Neuropath CD release announcement
Some of you may remember me mentioning that my old death metal band Neuropath had agreed to terms with Sphere of Apparition Records to have our two 1995 demo tapes ("Desert of Excruciation" & "Nefarious Vivisection") remastered & re-released on CD & digital formats towards the end of last year. Well, it's been a lot of work to get here but we're finally at a point where I can announce the official release date & share a preview track. I hope you like it.
Amazing guitar work, Daniel! The death metal community will certainly be headbanging to this blazing brutality.
I've been waiting!
Good to see this see the light of day Daniel.
Love this track. Right up my street. I've already put Sphere of Apparition on follow on Bandcamp in readiness for release day!! The production sounds really great, those guys have done a brilliant job - love that cover too.
Thanks Sonny. Most appreciated. :)
So "At Damnation's Core" was released yesterday in both physical & streaming formats. It's available through Sphere of Apparition Records, Bandcamp, good record stores around the world & also on Spotify which I'm quietly thrilled about.
"At Damnation's Core" received a pretty amazing review from a rival metal website this week:
https://hessianfirm.com/neuropath-at-damnations-core2023/
Also, featured on this popular Aussie YouTube channel episode after the Cruciamentum review:
That is indeed a very positive review, Daniel. It must make you feel very proud to be spoken of in such glowing terms.
I have looked into getting a CD copy, but Bandcamp want 150% of the media cost for postage alone, so they want £20 for a CD that costs £8. Discogs is even worse, one guy wants £16 shipping! I'll have to settle for the digital version for now and see if any UK distros pick it up later.
Yeah, it certainly does make me proud Sonny but it's also hard to know what to make of a review like that as I struggle to connect those sort of comments with the "Nefarious Vivisection" demo which quite literally contains the first death metal songs I ever wrote when I was only 17 years old. Perhaps it's understandable that I struggle to separate myself & look from the outside but I hear something very different to what the reviewer is hearing when I listen to that stuff. It's worth noting that the rest of the band was still only 15-17 years old when "Nefarious Vivisection" was recorded though & I was only 19 myself. I come much closer to understanding the praise for "Desert of Excruciation" which I consider to be infinitely better. I'm often amazed by how far we came in just ten months.
I'll speak to the label & see if there's anything that can be done as those sorts of postage numbers are scary. I just did a quick Google on what it would cost me to send you a copy myself & it wasn't in any way affordable.
Sod it, I've gone ahead and ordered a copy from Bandcamp, anyway.
I'm gonna call it a Xmas present to myself!
Much appreciated Sonny. Feeling very honored that you would invest your hard-earned money in our little release. Wait till you see the band photos on the inside cover. :)
Much appreciated Sonny. Feeling very honored that you would invest your hard-earned money in our little release. Wait till you see the band photos on the inside cover. :)
I must admit, the booklet is one of the big reasons I wanted to get hold of a physical copy. I'm looking forward to reading it.
Some more YouTube reviews:
There are also some cool Neuropath badges floating around that were made up by the lovely Steve from fellow Aussie death metal bands Encabulos & Unholy Redeemer:
Vocalist Mark Wangmann & I will be recording an interview for France's Hessian Firm podcast on Saturday morning following on from their very positive review of the CD on the Hessian Firm website so that should be a bit of fun (as long as we don't fuck it up).
The interview with Hessian Firm went great. I'll share it with you all when it goes live.
Here's the Hessian Firm interview with myself & vocalist Mark Wangmann that's just gone live:
Yay, my CD has arrived. Not bad, just over two weeks from the other side of the world, it took nearly that long for my brother's xmas card to get to him in Scotland from here in England!
Enjoyed reading the liner notes and hearing how the band was put together and, unfortunately, disbanded in the end. The trials and tribulations of a life in metal. Great photos too, so I've got to ask Daniel, in the picture on the video above, which is you?
Second from the left. If you watch the video you'll get a good view of what I look like now & will also hear a lot more about what it was like to be a young death metal band in Sydney, Australia back in the mid 1990's too. Let's just say that I intentionally gave a warts-&-all portrayal.
Just checked out the interview and never having been near to being in a band myself, I found it really interesting listening. I don't know, but having zero musical ability I have always put those who do have it on a pedestal, so it was great to hear how a gang of normal kids actually went about putting a band together and making it work. I have heard endless stories of bands' origins obviously, but when you hear it from household names like Ozzy or Lemmy or whoever, it is still very hard to relate to, yet your explanation of Neuropath's beginnings and, indeed, ending was very relatable indeed. It was a bit of a surprise to me that Sydney didn't have a big death metal scene back then, again probably because my own personal experience is of shitty little industrial towns and I always thought every big city had almost everything!
It seems ironic how Mark, who wrote the lyrics and by extension projected the band ethos, seems to be quite reserved in conversation (a bit like myself I might add). He seems like a guy who only speaks when he really feels he has something to say. It had puzzled me why you hadn't carried on in the metal "biz" when you obviously had so much ability and an affinity for it, but that seems much clearer now.
