CELTIC FROST: New Album Cover Art Complete

CELTIC FROST frontman Tom Gabriel Fischer has posted the following message on his official blog:

"Last night, at our rehearsal studio, Martin [Ain, bass] made the highly anticipated album artwork presentation to the group. Many months ago, he had shown us the original design for the front cover. It was a radical image, a collage of dark and confounding emotions, designed by Martin and a close friend of his, a graphic designer. Like most CELTIC FROST album cover art before, it wasn't easy to just digest it, but it was a new, visual, interpretation of our current music, and it all began to really come together in our minds. Just like the band's look, the lyrics or the very titles of the songs, the artwork is not simply an afterthought. It is a fundamental component to the album which we approach with as much conscientiousness as the music itself.

"Last Friday, on the occasion of our drummer Franco's birthday, Martin made an improvised and brief presentation of the by now substantially evolved album artwork. It was a bad idea, he didn't have the proper prints yet and much was still missing. But Franco — and frequently the rest of us too — had pressed him to show something, anything. I have to admit that I had a hard time at first imagining that what we saw would represent the new CELTIC FROST album to the world. I went home that Friday unable to stop my mind from working over the visuals I had seen. The evolved artwork now entailed merely the central detail of the artwork we had originally seen. I wasn't sure if this detail was too direct an image for a CELTIC FROST album. And I was unconvinced at first that the original CF logo, which Martin and the rest of the band had fervently insisted on bringing back, would suit the artwork. I had always been very skeptical of this logo to begin with, not least because it was me who designed it so many years ago.

"But last night, Martin properly hosted the long-anticipated event and presented us with an almost complete set of the artwork, including images of the individual members (one can lo longer refer to them as 'photos'),fold-outs, and CD print. Perhaps it was because seeing it all together provided the proper and essential context, perhaps it was because I had been processing it endlessly in my mind these past few days — but the artwork is stunning and effective. As all the designs were spread out on the floor, one could really see it all come together, yet another part of the project being put into its intended place. It added to the identity we had developed through our lives in the intervening years and through our new music, which has grown out of these very lives."