a lot of advice from people with agendas. They want you to do x so that they get y. What follows is generic advice for putting your best foot forward.
Five things every aspiring musician should have:
Mailing list. Before you start freaking out, realize this isn’t a big deal that involves new software and complexity that might make your sensitive artistic brain burn out. You can do this in Gmail or any other mail program. The point is to keep a list of every person who has helped you, liked you, interviewed you, or written to you showing interest. Don’t lose contact through disorganization, which is what 99.99% of musicians do. Ask “Mind if I keep you updated about [Band Name Here]?” and most people will say yes. Then send them periodic updates, about every third month. For people in the industry, this helps them track you and do nice things for you like write articles. For fans, this is a sense of being attached to something important. As your list expands, you can migrate to a free mailing list service.
Audio streaming. As soon as you have recorded material, you should have one current song you stream live. You do not necessarily need more than one, which preserves the exclusivity of your work. However, especially at the demo and first album stages, it doesn’t hurt to worry less about monetizing your work and more about getting it out there. Unfortunately, most streaming services are pretty bad and also rely on the notoriously buggy and unsafe Adobe Flash Player (if your computer got hacked in the last 5 years, it’s most likely it happened through this piece of junkware). The best are SoundCloud and YouTube, and both are free.
Contactability. Most of you have a web/phone presence, but the important part is this: it should never change. Thus you probably want it to be separate from your social media presence, which is where you post updates. What’s wrong with using Facebook as your official page? Social media trends change, and you’ll be (in about six months) in the same place the people are who stuck to MySpace. Get yourself a free website and keep it minimal. Post links to your audio streaming, your mission statement (see below), and have some kind of contact, whether an email address or a contact form.
Demo. What’s this, 1992? A demo? No one uses tapes anymore, you say. That may be so. However, the demo is the most important stage of your band’s career. It’s where you hone your craft and show us the direction into which you’re expanding. It’s also a stage at which experiencing reviewers tend to be generous to you, since they know it’s a work in progress. Most demos get cut from the review pile not for being bad but for being contentless, in other words imitations of form without substance. If you’ve got something you are trying to express, even if your style isn’t distinct, experienced reviewers tend to be accepting. A demo also allows you and your fellow band members — if any — to focus on what you’re doing, and figure out if you like your direction. It’s a form of prototyping that’s vital to making music. Nowadays, it might be an MP3 demo. But nothing’s worse than a band who rush out a first album of material that still needs incubation.
Mission statement. This is both a formal mission statement, and a one-liner for your own head. You’re at a party, and you head back over to the punch bowl made from an imitation triceratops skull, and you meet someone new. They ask, “So what’s your band like?” You want to have a one-liner you can zap out in a zombie-like state. This should briefly describe your musical style, but more importantly describe your direction. “We’re a death metal band trying to revive the creativity of the early heavy metal era” or “We’re a doom metal band who want to capture a naturalistic vibe.” Keep this one short and sweet. For your website, and to email to anyone who shows any interest in you, you need a one-paragraph more formal statement. If you aren’t confident in your word-smithing skills, find a local (underappreciated) zine editor or DJ and they will most likely help. Your mission statement should be a clear and easily-grasped statement of both style and substance, and it should be the first thing in any communication you have with industry. It’s not realistic to expect people to remember you immediately, and they’re busy people; give them a helping hint. This also gives people who visit your website “talking points,” such as “I found this new band, they’re organic doom metal” when they tell their friends about you.
This article is limited, and not intended to be anything other that five useful things for you to do. For more general advice, try the BBC page and How to Promote Your Music on About. It’s also worth checking out industry-related rants from Trent Reznor and Steve Albini.
“Listen to your customers, not your critics. Only invest your efforts into something you enjoy…”
Lee Parsons, CEO, Ditto Music
This is best expressed as a more universal principle: make music that you would be able to listen to for two weeks straight as a teenager and then throw on at least once a month for the rest of your life without getting bored. Make music you would be excited to find in the store or on a dub or torrent. If you satisfy your own cravings, and not the neurotic critique that most of us having running in the back of our heads, you will make something you can believe in.
Here at DMU HQ, we see many potential topics for review. Some are terrible, and are sent to receive a public shaming via Sadistic Metal Reviews. Most are average, doing something somewhat competently but not in a unique fashion worthy of note; these we mention in passing or let languish in silence. The smallest group is that which does something uniquely and with room for potential future development. It is in this last group that we find Ritual Decay, with extracts from their upcoming demo Conquering Darkness.
