About the Bazillion Points Blog
Hear ye, hear ye! Celebrating the tradition of freely-traded heavy metal demo cassettes, BazillionPoints.info [formerly Bang! Bang! Blog] is preserving the pioneer spirit of the underground, one magnetic particle at a time. Much of heavy metal’s past is rotting away on cassette demo tapes, and we’re here to help.
Bang! Bang! is the weblog of Ian Christe, publisher of Bazillion Points Books, and author of the books Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal and Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga. Please buy these books in multiple languages for everyone you know who cares about metal, who should care about metal, or who just needs a good education. Thanks!
The demo archives in this blog are transfered from the original cassette sources unless admitted otherwise. Mostly they sound pretty good, but sometimes you can hear the tapes already starting to rot. The MP3s are packaged with the original artwork in .RAR file format — too many freeware .RAR expanders for Mac and PC exist to list here, just check Google.
If you want to see your great vintage metal demo cassette posted, get in touch. If you see your demo here and you want it removed because you’re still selling it — get in touch even faster.
Beast wishes!
IAN CHRISTE
ian soundofthebeast com
May 22, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Radtacular! Thanks for doing this.
-Pete
June 1, 2007 at 5:29 am
…hey, today I read Blabbermouth and your website is so gooD….I was a tape trader in the distant Eighties and I had a collection of demo tapes…yeah, DEFCON, HOLY TERROR MAYHEM from Euronymous….by that time HE was the PRINCE among European tape traders…maybe di yoy remember PHANTHASM with Ron Mc Govney from Metakkica and Katon De Pena from Horax….that demo was so goog with that SSD cover “Glue”…. I will look for it….ciao!
June 1, 2007 at 6:35 am
lets see what these old boys could do
June 1, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Bring back the good old demo days!! Seiege Heil! If anyone ever heard of Singapore’s owned, PROFANCER do ctc me.
June 12, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Mint deluxe!
June 13, 2007 at 8:20 am
Great site you have here - some killer demo material too. Keep the hot stuff coming!
June 15, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Great site, makes me feel 17 again. anyone out there remember Morbid Scream from Texas and Silenxce from Holland
Nice one Ian
June 15, 2007 at 9:26 pm
hail dudes!! fantastic and killer blog!!! Also I was a thrash/death metal fan and will continue being…I’m into tape trading from 80’s and I have over 1500 tittles, but I never had the chance to put out on internet, I didn’t thought. really I prefer the old fuckin tapes. Anyway welsh barney I have SILENXCE demo yet…maybe can be upload at rapidshare, I notice you If you like it. Well, thanks for the space and stay metal forever!!!
http://www.myspace.com/headbangerzine
http://www.headbangerzine.cjb.net
July 16, 2007 at 9:21 am
this site is both hilarious and revealing. it’s like finding an archeaopterix bone that links metal’s evolutionary chain from black sabbath to where it is today. the demos are from hungry bands - before producers, sparkly clean production, and the money hungry labels screw it all up. at the same time, I can’t help but laugh at the hand-drawn demo covers and out-of-tune guitars. To think that these came across someone’s desk at some point to be taken with the upmost sincerity is pretty funny. I myself can’t stop listening!
July 17, 2007 at 10:42 pm
ahoy, maytees! A pirate’s chest of metallic gold nuggets this site is. Drink deep the rum of old school sincerity. Like a siren they call to you in the dead of night. Legend has it only the true-est of metalheads would create such a swashbuckling site, and only the heartiest of bangers would share in its delights.
August 10, 2007 at 7:40 pm
I have some good old Texas tape trade metal bands if you’d be interested.
Great idea - it feels good to hear some unpolished pure performances once again!
Andy Sneap eat your shorts - hear comes Casbah!!!!
September 8, 2007 at 2:04 am
Guys, how can submit a demo (in mp3 ofcourse) here. I got MALFEITOR (USA) 1987 demo. Moderator?
October 7, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Hey, I just came across your site, this is excellent. The demos in particular are great, it’s always good finding early stuff from bands you already know about, and even better discovering entirely new stuff, keep it up!
December 12, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Ian has published the best book on metal ever, and I have read dozens. For the first time you can actually read someone who is not only 100% competent on what he writes, but he also has the journalistic ability to extract important events from history and place them in the right order. You can actually tell this guy has gone through it all. I started my musical “life” in the mid eighties, and “Sounds” is the first book that succeeds in making me revive it all (the coming of cd, the walkman, the tapetrading etc…). His blog is also sublime, my number 1 musical read - period.
January 27, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Brutal death greetings from South Africa.
Check out our gigs in April 2008.
April 1, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Have thought uploading the demos from danish thrashers Shotgun Wedding?
They have released 4 fantastic demotapes!
April 2, 2008 at 11:53 am
My son just showed me the German version of the book “Sound of the Beast”, published by Austrian “hannibal” under the heading “Hoellenlaerm” (2nd edition, 2005).
On page 294 is written that some band’s intro “starts with the drum sound of Conrad Schnitzler, once the drummer of the psychedelic band Tangerine Dream … which is know by everyone with a bit deeper interest…” (I translate from the German).
Wrong. Conrad Schnitzler was the violin player of the band (and a bit of cello on this album). The excellent drummer then, live and on the first album of Tangerine Dream, was Klaus Schulze.
April 2, 2008 at 12:41 pm
KDM:
Danke for the clarification — that’s an error particular to the German editions, which I wasn’t aware of until now. I don’t know why the translator sought to add a detail, and then got it wrong, but such is the stuff of an author’s nightmares. I appreciate you setting the record straight.