The first stirrings of the death beast, pt. 4
posted on 19 Mar 2015 under category History
So we’re now somewhere in 2003. After somewhat losing interest in metal music, and then encountering insurmountable technical problems, Dementor has quit Death Beast, telling me I can carry it on if I want to. I have a whole album’s worth of material written and about half-recorded.
And I have no idea what I’m going to do about a singer.
Since I was running a remote business for Opyros, I was in contact with him nearly-daily over AIM, and so I told him about the developments. He has a suggestion almost immediately: “Why don’t you talk to Ramrod from Chemikiller?”
I was of course familiar with Ramrod, since we had already been in touch many times over the years. I had reviewed some of his earlier Chemikiller demos for Eternal Frost back in the late 90s, and I solicited some Venom covers from him for the UHR online Venom tribute at about the same time. Chemikiller had just signed to Witches Brew as well, which may be why he suggested Ramrod to me. I knew we both had the same affinity for old-school death/thrash metal, so while his vocals were very different from Dementor’s I thought that he would still be a good fit. I messaged him on AIM (old-school!), we got to talking, and it blossomed into a bidirectional working relationship when he not only agreed to do vocals for Death Beast, but he also asked me to play bass when he finally got around to recording the full-length Chemikiller album.
Then that damn tech gremlin horde struck again.
We had each gotten to the point where we each had our own music files far enough to swap them for each other to finish the traded parts. And damn if those gremlins didn’t find BOTH of our computers. Mine was more straightforward - none of my computers could run the multitrack software he used for recording. I’m blanking on the name now, but it was one that was Open Source free online somewhere. I tried it on my laptop, my desktop, and even a borrowed work computer, and it just wouldn’t run at all. Ramrod had slightly better luck, getting vocal files recorded for most of the album, but when the files came back to me none of them would synchronize when I imported them into Sonar (my recording platform of choice). I tried doing the auto-sync built-in, stretching by hand… nothing would work, except for just ONE song, “Here Comes the War.” Appropriate, though, since that was the one he co-wrote lyrics for (with Aerik Von, with whom he was also collaborating in building the Von Frankensteins at the time). With too much going wrong, and it now being deep into 2004, we decided to take the hint from the universe and give up trying to make our collaborations work. There was no animosity, of course - we even worked together later when he released two demo compilations of Chemikiller on UHR, as well as some old Nasty Nymphos material and, later, the first Von Frankensteins EP. If anything, there was just fear that the universe was watching. Perhaps it knew it couldn’t stand that much metal awesomeness compressed into a five-inch metal-and-plastic disc.
Still, it left me high and dry without a vocalist. Or, rather, without knowing I had a vocalist until The Black Goat came calling again…