Nearly ten thousand copies, dubbed onto cassette and sold through the post out of a country where a Western record was a rumour with a price on it. That is what Morbid Reich did in 1990, and the band that made it, Vader, were four men in Olsztyn with no label, no distributor and no shop that could legally order the albums they had learned from. By most counts it is still one of the best selling demos metal has produced.
Hold on to that figure, because the first four chapters of this history happened in places that had the machinery. Tampa had Morrisound and a producer with a diary. Stockholm had a studio and a distortion pedal that everyone borrowed. New York had the clubs, the labels within driving distance and the argument about brutal death metal that ran through all of them. Take the machinery away. Take away the record shop, the credit account, the reliable post and the hard currency, and you still get death metal. You get more of it, and it comes out stranger.
The pillar of this series has death metal explained from its first principles, in the country that assembled them. This chapter is about what happened to those principles in transit. Britain heard the American records through a grindcore filter and gave the genre its heaviest guitar tone. The Netherlands built four bands out of one voice and a lot of arguing. Poland built a scene inside a state that had no record industry to speak of. Brazil, Chile and Japan got the signal last and least, and two of the three answered by making something the originals would not have recognised.
Nottingham had the label, Coventry had the tank
Britain arrived early and sideways. The English did not copy Florida, because in 1987 there was almost nothing from Florida to copy; they came at death metal from grindcore, from the Birmingham crust and hardcore end, and the label that carried all of it was a one man operation in Nottingham. Earache Records was founded in 1985 by Digby Pearson, put out its first vinyl in 1987 with a catalogue number of MOSH 1 for The Accused's The Return of Martha Splatterhead, and inside three years had Napalm Death, Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Morbid Angel and Entombed on the same roster. Scum reached number seven on the UK independent chart. No British major had any idea what to do with a record like that, and Pearson did not need one to.
Carcass are the border post. Formed in Liverpool in 1985 out of a school band, with Bill Steer and Ken Owen at the centre and Jeff Walker in on bass from 1986, the trio put out Reek of Putrefaction in June 1988 in a state so raw that the band themselves disowned the mix, and the record went straight into the hands of the one broadcaster in the country who could do something about it. John Peel played it on national radio and made it his favourite album of the year, which brought a BBC session in 1989 and an audience that had never bought a death metal record in its life. Symphonies of Sickness followed in November 1989 with Colin Richardson producing, the songs longer and the tempos finally legible, and Michael Amott came in on second guitar for the tour behind it. By Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious in October 1991 the band had stopped sounding like an accident.
John Peel played it on national radio and made it his favourite album of the year, which brought an audience that had never bought a death metal record in its life.
The other half of the English answer came out of Coventry and it moved at walking pace. Formed in 1986, with Jo Bench on bass from 1987 and Karl Willetts on vocals from the same year, Bolt Thrower recorded three sessions for John Peel between 3 January 1988 and 22 July 1990, released In Battle There Is No Law on Vinyl Solution in 1988, and then made the record that fixed the British sound in place. Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness was cut at Loco Studios in April 1989, engineered by Tim Lewis, and released on 28 October that year. The record still runs fast in places, and reviewers have argued about the balance ever since, but the thing that separated the four from Coventry from everyone around them is audible in the title track: a mid tempo advance with no gaps in it, a guitar tone with the weight of moving earth, and a rhythm section that refuses to be hurried. Over the next three albums that tempo hardened into the band's entire identity. Their records had sold over 100,000 copies in the United States alone by 2005, which for a group that never had a video on television and never wrote a chorus is a remarkable piece of arithmetic.
Birmingham, and the traffic running the other way
Birmingham gave the genre Benediction, formed in 1989, and gave it twice over, because the band's first singer did not stay. Subconscious Terror was cut at Soundcheck Studios in Birmingham across September 1989 and January 1990, produced by the band with Mick Harris of Napalm Death, and released by Nuclear Blast in 1990 with Mark Greenway on vocals. Greenway then left to front Napalm Death, and Dave Ingram took the microphone from 1991 to 1998, through The Grand Leveller in 1991 and Transcend the Rubicon in 1993. The verdict on that swap has always split the room. Ingram had the deeper throat and the better records behind him. Greenway had the thing that cannot be taught, which is the sound of a man who means the words.
And then the exchange reversed. In April and May 1990 Napalm Death flew to Tampa, recorded Harmony Corruption at Morrisound with Scott Burns co producing, stayed in the house Morbid Angel were renting, and put members of Deicide and Obituary on the track "Unfit Earth". Earache released it on 30 July 1990 and it went to number 67 on the UK album chart, with Combat handling America in December. The British had learned death metal from cassettes of Florida bands, and within three years they were in the Florida studio hiring the Florida producer, which is either a compliment or a surrender depending on how much you liked the first two Napalm Death records. The important part is the direction of travel. Once the traffic ran both ways, the genre stopped belonging to anybody.
