Live Disfigurements by Maceration

Friday June 8th 1990 is the opening day of the World Soccer Cup. Maybe that’s the reason why there are so few people present at tonight’s concert in Aktivitetshuset in Esbjerg on the Western coast of Denmark. The evening’s program offers no less than three brutal bands with visiting underground phenomenon Darkthrone as headliner. At this point the Norwegians are still playing death metal and so is tonight’s local name Maceration. This is the evening of their debut, and the recording on the album you are now listening to is a documentation of no less than the night death metal came to Denmark!

Jacob Hansen: “It all started when I went to folk high school in 88, because one of the teachers had a marvel of a four-track tape recorder. For some strange reason, I have been interested in recordings and studio work right from the very beginning, so I borrow the recorder and heads for the school rehearsal room and record a bunch of songs. It’s just me doing all instruments in one afternoon, and later I record a little more myself in Invocator’s rehearsal room. I think it also inspires us in Invocator but it’s hard to persuade a band that already has it’s own thing to e.g. start tuning down. We discovered that Carcass already did this on “Symphonies of Sickness” (1989). In Invocator we were more Dark Angel and late 80s thrash and maybe also some Sadus and Ripping Corpse, not so much death metal.”

Instead Jacob Hansen fulfills his death metal ambitions in a bunch of solo recordings, where tracks such as ”Hideous Disfigurement” and ”Time Flies” later will be introduced to Maceration, while tracks with titles such as ”Foxy Carcass” and ”Inorganic Sperm” mercifully is left to rot. He invites friends Rune Hansen (guitar and vocals) and Lars Bangsholt (guitar) to rehearse with him. Later, Jakob Schultz from Invocator (bass) also joins, and at the end of 1989 Maceration is a real band.

The concert on June 8th 1990 is just another concert somewhere in the outskirts of Denmark, but unlike so many similar events that have long since been forgotten, both Maceration’s and Darkthrone’s concerts are recorded by the soundguy and in time officially released. For Macerations, though, this was never meant to be. The band is first and foremost a playground for a group of friends who have just discovered death metal, and while Jacob and Jakob are already experienced musicians who have done several shows with their main band Invocator, Maceration is in every way a debuting outfit. Jacob Hansen doesn’t play drums in Invocator nor Jakob Schultz bass, Rune Hansen on guitar and vocals has never performed live, and this is almost also the case with the other guitarist, Lars Bangsholt, who had only been on stage once as lead singer in his band Regurgitated Guts in 89, but otherwise not performed outside of rehearsal room shows with his grindcore band Blind Mirror in 88, so that was his second concert

When listening to the recording from that night it is obvious that this is indeed Maceration’s first concert. It lasts a little over half an hour, and in that time the band manages to play nine tracks with only four of them being originals – the two tracks from Jacob’s old recordings and the two new tracks “Incombustible Remains” and “Total Obstipation”. The rest are covers of the American bands Defecation, Death and Obituary. Obituary’s song “Godly Beings” is even played twice, as the band hasn’t rehearsed enough material for the encore which the small audience enthusiastically demands. And actually it is a pure coincidence that the as yet totally unknown Maceration ends up playing with Darkthrone – who at this point has released four demos and are soon to enter Sunlight Studio in Stockholm to record their debut album “Soulside Journey”