Siege (band) - Recording History

Recording History

Siege recorded a six-song demo tape at Radiobeat Records in Kenmore Square on February 6, 1984. The demo was produced by Lou Giordano (who is also the producer of Hüsker Dü, Negative FX, SS Decontrol, Goo Goo Dolls, and many others), and has been extensively bootlegged. In October 1984 the band recorded three more songs at Radiobeat with Giordano for Pushead's classic 1985 hardcore compilation called Cleanse the Bacteria. Those 3 songs were Siege's only official original release.

Giordano later recalled those sessions:

"The way our studio operated was that anything that comes in –there’s no value judgements made about the music. We just record it. Still, one of the things that I guess was cool about being a staff engineer is that I wouldn’t have sought out a band like that. I wasn’t philosophically into anything that they were doing, but they were all good musicians –you would have to be to stay together at the speeds they were playing at. So there was that aspect of it, and just the whole pushing the envelope thing. It sounds like it’s just gonna completely break apart going 700 miles through the sky and then all of a sudden everything just comes right together again."

"And they were some of the most unassuming, laid-back people to ever work with. I mean, they had no attitude at all. They just came in and they were just really polite and very thankful, and then when they turned on the amps and made that noise, it was just unbelievable that it was coming from them."'

Siege's 3 songs from the Cleanse the Bacteria compilation and 6-song demo were released by Relapse Records in 1994 as the Drop Dead CD. The same material was released on 12" vinyl in 2004 by Deep Six Records.

However, two separate additional reissues of the original Siege material done on lp in 2006 and 2009 by the Deep Six record label mysteriously contained an additional three tracks, "Two-Faced," "Trained To Kill," and "Questions Behind The Wall". According to the sticker on the cover of the 2006 reissue, it states that these tracks are "unreleased tracks from original sessions," but it is unclear if the songs were recorded in 1984 and remained unreleased until now, or if only the music is from the original sessions with vocals added later (by either the original vocalist or by Seth Putnam).