The eponymous track is a winding, minimalist affair. The more thoroughly composed of the two tracks, it presents a slower form of death metal informed through the black metal tradition, though this track does not quite reach the same level of sinister malaise that this description might evoke.
Coming to the listener from a distance, the production sounds subterranean and contributes to the narrative by forming a bleak backdrop for minor tonal variation to paint color on. However, this is interrupted to an extent by the up-front placement of the drums and their prominent use within the song. The guitars’ motif endures throughout the entire track, undergoing modification as it progresses, but still retaining a common melodic and rhythmic base reinforced by drum patterns that provide forward motion. Where this track succeeds is in the way various riffs fit together to communicate commonality to the overall sensation, though still providing a definite direction in movement to a place related to the beginning, but identifiably unique.
The second track is much shorter and also more forgettable. Having more in common with a punk influence than with death or black metal, particularly in the vocal rhythm and delivery; this is a direct forward assault that does not come close to instigating the sense of foreboding that the preceding track did. Riffs are competent enough, though not enough to induce a desire for repeat listening, seeming more a collection of riffs, than a full-fleshed song; though this may be part of the nature of a demo.
There is a core of talent present within this band; though at least in the two tracks presented so far, the band is suffering from stylistic confusion in how to best amalgamate its various influences. If the band has the opportunity to explore ideas in greater detail, it will be interesting to see how the music develops in the future; hopefully keeping what is done well and discarding the rest.
Empyrium recently released a live concert video entitled Into The Pantheon celebrating their recent return to live performances (read our interview with Markus Stock here). They’re releasing the same concert as a CD.
For many, this will be not only the preferred way to experience this live concert, but also the preferred way to experience Empyrium. First, while the video is beautifully shot with professional attention to detail, this concert also lends itself to listening especially while deep in thought. Second, the setlist for this show compiles much of Empyrium’s most interesting material, providing both a best-of and highlight performance reel.
Into the Pantheon shows Empyrium using live acoustic instruments including pianos, strings and twelve-string guitars to create a fully-fleshed version of their sound, including operatic vocals but not the wash of keyboards doubling the guitar riff that is “symphonic metal.” This performance is closer to what Summoning and Enslaved did, which was to combine medieval music — think Dead Can Dance, but even more authentic — with slower atmospheric metal and use the combination to launch into songwriting that has been traditional to their homelands for millennia.
Technically, this is a metal album, and has metal sensibilities, much as Summoning does despite its convoluted take on the style. However, at its heart is the skaldic/bardic tradition of old Europe where singers put epic poems to music and other musicians as could be spared contributed chorus effects. Most of these songs are sung in the main by a single voice, in a less ostentatious version of operatic vocals (closer to the visceral and honest performance that Attila used to crown De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas), but this voice is accompanied by the aforementioned instruments, including a heavily distorted guitar that lays out the darker and more urgent themes using the best techniques of death metal and black metal.
Often however the instrument that leads is the acoustic guitar, plucking simple melodic patterns that are then echoed by violins and piano, and encouraged through harmonization of vocals to urge the melodies on. These develop, and then fragment, with multiple instruments each taking one approach, and as these conflict, a dissonance and sense of longing fills the songs, like wanderlust with fin de siècle wistfulness. The vocals return to guide these home and they do so, dropping from their atmospheric cloud of sound a clear counter-theme which provokes them into resolution.
The songs on Into the Pantheon are memorable, distinct and elegant, all while being metal enough to be of interest to anyone short of war metal fans. Like the dramatic presence of Candlemass with the somber mood of Skepticism, these songs seize the atmosphere and re-shape it in their own image. They then promptly escape any over-consistency by developing within these dark tunes storylines that include the light and beautiful, and many emotions between that and the abyss. The result is the classic European art of telling epic story through lyrics and song.
Since this late-career retrospective gives the ability the ability to both carefully choose songs and update them with all that they’ve learned about music since the early days, Into the Pantheon presents Empyrium in their best light and creates a platform on which they can build if they choose to release future works. But for now, this is a strong contender for inclusion on the list of quality albums released in 2013, and well-crafted enough to last years beyond that as a listening experience.
Bleak minimalism enshrouded in atonality helped popularize bands like Antaeus and Aosoth. Austere ingredients were then implemented to include aspects of nihilism which eclipse the human condition.
