...it's probably the most dark album we ever made. The ASPHYX fans were very happy to see "Embrace The Death" finally being released! It's a piece of important history of ASPHYX.
Local label C.M.F.T. has come up before on these daily noise 'histories' with their most important (well, best anyway) release - TIAMAT's killer debut LP Sumerian Cry.
Read the Sumerian Cry history here. As you'll see in that TIAMAT interview C.M.F.T. was already in trouble by June 1990 when they released Sumerian Cry. Around the same time ASPHYX were in the studio recording Embrace the Death - their intended first album following the successful 7" Mutilating Process - when they learnt of the label's demise:
...we had contact with CMFT from the UK at that time and they were interested as well in releasing an ASPHYX album. First they wanted to release the "Crush The Cenotaph" demo on vinyl, so we sent him (Daryl Turner that is) the master tape, but nothing happened. He still has to return that tape... Motherfucker! Anyway, in the meantime we entered the studio to record "Embrace The Death", thinking CMFT was going to release it. In those days, in the studio, we found out that CMFT was no longer! But we were in the middle of the "Embrace..." recordings, so we didn't tell the studio owner of course. After the recordings, the raw sessions that is, 'coz since CMFT ceased to exist we didn't have the time to mix the damn' thing, we asked the studio owner if he could tape the still unmixed album for us, so we could listen to it at home, so we knew then what things to change if we got back to mix it. He taped it for us, we went home as quickly as possible and we never went back to mix it properly. Also the Deathlike Silence label from Euronymous wanted to release an ASPHYX album, but we wanted to look further.
- Bob Bagchus / Asphyx interview, Voices from the Darkside
In the end they signed with Century Media (as did TIAMAT) and released their official debut album, The Rack, in April 1991. Embrace the Death was eventually released on this day in 1996 coupled with the Mutilating Process EP.