The Netherlands: one voice, four bands
The Dutch had a head start nobody uses when they tell this story. Thanatos formed in Rotterdam in 1984 and had a demo out that same year, which makes them older than most of the Florida bands and older than the word itself in common use. What the Netherlands did not have was a domestic label with any reach. Thanatos waited until 1990 for a first album, Emerging from the Netherworlds, recorded in Gelsenkirchen and put out by the German company Shark, and that route is the whole national pattern in one release: the scene ran on Roadrunner, on German money and on one extraordinary throat. Pestilence came together in Enschede in mid 1986 around Patrick Mameli and Marco Foddis, made a thrash record called Malleus Maleficarum for Roadrunner in 1988, and then Martin van Drunen took over the vocals and the whole thing changed shape. Consuming Impulse, in 1989, is where it lands: a voice dredged up from under a concrete floor, guitars that do not play a riff so much as saw a hole through it, and a set of songs about disease that mean it literally.
Then van Drunen left, and the country got a second band out of it. Asphyx had formed in Oldenzaal in 1987 around Bob Bagchus, and with van Drunen singing and playing bass from 1990 they made The Rack for Century Media in 1991, a record that goes at half the speed of its neighbours and hits considerably harder for it. They toured Europe with Entombed behind it and with Bolt Thrower and Benediction in 1992, then van Drunen went again after Last One on Earth. Mameli, meanwhile, took Pestilence somewhere else entirely: Testimony of the Ancients in 1991 with Tony Choy of Cynic on bass, then Spheres in 1993, built on guitar synthesisers and jazz fusion phrasing, a record that split the audience so completely that the band came apart in 1994.
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Zeeland produced the fourth one. Gorefest formed in Goes in 1989, made Mindloss for Foundation 2000 in 1991 with Colin Richardson at the desk, then signed to Nuclear Blast and made False in 1992, which is the Dutch record most likely to be named when the subject comes up. What happened next is the useful part. Erase, in 1994, began pulling the tempos back towards rock, and by Soul Survivor in 1996 the band had walked out of the genre altogether and taken most of their audience's goodwill with them. Sinister, formed in Schiedam in 1988, went the other way and got faster, and their Cross the Styx in 1992 is the Dutch record that sounds most like it was made in Florida.
Poland: a scene assembled where the industry was not
Poland is the hard case, and it is hard for reasons that have nothing to do with music. Through the 1980s the record business there was an arm of the state. Tonpress belonged to the national publishing agency; Polskie Nagrania Muza remained in government hands until it was sold to a multinational in 2015, and what got pressed was decided some distance from the people who wanted to hear it. The punk band Dezerter recorded a four song record at the Tonpress studio in Warsaw in September 1982 after submitting a list of twelve songs for a censorship office to read first. That is the environment. There was no independent label to sign to, no importer to order from, and no realistic route by which a teenager in the north of the country could own a copy of the American records that were reorganising the genre.
What existed instead was the cassette, and the cassette turned out to be enough. Bands sent tapes to the organisers of the Jarocin festival to be considered for a slot, home dubbing filled the gap that the shops could not, and a national trading network grew in the space the industry had left empty. This is why the Polish death metal bands of the late eighties sound the way they do: not because they were imitating anyone accurately, but because they were working from third and fourth generation copies in which the top end had already been flensed away and only the bones of the riff survived. They wrote to match what they could actually hear.
They were working from copies in which the top end had already been flensed away and only the bones of the riff survived. They wrote to match what they could hear.
Vader had been going since 1983, started in Olsztyn by Piotr Wiwczarek and Zbigniew Wróblewski, and had moved through heavy metal and thrash before arriving at the thing they are known for. Necrolust came in 1989 and Morbid Reich in 1990, and the figure at the top of this chapter is what that second tape did with no promotion budget and no shop window. The album took longer and cost more temper. The band went first to Sunlight Studio in Stockholm to work with Tomas Skogsberg, ran into problems that Wiwczarek later put down to electronic drum pads that were never built for blast beats, and abandoned the session. The Ultimate Incantation was re recorded at Rhythm Studios in England with Paul Johnson producing, came out on Earache on 16 November 1992 with a Dan Seagrave painting on the front, and was licensed on for the markets that mattered: Carnage in Poland, Toy's Factory in Japan the following year, Metal Mind at home again in 1994.
The licensing tells you as much as the music does. Carnage Records had been started in 1986 by Mariusz Kmiołek to put out European albums for Polish buyers, mostly on cassette, and by the early nineties it was representing Earache, Osmose and Holy Records in the country before being renamed Carrion Records in 1994. Metal Mind Productions, founded in 1987, published the Polish edition of Metal Hammer and ran Metalmania, the largest metal festival in central Europe, and also drew years of complaint from bands including Behemoth over unauthorised releases. Pagan Records arrived in 1992 and handled the Behemoth demo ...From the Pagan Vastlands in 1994. Behemoth themselves are a black metal band for most of the decade, formed in Gdańsk in 1991 as a trio around Adam Darski, and they only cross into this history properly with Satanica in 1999, at which point Poland has two internationally distributed extreme metal bands and no working memory of having had none.
