Lafayette, California, 12 and 13 April 1986. Two people in a hired room: a nineteen year old from Florida playing every guitar and every bass part, and a seventeen year old drummer he had met through the post. Three songs in two days, ten minutes and twenty four seconds of tape, no second guitarist, no budget worth the name. The cassette was called Mutilation. Combat Records signed the band off it, and the album that followed a year later is the one everybody credits with building the genre.
That is the shape of the whole decade. In the first six years of this music the demo was not a rough draft submitted in the hope of something better. It was the record. Bands were judged, copied, feared and signed on cassettes that never reached a shop counter, and if you want the roster of who was doing it, that is the 80s Death Metal Bands, Year by Year. This piece is about the tapes themselves and what is actually on them.
1984: two cassettes, two coasts, one word
Possessed recorded three songs in 1984 with Jeff Becerra on bass and vocals, Mike Torrao and Brian Montana on guitars and Mike Sus on drums, and titled the tape Death Metal. "Death Metal", "Evil Warriors" and "Burning in Hell". It is faster than Seven Churches and considerably worse recorded, the cymbals wash over everything, and Becerra's voice arrives already finished, already down where nobody else in America had put one. Montana was gone before the album. The tape moved through the underground for a year before Combat did anything about it.
In June of the same year, in Altamonte Springs, Mantas posted out five songs called Death by Metal, with Chuck Schuldiner on guitar, Kam Lee on drums and vocals and Rick Rozz on second guitar. It is slower, muddier and more deliberate, and the vocal is lower than the California one. Neither band knew the other existed. Both tapes were in the same trading circuits inside four months, which is how a genre with no records ended up with a shared vocabulary.
Those two cassettes are the entire recorded output of American death metal for 1984. Everything else that year was a rehearsal on a boombox.
1986: the tape that bought a contract
The Mutilation demo carries "Land of No Return", "Zombie Ritual" and the title track, and two of those went onto the album more or less intact. What the tape has that the album does not is the sound of a band with nothing to lose and no producer in the room. Chris Reifert hits everything slightly too hard. The bass is audible, which stopped being true for the next four years of this music. Albert Mudrian's account of the period is blunt about what it achieved: this was the tape that got Schuldiner his contract.
Two more 1986 tapes matter as much and got nothing. Massacre put out Aggressive Tyrant and Chamber of Ages from Tampa, both of them heavy, both of them traded across Europe, and the band did not get an album into shops until 1991. Five years on the strength of two cassettes. And in Flint, Repulsion recorded the material that became Horrified, split up, and let it circulate on tape for three years before Carcass released it in 1989 on their own Necrosis imprint.
A demo is the sound of a band before anybody has been paid to make them presentable, which in this genre is most of the point.
1987 and 1988: the tapes that outrank the albums
March 1987, San Antonio. Necrovore record four songs and call the tape Divus de Mortuus. The band lasted from 1986 to 1988 and never released anything else. Those four songs are chaotic, treble heavy, played at a speed the drummer can only just hold, and they arrived a year before most of the bands now credited with inventing that approach. The demo has been bootlegged more times than most of the decade's albums were pressed.
Liverpool the same year: Carcass record Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment, seventeen tracks of medical vocabulary and unlistenable guitar, and Earache signs them off it. In Concord, California, Autopsy tape a demo within weeks of forming in August 1987 and follow it with Critical Madness in 1988, and Peaceville takes them from six thousand miles away without ever having seen the band play.
Stockholm, 5 and 6 December 1987, Thunderload Studios. Morbid cut December Moon with Per Ohlin singing and Lars-Goran Petrov behind the kit. Neither man stayed. Ohlin went to Norway, Petrov went to the microphone in Nihilist, and the Nihilist tapes of 1988 and 1989 are where the Swedish guitar sound was actually finished, two years before Left Hand Path made it famous. The chainsaw tone people credit to that album is fully formed on a cassette that sold in the low hundreds.
1989: the demo stops being the record
May 1989, Border City Recording, a five song cassette engineered by Dennis Fura and running eleven minutes and fifty two seconds. Cannibal Corpse had existed for about five months. It opens with "A Skull Full of Maggots", Metal Blade signed them almost immediately, and Eaten Back to Life was in shops the following year. Compare that to Massacre's five year wait on two better demos and you have the whole change in a sentence.
From 1989 the function inverts. A demo stops being the finished statement and becomes an audition tape, made quickly, mixed to be legible to an A and R department rather than to a trader in Belgium, and superseded within eighteen months. Suffocation recorded Reincremated in 1990 and had an EP out on Relapse the next year. The tapes got better and they stopped mattering as much, which is not a coincidence.
Why the tapes sound better than the records
Three reasons, and none of them is nostalgia. The first is time: a demo was cut in one or two days on a booking somebody paid for out of a warehouse wage, so the takes are live and the mistakes stay in, and the mistakes are where the violence lives. The second is signal: everything was recorded too hot, so the tape gives up and smears the guitars into one continuous grinding surface that no studio would sign off on. The third is that nobody was listening yet. A band recording for four hundred traders makes different decisions from a band recording for a label that has just advanced them money.
The verdict cuts both ways, though. Plenty of celebrated demos are simply badly played, and the trading network was extremely bad at telling the difference between raw and inept, because the fourth generation copy everybody heard flattened both into the same hiss. For every Divus de Mortuus there are forty tapes that deserved to stay in the shoebox. The sleeves, photocopied and folded by hand, went through the same filter, and that argument belongs with death metal album art rather than here.
What none of these cassettes explains on its own is how a tape recorded in San Antonio in March reached a bedroom in Enschede by June. That was a machine, it had rules, ratios and running costs, and it is the reason this genre spread while better funded music stayed local. That machine is tape Trading, and the four years it carried on its own are the same four years covered in where the genre came from.
