Hellhammer - 1983 - Satanic Rites C50

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 6:41PM

Private Release – none

Satanic Rites looks almost too calm for its own name. The front of the cassette is a dark outdoor photograph: a small tree or shrub turning reddish-orange in the foreground, a patch of grass, and a wooden building disappearing into shadow behind it. Open the J-card and the scene becomes clearer. This is not an invented gothic landscape. It is an ordinary rural place, vegetation growing around a house or outbuilding, rock rising immediately behind it. The photographs have the accidental seriousness of something encountered while walking rather than staged for a record cover.
Then the inside opens into a mass of pale yellow flowers.
That image changes the entire object. “Satanic Rites” surrounded by flowers could have been played as obvious irony, but nothing here really winks. The flowers are allowed to remain beautiful. The house is allowed to remain a house. The rock is allowed to remain rock. Hellhammer supplies all the ugliness necessary once the cassette begins moving.
The cassette itself is nearly transparent, including its hubs, with the dark wound tape forming a black circle behind one reel and a thin red leader tracing its path around the shell. “HELLHAMMER 1983 / Satanic Rites” appears in small typewriter lettering near the top. Turn the cassette over and those words remain visible backwards through the plastic. Nothing is hidden by a label. The machinery, tape path, screws, pressure pad, leader and reversed title are all part of the appearance.
The recording opens with about a minute of “Intro,” and immediately establishes a sound different from the main songs. It is quieter, darker and much narrower than what follows. The two channels are more closely tied together and most of its energy sits considerably lower in the spectrum. It behaves like an entrance corridor. The cassette is already making noise, but the full body of the recording has not arrived yet.
Then “Messiah” enters and the door opens.
The first seconds are still relatively restrained, but within the opening half-minute the recording swells noticeably. The upper frequencies spread outward, the level rises and the primitive mass of guitar, drums and voice establishes itself. The sound is wider than the intro but still nowhere near a polished modern stereo image. Instruments do not occupy carefully carved spaces. They overlap. Guitar distortion becomes atmosphere. Cymbals dissolve into a dirty metallic wash. The voice sits inside the band instead of being placed safely above it.
That congestion is important. Satanic Rites does not sound merely old. It sounds physically crowded.
“Messiah” keeps changing internally without ever becoming clean. There are brighter stretches where cymbals and guitar edges claw farther upward, then darker sections where everything folds back into the middle. The track gets increasingly rough toward its final minute, not necessarily louder but more exposed in the upper frequencies. By the end, the recording seems to have worn away some of its own covering.
“The Third Of The Storms (Evoken Damnation)” begins from farther back again. Its opening is noticeably quieter than the body of the song, then the recording surges forward. The track moves through a series of pressure changes rather than simply holding one volume. Around the middle it briefly loses some weight, then recovers, and the final minute becomes one of its strongest stretches before suddenly dropping away.
The music continually demonstrates how much can happen inside bad fidelity.
A clean recording gives detail by separation. This recording gives detail by instability.
Something shifts in the microphone balance and the drums suddenly become more apparent. A riff moves slightly upward in frequency and the entire recording changes color. A passage loses volume and what had been background noise becomes audible structure. The ears begin learning the dirt.
“Buried And Forgotten” is the longest piece on Side A and gives that unstable sound enough time to become a whole environment. It runs just over six minutes and repeatedly contracts and expands. There are several obvious drops in pressure during the track, but they never resemble polished studio dynamics. They feel structural, almost geological, like portions of the recording sinking and then being pushed upward again.
The last half-minute is especially effective. After maintaining so much density for so long, the track begins losing mass. The final seconds collapse toward near silence instead of delivering some gigantic conclusion. “Buried And Forgotten” does exactly what the title suggests sonically: it seems to disappear into the medium carrying it.
Then “Maniac” arrives noticeably sharper.
Of the Side A songs, it throws some of the strongest energy into the upper part of the recording. The guitar abrasion and cymbal spray become more exposed, giving the song a nervous brightness compared with the darker center of “Buried And Forgotten.” It still has the same crowded body underneath, but there is more scrape on the surface. Around the middle the recording briefly relaxes, then returns to full pressure.
That small difference is enough to make the song feel faster even before tempo is considered. Brightness becomes aggression.
