CELTIC FROST Frontman: 'We Started From Nothing And All We Had Was What Was Inside Us'
November 24, 2006The Associated Press recently conducted an interview with CELTIC FROST bassist Martin Eric Ain and frontman Tom Gabriel Fischer. A few excerpts from the chat follow:
On the band's comeback album, "Monotheist", which took four years to make:
Ain: "It wasn't only four years of writing the songs and recording the material. It was four years of becoming a band again, of reinventing CELTIC FROST in the new millennium."
On the songwriting process for the new CD, which required frontman Fischer and Ain to live up to their legacy and strengthen their friendship:
Ain: "There were a lot of demons that we thought we had banished that surfaced all of a sudden. They needed to be exorcised or at least evoked properly and were given form in a lot of songs."
Fischer: "It's not just one of our most personal albums. It is the personal album. [In past years the band was] too young to live through enough to be able to reveal ourselves as intimately as we do here."
On the band's early years:
Fischer: "We started from nothing and all we had was what was inside us. It was so improvised and desperate that we never thought people would pick up on it."
On finding an advocate in the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, who allowed them to use "Satan I," a provocative image of a demon using Christ's arms as a slingshot as the cover of "To Mega Therion" in 1985:
Ain: "We were completely stunned when he got back to us telling us that he could relate to the music, that he saw something of his art reflected in the music. That was one of the biggest boosts we've ever gotten artistically speaking, because back in those days ... a lot of the inspiration we got was from literature or art."
On "closing a circle" by touring with bands like Norway's 1349, who proudly cite them as an influence:
Fischer: "To me it's something very difficult because I look up to these bands. I don't care if they are 50 years old or 20 years old."
Read the entire interview at this location.
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