As always, no one will stop you if you decide to scroll down to the bottom of this page immediately and start playing the song by Rogga Johansson that we’re premiering, but if you do that I hope you’ll still come back up here to the top and continue reading. If you don’t, you’ll miss an interesting story, and as a further inducement, I’ll tease you with the name Demiurg.
That band was an honest-to-god death metal super-group (and by using the past tense I don’t mean to suggest they are defunct, because that would be unduly pessimistic). The line-up included Rogga Johansson as guitarist and vocalist, Dan Swanö as lead guitarist and keyboardist, Ed Warby on drums and vocals, Johan Berglund on bass, and vocalist Marjan Welman from the Dutch goth metal band Autumn.
They released three conceptually related albums beginning with 2007’s Breath of the Demiurg. The last one was 2010’s Slakthus Gamleby. As I learned when I devoted one of our Rearview Mirror posts to a stupendous song from that album earlier this year, Gamleby is the second largest locality situated in Västervik Municipality, Kalmar County, Sweden, and is Rogga Johansson’s home, and “Slakthus” is Swedish for “slaughterhouse”. Continue reading »