This month in 1996 KATATONIA were in Finspång, Sweden at Dan Swanö's Unisound to record their classic dark doom album Brave Murder Day.
KATATONIA had used Unisound for previous releases: Dance of December Souls, For Funerals to Come... and others. After Brave Murder Day they began recording at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm.
The influences have changed quite a lot, because when we did the first album, we were mainly influenced by Paradise Lost, essentially, and Tiamat as well. On Brave Murder Day, I'm not really sure, but I don't think we had many influences when we did that album. It was more like we wanted to try something really new for us, which led to this very repetitive sound, which I think is very dark.
- Jonas Renkse / Katatonia interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1999
The album was released by Avantgarde in November that year.
We found the front and back cover pictures in an archive here in Stockholm. They have tons of good - and bad - pictures, and we instantly fell for those two as both of them represented what we were doing at the time. The band picture is also cool, we had the photographer shoot our reflections in a pool of oil in an industrial area - I think that gives the picture a darker shade than if it was just an ordinary photo.
- Jonas Renkse / Katatonia interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 2001
Around the same time the band went on the 19-day European "Autumn Wilderness Tour" with IN THE WOODS... The last three dates were in London, Bradford and Dublin.
We did one tour in 1996, for Brave Murder Day - it was an European tour, a small tour. I think we had something like twenty dates with a Norwegian band called In the Woods... So that's the only tour we've done, and then we've been playing some shows in Sweden, but this was a long way back. We haven't been playing live for a very long time.
- Jonas Renkse / Katatonia interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1999