Germany: the labels first, the bands second
Germany's contribution to death metal is mostly infrastructure, and infrastructure is not a small thing when half a continent has none. Nuclear Blast was set up in Donzdorf in 1987 by Markus Staiger, whose first release was a compilation of American hardcore bands. Century Media followed in Dortmund in 1988, founded by Robert Kampf and Oliver Withöft, and inside four years had Grave, Unleashed, Samael, Tiamat and Asphyx on its books. Between them those two companies paid for a large share of the records in this chapter, and they did it from towns nobody outside the country could place on a map. The German bands themselves came slightly behind. Morgoth formed in Meschede in 1987 around Rüdiger Hennecke and Carsten Otterbach, put out the Pits of Utumno demo on four tracks in 1988, upgraded to a twenty four track room for the Resurrection Absurd EP in 1989, and recorded Cursed at Woodhouse in February 1991. It is the best German death metal record of the period and it is also the sound of a band who could afford the studio their heroes could not.
| Band | Home | First album | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bolt Thrower | Coventry, England | In Battle There Is No Law | Vinyl Solution | 1988 |
| Carcass | Liverpool, England | Reek of Putrefaction | Earache | 1988 |
| Pestilence | Enschede, Netherlands | Malleus Maleficarum | Roadrunner | 1988 |
| Thanatos | Rotterdam, Netherlands | Emerging from the Netherworlds | Shark | 1990 |
| Benediction | Birmingham, England | Subconscious Terror | Nuclear Blast | 1990 |
| Morgoth | Meschede, Germany | Cursed | Century Media | 1991 |
| Asphyx | Oldenzaal, Netherlands | The Rack | Century Media | 1991 |
| Gorefest | Goes, Netherlands | Mindloss | Foundation 2000 | 1991 |
| Sinister | Schiedam, Netherlands | Cross the Styx | Witchhunt | 1992 |
| Vader | Olsztyn, Poland | The Ultimate Incantation | Earache | 1992 |
| Krisiun | Ijuí, Brazil | Black Force Domain | Dynamo | 1995 |
South America, where the demo was the career
Brazil had already done this once. The country's extreme metal was built in the mid eighties on borrowed instruments and photocopied sleeves, and the story of how it got there belongs to the thrash side of the family. What matters here is the second generation, the one that took the Florida records rather than the Venom ones as its starting point. Krisiun formed in 1990 in Ijuí, in the far south of Rio Grande do Sul, and consisted of three brothers: Alex Camargo on bass and vocals, Moyses Kolesne on guitar, Max Kolesne on drums. Three demos went out between 1990 and 1992, an EP called Unmerciful Order was self released in 1993, and the first album, Black Force Domain, came in 1995 on the Brazilian label Dynamo. It took until 1999 and a Century Media contract for the rest of the world to be able to buy their records without writing a letter first.
Chile is the purest case in the chapter and it is a sad one. Pentagram formed in Santiago in 1985 and played their first show on 28 December of that year. Two demos followed in 1987, both of which travelled across the tape network far beyond anything the band could have managed with a label, and there was no label, because nobody offered one. They broke up in 1988 having released no album at all. The reunion show came on 27 May 2001, the proper reformation in 2009, and the first studio album, The Malefice, appeared in 2013, twenty eight years after the band's first concert. An entire body of influential work exists on cassettes with hand lettered inlays, and that is the whole story of the continent's isolation in one discography.
Japan: last to hear it, first to pay for it
Japan came into this from an odd angle, because the country was simultaneously the hardest place in the world to start an extreme metal band and the easiest place to sell one a record. Import prices were high but payable, the collector market was serious, and licensing deals with Japanese companies kept European catalogues solvent for years. Toy's Factory taking Vader's debut in 1993 was not charity; it was a functioning business buying a product it knew it could shift. Meanwhile the domestic bands worked at a scale that makes the Chilean scene look well funded. Necrophile formed in 1987 and put out cassettes around Tokyo before going quiet in 1991. Transgressor emerged at the end of the eighties, traded demos for three years and released Ether for Scapegoat in 1992. Defiled started in 1992 and their 1994 EP Defeat of Sanity circulated far enough that another band eventually named itself after it. The drummer Takashi Tanaka connects most of them, and much of what came later out of the country runs back through his hands.
Set the whole chapter next to the American one and the difference is not talent, and it is not equipment either. It is what each scene was reacting to. Florida was reacting to Florida. Everyone in this chapter was reacting to a degraded copy of Florida, arriving late, in the post, with half the frequencies gone, and every one of them filled in the missing parts wrong. Coventry filled them in with weight. Enschede filled them in with disease. Olsztyn filled them in with speed and a rhythm section that sounds like it is being pursued. Santiago filled them in and then had nowhere to put the result. By the time the genre reached its commercial ceiling and started falling, the map had four or five centres instead of one, which is precisely why death metal in the nineties did not die when the American labels stopped writing cheques. There was somewhere else for it to live.
