You can't imagine an actual human being making sounds like this. Or, you don't want to-not a human living free in the world, anyhow. Brimstone-caked growling, the roars of an earthbound devil-one with guitars and amplifiers. And black-clad fans pulsing in a sweating mass against the stage, whirling in unforgiving circle pits, arms raised, hands clutching. Death metal, grindcore, thrash-this is music that pushes past intimidating, and asks for more than three or four minutes of your casual time. Extreme metal demands more than your attention; it wants your devotion. 

Pummeling blastbeats, inky dirges, guttural growling, a furious pounding chug that pushes the air from your lungs. Listening to it live, death metal feels like an attack, like something should be breaking-onstage, in the speakers, in your chest cavity, in your inner ear. Death metal's grindcore nephew, even more so, with its unflagging tempos, nightmare screeching, and songs so brutal they don't sustain longer than a minute or two, or even less.

Metal has its friendlier subgenres and acts, and in some ways, the music has increasingly caved to-or at least marketed itself to-bored indie masses in recent years. Think of pop-tuned metal bands like Harvey Milk, Torche, or the teeming mass of "stoner" metal that's slid into the hipster lexicon right alongside "noise rock." Hopefully, this more mainstream stuff serves as a gateway to the "real" thing. And death metal is, arguably (depending on whether or not you ask black metal fans), the realest, the genuine extreme, and difficult to penetrate. 

And this is the music that has filled every room of downtown nightclub Sonar with bands and fans over a long weekend in May for the past several years as part of Maryland Deathfest. As of 2009, the annual festival has grown so popular that it plans to unleash the mayhem on the street outside.

"I think the bands [that play Maryland Deathfest] are too extreme for people that are not into metal at all," says Smattro Ansjovis, singer for cartoon-ish grindcore band Birdflesh, which is playing Deathfest 2009, May 22-24. "But I think it can attract metal fans to get into more extreme metal. MDF is not an event that you just go to by accident!"

For the past six years, Baltimore has been rushed by some of the most dedicated metalheads in the world. This year, co-organizer/co-curator/co-everything Ryan Taylor projects a daily attendance of 2,000 people for MDF's three-day run. Compare that to about 150 daily for High Zero or roughly 2,000 daily for Whartscape. (Artscape, a mixed art and music, free festival, brings in hundreds of thousands annually according to organizers.) Based on current ticket sales, this year's Deathfest is drawing in attendees from at least 15 countries, including more than 30 sales so far to Australia.

And the fans come from all over the world not least because the bands come from all over the world-from England's mighty Bolt Thrower to Sweden's Birdflesh. "There are so many people and bands from all around the world that you almost forget you're in the United States," Ansjovis says.

Jason Netherton of Baltimore's own Misery Index, a politicized death metal band as frighteningly precise as it is brutal, adds from a California tour stop: "To have dozens of bands we know from all over the world come to play in our hometown is almost surreal."

Despite the tumult he helps put onstage every year, Taylor is the walking definition of even-keeled. Less than three weeks from the festival's kick-off, he's almost pathologically collected, and that turns out to be a good thing. In April, the festival faced having a mammoth monkeywrench tossed into the works when the city dragged its feet on approving the ever-expanding MDF's permit to close the block of Saratoga Street outside Sonar to accommodate another stage. Uncertain of whether or not the outside stage would come through, Taylor had to consider the event "sold out" until the permits came through and the additional capacity was made official.

At that point, MDF had sold roughly 1,500 tickets, and fortunately fans were eager to sign up for a waiting list. Managing the list and ticket sales takes up four to five hours of Taylor's day. Eschewing ticket vendors like Ticketmaster and Brown Paper Tickets, MDF processes all its tickets in-house.

"I don't like for people to have to pay a service fee," Taylor says over beers at a Pigtown bar. "I think Ticketmaster charges like four dollars a ticket, which is kinda crazy."

