(Yesterday we premiered a full stream of the new album by the Swedish death metal band Toxaemia — which will be out tomorrow via Emanzipation Productions — and today we follow that with our French contributor Zoltar‘s excellent interview of Toxaemia co-founder and bassist Pontus Cervin.)

Before the internet and Ebay (later on, Discogs) ruined it all, collecting obscure early extreme metal items was a fun if sometimes quite frustrating adventure. These days, even the least memorable and 134th Entombed copycat gets the momentary chance to shine thanks to all those reissues flooding the market and surfing on the general impression that artistically speaking the early ’90s were the golden years of Swedish death metal (spoiler: they were). But three decades ago, the genre was deemed ‘passé’ and most of the bigger bands were left to choose between jumping on the bandwagon or splitting up, whereas the low-profiled or unlucky ones were simply buried six feet under, seemingly forever.

For a long time, Toxaemia was first and foremost remembered as topping the ‘impossible to find’ list of early SweDeath items next to Expulsion, Goddefied or Mastication. Released in January 1991 on the mighty Seraphic Decay imprint, their sole ‘real’ release, the Beyond The Realm EP, with its thrashier take on classic death metal would quite often fetch insanely large sums of money whenever one copy would happen to pop up on Ebay. Continue reading »