Tuesday, March 31, 2009

No Earache tracks on Swedish Death Metal CD


Question: So what happened with the Earache contributions to the compilation that was meant to have been a companion cd to the Swedish Death metal book? The author said in terrorizer that there were problems with earache letting them use tracks from at the gates, entombed and carnage. From:

Answer: We were never asked for At The Gates actually. Short answer is we value the bands and songs in the Earache back catalog extremely highly, and basically we could not see eye to eye with Stefan from the German label Prophecy.Stefan was the one who contacted us to obtain the licences for the comp.After some protracted negotiations, which were cordial but pretty strained as he kept mentioning that he 1) wanted the songs for free and 2) could obtain demo tracks instead of the Earache ones anyway - we eventually agreed on a valuation of the 2 songs but the deal fell down due to digital rights for iTunes.

Itunes has an annoying policy that they do not allow albums to be sold as digital bundles, its individual songs all the way, or nothing.Sadly, Stefan has the wrong understanding about this.When Earache released the Thrashing Like A Maniac compilation, we had to remove tracks by Toxic Holocaust, Dekapitator and Fueled By Fire- even tho they are on the CD & LP the owners banned their use on the digital version for this reason, and we were perfectly happy to agree to their wishes and other bands appear on our Digital version.

I guess Stefan probably thought it was to much hassle to make any digital exceptions for us,which is fair enough.Hence demo versions of Entombed and Carnage songs do appear instead.They might even be better versions actually, so the bands are fully represented.

We know Daniel Ekeroth very well - we released 2 albums by his band Insision.I only just read the book actually and its amazingly detailed.Its different from the Choosing Death as its more an in depth encyclopedia of the bands and the music coming out of Sweden from the late 80's onwards.Choosing Death explored the juicy stories behind the scene and delivered less facts.Daniel delivers fact after fact- like demo name, recording date,studio, and tracklisting, its a treasure trove of information. All fans of Death Metal need to snap it up.

Heres Daniel explaining the Swedish Death Metal guitar sound.

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