DAEMON

Rip It Up, Issue 230, 1 October 1996, Page 8

DAEMON

“We knew the songs back to front, so it was really easy to go in and get them down in one or two takes”, replies Wayne Remnant of Nelson death metal band Daemon, when asked how the group managed to record, mix, and master their debut album in less than three days.

In May, Daemon travelled to Auckland for a weekend of fun, to York Street’s B Studio in Shortland Street, and buried themselves away with engineer Andrew Buckeen until the job was done. And last month, they quietly toasted the release of their self-titled recording on the Nelson label, Migraine. A bunch of shows are lined up around the top of the South Island to spread the word about Daemon, says Remnant, otherwise the band are taking it nice ‘n easy — no one’s expecting a mad flock of newly converted metal fans to coming running out of suburbia to make them household names.

“The music market seems an overcrowded place to be, there’s a lot of people trying to do it, so at the moment we’ll settle for selling enough copies to break even.”

Aside from the new album, Daemon’s claim to fame and biggest coup, was playing live on Newsnight in July last year. In one of those weird quirks of rock fate, Daemon turned up in the right spot, when the timing was perfect, without even being aware of it.

“Greg, our manager, sent a few demo tapes to people in the industry in Auckland, and one of them went to Flying Nun. They didn’t know what

to do with it, and they ended up passing it to someone at TVNZ. It just happened that Marcus was doing this tour of the South Island, so it was just a fluke really.” And Daemon’s run of luck with the media has continued since the album was released. The band is scoring substantial radio play on the student network, and several of the more enlightened youth oriented commercial stations are also giving Daemon a spin. Remnant says he can’t believe it. “I always thought radio stations tended to stay away from our sort of thing, and because we were heavy music I didn’t think we’d ever get that much exposure, but surprisingly enough radio play hasn’t been much of a problem. The stations have been agreeable to this music that is not commercial, which is really cool for us.” Having these doors open has been a boost for the band says Remnant, especially since Daemon have always preferred to follow the traditional commercial channels that more mainstream bands would opt for, without compromising our music to do it”, he adds, “and so far it’s working alright.”

JOHN RUSSEL