On the Metal Archives credit for Tormentor's 1989 demo Anno Domini, the vocalist is listed as "Attila 'Mayhem' Csihar." He wasn't in Mayhem yet, and wouldn't be for another four years. The nickname reads now like an accident of foresight: Euronymous, casting around Oslo for a replacement after the 1991 suicide of Mayhem's singer Dead, ended up hiring the Hungarian off the strength of this exact tape.
Tormentor formed in Budapest in the mid-1980s, behind a border that made Western metal hard to come by and harder still to distribute. Their first demo, The Seventh Day of Doom, came out in 1987, recorded in conditions rough even by demo standards. Anno Domini, cut two years later with Csihar on vocals, Attila Szigeti on guitars and keyboards, György Farkas on bass and Zsolt Machát on drums, was meant to be different: a proper studio recording, pressed to vinyl.
It never was.
The label lined up to release it collapsed, its manager vanishing along with the master tapes, a fittingly chaotic ending for a project attempted in the last years of Communist Hungary. What survived was a cassette, dubbed and re-dubbed, passed hand to hand through the international tape-trading networks that did the actual distribution work for underground metal before the internet existed. It reached Scandinavia. Euronymous wanted to put it out himself, on his own label Deathlike Silence Productions, before he was murdered in August 1993. It eventually appeared on CD in 1995, through Nocturnal Art Productions, the label run by Mayhem's drummer Hellhammer.
The thirteen tracks, running from "Introduction" -- which samples the theme from the 1979 horror film Phantasm -- through to the closing title track, spend their runtime on the material that would later become genre furniture: countesses, graves, Transylvania. "Elisabeth Bathory" takes its subject from the real Hungarian noblewoman whose sixteenth-century murder trial turned her into folklore's most durable vampire. None of this was calculated positioning. Tormentor were simply Hungarian, and Bathory was theirs before she was anyone else's metaphor.
Csihar recorded his vocals for Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas in late 1992 and early 1993; he learned Euronymous had been murdered that August only months later, from a copy of Hungarian Metal Hammer. Tormentor themselves had split in 1991, reformed in 1999, released the considerably stranger Recipe Ferrum! through Avantgarde Music, and reconvened again in 2017 with Csihar back at the microphone, playing a reunion show in Budapest the following April. Anno Domini, meanwhile, kept doing what it had always done best: circulating, reissued every few years by whichever label currently holds the rights, still sounding like a demo that knew something the rest of the genre hadn't worked out yet.
