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 was the double CD Mutilation
Recreation which was released in 2005. During 2005 Jonas Rimheden,
cousin of Andreas, picked up after Stefans short reappearance
in the band.
After the release of Mutilation Recreation Andreas continued to create some completely new music in the
spirit of the early Morticians but with an updated fresh
sound. The first new track to appear was Overlords which was included on the compilation Plutonium Showcase v.2. The track Art of Pain will be appearing on the compilation Old School Electrology vol. 1 from the Canadian EAR label, which will be released soon.
In 2009 Marie Hagelqvist, long time companion on the synthpop side project Eternity Range, has joined the band to add a female dimension to the hard industrial sound. The duo continued to record new material and a full length album, Voidwalker, was completed in February 2010.
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