Description
Label: Svart Records
Vinyl Release Date: 06/13/2025
Original Release Date: 09/28/2018
Variant: Vinyl
All Demilich demo material plus recordings from 2006 in a snappy double LP package.
Compiled together with the band, this is the ultimate Demilich demo compilation.
In the late days of the early life of death metal in the early nineties, the death metal
“community” had strayed from an appreciation of the majestic possibilities of sound, and
were making a mundane product instead. They wanted the most “brutal” sound so the
largest crowd could hear it, consider themselves “extreme,” and go back to work with a
hangover. This made the music escape its tiny audience, but killed off exploration as well. In
addition, it was defensive and under-confident, feeling its chops lagged behind the rock,
blues and jazz genres. Stagnation struck even as the genre accelerated.
Enter the dark horse, Demilich. These inventive Finns reintroduced amazement at the
possibilities of music. Where most people look at a forest and see wood for sale, a death
metal fan after Demilich sees an intricate organism in itself, with the smallest details
corresponding to the broadest concepts. The labyrinthine riffs of Demilich corresponded to a
worldview that saw the connection between details as a design, and a design as conferring a
purpose to life, cycling between birth and death as it spelled out the cryptic intricacies of
ancient mysteries. Demilich was like finding a submerged city, or discovering a new path
through the mountains, or even confronting a glowering enemy on the open plain. It brought
risk, uncertainty, ambiguity and a sense of sublime beauty back to death metal, pulling it
away from the slump in which it treated itself as a hammer and every listener as a nail.
When Nespithe arrived in 1993, most of the response was mostly scornful and disturbed at
first. Most reacted with a sense of this not being what they expected, therefore it was wrong.
But a few saw underground metal being given new life through twisting passages of fractal
melody in structures that evolved as the song progressed, creating successive expansions
of meaning which developed the exotic from the mundane and the natural from the bizarre.
Unlike the devotional nature of most pop music, Demilich was esoteric, and required the
listener to discard preconceptions and meet it halfway in order to understand it. Over time
more joined the growing fanbase for Demilich, but metal — and music at large — never really
caught up with Demilich. Contemporary progressive music seems to thrive on hitting us with
a linear series of contrasting parts but never integrating them into a theme like Demilich
would have. Many have since imitated it, but none have achieved that dreamlike state in
which all is infinite and possibility is around every corner. Nespithe surged ahead of its time,
but even more importantly, remains ahead of the mindset most people have adopted in this
time. To appreciate Demilich is to have to think about it, and to have to use abstraction to
uncover the mysteries writhing within the dark trails through its texture. Demilich saw the
complexity of existence as a positive, and not unprofitable and irritating, thing. This musical
landscape was a riddle crafted by the artist, undertaking a transcendent goal. The ultimate
fulfillment of the left hand path is to take what is ugly and make it beautiful, and Demilich
undertook that quest, baffling the larger audience. For the next decade the band was almost
religiously shunned, but now that the ashes have fallen over the church of “extreme metal,”
more are digging through the charred remnants to find the mysterious life of this artform.
1. Introduction / Embalmed Beauty Sleep
2. Two Independent Organisms → One Suppurating Deformity
3. And the Slimy Flying Creatures Reproduce in Your Brains
4. The Uncontrollable Regret of the Rotting Flesh
5. (Within) The Chamber of Whispering Eyes
6. …and You’ll Remain… (In Pieces in Nothingness)
7. The Cry
8. The Putrefying Road in the Nineteenth Extremity (…Somewhere Inside the Bowels of Endlessness…)
9. Inherited Bowel Levitation – Reduced Without Any Effort
10. egasseM neddiH A – ortnI
11. The Echo (Replacement)
12. Erecshyrinol
13. The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)
14. The Cry
15. The Faces Right Below the Skin of the Earth
16. Emptiness of Vanishing
17. Vanishing of Emptiness
18. Uncontrollable Regret of The Rotting Flesh