In 1995 BloodHag was little more than a joke, based off of “Robert E. Howard” an acoustic song written for an side project of Jeffery McNulty and Jake Stratton, the Van Pelts. But by 1996 we had written a demo's worth of songs and decided to play out live with a drum machine, Big Black style. We found a like-minded bass player in Zach Orgel; his qualifications were that he played bass and he had more books than both of us combined!

Our first gig was summer of ‘96 at our friend Brent Carpenter’s house, where Jake proceeded to peg Brent’s girlfriend smack in the face with the very first book he threw. Thus began a long career of beaning either the smallest person or the biggest, most pissed off dude in every room we played. Little did we know that Brent would eventually become our permanent and quintessential drummer…

This is the recording that started it all, the 1996 BloodHag demo, “Swords and Deviltry”. These are versions sans-bass, as they were written and recorded before Zach joined the band. This is also the only time Jeffery sang lead vocals on any BloodHag recording, on the songs A. E. Van Vogt and Joanna Russ, respectively.

Please bear in mind that this is a cassette tape, duped off a cassette master and mixed down from a 4-track cassette tape. When transferring the tape to digital I decided to not touch the masters much, leaving all the noise, wow and hiss.

Enjoy!

Dr. J. M. McNulty aka Deus Ex Libris the Plagiarazer