Much like a swim during a storm with gusts and waves colliding against you, Lorn’s instrumentation pinpoints a more tooth-and-claw element of human tendencies. An unsettling dissonance weaved within a transcendent urgency without the all-too-human impulse to vocalize one’s thoughts assists in bringing out the unique differentia of Subconscious Metamorphosis.
Lorn charge ahead as a brigade of instrumentalizations that enables the listener to journey to their own introspective conclusion. Occasional synthesizing blends in with the repetitious guitar riffs and conveys absolute bleakness. The tempo changes in drum patterns help to keep singular riffs alive for much longer durations.
One of the more interesting components of this release is that it only has vocals on the first track where it sort of sounds like an ambient hybrid of Gorgoroth and Aosoth. After the initial introduction Subconscious Metamorphosis continues as a solely instrumental album. The result is like a walk through a poorly lit tunnel in which one fatigues and decides to sleep in the darkness. Alone and sensory deprived, one finds comfort inside their subconscious while in solitude.
When we first heard about Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay, the upcoming documentary about industrial music and its origins, it struck us as relevant for a death metal site.
In the landscape of popular music, there are obvious “pop” genres on the surface next to accepted forms like jazz and classical, but underneath that are the surly and dangerous types of music that are underground because they don’t place nice with the contemporary mythos and ideology of our society.
That group includes metal, hardcore punk (not pop punk, which belongs under rock/pop) and industrial. These genres just refuse to play by the same rules as everyone else who wants mainstream acceptance, mainly because they flirt with or outright endorse ideas that the mainstream has decided are unpalatable.
We were fortunate to get a brief Q&A with Amélie Ravalec and Travis Collins, filmmakers of Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay.
Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay as a title seems to suggest both a documentary on industrial music, and some sense of the motivations behind industrial artists. What made you choose this approach?
Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay is the first film to document the history of industrial music, featuring interviews from the genre’s most influential bands, artists, labels and fanzines.
I was motivated to make this documentary as I felt this genre and these artists deserve to be exposed to a broader audience. This film is about more than just industrial music, it also reflects on art, politics and social issues, postindustrialisation and urban decay.
Are you and your fellow filmmaker industrial fans? If so, what first got you into the genre?
Amélie: I came across industrial music while directing my first documentary Paris/Berlin: 20 years of underground techno. I’ve always enjoyed the harsher and darker side of music. Throbbing Gristle’s song “Convincing People” is one of the first industrial songs I remember hearing. I was immediately attracted to Genesis’s monotonous British voice and the hypnotic repetitiveness of the song. This led me on a path to discovering more industrial, post punk and dark ambient, as well as beautiful crossovers bands like Coil or In The Nursery. As I dug deeper into the industrial genre, I realized that I shared a lot common influences and preoccupations with those artists, even though they were from a different generation. From a really young age I read books by Burroughs, Ballard etc and became interested in art movements like the dadaist or the futurists, so I felt an instant connection to this music.
Travis: Working in a record store from a young age, I discovered techno and experimental music and was immediately appealed by the rawness of this sound. While living in Perth, Western Australia I had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Malinder on a radio program and had him DJ at a club night I hosted. Mal and I became friends over the years and he was the first industrial band I fell in love with. I also got into bands like Throbbing Gristle, Meat Beat Manifesto, Silver Apples, Renegade Soundwave and others through my favourite DJ at the time, Andrew Weatherall. I met Amélie while traveling Europe and we decided that this film needed to be made.
I am no expert, but it seems that metal, punk and industrial come from a similar root, which is a rejection of the social impulse of mutual tolerance. Why do you think this is, and how do you think it relates to social decay?
All bands and collaborations bring different influences to the music they make and the environment and social context of the musicians also plays an important role. Most of the early industrial bands we interviewed grew up in turbulent times, where unemployment, highrise living and cultural oppression were all part of the decaying environment in which this music blossomed.
When the history of humanity is written, how do you think industrial music will be recorded? Do you consider it a historically important musical movement?
Industrial bands have been influential in many ways inspiring art forms, using tape loops and edits that pre dated sample music and these days you can hear noise and industrial elements in all forms of music from, electronic music, pop through to classical music.
Industrial musicians are educated, artistically minded and politically aware artists. They found inspiration in the avantgarde movements from the early 20th century like the Futurists, Dadaists or Surrealists, as well as contemporary writers William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. They were also influenced by early science fiction movies, Krautrock artists Kraftwerk, Can and Faust, The Velvet Underground and the DIY ethos of punk music. These artists rejected major labels, mass media and mainstream culture to invent a culture of their own.