“Eurynomos” closes Side A in a compact three-minute rush. Its recording is comparatively consistent after the longer fluctuations of “Buried And Forgotten” and “Maniac.” It enters quickly, reaches its working pressure almost immediately and remains there. The cassette has spent more than twenty minutes teaching the listener its language by this point, so there is no need for another transition. The side simply finishes inside the sound it has created.
Side A runs a little over twenty-one minutes.
Side B begins with seven minutes of “Triumph Of Death.”
That length matters. It is not merely the longest track on this side before “Satanic Rites.” It changes the scale of the cassette. The opening is darker and quieter than much of Side A, and the first minute takes time accumulating weight. The recording gradually becomes brighter and more forceful rather than announcing everything immediately.
For several minutes “Triumph Of Death” hovers inside a relatively dark spectrum. The guitars feel thick instead of sharp. Then, toward the middle, the upper frequencies begin opening more consistently and the recording becomes increasingly abrasive. The changes happen slowly enough that they are difficult to notice moment by moment. By the time the track reaches its strongest middle section, the ears have traveled somewhere without receiving a clean transition.
The final minute sinks downward again.
This is one of the most interesting recordings on the cassette because its seven-minute duration allows the fidelity itself to develop like part of the arrangement. The same musical language feels different depending upon how much treble survives, how strongly the two channels separate, and how completely the distortion occupies the center.
“Revelations Of Doom” reverses that immediately. It is one of the brighter recordings here, throwing substantially more energy upward than “Triumph Of Death.” The guitar and cymbals feel shredded rather than buried. The entire track is also remarkably even in level until the closing seconds suddenly fall away.
Then “Reaper” darkens everything again.
It is short, direct and heavier in the low-middle frequencies. The upper edge is less pronounced, so the rhythm section seems larger. It sounds like the same room with the lights changed. The cassette does not need radical production differences to make each song distinct. Tiny shifts in bandwidth and recording balance do the job.
The title track is the giant on the second side.
“Satanic Rites” runs more than seven minutes and continually changes its internal temperature. The first forty seconds are quieter and darker, almost another introduction. Then the recording opens sharply. During the next several minutes the upper frequencies repeatedly surge and retreat. Some stretches are abrasive enough to rival “Maniac” and “Revelations Of Doom”; others fold back into thick, darker distortion.
Around the four-minute mark the sound noticeably sinks. For nearly a minute the track becomes duller and quieter, as though the recording has moved farther from the listener. Then it rebuilds. By five minutes the brightness has returned, and the later portions alternate again between cutting upper-frequency attack and heavier middle-range crush.
Seven minutes is long enough for the noise to stop feeling like a defect.
It becomes weather.
“Crucifixion” follows with less wandering. Under three minutes, comparatively bright and consistently forceful, it feels like the cassette tightening everything after the long title track. There is no need to develop another landscape. The song arrives, occupies the available space and leaves.
Then comes “Outro.”
Like the opening minute of the cassette, the outro is sonically separate from the songs. It is narrower, darker and more strongly centered. Its spectrum sits far below the abrasive height of “Satanic Rites” or “Revelations Of Doom.” The frame closes around the recording.
The full program runs a little over forty-six minutes, almost perfectly suited to a C50. Side A is roughly twenty-one and a half minutes; Side B approaches twenty-five. The difference is largely created by the enormous pairing of “Triumph Of Death” and “Satanic Rites,” which together occupy almost half of Side B.
The physical object makes those forty-six minutes stranger.
Unlike the pink shell used for Death Fiend, this cassette nearly disappears. The clear plastic exposes the mechanism, while the artwork outside it is filled with an ordinary building, rock, vegetation and flowers. The satanic language exists primarily in the typewritten title and the audio. Nothing in the photographs performs evil for the listener.
That creates a better collision than conventional imagery could.
The outdoor photographs are quiet.
The flowers are almost ridiculously soft.
The cassette is transparent.
Inside it, the recording is opaque.
Hellhammer's sound is the opposite of the shell containing it. Guitars and drums merge into one another. The voice struggles inside distortion. Frequency ranges overlap until individual sources become difficult to separate. There is very little transparency in the music at all.
You can see straight through the cassette.
You cannot see through the sound.
And when the outro finally collapses, the tape stops inside a clear plastic box surrounded by yellow flowers.