"We definitely did not expect it to happen [this] way when we started," says co-organizer Evan Harting via telephone from his Baltimore home. "The whole idea started off as a small one-day fest. We seem to be doing something almost impossible to find in the United States. There isn't really anything like this at all."

Baltimore natives Taylor and Harting met at Parkville High School via the metal sign-system of the offensive metal T-shirt. "I was maybe in 11th grade when I met Evan," Taylor says. "[We found out] we had a common interest in music. We've always been best friends. I remember Evan would come to pretty much every show my band [Ciborium] had."

"Since middle school, I'd try to find the heaviest stuff I could-White Zombie, Pantera," a busy Harting says by phone. "I got into the [metal] underground by going to stores that had more underground stuff.  I was the only metalhead I knew for many years. In high school, I found people into metal in the way I was. [I liked] everything about [metal], the way it was heavier than anything else. The image was more extreme. And the fact that no one really knew about it."

"I got into metal when I was 11 or 12 years old," Taylor echoes. "I guess I can credit my father. My parents are divorced, and when he'd pick me up on the weekend, we'd go to the record store and we'd find old cassettes of Metallica, Dio, Sabbath. I really don't know, in the beginning, what made me into metal more than anything else. Maybe it was out of the norm for a 12-year-old to be listening to Megadeth . . .

"You know how people go through phases in school-now I'm a yo boy, now I'm into Dave Matthews?" Taylor asks finally. "For me it was never like that. I was just into metal. You can get into different subgenres, but it's still metal. It's in me and I can't get it out."

Talking to Taylor, who used to teach English in Europe, you don't get the sense that the leap from high school metalheads to deans of an extreme metal institution was predestined. They'd never booked any shows beyond a handful of small local gigs, didn't know much about business, didn't have high credit limits to tear through.

Taylor and Harting, now 24 and 22 respectively, were nobody special, just two local dudes "living paycheck to paycheck," as Taylor says.

"It's pretty random how it happened," Taylor says of MDF's creation. "In December of 2002, [Evan and I were] both working in the kitchen of this crappy restaurant. We had been at this death-metal festival in Ohio, and we were driving back and I said something like 'I think we could do better.' Six, seven months later we're just standing around bored at work-I don't know really what made it come up-[and said] why don't we not necessarily throw a fest, but maybe one longer day of bands? East Coast, Midwest bands. It turned into three days and almost 40 bands in the first year."

The headliner for the first Deathfest, in May 2003, was Suffocation, a New York death metal band that would like to do romantic things to your entrails. (Stage banter from a recent Baltimore Suffocation show: "This goes out to all the lovely ladies out there/ sometimes we just want to/ cut you open/ and bathe in your warm entrails.") The show was held at the Thunderdome, a now-defunct club in South Baltimore that held maybe 700 people.

"Back then, Suffocation was a big deal-they hadn't played a live show in five years," Taylor says. "Once we announced them, the interest just kept growing. We just kept booking."

He estimates that first year cost between $15,000 and $20,000 for guarantees for bands and other expenses, roughly a tenth the financial commitment it now requires. "We had no money [up front]," Taylor recalls. "It was honestly a big risk what we did. It was like, 'It's 30 bands, so we need to make this much money to break even.' In the end, enough people came. We didn't lose our ass. 

"It wasn't long before my 21st birthday, and my partner had just turned 18," he continues. "At first, the venue was really skeptical because they knew how young we were. 'Are they serious about this? Are they going to bring anyone at all?' We were young-they knew we were. They wanted to make sure we did what we said were going to do." They did.

Music aside, the bare grassroots nature of MDF is one of the most striking things about it. Events of this scale are put on by corporations (or they're run by hippies and happen on campgrounds). Taylor and Harting don't even really have hired help or interns, just some friends and family helping out here and there. "It's just the two of us, booking bands, contacting [distributors], record labels, food vendors, putting it all together," Taylor says. "It's a two-man show."