When will Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay be released and how can people watch it?
Some years have passed since Emit was first featured in these pages, but the UK dark ambient/noise/black metal-influenced project returns in the coming year with the newest edition of its most recent work.
MM, the creator of Emit and Hammemit, took the time to answer a few of our questions. Not only is he an underground musician, but he is also a zine publisher, having produced three issues of the Anti-Art Manifesto zine during the later years of underground black metal.
Emit claims influence from a number of sources, including its constitutent genres of black metal, dark ambient, electro-acoustic music and noise. However, there are extra-musical influences as well, such as a rumored connection to the Order of Nine Angles and other mystical groups.
As metal seeks new influences and directions in which it can go without losing its essential metal-ness, it makes sense to observe how others are navigating paths through the chaos. Thus we are very proud to present an interview with MM of Emit/Hammemit.
So… Emit’s back. What made you decide to resurrect this project?
Typically, Emit resurrected itself because it began to irritatingly manifest unbidden within recording sessions for Hammemit. Rather than contaminate the pure spring waters of my youngest son with the angry attentions of the estranged eldest, something had to be done with it. They are of the same blood, but are of different temperaments. I now create music as Dr. Jekyll might.
What have you been doing in the intervening years between Emit’s cessation and resurrection? Do you view these as similar activities in spirit, even if not in sound?
Well, there is Hammemit. To inaccurately quote myself from an unpublished interview: in varying shades of subtly dark sound I have raised again to their former use and gestalt such structures of worship and diligent study as may currently be found ruined or in state of repair within a certain radius of my guitar, in spectral form. These existing in an ancient realm quite recently known as England that I understand from books and hearsay actually once existed and is become resurrect via such musics as mine own. It is the spirit of a dead realm I still sadly bear living memory to.
Of course they are similar in spirit as I speak with one voice, searching for the ultimate expression, faltering with words yet more fluent in music to express the mysteries I am bound to darkly perceive yet struggle to grasp since earliest memory.
What motivates you to make music? Is there a philosophy to your life?
The motivation is a sudden urgent and painful desire to attempt a capturing of the essence of mysterious elements of existence, because mere words fail me as already explained. Music fails me too, but comes closer to describing that experienced than any other medium I might think of using for such means.
My most fervent hope is to capture perfectly, like ancient insect in amber, this unexplainable inexplicable. I perhaps came closest to doing so with a Hammemit piece called “The Trod of the Darklie Faye,” but yet still remains so distant from the core of the thing.
If there is a philosophy to my life it would surely be the cause of many a smile in the Greek underworld, in the unlikely event they bothered to peer up from their dice games to take notice.
Your CD is coming out on Crucial Blast Records in 2014. Can you tell us what the new Emit will be like? What’s the title?
It has already been available on cassette from a label called Glorious North, originally a demo. However, such is its apparent accomplishment that it deserves releasing again with full album status, expanded tastefully where necessary (I mean no bonus tracks).
The title is not quite borrowed from a compendium of M.R. James short stories, Spectre Music of an Antiquary. The cover (for the CD) is a photographically recorded arrangement of what “might” be called necrotic artifacts, of varying degrees of relevance to the music in question. Items with history and spectres of their own tied to them. In any case, not just some accidental collection of random rubbish as can often be seen elsewhere on album covers belonging to profane Public House crawling musicians with time and nothing else to kill.
It is musically comprised of bio-mechanically haunted vignettes, with a subtle 1980s film soundtrack aftertaste.
How do you think the metal community has changed between the last Emit and the next?
My connection to and interaction with any kind of music community or movement was always minimal. This not being by choice and I sometimes in the past regretted that fact. However I realise now in the light of maturity I was happier that way. I remain a writer of letters (and emails), mostly to people I have known a long while. Most of these people, if not all, bear the same opinion as myself, namely that there is little that such a community can offer people like us and increasingly so. The majority of those comprising these communities have no spirit or panache and wish for acceptance.
What’s next for Emit, and for you as a musician, after this album? Tour? More recordings?
A tour is unlikely to say the least. But some more live examples should be made where possible. More recordings are not out of the question, but only if there be a violent urge to do so. I never record anything for the sake of making a “new” recording. Especially as everything I have ever committed to tape (or .WAV file nowadays) has already been given birth in some form or other many hundred years previous. Even if it took the shape of a church or priest hole rather than unpopular song.
