Delta Machine demos

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On September 20, 2021, 45-second excerpts of demos of 12 songs and studio outtake / rough versions of 2 songs from the 2013 album Delta Machine were uploaded to SoundCloud, but were removed within a few hours.[1] The link to the SoundCloud playlist was posted on the Home fan forum[2]; see screenshot. Those excerpts were downloaded and are mirrored below.

Screenshot of Home forum post[2] linking to SoundCloud playlist of these excerpts.

One song, "Schism", is an unreleased instrumental song. The demo for Slow is not the original demo of the song recorded circa 1993, but is a re-recording.

Some songs closely resemble the final released versions, such as Always, Heaven, Slow, and Welcome To My World, as well as the two "rough" versions of Secret To The End and My Little Universe. Other songs are vastly different from the released versions.

Facebook member Jonas Öberg posted a photo about these demos on May 14, 2021[3], indicating that he has had the demos for at least 5 years since the time of the post, and showing the same 14 songs along with Goodbye, which did not have a snippet uploaded to SoundCloud. According to Winamp seen in the photograph, Slow is 1411kbps 44.1khz, which is 16-bit 44.1khz PCM audio, suggesting that he has lossless copies of the files.

Screenshot of Facebook post[3] by Jonas Öberg advertising these demos.
The full-size photograph of the fileset from the Facebook post[3] by Jonas Öberg advertising these demos.

Track list

A WAV download of 2 minutes and 44 seconds of different demo excerpts compared to what was uploaded to SoundCloud was uploaded to MediaFire[4] and posted by wiki user Stonefaceblack on September 27, 2021.[5] A screenshot of the MediaFire download page is supplied in case the link becomes no longer available; according to MediaFire, the file was uploaded from a user in Israel on September 27, 2021 at 12:01pm (unknown timezone). This WAV compilation is poorly crossfaded and sounds to have some equalization applied to the audio. Based on spectrogram analysis, all songs are lossless, except for "Secret" which appears to have been lossy encoded. It can be streamed below; the file has not been re-encoded and is identical to the WAV file found at the MediaFire link.

Screenshot of MediaFire download link[4] for the 2:44 duration WAV excerpt of demos.

Audio contains excerpts of Welcome To My World, Heaven, Secret, Universe, Slow, Broken, Higher, Soothe, Happens, Always, Lot, and Schism.

45 second snippets from each song originally uploaded to SoundCloud[1] are streamable below.

Welcome To My World

Martin vocals.

Heaven

Martin vocals.

Secret

Dave vocals.

Universe

Martin vocals.

Slow

Martin vocals.

Broken

Dave vocals. This song has both a 45-second excerpt and a 2 minute, 46-second excerpt which was also uploaded then removed by the SoundCloud user "DMfanTrade" (user no longer exists as of 9/22/21) in August 2021; file captured by and provided courtesy of zzed101.

45-second snippet:

2 minute, 46 second snippet:

Also of note is a fan-edit of what seems to be the full demo track available on YouTube here. From a comment left on that video by the creator of the mix:

I got the actual (and rare) demo recording from a friend, but the sound quality was terrible, so I had to enhance the vocals and recreated the music, but left it very close to the original demo.

Higher

Dave vocals.

Soothe

Martin vocals.

Happens

Dave vocals.

Always

Martin vocals.

Lot

Dave vocals. Demo for All That's Mine.

Schism

Unreleased instrumental song.

Secret To The End (Rough 9 Oct 12)

Rough version, apparently very close sounding to the final version.

Universe (Ruff 3 Oct 12)

Rough version, apparently very close sounding to the final version.

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 SoundCloud playlist (no longer available) uploaded by SoundCloud user "DMfanTrade" (user no longer exists as of 9/22/21).
  2. 2.0 2.1 Home thread titled "where can we talk about demos of delta machines?"; thread no longer accessible as of September 21, 2021
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 Facebook post in public group Depeche Mode Original by Jonas Öberg (post inaccessible as of 9/25/21)
  4. 4.0 4.1 Original MediaFire download link posted by wiki user Stonefaceblack
  5. Delta Machine Demos - Revision as of 13:49, 27 September 2021 by Stonefaceblack - MediaFire link added to the bottom of the page.