The Under-Underground

It’s the late nineties. Maybe the early two-thousands. The exact year doesn’t matter, because the way I remember it, time moved at the speed of a dial-up handshake. I’m sitting at my PC, listening to it connect, hunting for more metal.

There had been mild exposure already. My parents kept a library of new wave and prog rock, and somewhere in those tapes was the first hint that music could be stranger and louder than whatever everybody else was listening to. I’d brushed up against some extreme metal too. Nothing prepared me for what came through next.

I land, somehow, on the Black Mark website. I download a single MP3. It’s called The Rite of Darkness. Bathory.

Everything changes.

I don’t have a better way to put it. There’s a before and an after, and the line between them is one track loading late at night. After Bathory came Opeth, and between those two bands a whole world cracked open. Half of me wanted the raw, frostbitten, primitive end of extreme metal. The other half wanted the finer, more composed, more devastating version of it. I never had to choose. I just fell in.

I wasn’t the only one falling. Down there was an entire scene, and almost none of it was ever written down. Today the people who lived it are scattered across continents, most of the tapes are gone, and memories are fading. This series is an attempt to get it down first.

The facts have been out there for years, scattered across Metal Archives, Discogs and old forum threads. What nobody had done was lay them side by side. Put 56 bands, 228 releases and 254 musicians across 32 years in one place, and you start to see things no single entry shows you: only two full-length albums before 2000, and the same handful of names running through everything.

A Tape Here, a Friend-of-a-Friend There

People talk about Pakistan’s underground metal scene as if it were one thing. It wasn’t. There was the underground, and then there was the under-underground. No rock bands. No crossover. Extreme metal in Pakistan was always alive, but it lived in pockets: a tape here, a friend-of-a-friend there, a handful of shows in the late nineties you only knew about if you already knew somebody.

If you knew that somebody, you were handed a different scene entirely. If you didn’t, you could live your whole life in the same city and never know it existed.

What stitched us together was the internet, but not the internet anyone romanticizes now. It was mIRC and DC++. Music was hard to find, so those channels became our record stores, and because we were all in there at two in the morning hunting the same impossible files, they became something else too. You came for a Marduk rip and left with people you’d know for twenty years. People like Ali Nabeel and Salman Mumtaz, who did more than anyone to pull me deeper and deeper into extreme metal, and never gatekept a thing.

Dial-up was expensive, so we rationed it: a few hours online a day, almost all of it spent downloading. When friends came back from abroad, they came with burned CDs. In the shops, a pirated CD cost Rs100. An original, if you were lucky enough to find one, cost around Rs600.

More Cover Bands Than Originals

We never really had nu-metal. One or two bands, maybe, though for a lot of people it was the gateway that cracked the door before the heavier stuff kicked it open.

What we had was cover bands. More cover bands than bands writing their own music. This series isn’t about them. It’s about the people who made original music: a smaller, stranger, more heroic list.

The Worst Sound Imaginable

There was no infrastructure. None. You put the shows on yourself. Nobody sponsored anything. The venues, places like the Pakistan American Cultural Centre (PACC) and the Women’s Auditorium near Do Talwar, had the worst sound imaginable, and somehow that was exactly what made them perfect: a bad PA, a blown room, no monitors, and a feeling in your chest that nothing this good was ever meant to be heard cleanly.

The press didn’t help. It would happily write about cover bands and the rock end of the underground, but the extreme stuff was invisible to it. For one brief moment we even had a metal show on the radio. Black Sunday was a small miracle that, like most small miracles here, didn’t last.

What we did have were the stores, if you knew where to look. There were shops across the cities where, with some digging, you could find a metal tape, and later a CD. Some sold original merch. People still swear there was Bathory on vinyl sitting on a shelf on Tariq Road. Music Megastore in Zamzama sold us Metallica’s Live Shit box set for Rs1,500. And then there was Ground Zero, whose business was copies: it bought original CDs, sold the copies it made from them, and was left holding the originals. So I bought those. Pretty much all of them.

And the scene pressed records. Plenty of bands here got released on vinyl, something the rock and pop acts of the eighties and nineties can’t even claim. Nobody whined about not getting a chance. They hustled.

Sundays at Babar’s

Some Sundays I spent at Babar Sheikh’s, doing nothing but listening to European and South American thrash. Whole afternoons given over to the gospel of obscure demos, and a lot of Sarcófago. Babar had been tape trading since the early nineties, and his network ran deep. It still does. Dusk was one of the first bands from here to be heard abroad, and Babar’s web of contacts was every nineties tape trader’s dream: the kind of global connection I wish all of us had felt back then.

Between shows, this life lived on forums: the Dusk Horde forum, the Messiah forum, little rooms on the early web where the scene argued, organized and existed.

The same faces kept turning up. Bands traded musicians constantly; in this archive alone, 18 people played in three or more bands, and some went on to play with the biggest acts in the country. For every band that surfaced, others simply faded, recorded real, original music that almost nobody ever got to hear. That’s the quiet tragedy under all of this. So much of it was made. So little of it was heard.

We weren’t saints about it, either. There was pettiness: fights online, fights at shows, and a lot of gatekeeping. I’ve come to believe it did as much damage as everyone slowly moving abroad. Everyone who made something here belongs in this archive, including the people we had beef with.

Someone Had To

Which brings me to the thing I can’t leave out, even in an introduction. By 2008 I’d had enough of watching the scene release nothing but singles: one track here, a demo there, a song traded between friends and then silence. Bands were making whole bodies of work, and the world heard a fragment of it, if it heard anything at all.

So I started an underground record label. It began, of all places, as a business-management project during my MBA. A spreadsheet exercise turned into the only real answer I had to a problem I’d watched eat the scene alive.

The idea was simple and a little stubborn. If the records weren’t going to release themselves, and nobody else was going to do it, someone here had to treat this music as worth pressing, archiving and putting a catalogue number on. The label was GmH Records. It was the first real attempt to stop the work from disappearing. This project is the second. The label gets its full story later: the bands, the releases, what worked and the many things that didn’t. Its first release is the next dispatch.

There Is No Beginning

People ask where the scene started, and the honest answer is that it didn’t, not at any single point you could put a pin in. There’s no clean origin, no first cause. But if I had to pick two candidates, the first would be the formation of Dusk. The second would be Shemhamforash. Even the name is still argued over: some remember it as the band that headlined, others as the name of the show itself. It happened in someone’s garden, or maybe their backyard, sometime before 1998. Some of the bands that would go on to matter most were there, in one form or another. Babar played with the main band. Autopsy Gothic performed in some form too. That night will probably get its own dispatch, once I’ve pieced together what actually happened.

The scene arrived in a mad frenzy, and then it was gone. Like thunder and lightning, it was glorious for one short moment in eternity.

This is my attempt to catch some of that light before it fades for good: to set down the real history of Pakistan’s extreme metal underground while the people who lived it are still here to tell it. Not the version that made the papers, because there never was one. The real one. The tapes traded at two in the morning. The bands that never released a single note in public. The nights in rooms with terrible sound that somehow came out perfect.

It’s been a long time since that dial-up handshake. I’m still hunting for more metal. This time I’m writing down what I find.

So consider this the first crack of thunder.