Underground Never Dies! is a look at the nascent death metal movement through the eyes of zine editors, musicians and writers from the mid 1980s-mid 1990s era when the genre was birthed. For more information about its genesis and content, you might want to check out our interview with Andrés Padilla and read the other half of this review, which includes a 3-page sampler of the book itself.
What makes Underground Never Dies! exceptional is that it does not attempt to be anything but a subjective and in-depth exploration of what the author and those he knew found to be meaningful in the death metal underground. It explores what the term “underground” itself means, and what motivated these musicians and other creative people to set up an underground and nurture the music in it.
The book itself is a crown jewel, with glossy pages reproducing the original flyers, zines, band photos, demo covers and other artifacts of the age, plus extensive commentary by people who were active in that time, with big names appearing alongside obscure but insightful contributors. Visually, it is overwhelming to the point where it must be digested over many days with appreciation for all of the details, much like one used to peruse Mad Magazine for the Antonio Prohias cartoons in the margins.
The accompanying LP is also a masterwork of old school underground extreme metal joy. Side B begins with the most famous track by Necrovore, the band who in 1986-87 took the raw ideas of early death metal and gave them an aesthetic of apocalyptic rage that was later influential to Morbid Angel. Invocator and Armoros follow with tracks that show us the speed metal roots of many of the most popular riff themes in death metal. Sadism contributes an older school track that shows the mentality shifting from speed metal’s logicality to death metal’s feral rage and structural obsession. Finally, Poison and Mental Decay reveal some of the more hardcore punk-influenced work in the underground, showing us both the weirdness and commonality of purpose between the two genres in their original form.
In addition to the tracks streamed here and on Side A, the CD/MC version of the accompanying music contains a bonus side with more tracks from famous, infamous and obscure bands.
Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay explores the history of industrial music, featuring interviews from the genre’s most influential bands, artists, labels and fanzines.
The documentary film by filmmakers Amélie Ravalec and Travis Collins is currently in post-production. Its topic is industrial music, meaning the noise-based variety more than the post-EBM variety, defined as “an experimental music genre inspired by a wide spectrum of ideologies and interests” which “combines improvisation and performance with avant-garde, provocative, political and taboo themes alongside harsh noise and environmental sound recordings.”
According to the filmmakers, industrial was a DIY genre that rejected mainstream society — much like the original hardcore punk and metal — and “found inspiration in the avant-garde movements from the early 20th century like the Futurists, Dadaists or Surrealists, as well as contemporary writers William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. They were also influenced by early science fiction movies, Krautrock artists Kraftwerk, Can and Faust, The Velvet Underground and the DIY ethos of punk music.”
What follows is a list of the interviewees for this film:
Throbbing Gristle
Cabaret Voltaire
NON / Boyd Rice
SPK
Click Click
Test Dept
Clock DVA
Re/Search
Z’EV
Sordide Sentimental
Hula
In the Nursery
Hands Production
Klinik
Ant Zen
Orphx
Prima Linea
For more information, check out the group’s Facebook page.
British NWOBHM band Blitzkrieg have returned with a new album, entitled Back From Hell. Melodic while still retaining structure, this album will appeal to fans of 80s era heavy metal, as well as those who prefer death/black metal but can appreciate skillfully constructed metal whatever form it may take.
Back From Hell has the band mostly keeping true to the traditional NWOBHM sound, with a few elements of further-developed speed metal present. Songs are expertly arranged, with each track featuring a clearly developed concept that never loses focus. This allows immersion within the verse-chorus structure and quickly illuminates the theme present within each. Verse and chorus are linked together with skillful transitions that makes the distinction between them organic, rather than artificial. Ornaments such as solos and fills are executed tastefully, with an eye towards shaping them into the song rather than the reverse.
Tracks are a mixture between heavier material and those that have more in common with 90s radio hard-rock and seem placed solely for commercial exposure. On these tracks the band forgoes thematic development in favor of repetition. Fortunately, those are the exception and not the rule; and while they do interrupt the album’s narrative to an extent, are still competently conceived.
Exuberant and honest in a way rarely seen among contemporary metal releases, in its best moments Back From Hell transports the listener back to a time when heavy metal was still exciting, and for that reason will be present on many best-of lists for 2013, even if it is marred by some concessions.
Bleak minimalism enshrouded in atonality helped popularize bands like Antaeus and Aosoth. Austere ingredients were then implemented to include aspects of nihilism which eclipse the human condition.
