etr.historyframed

around 1990, the birth of ignorance demo evolved from danny's bedroom. these crude recordings were crucial steps in the marring of the old school thrash sound with the developing grind scene... i think glen evans produced the tape... a totally raw three-piece recording before i joined the band. incidentally, my first gig with the band was at one of those milwaukee metal fests... also comedic, my first bill for destruction.... i believe the first tab was a monitor screen... that or a mic... any rate, the 4-song demo was enough to let danny out of his combat / nuclear assault deal... free to embrace the clutches of pure evil in years to come... it started off innocently enough with danny and original drummer scott lewis handling the vocals. if anyone can remember scott playing and singing... the tempo got too intense to keep up, and it became obvious they would need someone else to sing... that became me after some weird demo project that dan and i did in his house, eventually coining the term smoke, grind and sleep... pure comedy considering the recorder is remembered more than the band or titles... neither of us can remember the name of the project, but the tape had 4 songs that eventually had riffs and beats ending up on the extreme conditions demand extreme responses record... another note, we did a bloodhound tape around then that consisted of grind and a dogs barking, eventually becoming brutal truth songs as well... insert "gap in time" code

scott lewis - vocals - drums
dan lilker - vocals - bass
gurn - guitar

...i believe before our first 7" came out, we were bootlegged... profane existence had something do with it - can't really remember... but the quality is raw with the a - side being "the birth of ignorance and b- side "anti-homophobe"... leaving "consumer mentality" (unreleased) and "stench of profit" to gain tempo. these were good times... we had no gear, would drive up to gigs in beat up cars and burn our way around the north east... the best... everybody knew everybody... the early rhode island fests with jim phlegm... cbgb's... abc no rio... or squat shit with scott's other band winter, exit 13, apocalypse... thurston moore, john zorn... Incantation, human remains, destroy, nausea... all the same...
any rate, i guess it was here that collectors were introduced and a shit ton of releases followed... we kicked it around, bumming and slumming, eventually touring our way to the promised land... milwaukee metal fest... again, with pungent stench and incantation

recorded by colin richardson and garris shipon, ill-neglect brought a cleaner sound to the recording, but maintained it's punk ethics through kinko's - score, fold and stuff a patch method... i screened each one with this shitty screen from pearl paints... we did this ourselves, riding around in a van with cathedral on the campaign for music destruction tour - i think it was 92. it was the salad days... we made $50 a night and played to upwards of 3600 in la on that tour... sweet suck-cess... we played, didn't bathe, sat in shit for 3 months, folding 7 inch record sleeves, stuffing patches and watching carcass sell shirts...

recorded again by colin richardson and garris shipon, extreme conditions... redefined the genre, however in typical record label fashion, our record came out many months after the campaign tour. as a sleeper release; morbid angel, carcass and napalm had some big records that year... and like everything at that time, was real different... like every breath of air in anything new genre, vultures swarmed... hungry for a taste of whatever the underground produced... we were ripe kill for a developing touring market in europe... the taste was sweet and everybody was hungry... we did a tour with what was to be a cross-genre thing; us, larceny and fear factory, but larceny backed out... We had done a split with larceny... knew fear factory through the channels and it seemed like a good time... the press was rolling in it's own fodder and developing a cult classic. earache was the toast and we were the sex toy of the genre... if you are going to track this one down, try searching the release on toys factory... it has the "perpetual conversion" ep, ill neglect seven inch and a ton of sob shit we did on tour in japan... we also toured canada, the states and europe... and progressive went broke.

recorded by colin richardson and garris shipon, perpetual conversion was a mix of tone... it was all over the shop and gave us room to move around after such an identifiable release... black sabbath, the electronic assault of bed sheet and techno meld of the the larceny remix... i'm not sure the press understood what was going on, but it made sense to us... at any rate, we were on the hit list of hate... then fear factory became techno and were genius... hummmmm.... we rolled back to the states and brought out the boredom's from japan... headlining was the pain teens... you look back in time and remember certain shows more than others... this was a hell of a tour... everyone from rollins, to thirwell, to ian mackaye came out... we went to the grand canyon, broke down in the redwoods. saw some incredible bordoms gigs... let's say it was a good time...