It's also funny how you build up a picture of people in your mind's eye and I've got to say, Daniel, you look far more "normal" than I had pictured!!
I thought it was an honest and inciteful interview. From what I recall, Mark was always reserved, but if memory serves me correctly, he was the only band member that noticed Daniel's awkward little brother hanging around the scene and was always nice to me.
As for Daniel's appearance, he tried his hardest to look evil back in the day, but people are always shocked when they find out we live and breath metal music. "But you seemed like such normal, nice people!"
Mark is a highly intelligent, introspective & often reclusive character who no doubt has his own set of personal demons to battle with which makes for a great lyricist. He's also a top bloke & this whole exercise has seen us rekindling our friendship which has been the biggest positive to come out of it for me. I can see us maintaining communication into the future actually.
I actually used to wear leather, studs & spikes every single day (even to work) until about 1998. I gradually moved away from it after that as I became more & more interested in setting myself up for the future from a business sense & it made an enormous difference to the way I was perceived. I didn't get rid of the long hair until I became entrenched in the club scene in the early 2000's though which was predominantly because I was getting so hot & my hair was so long that it was all over everyone around me on the dancefloor. I've always been a very easy-going, confidently spoken & generally positive, glass-half-full type of guy which somehow seems to be at odds with people's perceptions of what a death metal musician should be, particularly in Australia where your average person on the street thinks Pantera & Slipknot are death metal.
One final question, Daniel. Do you think you moved away from metal altogether and into the club scene because of a disenchantment with metal following the demise of Neuropath and the lack of a strong support structure for death metal in Sydney, or because you felt your need to create would be better served by the club scene, or was it something different altogether?
P.S. I hope no one took my comment about Mark as a negative, he seems like a really cool guy and someone I feel I could get along with (which isn't actually that many people usually).
There were a number of reasons that Neuropath broke up. Strained relationships & differences in age & maturity were certainly a factor. The increasingly underappreciated & unbalanced effort that I had to put in to get anything moving was another. My exposure to older musicians who were keen to work with me on exciting new sounds certainly came into it too, as did my de facto relationship issues which were playing out in front of my whole social network. It was definitely more about people than it was the music though.
As soon as we'd ended the band I joined a Western Sydney doom/death outfit called Elysium (they later changed their name to Stone Wings) which included members with links to a whole array of different Aussie bands such as Mournful Congregation, The Amenta, Sacriphyx, Innsmouth, Backyard Mortuary, Murkrat, The Slow Death & Lord Kaos. I spent six months with Elysium before deciding that I needed to distance myself from the entire metal scene for an extended period if I was going to sort out my relationship issues properly as I just couldn't stand the scrutiny any more, particularly after my partner fell pregnant when I was just 19 years old with the weeks leading up to an eventual decision to abort being amongst the most emotionally torturous of my life. So, I decided to take a break from the people & the scene more than I did the music as I initially intended to continue making metal in my own time & without external influences.
What ended up happening around 1997/98 was that I unexpectedly started to find all of the extreme metal I was picking up through tape traders to a) sound like rehashes of my favourite bands from years gone past or b) be diluting the essence of what I looked for in my metal so it gradually became a little less exciting. I became increasingly more infatuated with guitar technique with & decided to write & record an instrumental guitar shred CD where I would perform all of the instruments myself with the intention of putting together a band to play the material live afterwards. That CD (entitled "Ebony Tomorrows") would eventually see the light of day in 1999 but by that stage I'd become so exhausted with the effort required to do everything myself that I once again needed to explore other sounds for a while.
Electronic music opened itself up to me through my huge passion for artists like Massive Attack, Bjork, Chemical Brothers & Carl Cox. Once I broke the surface though I discovered a whole world of exciting new sounds & a club scene that was very much the opposite of the one I'd escaped from. My best mate was just as into it as I was & we went on a decade long journey of discovery where we had some of the best times of our lives. DJing came very naturally to me & became my new obsession. I loved techno every bit as much as I've loved metal & utterly indulged myself in the culture. As with my other musical flights of fancy though, I eventually got tired of doing the one thing musically & also started to get physically tired as I got older too. I was a five-day-a-week gym junkie by that stage & my health focus just didn't work all that well with the late-night DJ lifestyle. The Sydney lock-out laws were the final straw as they limited my ability to get gigs in a pretty major way so I pulled the pin some time in 2008/09 & felt pretty relieved to have some spare time back in my life even though I don't regret a minute of my dance music days.
At that point Ben started to open me up to all of the exciting stuff I'd missed in the metal scene over the previous decade & I saw my interest in previously unexplored genres like sludge metal, mathcore, post-metal & drone metal growing really fast. I started going to gigs again & rekindled my love for metal. I've never looked back since.
Thanks for such a forthright and honest reply, Daniel. Sorry for being so damn nosy, I promise I'll stop bugging you about it now.