Trauma XP was the guy who kickstarted the whole hateparade / f**kparade thing in Berlin - the speedcore based "counter"-parade to the more well-known loveparade. He also ran a radio show in FFM (Frankfurt am Main) , and was nice enough to stream it for free into the internet. So I sat there at home in 1998, listening to his broadcast, and the guest DJ was - The Berzerker, who at this point had not formed a band yet, but had shook up the Hardcore Techno scene with his mental Speedcore releases on labels like Industrial Strength's sub "Bastard Loud" or - nomen est omen - Martin Damm's Speedcore Records.
He talked about his music, played one of his new tracks, and I was blown straight away. This sound changed my life and trajectory in a profound way.
And then it took me over a decade to get a glimpse of this very sound again. In form of this neat demo CD-r that contains "demo" version of The Berzerker's work in the 90s... and in some way, from beyond, too.
Because if you listen to the tracks, or read the track names, you will note that a lot of these appeared on his album on Earache, done by his newly formed band.
The sound is vastly different, though. These are not really "demos", in my view. They are fully formed Speedcore, Hardcore Techno, Metal-Terror tracks.
The difference is that the "band" version has a more slick, 'professional' mixdown. Similar to the Earache bands that reached MTV's rotation in that time period (ironally, word of mouth says that MTV finally refused to play the Berzerker's debut music video - and not because of the sound, but because of the extreme visual content).
This ain't a bad thing, of course. But... these demos pack a lot more punch. They are raw, they cut your nerves like a blade, they are unpolished and desperate to gnash on your bones.
The sound is more reminiscent of a young death or grindcore band jamming in their garage, but also of 90s EBM-Industrial projects, and, of course, of the extreme speedcore terror sound in these years.
This is the roughest metal-speedcore-techno crossbreed album that was never released.
There are also a lot of samples out of horror movies like hellraiser, that did not appear on the "earache" version at all. If I remember correctly, Kenny blamed this on airport security scanners accidentally damaging the finished tracks on his laptop beyond recognition. If this is true (and I believe it), this makes the release almost a case of "lost media".
But it is not completely lost yet, and I would recommend any gabber-turned-headbanger to listen to this record (or vica versa).
Amen.
(Note: I'm not certain of these tracks were completely done by a "solo" Berzerker or actually an early incarnation of his band)
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