Reptor Productions 2008 - UK based unsigned online band promoters - Morticians Music

Morticians Music -		Visit website
Formed		Email this band
Genre Rock		Bookmark page
Country Sweden		Email a friend

Tracklist:	mp3	real
1.		play
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Morticians was formed in the autumn of 1991 when Andreas Rimheden and Stefan Thor both went to the same art school in the southern parts of Sweden. They discovered that they shared a fascination for hard electronic music, especially when it was accompanied with distorted energetic vocals.

After buying a distortion effect box the two art students used Andreas' synthesizers to create some music to yell their guts out to and found that this was their calling in life. Andreas continued to work on the music and soon they had made some real songs which they started to perform on local gigs that they mostly arranged themselves. The demo tape Mutilation Motivation, recorded 1993, included most of these early songs.

Andreas had previously been a big fan of heavy metal which made the choice of band name and image and easy one. Skulls, blood and horror were used excessively on their gigs and also made up the contents of their lyrics during the first couple of years.

The bloodsplattered shows and hard but yet quite catchy industrial EBM songs which felt kind of like a crossover between Alice Cooper and Skinny Puppy, were loved by many and the band gained a faithful local following. Many of the early Morticians fans eventually started making their own music and created kind of an underground electronic scene in Morticians' home town. Electronica guru Andreas Tilliander is the only one of them that really made it big.

After two years of horror electronics Morticians felt it was time for something new. Greatly influenced by minimal industrial acts like Klinik, Dive and Esplendor Geometrico they decided to make their own blend of minimal noise based music. This was a very conscious decision that the two members discussed thouroughly and they even formulated a recipé for how they would work.

The method they used was that everything that didn't clearly raise the quality of a song was cut out, and every traditional instrument was exchanged with a similar sound from a completely different source. For example they exchanged a bassdrum with the sound of thunder, a bassline with the sound of a pen against a roadsign, a guitarsolo with the scream of Andreas' newborn son. Everything was based on samples. Almost no synthesizers were allowed. The result of this approach could first be heard on their demo tape Thpfft! - We fucked Fifi.

The new music style of the band became almost as popular as the early songs but the bands' new playful liveshows, especially Stefans high energy wacky performances, was the main attraction of the band during the years to come. The skulls and blood were replaced with toys and Stefans bizarre actions like singing one song hanging upside down from the roof of the stage, jumping around on a jumpstick among the audience etc.

One truly memorable performance that the band did during this time was their one of a kind unplugged gig in their home town. All synthesizers and samplers were replaced with acoustic instruments like mandolin, harmonica, recorder and the drums consisted of one tom and a lot of metal junk.

Since the mid 90s the two Morticians members slowly started to go their separate ways, both because they were now living too far away from each other and because their musical taste started to differ. Stefan became interested in drum'n'bass and electronica and has released his own music under the name Folie. Andreas still wanted to continue in the same tracks but in a more serious and mellow manner. He continued to use the old band name for this music but has now changed it to Eternity Range. Folie is signed to the label Mitek and Eternity Range will soon release a second album on the US label Kinetik Media.

The original Morticians was reformed in the autumn of 2004 to recreate their early sound and release a new version of their first demo on the Swedish label Plutonium Distribution. The result is the double CD Mutilation Recreation which is out now. During 2005 Jonas Rimheden, cousin of Andreas, picked up after Stefans short reappearance in the band, to create some completely new music in the spirit of the early Morticians but with an updated fresh sound. The first track to appear from this cooperation is Overlords which is included on the compilation Plutonium Showcase v.2. A whole new album is on the way.