Hellhammer - 1983 - Death Fiend C35

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 6:51PM

Private Release – none

There is something wonderfully wrong about the physical appearance of this tape before a second of Hellhammer is heard. A pale pink cassette. A tiny fluorescent orange typewritten label. A mountain building beneath a clear blue sky. Yellow and white daffodils filling the inside panel. None of the visual vocabulary normally attached to titles like “Death Fiend,” “Chainsaw,” “Ready For Slaughter” or “Sweet Torment” appears anywhere. There are no skulls, inverted crosses, graveyards, demons or black-and-white photocopied menace. Instead there is sunlight, rock, flowers, painted wood and an almost toy-like pink shell.
That contradiction is much stronger than simply putting ugly music inside ugly packaging. The cassette looks gentle enough to contain a children's story. Then “Maniac” starts.
The recording immediately establishes its own physical world. This is not spacious, cleaned-up metal where every drum and guitar has been separated and polished. The sound is concentrated heavily in the low-middle and middle frequencies, with guitar, bass, drums and voice crowded together into a thick central body. The stereo image exists, but it is narrow and highly connected between channels rather than presenting instruments in neat left-and-right positions. Everything seems to be fighting for room inside the same strip of magnetic territory.
“Maniac” begins slightly below its eventual weight and settles quickly into a remarkably consistent wall. The important sound is not simply distortion. It is compression by circumstance. The guitar does not float above the rhythm section; it rubs against it. Cymbal energy produces a rough spray across the upper frequencies while the bulk of the recording remains lower and heavier. The vocal feels embedded rather than pasted over the top. When the arrangement changes, the recording does not suddenly become clearer. The entire mass changes shape together.
That makes the primitive quality enormously appealing. “Primitive” here does not mean incompetent. It means the recording has not been disciplined into the sonic conventions that later became normal for extreme metal. The edges are still sticking out.
“Angel Of Destruction” has one of the more noticeable entrances on the cassette. The first half-minute is comparatively restrained and uneven in level before the recording grows into its full body. There is almost a sense of machinery warming up. Once it reaches cruising pressure, the track becomes particularly thick in the lower mids. The top end is less aggressive than several of the tracks that follow, giving it a darker, heavier enclosure. The drums arrive as physical impacts inside the guitar sound rather than pristine individual pieces of a kit.
Then “Hammerhead” sharpens everything.
Its upper-mid and treble energy is noticeably stronger than the songs around it. The first twenty seconds are especially abrasive, with a brighter scrape cutting through the otherwise heavy center of the recording. It sounds more exposed, almost as though somebody briefly removed a layer of cloth from the speakers. The track eventually settles closer to the overall sound of the tape, but that opening bite gives “Hammerhead” its own identity before the riffing even has time to establish itself.
“Bloody Pussies” is the longest piece on Side A and also one of the darkest recordings here. Nearly five minutes gives it enough time to become an environment instead of merely another short attack. High-frequency extension is more restricted than on “Hammerhead” or “Death Fiend,” so the track seems to sink downward into guitar, bass and the thud of the drums. The recording remains dense almost continuously, but subtle changes in pressure matter. Around the latter half the sound pushes forward, relaxes, then thickens again. Nothing becomes clean enough to provide relief.
That is the remarkable thing about Side A. There is very little empty acoustic space. Even when individual instruments stop or change, the recording itself seems occupied. Amplifier residue, room sound, distortion and the limited fidelity of the source fill the gaps. The music does not simply happen inside the recording. The condition of the recording becomes part of the music.
Flip the pink cassette and “Death Fiend” is waiting.
It is the brightest, most abrasive recording on the tape. The spectral balance reaches farther upward than anything on Side A, which gives the guitars and cymbals a shredded metallic edge. The difference is immediately audible after “Bloody Pussies.” Side A closes dark and congested; Side B begins with a blade.
That makes “Death Fiend” an excellent title track for this particular transfer. It feels less covered over. The high end is ugly in exactly the useful way: not sparkling, not detailed, but splintered. The sound resembles metal being torn rather than polished.
