Good evening everybody, today we’re taking a look back at Bucketheads darker, alter ego, Death Cube K.

In case you haven’t figured it out Death Cube K is an anagram of Buckethead. The name was given to Buckethead in 1994 by Keyboard magazine writer Tom Darter, who Buckethead knew through guitar player magazine.
At the time a certain record company thought they could get buckethead to do whatever they wanted, but, as we know, Buckethead does whatever Buckethead wants to do.

(Brain interview)
I think I went to the Sony offices with him and they were trying to get him to do a new school Frankenstein. But ya know, Buckethead likes to do his own thing because he’s such a true artist. He just does his thing, and I think that Sony thing scared him.I think he was like ‘wait, what? You want me to do what?’.

So, thanks to Sony Death Cube K was born and Buckethead could release an album without Sony filling their greedy pockets and turning our guitar hero into some sideshow joke.

When describing Death Cube K, Bucketheads website stated that “Death Cube K is a separate entity that looks like a photographic negative version of Buckethead with a "black chrome mask, just like Darth Vader." This apparition haunts Buckethead and appears in his nightmares.

An early sketch for a Death Cube K comic describes the moment Buckethead comes face to face with Death Cube K
‘I screamed and he stared, then he heard something’…..Standing behind him was a another one…in Black’.
Unfortunately we never got to see a Death Cube K comic…or the Death Cube K doll that was shown on Buckethead’s secret recipe dvd.

But, what we did get was 6 albums released over a 15 year span. The first release being ‘Dreamatoirum’ featuring Praxis founder and producer Bill Laswell, released on May 13th 1994, Bucketheads 25th Birthday.
The Death Cube K albums were primarily dark, ambient and occasionally unsettling. Similar to the Halloween Pike series Buckethead would later release in 2015.

Buckethead has never performed live under the name Death Cube K, but he has played the song ‘Tunnel’ from his 1999 album of the same name less than a handful of times.

New York Times bestselling author and friend of Bill Laswell, William Gibson would later use the Death Cube K moniker in his 1996 novel Idoru. In the Novel, Death Cube K is a bar in Tokyo Japan where strange things happen. Sounds about right.

With the last Death Cube K album being released in 2009 and Buckethead not having performed any of the songs in almost 20 years. It seems highly unlikely we’ll get another Death Cube K album or performance.
But with no record company breathing down Buckethads neck, and with him being well into his Pike album series, in the end it seems that Death Cube K no longer haunts Buckethead, instead they are one single entity.