Uploaded September 2016 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago

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This year I am celebrating 21 years since I started to play guitar and compose my own music, so I've decided to capture this VHS cassette, which was recorded 17 years ago and to share with you a very nice memory of my teen age. This is my very first concert. Is this boring so far? Now wait and read the story before getting bored. There were two good friends, me and Florin, the vocalist in my band. We were both die-hard fans of extreme metal (mostly Swedish death metal and Norwegian black metal) and we were spending hours and hours after the school schedule with talks about the music we loved so much and we were drinking as much as we could afford it. Romania in the 90's was a very tough place for us given our possibilities. I played guitar and pseudo-drums in other homemade musical projects or garage bands since 1996, but we never had the chance to have even a so-called band together until then. So we decided to create one. Florin started to write lyrics, while I was writing the music. We were doing this separately, each of us working in his own apartment. We were always talking about our great band, but we had just a failed attempt to rehearse at his place. The main reason for our failure was Florin's dog, a small ratter with an immense and too loud (for the crowd) barking. The dog was beyond stressed due to our music, so we just closed the case. After many nights spent at the 76 Club, a place where the most underground bands having not much of a perspective were hanging around, we discovered a super-talented drummer in a local gothic-doom band called Graven. One evening we got drunk together and we told him that we had a band and we wanted to play live, but we didn't have a drummer or a rehearsal place. And the guy said "okay, cool, but how the hell are we going to rehearse?" I said "We will not, we will just hit the stage and play. It is pretty easy. You will figure it out!" He said "okay!" Next weekend we had our first show, just as we had agreed. We didn't rehearse, we just played and it was fucking amazing, pure energy! A few months later I used my cassette player to record the sound coming out of the TV speakers as I was playing the VHS cassette and I used just the player's incorporated microphone. I selected four songs (as you will see, the "camera-guy" messed up the filming with tons of unexpected cuts - that is not my editing, that is the content found on the fucking VHS) and an intro was made at home and this is how our first demo was done. We released it in five copies on December 22, 1999. It was basically a meeting between close friend. We gave each of them a cassette and we got drunk. Retribution (the name was our tribute to Dissection) had two live shows altogether (we did that chaos twice, but the second time we were drunk and no one remembered anything - too bad that nobody filmed that) and one demo, but we lived one of the most intense experiences in our lives doing this band! I have added some personal comments over that fucked up footage. I kept a lot of the original footage, including live clips with both bands that shared the (rather nonexistent) stage with us that night (Iedera - crossover from somewhere near Bucharest I think, and Onderah - black metal from Bucharest). I also kept a lot of extra footage with people making jokes and random stuff, which is very personal and I hope that many of my nostalgic friends will be excited about that.
Enjoy!