GODPLAYER ep
earache records (94)

gurn - guitar
rich hoak - drums
kevin sharp - vocals
dan lilker - bass - vocals

godplayer
wish you were here... now go away

...around the time we finished touring for perpetual conversion, scott dropped out... touring didn't really agree with him... we knew that scott was unusual, so we looked at drummers that had nothing to do with scott's style. i met rich through the guys in buzzoven, he was playing with mike dean in a band called ninefinger... we were at abc no rio drinking malt liquor and decided to see if it would work... he played this absurd marching snare and this ride that shaved points off my hearing, but somehow it sounded right to us... enter philly... this track really opened up the sound... I met buzz osbourne after he watched this on tv... we recorded on each others and splits, eventually doing the venomous concept together... there was a heavy japanese thing going on, and we pushed it with andy haas... having done the knitting factory thing with him, i new he could differentiate the feel of the track... bizarre... the b-side was a pink floyd track soaked in embalming fluid.... we played with enslaved, god head silo, murphy's law... krs 1, joey ramone... new york was good like that... you could play with anyone... any club. it was interesting times and we were high... real high.... we recorded the record ourselves and colin mixed it at phil collins studio in liverpool... not funny.

NEED TO CONTROL full length earache records (92)

gurn- guitar rich hoak - drums kevin sharp - vocals dan lilker - bass - vocals
collapse black door mine turn face godplayer i see red ironlung bite the hand ordinary madness	media blitz judgment brain trust choice of a new generation mainliner displacement crawlspace

this record was a work of art - and i mean that figuratively... earache had spread itself in corporate oil, signing to columbia and milking the aspirations of greatness... we were recording ntc and planning a tour with pungent and macabre... they were wanting to make nice with their new lover, columbia records, and pushed us out of our studio for some tax write-off singer songwriter... we conceded under the promise that they would find us a comparable studio... we ended up in the r&b studio with c&c music factory working next door... it cost twice as much as the studio we were end and if you know anything about studios, guitars are non-existent in r&b... oh yeah by now they decided that their schedule was too busy to get our record out before the tour, so they asked us to record an ep... like these songs drop from the heavens like rain from clouds... all of this was scrapped anyway... we let the label know there was no chance of mixing in this studio and like i said before, ended up in phil collins studio in liverpool after the tour with pungent and macabre... not very grindcore, huh... one other interesting note... our label lost the artwork while we were on tour, forcing us to shoot photos and layout the record again... we had meetings booked with them after the tour to discuss how we could help pull their head out of their ass... only mitch unseen terror showed up for work the 2 days we were in nottingham... one guy actually called in work sick for 2 days with a back ache... mitch was nice enough to take us out for pizza... dig was nice enough to charge us for it... lesson learned, yet all the finger fucking aside, we managed to come up with an interesting record... they were so inept at this time, when we sent them our option notice via registered mail, they never bothered opening until we called them after the option expire... free at last... one other fantastically funny thing about the record... because they were so lazy wiring us the money instead of the studio... we paid for it out of our account... sad for them, as they actually had to pay us money they owed us before we would give them ntc... needless to say our last statement was somewhere in the mid-ninties... so yeah... feel free to snag as many copies of the earache records... one other note... eggshells came out a little dodgy so we released that one on the no idea comp - bread the inedible napkin... i believe earache re-released it on something...

gurn - guitar
rich hoak - drums
kevin sharp - vocals
dan lilker - bass - vocals

spare change
machine parts
collateral damage
fucktoy
kill trend suicide

by now, we pretty much dropped completely out; touring, writing and recording constantly... we recorded a ton of stuff that we were mapping out for comps, splits, ep's and lp's.... summer heat produced this one on the ever brutal smoke, grind and sleep 8-track... I thought it was sort of a cool way to show the writing process, from it's initial thought in some shithole in the sky to a finished release... this ep has gone through maybe 6 pressings and at current can be picked up through bones brigade... i think they also have some shirts as well...

I remember recording this one on my lunch break... we were using this studio that was sort of half put together. i think billy anderson recorded this. we might of spent 4 or 5 days doing this record and things were shutting off all the time. so in between losing moments in time, we finally nailed an odd one. i think this is one of my favorite records - and it probably comes from the conditions... total state of decline... it's raw and the tracks were just structured differently...we hit the road and records followed. we recorded some stuff in japan - a bunch of sob tunes - maybe the mdc born to die tune. they were on the toys factory release. We toured for what seemed like a lifetime on that one... cannibal corpse, deicide, cathedral, only living witness... it didn't matter... i've always enjoyed playing with all kinds of bands... it's always interesting meeting new unusual people... makes me feel more normal...