Necromantia never had a guitarist. Not on Crossing the Fiery Path, not really at any point across three decades. George Zacharopoulos, who performs as Magus Wampyr Daoloth, sang and played bass; Makis Kanakaris, credited as Baron Blood, played a second bass, an eight-string, worked as though it were carrying the lead lines a guitar would normally take. A single guest solo on "Les Litanies de Satan" is the closest the 1993 album comes to conventional guitar, and it's there precisely because it's the exception.
The pair formed in Athens in late 1989, a city with its own quietly overlooked claim on early black metal history. Alongside Rotting Christ and Varathron, Necromantia are usually credited as one of the three bands that got a Greek black metal scene moving before anyone was calling it that. Their 1992 demo, Vampyric Rituals, arrived with vampire imagery before most of the Norwegian bands that would later make it a genre signature.
Crossing the Fiery Path, released the following year on the French label Osmose Productions, was recorded mostly at Sin Ena studios in the spring of 1993, with one track, "Lord of the Abyss," left over from a session in December 1991. Christos Hajistamou produced, with Zacharopoulos co-producing; a session player, Nick Adams, handled drums, since neither permanent member touched a kit. Seven tracks, the longest of them, "The Warlock," running past thirteen minutes.
The cover did as much work as the music. A vampire lord stands over a castle, flanked by bats and wolves, painted by Panos Sounas in a style widely traced back to the artwork of a Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook for the Ravenloft module -- extreme metal borrowing its imagery from a tabletop game, of all places, and turning it into one of the more recognisable sleeves in the genre. Phantom Slaughter, who records as Worm, has named it the image he pictures first when anyone says vampiric black metal.
Necromantia kept going for another twenty-eight years: Scarlet Evil Witching Black in 1995, The Sound of Lucifer Storming Heaven in 2007, and a final album, To the Depths We Descend..., released in October 2021 as a tribute to Kanakaris, who had died in 2019. The band dissolved that December. Zacharopoulos hasn't slowed down; he's since turned up in Thou Art Lord, in Principality of Hell and in Yoth Iria, and released a solo record as The Magus. None of it uses a guitar either, out of habit as much as principle by now.
