Recorded over the summer of 2007 in various living rooms and a disused TV studio in the south of England, Dog Kill Bird was a lo-fi convergence of ambition and frenetic songwriting. Featuring the pseudonymous Herb Powers on electric guitar, Pidge Pidgeon, then of The Dials on drums and Bilu Acharjee of Dead!Dead!Dead! guesting on bass guitar

Dog Kill Bird marked the confident emergence of the fully formed Demis CousCous. A breakup album of epic proportions, switching out the standard broken hearted lovers fare for bitter, angry shadow lamentations and meditations of death, murder and resurrection. Released in the autumn of 2007 it was a cult success on the pre-streaming internet. The album was shared far and wide across the world via the zeitgeist of the blogosphere and the file sharing platforms that were eventually outlawed.

Following the success of Dog Kill Bird, Demis CousCous retreated in early 2008 to work alone on the follow up album. Aesthetically very different from its predecessor, Freemealin' drew influence from French artists Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Dutronc and a period of reflection spent in a lighthouse on an island in Norway. The album was a work of a floored and flawed individual. Despite touching on similar themes, it held a pop sensibility through which it could almost be considered day-glow by comparison to the inherent doom laden atmosphere of Dog Kill Bird.

Featuring contributions from David Bryan of The Mackerelheads, lyrical contributions from Margaret Sturton and musical inspiration from Tam Revorg, it was an expansive album of overt ambition matched only by its relative failure to connect with any audience in the way Dog Kill Bird had the year before.

The album was followed by two short EP's: The Eighties Girlfriend EP and Nicotine and Caffeine EP, both of which were available exclusively on the original Demis CousCous Caboose.

In the summer of 2009, Demis CousCous and Herb Powers reconnected with the intent of following up the work they had undertaken on Dog Kill Bird. As with the original sessions, work involved Demis and Herb recording live together on acoustic and electric guitar in Herbs living room, before the pieces were taken away to be worked into songs. These sessions generated a plethora of tracks, with many still unreleased. Shortly after these sessions Herb Powers, who now wanted to be credited as Herb Womack moved city, ending a fruitful collaborative partnership.

The subsequent album, I Was Prufrock was not released until mid 2011, by which time life had moved on in many ways and so much more material had been recorded that the original sessions accounted for only about two thirds of the album. It was a return to the darker aesthetic of the first album and sought to create a tongue in cheek world in the liminal space between life and death in which the dead and the living coexist in a fragile covenant.

The album was largely ignored by a world that had by this time moved on from Rapidshare and Blogspot into the future of streaming platforms. To this day, all three of these albums remain enigmatic entities. Never uploaded to the streaming platforms, they became randomly accessed memories in a few thousand mp3 collections and vintage iPods around the world. Periodically someone somewhere will upload a video to YouTube of one of the tracks or reach out for info. Demis himself put the albums on Youtube in their entirety a few years back, but with no interest or appetite for promoting them they've sat there slowly clocking up a few listens over the years, cementing their place as outsider music, known by a few and chanced upon by fewer.

This was where the trail and trials of Demis CousCous largely dried up. Occasionally he would turn up on Soundcloud with a bewildering choice of cover song, or some stylistically random original composition but no more comprehensive releases ever emerged under the  Demis CousCous moniker. Until one day, earlier this year, he woke up from his long sleep.

2026 saw the release of the OP-1 Songs EP and Sketches From The Archive of Insanity. The former, a short collection of songs recorded on the OP-1 Field device, the latter a curated collection of songs from the archive. A wilderness years compilation of songs from the last 15 years. 

These are schedule to be followed by a remixed and remastered Dog Kill Bird 20th Anniversary edition in 2027 and a new album, of which I'm assured more news will follow in time.

D'Arcy Sarto 2026