Self portrait of the author of this blog, replete with inner demons, while sketching lyrics for the song "Shatter" under the open sky, in the endless fields and forests in the countryside near Schatzhofen, Bavaria, August 28, 2009.
The initial ideas for Triptykon's "Eparistera Daimones" album first began to take shape shortly after Celtic Frost's last album, "Monotheist", was released in May 2006. Actually, perhaps even before that date - there emerged so many musical and lyrical ideas during the protracted gestation of "Monotheist" that it became impossible to see them all realized on just that one album.
In the course of 2007, during breaks in Celtic Frost’s "Monotheist" tour, many of these early ideas and concepts further evolved. I played first musical sketches for the band during what would later turn out to be the final few Celtic Frost rehearsal sessions, and I wrote a number of initial draft lyrics. As the situation within Celtic Frost deteriorated, torrents of darkness and rage began cascading within me.
While working in the studio in Norway with 1349 at various times in early 2008, more ideas arose. The studio, a converted barn in the remoteness of Toten, was surrounded by vast, murky forests. The days brought only a few short hours of light and the nights were pitch black, and everything was covered by what seemed like perpetual, frozen snow. The messages and phone calls arriving from back home made it unmistakably clear that Celtic Frost was headed towards an irrevocable, miserable demise. I eventually flew back to Zurich with much new material, among it a first draft of the lyrics and music for "The Prolonging" - itself in many ways a digest of the human delusion and animosity that caused such destruction to something that once was sacred to us.
Months of instability, uncertainty, and darkness were to follow.
As Triptykon subsequently rose from the carcass of Celtic Frost, I began work in earnest on the many fragments that once were to be part of Celtic Frost’s next album. In due course, we made this album our own entirely. I did not intend this production to take the five years that "Monotheist" had consumed. But the album we had in mind was neither an easy one nor any less ambitious. This meant dedicating myself to this album unconditionally and comprehensively. And it included the finishing of the lyrics.
I was initially very hesitant to allow myself to be fully immersed into the lyrics, to be thus dragged back into the shadows past. I avoided it for months, even though I desired to deal with it and knew it was utterly necessary to complete the album the way it needed to be completed. But once I opened myself to the darkness, it became overwhelming. I became enwrapped in it, virtually obsessed. For almost year, there no longer were any days not dedicated to the music and any nights not devoted to the lyrics.
There was the late night when I walked towards the dense woods near my home. There was no moon, and the outline of the forest was a mere black shade against more blackness above, which appeared almost like a hole in the sky without any stars, as I had once before experienced it during a winter night in Norway. And yet the darkness seemed to merge with the crowns of the trees, an all enwrapping, cold, deep void that became so physical that it encumbered me and inhibited my breathing, imagined or otherwise. And, like it once happened on Hellhammer’s "Apocalyptic Raids" and Celtic Frosts’ "Morbid Tales", the album, a significant part of it, became drenched in misanthropy, hatred, detestation, and revulsion. Revulsion against mankind, organized religion, greed, defamation, betrayal, megalomania. And the one who destroyed Celtic Frost.
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