Sorcery

SORCERY BIOGRAPHY
Sorcery was founded in 1986 when guitarist Paul Johansson, bassist Magnus Karlsson-Mård and vocalist Ola Malmström hooked up with Fredrik Nygren, another guitarist and his cousin, the drummer Patrik Johansson. The music was then influenced by the thrash scene at the time with bands like Exodus, Slayer, Metallica and Bathory. This lineup released their first demo in 1987 called “The arrival”. Shortly afterwards Patrik and Fredrik was dismissed from the band. After various of line-ups and people come and went within the band, finaly, Fredrik decided to join the band again. The music had changed dramaticly since the first demo and was now very fast and lesser complicated. The second demo “Ancient creation” was released in the spring of 1988 and carries the legacy of the bands fastest period. The drummer at the time, Joakin Hansson, was very much influenced by bands like Cryptic Slaughter and it is much due to him that the band started to pace up. After ancient creation Joakim left the band and the members started to switch instruments with each other. Paul went from guitar to drums and Magnus changed to guitar from bass, leaving the bass spot empty. Mikael Jansson joined the band as a bassplayer and the music went a little bit slower heading towards a more traditional death metal style. In august 1989 the band recorded it´s third demo “Unholy crusade”. This demo got the french label Thrash Records interested and they offered the band a deal for a 7” single. Rivers of the dead, as it would be called was released late 1990 and the first press of a thousand records was soon sold out and by the end of the year another thousand was made. It was through that EP that the band at first came in touch with Underground records. A deal was set up and the bands first LP “Bloodchilling Tales” was released in august 1991. In November 1991 Mikael left the band founding another band with Ola called Fear my solitude. Peter Hedman was the new Guitarist hired by the band, Magnus went back to playing bass and so it carried on for a while. After a gig an April 1992 Magnus was sacked by the band and shortly afterwards they recorded a final demo as a fourpiece. This demo was actually never released but it contains three songs that up until today may be the strongest the band ever recorded. Not even this time the band would be holding on together. Fredrik left shortly afterwards and is now found in a band called Gadget which he has released some albums with. The final release of the band was in 1997 when they paticipated with one song, “Inhabitants of the tomb” on the voices of death compilation. At this time the band was a three piece unit with Ola, Paul and Peter. Paul went on to play in In Aeternum, Peter dissappeared from the scene and Sorcery called it a day after 11 years. In 2001 Paul, Mikael and Ola started to play together in a band called Outremer. Paul have since then put his guitar on the shelf but Ola and Mikael is still playing on.
DISCOGRAPHY:
The Arrival Demo 1987
Halloween
Witches dance/Infernal hill
Satan's return
Narration
Master of evil
March of the mountain king
Satanic birth
The light of the midnight sun
Flight of the sorceress
Epilogue (midnight sundown)
This recording were made from February 17th to the final mix in March the 24th 1987.
Olas recolation of this recording:
This was an exciting time. Our first demo. We rented a room beneath a local music store and borrowed a 4 track tape recorder from someone connected to Fredriks fathers dance band. We actually called the room we recorded the demo in the "serpents nest" due to all the cables from Patriks drumset. He had the biggest drumset I had ever seen, a tama kit with mirror bottomskins. To this day he is the most talented drummer (nearly matched with Jocke of Outremer) that I have worked with. I guess he would have made it big on his own but I haven't seen him in ages and he may be lost in the dark. The accoustic parts were a surprise to me when I heard the final demo as Patrik and I believe Fredrik too went to mix it alone. Ove Gerdin, the guy who owned the four track tape recorder, plays a solo on "The light of the midnight sun". I think Patrik the drummer played all the accoustic parts of the demo, and when we listened to it, Paul complained about all the sounds from the picks touching the strings.
Anecdote 1:
I heard a rumour that Peter Hedman (later guitarist in Sorcery) was at a party with the guys from Nihilist before som thrash/death gig in stockholm at the time and they listen to this recording and was excited about the song "Satanic birth" and played it over and over again. True or false? I don't know but I liked it when I heard it......
Anecdote 2:
We rented this room in the basement of the music shop for a week and when we were finished recording and had to clean up our mess I went to see a Deep Purple concert and the other guys had to pick everything up. Call me a whimp or whatever but I have always liked the old stuff and it helped me from cleaning this time.
Anecdote 3:
We found a comicbook at the location of the recording and in it it was this character called "Nulf". We started to call Fredrik Nuffe but he didn't like it so we shortly went back to call him by his christen name: Nygge.
Anecdote 4:
Almost everybody refeer to this tape as the green demo or the blue demo or the red demo or whatever friging coulour they might want. The truth is that we made it in one hundered copies and the covers were xeroxed on different colour papers at our rehearsal house. Any colour is the original one as long there is a white cassette inside.
Ancient creation Demo 1988
Intro:Ancient creation
In the sign of evil
Black wizard
Lucifers Legion
Holocaust
Mausoleum
This is the demo that you can hear the mighty Jojo Hansson on drums. He was into the punk movement when I started to know him. At the moment he played with "Organiserad Avföring" (sorry no translation). At the first gig we should attend our old drummer Patrik decided not to show up and as some members of the band allready had made some new songs we decided to play them. The problem was that I hadn't heard them and we didn't had a drummer. I got the lyric sheets and we forced Jojo to drum with us. As neither Jojo or I had heard the songs, Magnus, our bassplayer at the time had to nod at me when to sing and to Jojo when to break. The result of this was that I sang on every break he did and he braked everytime I sung.
Anecdote 1:
We recorded another version of this demo in the fall of 1987 with another guitarist called Peter Sjöberg. At the time we had a lot of fun and Fredrik had left us in the same time as Patrik failed to attend our first gig. The problem with Peter was something else. He looked cool with his straight hair (made by his mother) and was generally a fun guy to have around. He also owned the couch that was in our rehearsal room. One day I was going to the reheasals I was told that Paul had thrown out Peters couch of our room and sacked him. No one questioned this and Paul was satisfied. Peter then became one of the most brilliant guitarsist I have even known even though our musical directions differs a lot. I guess Yngwie Malmsteen would whipe Peters arse anytime as he really could play his shorts off. Peter is now living his dreams with Mekong Delta and the best of luck to him. By the way, Peter Sjöberg now goes under the name Peter Lake.....
Anecdote 2:
"Lucifer Legions" from this demo managed to hold on for the Bloodchilling tales album. There is also a very exelent recording made by Martyrum of this song with me singing on it.