Feature: The Curious Case of Demonic Dismemberment
Long ago, when AI was still relegated to the world of Skynet and HAL 9000, there existed a relic on the internet called Myspace. This early social media platform proved to be a spawning ground for not only a legion of deathcore bands in the 2000’s, but also produced a small burp of DIY, bedroom/demo-level grindcore bands in the Christian scene that would take the pioneering work of bands like Vomitorial Corpulence, Carcass, and Frank’s Enemy, and put their own hyper-underground spin on it. One of these bands, or solo projects rather, was Demonic Dismemberment.
The brainchild of a young dude from Sacramento, California – Hayden Edwards – Demonic Dismemberment took the gore-soaked grind of Vomitorial Corpulence and the squelchy sounds of Eternal Mystery to new heights of musical extremity. Where those bands actually had discernible riffs and lyrics (no matter how crazy the vocals could get), Demonic Dismemberment’s style took grindcore into the fringes of pure noise (in fact, the project would come to fall under the umbrella of grind spin-off microgenres like noisecore and mincecore). Only the little-known Brazilian act called God’s Way seems to have reached such ludicrous levels of grinding noise, so much so that music in any kind of conventional sense is rendered entirely irrelevant. Here, it’s all about the impact, the delivery.
Most of the Christian grindcore bands in the 2000’s, admittedly, all utilized a similar sonic palette. Bands like Eternal Mystery, Flactorophia, and Corpse Under Construction were homemade, garage-level music, obviously quite reliant on personal computers as home studios rather than anything remotely resembling “production.” Drum machines were de rigeur with these projects, essentially functioning as little more than rhythmic hammers to drive the music along.
Demonic Dismemberment is no different in this regard. With any Demonic Dismemberment “songs,” it’s pretty much just full-on carnage. A drum machine that sounds tinnier and more grating than anything on Metallica’s St. Anger clangs away like a bullet ricocheting in a metal pot, as a slurry of guitar distortion as thick as swamp muck churns away relentlessly. But what sets this project apart from the other admittedly strange Christian grindcore bands of the 2000’s era is the vocals.
Goregrind as a subgenre often makes use of pitch-shifted and distorted vocal stylings, but Hayden Edwards’ work on here is a new level. Nothing about his terrifying roars sounds even remotely human at all. Instead, it sounds like a garburator on full-blast that’s swallowing a Rancor Beast, all filtered through several distortion pedals. Nothing I’ve heard before or since really comes close to how frightening (and frankly, ridiculous in a way) these vocals get.
Though lyrics, if there are any, are impossible to find, the song titles speak for themselves really. A mix of spiritualized gore used as a metaphor for sin and its morbid wages (see song titles like “Spewagly [sic] Engrossed Tumour Of Sin” and “Regurgitation Of All Demons”), we also get some fairly obvious messaging too with songs like “He Died For You and Me,” and “God is Love.” Talk about a bizarre way to get that message across.
Though Demonic Dismemberment never released a full-length album, there is a 2005 demo in existence. That being said, the project is more known from being present on several infamous underground splits with other Christian grindcore acts, most notably Six-Way Sin Decomposition in 2007, and Human Depravity in 2008 with Rehumanize (which was also the title of a standalone release by that band).
I’m sure I’m not exactly “selling” this artist to you, unless you happen to be one of those total grind freaks who loves extremity for the sake of extremity in music, but I’m not trying to. Music like this isn’t for everybody, and some Christian metal fans may (a position that can be justified, certainly) think that bands like this go too far. But as Loyd Harp noted on Indie Vision Music, “The lyrics and topics of this scene are just as intense as the music – at times juvenile in their approach. But let’s not be too hasty to write them off. These kids were using their love for intense music to share their faith in Christ, in a genre whose focus was often on gore, violence, and porn. Christians in the genre often used lyrical intensity and musical intensity to try to connect with fans of the genre.”
From what I can tell, Hayden Edwards seems to have disappeared off the extreme music map entirely after 2008, though the project seems to have almost resurfaced in 2017, if an old Facebook account is anything to go off of. Regardless, I have no doubt that Edwards’ work on here would provide some influence for later Christian noise/grind acts to follow, especially Necroscopia Burial, Reconstructed Carcass, and Deophobic Necrosis. For the daring, what remains are some of the most absurdly strange and musically uncompromising documents in the Christian metal underground.
The extra courageous can check out some of Demonic Dismemberment’s material HERE (just skip to about 22:30 in the video, as it’s a split release).
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