“Dark Warriors” swings in the opposite direction. It is one of the loudest and thickest tracks on the cassette, with a great amount of energy concentrated below the harshest guitar frequencies. The result is heavier, more bodily and slightly less exposed. There are moments where the texture suddenly thins or changes character before returning to the larger mass. Those irregularities keep the recording alive. A perfectly controlled production would remove them. Here they become landmarks.
“Chainsaw” is almost four minutes and spends most of that time maintaining a stubbornly consistent pressure. The title encourages an obvious comparison, but the guitar really does occupy that kind of continuous mechanical zone: not the clean buzz of a modern high-gain recording, but a coarse middle-frequency grind with percussion repeatedly breaking through it. Late in the track the texture changes enough to feel like the machine has shifted gears, yet the overall dirt remains.
“Ready For Slaughter” has more upper-frequency attack again. Its opening is particularly sharp before the recording settles into the same central crush that links the tape together. About a minute in, the balance changes enough to create a small internal reset, then the pressure builds back around it. These are not dramatic studio tricks. They sound like performance, microphone, room and recording level interacting in real time.
“Sweet Torment” is the shortest track and a perfect final piece because it does not attempt a grand ending. It begins quieter, reaches full force quickly and spends barely more than two minutes inside the established sound before disappearing. There is something satisfying about ending a cassette this ugly with a title containing the word “Sweet,” especially when the physical tape itself is pink and the J-card has been hiding a garden of daffodils.
The complete program is only about thirty minutes: Side A approximately fourteen minutes and fifty seconds, Side B a little over fifteen minutes. That compact length helps. Nothing has enough time to become historical monument or sacred artifact. These nine tracks still behave like a demo being blasted through equipment rather than an institution explaining why the demo became important.
The sound carries much of that effect. Across the cassette, more than half of the musical energy repeatedly sits in roughly the low-midrange where distorted guitar, bass weight and drum body collide. The recordings differ significantly in how much upper-frequency information survives. “Bloody Pussies” is comparatively dark. “Death Fiend” suddenly throws far more abrasive high-frequency material into the listener's face. “Hammerhead” also bites harder above the central mass. “Dark Warriors” pushes downward again. Those differences make the tracks feel physically separate even though they clearly belong to the same ugly family.
The transfer also refuses the enormous artificial width associated with much later heavy music. The channels remain strongly related throughout the tape. Sound gathers near the center instead of wrapping luxuriously around the listener. That narrowness increases the feeling of confinement. Hellhammer does not surround the room. Hellhammer occupies a dirty rectangle in front of the listener and keeps hitting it.
Then there is the packaging.
The front photograph shows a wooden mountain building cut diagonally by its roofline, with bare gray rock climbing behind it into blue sky. Unfolded, the image continues through another view dominated by rock and the edge of another roof. The photographs feel observational rather than dramatic. No attempt has been made to force them into darkness. Their daylight remains daylight.
Beside them is the PRIVATE RELEASE spine: stark black lettering on white, next to a narrow black strip speckled with tiny white marks. Then the J-card opens farther and suddenly produces a dense field of daffodils, yellow, white and orange against dark green.
The contrast becomes almost comical when the cassette itself appears. The shell is an uninterrupted dusty pink with a fluorescent orange rectangle typed:
HELLHAMMER 1983
Death Fiend
There is no logo.
No illustration.
No attempt to reproduce a known metal aesthetic.
Just those words sitting on pink plastic.
That may be the strongest visual decision in the whole object precisely because nothing about it tries to explain itself. “Death Fiend” does not become less violent because it is written on a pink cassette. The pink cassette becomes stranger because it contains “Death Fiend.” The flowers do not soften “Ready For Slaughter.” “Ready For Slaughter” changes what happens when the flowers are seen afterward.
This is one of the pleasures of a reproduced cassette that does not pretend to be an official facsimile. The recording and the object are allowed to establish a new relationship. Hellhammer's audio is already overloaded with distortion, abrasion, crude mass and physical limitation. Giving that sound predictable black-and-red artwork would merely confirm what the ears already know.
Mountain sunlight, flowers and pink plastic create friction instead.
The audio is harsh.
The object is almost pretty.
Neither wins.
Thirty minutes later the reels stop and the daffodils are still there.