To put it in even better perspective: While MDF has become a big deal in Baltimore, consider that it's likely the biggest festival of its sort in the world. "We have played some smaller [similar] indoor festivals in Europe, [but] nothing that can compare with MDF," Birdflesh's Ansjovis says.  "I don't think there are many events that can actually." And note that the festival isn't the Live Nation Maryland Deathfest or Maryland Deathfest Presented By Verizon Wireless.

Nor will it take a sponsorship to get the festival to its next, much higher level. "If we want it to keep growing as it has, it's going to require one or two bigger bands," Taylor says. "Maybe Slayer or Iron Maiden." He estimates a band of that legendary caliber, a headliner in more mainstream venues, could bring in a daily crowd upward of 5,000 people, putting MDF in the range of skyscraping, open-air European metal festivals like the Czech Republic's Obscene Extreme and Brutal Assault.

"That's where I was thinking, Whoa this is kind of big now," Taylor continues. "The idea started in a restaurant kitchen in Perry Hall. To think that's where it started and to even consider booking bands like Slayer, it's quite a few steps away."

Despite the aural violence of the music and the ritualized brutality of the pit in front of the stage, in six years Taylor's had only one major incident with a Deathfest fan-getting jumped by some dude who thought Taylor had thrown his girlfriend off the stage. It was in front of a handful of security guards, so, save for dude getting kicked out, it wound up a non-incident. "You have this really aggressive sounding music that's really misunderstood by many people," Taylor adds, "but the [fans are] pleasant, appreciative, and polite."  

Indeed, a quick poll of venue bartenders will likely reveal one universal about classes of showgoers: Metal fans are gold. Not only do they buy lots of merch, but they buy lots and lots of beer. It makes MDF a pretty quick friend with the venues it partners with (save for an ill-fated trip to White Marsh's since-defunct House of Rock in the fest's third year: "I can't imagine anyone walking away from there thinking, That's a cool place," Taylor says). Even the folks who ran Thunderdome ended up glad they took a chance on Taylor and Harting, "because of the amount of business we brought in. They loved us."

"Every year after it finishes, pretty much right away, we start working on the next one," Taylor says of Deathfest. And every year the festival has grown, amassing not necessarily more bands, but bigger bands. Past festivals have included Northern Virginia grindcore staple Pig Destroyer, the blasphemous bone-breaking black metal of Sweden's Marduk, and Norway's Mayhem, a band with a history that reads like a Rob Zombie movie script. This year's coup is Bolt Thrower, an English grind legend that holds one of the oldest spots on seminal label Earache and generally sits on one of death metal's highest thrones. Just imagine nearly 25 years' worth of chugging metal songs written on the subject of war. This will be the first time in 14 years the band has played in the United States.

"Bolt Thrower has been three or four years in the making, trying to convince them to play," Taylor says. "For years, they'd write back 'Sorry, we're not interested. Good luck.' Finally, this year they gave in."

In a statement posted on its web site, Bolt Thrower explained: "Due to the fact that we are not real festival lovers or great fans of flying, the chances of us ever coming to the States for a one-off show was always very small. But after years of relentless e-mails from Ryan we've finally given in." 

"They have a real grassroots, DIY mentality," Taylor says of Bolt Thrower. "The way I want to deal with people. I don't want to deal with [booking] agents at all-they just make things 10 times more complicated. It's so much easier to deal with bands like that, that would rather do things their own way."

And, as in years past, having a name like Bolt Thrower on the bill almost guarantees the festival will get larger next year. "If we were to take this billing and put it [on] in Europe," Taylor says, "I think it would [draw] 10,000 people." Six years of continuous one-upsmanship feels like almost a promise for the next MDF.

"I wonder how they're gonna beat this year's line-up," Ansjovis says. "I bet they will."

But that's also not quite it. Metal fans aren't so fickle as to just chase around festivals for big names. There's something unique about metalheads, a loyalty that doesn't translate the same to other music genres. "We have a pretty strong fan base that comes back every year," Taylor says, "on top of stronger billing."   

Email Michael Byrne