In the late days of the early life of death metal in the early nineties, the death metal "community" had strayed from an appreciation of the majestic possibilities of sound, and were making a mundane product instead. They wanted the most "brutal" sound so the largest crowd could hear it, consider themselves "extreme," and go back to work with a hangover. This made the music escape its tiny audience, but killed off exploration as well. In addition, it was defensive and under-confident, feeling its chops lagged behind the rock, blues and jazz genres. Stagnation struck even as the genre accelerated. Enter the dark horse, Demilich. These inventive Finns reintroduced amazement at the possibilities of music. Where most people look at a forest and see wood for sale, a death metal fan after Demilich sees an intricate organism in itself, with the smallest details corresponding to the broadest concepts. The labyrinthine riffs of Demilich corresponded to a worldview that saw the connection between details as a design, and a design as conferring a purpose to life, cycling between birth and death as it spelled out the cryptic intricacies of ancient mysteries. Demilich was like finding a submerged city, or discovering a new path through the mountains, or even confronting a glowering enemy on the open plain. It brought risk, uncertainty, ambiguity and a sense of sublime beauty back to death metal, pulling it away from the slump in which it treated itself as a hammer and every listener as a nail. When Nespithe arrived in 1993, most of the response was mostly scornful and disturbed at first. Most reacted with a sense of this not being what they expected, therefore it was wrong. But a few saw underground metal being given new life through twisting passages of fractal melody in structures that evolved as the song progressed, creating successive expansions of meaning which developed the exotic from the mundane and the natural from the bizarre. Unlike the devotional nature of most pop music, Demilich was esoteric, and required the listener to discard preconceptions and meet it halfway in order to understand it. Over time more joined the growing fanbase for Demilich, but metal -- and music at large -- never really caught up with Demilich. Contemporary progressive music seems to thrive on hitting us with a linear series of contrasting parts but never integrating them into a theme like Demilich would have. Many have since imitated it, but none have achieved that dreamlike state in which all is infinite and possibility is around every corner. Nespithe surged ahead of its time, but even more importantly, remains ahead of the mindset most people have adopted in this time. To appreciate Demilich is to have to think about it, and to have to use abstraction to uncover the mysteries writhing within the dark trails through its texture. Demilich saw the complexity of existence as a positive, and not unprofitable and irritating, thing. This musical landscape was a riddle crafted by the artist, undertaking a transcendent goal. The ultimate fulfillment of the left hand path is to take what is ugly and make it beautiful, and Demilich undertook that quest, baffling the larger audience. For the next decade the band was almost religiously shunned, but now that the ashes have fallen over the church of "extreme metal," more are digging through the charred remnants to find the mysterious life of this artform.
