So here we have it. For the first time since 1999 and now available digitally you can hear how it all started.

A little back story for those who are interested :

I started playing guitar in 1993 or 1994 and was a self -taught guitarist. I only had one friend who had started electric guitar a bit before I did and he taught me how to play power chords, which was a real eye-opener, haha! I started the guitar all wrong. I bought a shitty Mustang Fender clone for £60, it was a terrible guitar but all I could afford. I got a chord book and a tab book, "The guitar styles of Adrian Smith and Dave Murray" - or something like that. I just wanted to learn how to play those amazing solos I heard on the Iron Maiden records. I was trying to run before I could walk.

I never had any natural talent for music but I did have a will. Growing up in those times where I lived was very lonely. No one listened to anything that I listened to. I spent my days in my room listening to albums and trying to work out the guitars. I had a BBC Micro computer and printed out tab lines and tabbed stuff by hand with a pencil.

Around 1994 I heard Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and was totally blown away. My copy was a copy of a copy on cassette from a CD some girl in our school had bought. The track "Tomhet" just filled me with something...I loved the sound...the melody, the ambiance...everything about it.

Around ‘97 or so I bought a Roland D50 synth from a friend and it was the closest thing I found or could afford that gave me a sound near to what was going on with that Burzum track. I wrote some songs on my computer using Cakewalk 6. Hooking up the midi to the D50 and recording the midi as I played/improvised.

Sometime later I wanted to learn more about how all this new software worked. I used to program tracker music on an Amiga 1200 with Octamed and found a version for the PC. The next demo, "Doomsday's Dawn", mixed the D50 sounds with samples and stuff I threw into Cakewalk and Octamed for the PC.

I started Leviaphonic Records and sent Legion to a few magazines for review thinking I'd slam dunked this. I remember finding a photo on the net I thought was cool as fuck which turned out to be Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger cover. It had no logo or title so I used it as the cover to my Legion demo. I hadn't even heard of this band at the time and I had stolen their cover for my demo. Oops! I would rush to the newspaper shops and browse through the week's issues of various magazines to see if I had gotten a review. It never came. It was a disappointment. In hindsight, they probably would haven give it 1 out 10 anyway.

Listening back to these tracks as I write this is quite nostalgic but it doesn't bring me back to those times sitting in my room. The music and the reality of my day to day life then don't go together. I actually think some of the ideas are quite OK in a few of the songs. Tracks 4-6 (The first demo) were an attempt to replicate some kind of feeling I got from "Tomhet" but I never reached anything close to that song. I quite like listening to Silent Victory though. Funnily enough, I remember writing this thinking it was more like a Bolt Thrower style riff on a synth. Listening back I think I like Silent Victory and The Kyjeri Waters the most...almost meditative and gives me a warm feeling. The Doomsday’s Dawn songs tried to up the complexity a bit but are maybe not as effective.

This is a rip of the CD. I had to buy the CD from Discogs a few years ago as I sold all of them and lost the copies I kept for myself. I think I must have sold about 50 copies of this album. This rip is not remastered. I don't think it's worth spending time on this as a release project. I wanted to give some of the Murdryck fans who joined the ride in 2016 a taste of the origins of the band.

I get a lot of questions about the name and what does Murdryck mean. It means nothing. It was a name I came up with that sounded mystical or Tolkien-inspired that reflected the fantasy world I wanted to live in in my head. When I moved to Sweden in 2002 I was surprised to learn I inadvertently chose two Swedish words "Mur" and "Dryck and had slung them together. Very odd when I think about it. Back then I knew nothing of Sweden or the language at all.

When I started the Black Metal thing in 2015 I kept the name. I knew it was a risk and might be ridiculed in Scandinavia or be met with strange looks. That happened.

One more thing...the cover was created with an early alpha version of Terragen - a program that creates realistic landscapes. Hard to believe its over 20 years old!

These days I guess you can call this Dungeon Synth or what not. To me, it was just Dark Ambient. Inspired by Burzum and partly by the early Jean-Michel Jarre albums (Oxygen and Equinox)

Murdryck is laid to rest now. I am tempted to resurrect Murdryck as a Dark Ambient project at some point. Time will tell.

Be sure to check out Åskog, which is a new band of mine with the same singer who performed on Födelsen.