OK! So I'm in a nostalgic mood again, so if you can't stand reading an old man's rambling about his days of yore. Stop reading now! Anyway...
...seeing all those demo tapes I felt an urge to ask whether any of you have heard any of the demos made by Epic Irae. That was a band I sang in between 1988 and 1993 (by which we had abandoned the original monicker for Quicksand Dream - I had recently bought the Necromandus Bootleg LP back then...). We recorded three tapes during our existance:
Ballet of Desolation (1989-90)
One Cloudy Day (1990-91) (no Def Leppard recording budgets just a friend's portable four track studio at christmas break on these demos)
A Lonely World (a few complete songs and some basics tracks recorded in 1992 - completed by me and the bass player one year later after the band had split and eventually mixed and sent out in very few copies amongst former band members and friends, maybe in 1995-96 or so...)
We were never a true death metal band but we certainly recorded some songs within that genre. The first demo were pretty much thrash metal with a heavy metal feel (speed metal?).
The second were a mix of thrash/doom/death metal songs, some harsh and some melodic vocals and a Black Sabbath/Pentagram/Saint Vitus inspired one.
The third demo was a mixed affair with mostly melodic doomy/progressive influences, one death metal track (including a folky part with female/male voices) and a cover of BS's Electric Funeral. Also on this was demo versions of the two tracks that we later recorded for the Metal North compilation (as Quicksand Dream): Recreate A Thought (Nothing) and Wings of Suffering.
The first two demos were made in about 30 copies each and the third one probably less than 10. Still they seem to have spread a tiny wee bit by tape traders or such. I remember recieveing a letter from one member of Dark Tranquility (Sundin something???) commenting the One Cloudy Day demo - sort of praising our "professionallity"

. Also I was in contact

with the suspicious "owner" of Doom/Peace/hard'n'heavy rockville music/Audible Deafenings

and he had heard our first two (if memory serves me right) demos and liked the guitar sound (little did he know of the tiny black and orange Roland amplifier from which it had emerged

).
The bands we were listening to at the time would have been:
Manilla Road
Candlemass
Death
Coroner
Celtic Frost
Bathory
Fates Warning
Black Sabbath
Iron Maiden
Sabbat (UK)
Personally I never really was into Death Metal that much - or even Thrash. The earliest rehearsal recordings sort of sounded like a really slow and doomy Iron Maiden with an adolescent Kari Hokkanen (Stillborn) on vocals. I tried to introduce bands like Savage Grace, Attacker and Tension to the others but they never seemed to bother. I was kind of reluctant when the more brutal influences began to show in the songs written but did my best (which wasn't much) trying to adopt and kept the heavy metal connection as much as I could - eventually learning to sing properly.