tiistai 24. toukokuuta 2011

Equitant - The Great Lands of Minas Ithil demo 1994


Equitant - The Great Lands of Minas Ithil (City of Isildur) demo 1994
1)
The Fallen Walls of Agurak (A Time of Misery) Part I
2) The Fallen Walls of Agurak (A New Beginning) Part II
3) Love Song for Elizabeth Bathory
4) When the Istari Wizards Appeared in Middle Earth (The Days of the King Had Come to an End)

UPDATED: Depositfiles

Here's the second Equitant demo I promised to upload. Like I told you on the earlier post, these two old tapes differ very much from his later works and are dark ambient/dungeon music. The copy I found is of the version Equitant had self-released and sold himself, so the cover and other stuff is different from the DAP release. Scans are included.

UPDATE: Brother Fenrirsson sent me scans of his copy of this demo - it is different from both mine and the DAP version so I presume it would be a second edition released by Equitant himself as it has more decoration to it and quite obviously the picture of the lady is just slapped over the old cover. The DAP version appears to have another castle/fortified city image, from what I can tell from the tiny pic on Discogs. See below for cropped version of this second cover version which is now included in the new download link.

The second version sent by Fenrirsson

The sound quality is quite good even though the tape hisses quite a bit. That can't be helped I'm afraid. At least the tape wasn't worn otherwise. This demo consists of only four tracks which are quite lenghty each, with durations between 6:26 and 9:47. The lyrics are again fantasy oriented with the first two tracks dealing with Equitant's Agurak which seems to be influenced by Celtic, Nordic and Howard-school fantasy mythos. The rest are about countess Bathory (S/M flavour this time) and Tolkien mythos, like the title of the demo hinted. Music is mainly dark ambient/dungeon synth and this time the almost omnipresent spoken vocals are more dominant which I'm not very happy about. They worked better when more in the background I think. The first two tracks form a clear whole with their more bombastic yet solemn approach (and of course the lyrics) while the third one is more minimalistic in its dark ambient, with voice a little more in the background (thankfully, he sounds sillier than ever on this one) and the fourth one is instrumental and most "dark dungeon music" of the tracks. It's also my preferred track here. Check this out if you liked the first Equitant demo and these sort of synth projects in general. Personally I prefer the first demo but this is quite good too. If someone has the CDR re-release, I'd be interested to hear that for improved sound.

5 kommenttia:

Anonyymi kirjoitti...

Interesting cover for this one, because the one that I have is different. I should really dig it out. I purchased it from Dark Age Productions back in the day.

Velkaarn kirjoitti...

@Anonymous:

Yeah, I mention the different covers on the first paragraph. I'd be interested to see proper scans of the DAP version, if you find your copy can you scan the covers anywhere?

Anonyymi kirjoitti...

Thanx a lot man for the second demo too!I prefer this one from his first demo....especially the first 2 tracks (part I and part II)are quite amazing for my taste...interesting story(lyrics) too...

Anonyymi kirjoitti...

Yea man, will do. As memory serves, I think that it has lyrics too. I was looking at an old DAP mailer the other day that I've evidently been holding onto for the last 15 or so years - so many releases that I could and should have ordered, but which now have pretty much disappeared into night and fog...

Velkaarn kirjoitti...

@Anon1:

You're welcome, glad you enjoyed it!

@Anon2:

Great if you could do that! Yeah, there's a load of interesting releases on DAP and most are pretty damn hard to find these days. I too wish I'd gotten at least some of them back in the 90's.