Premature burial, as an idea, evolved from Joshua Heinrich's forays into experimental electronic music in college and studies of musique concrete and musique electronique. Initially emerging from the track "exctinction", an experimental dark soundscape composed and recorded in 1999 for a live group performance piece at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the on-again-off-again project eventually took on a new duality that blended processed orchestral instrumentation and sampling techniques with more tongue-in-cheek song-oriented material. The result was premature burial's debut album, flowers for the dead, with the band's somewhat dark name actually being an inside joke referring to the number of times the project was abandoned, reworked, and restarted.

With premature burial's second album, however, the project took on a life of its own along with a more serious and cohesive concept-driven style and instrumental sound that combined ambient, classical, industrial, rock, and world music elements. Centered around ideas including spirituality, searching for identity, historical events, and persecution, ritual became premature burial's most popular album and produced the cult hit "sacrifice", which has since appeared in film.

In 2002, flowers for the dead and ritual were reissued with additional artwork and bonus tracks (including material from Heinrich's score to the 2001 horror film The Strange). The reissues were followed by premature burial's third album, ruins, a second epic concept album that this time concentrated on violence and war, following civilization from the deaths of past cultures to the extinction of mankind in a bleak nuclear winter. While the melodic/orchestral elements of ritual were still firmly in place, ruins delved further into industrial/noise territory, portraying the album's later thematic content with relentless distorted percussion and bleak processed ambient noise as the world fell into disarray and violence.

In 2003, work began on a fourth premature burial album, titled nightfall, that was a concept album dealing with politics, the media, and false illusions of control and power. Recording sessions were soon abandoned, however, due to feelings that the material wasn't pushing the project forward musically, and premature burial was officially put to rest.

In October 2011, Autumnal Release released remastered versions of all 3 premature burial albums, including a 10th anniversary edition of ritual with bonus tracks that included an unreleased 2002 compilation track plus two of the previously unreleased songs intended for nightfall.

Akira Yamaoka, John Cage, Brian Eno, Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio, Frank Zappa, Pierre Schaeffer, Lydia Lunch, The Birthday Party, Lycia, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Joe LoDuca

Uhhmm..let see... Lots of various percussion instruments (some of which are not technically instruments), guitar, bass, violin and various other string instruments, flutes/woodwinds, various brass instruments, synths, samplers, various sound processing equipment, voice, a lot of other stuff (again, some of which probably wouldn't technically fall under the "instrument" category)