CELTIC FROST Mainman: 'We Are Opening Ourselves On So Many Levels On This Album'

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

"Sleepless, still. For weeks and weeks. Days and nights blend into one giant blur of feelings and impressions and sounds and creations and images of a personal abyss. This album keeps biting back at me, and it is doing so until the very last day of its gestation.

"What happens after that, I don't even want to imagine.

"As if they were gargantuan waves of an angry, bottomless ocean, so crash the emotions upon us and our existence here on this foreign soil. The production is often very difficult, but always an addiction from which there leads no way to anywhere. We are opening ourselves on so many levels on this album that it makes us at the same time extremely vulnerable, in spite of the ferociousness and darkness of our music. And ferociousness comes in many shapes.

"Is it stupidity, shortsightedness, ignorance, that keeps me from leaving here, and leaving instantly, from abandoning this storm which threatens at every given moment to consume me, to destroy me? Or is it professionalism, determination, vision? I can't decide. What I know is that what is happening here is CELTIC FROST, in all its characteristic and parallel beauty and destructiveness. It is us. It is me. And that is perhaps more than I can bear.

"As the days turn into long nights, we struggle to comprehend all that is taking place, now that the final chapter in the making of this new music has been embarked upon. It is not a week since the orchestra was here at the studio to record 'Winter', the third part of my Requiem which I began at the very same location, in 1987. And there was the choir, summoned to record for two of Martin's hymns which are so similar and yet so radically different at the same time. And 'Drown in Ashes', the song I originally wrote for CELTIC FROST years ago, has become so haunting, one of the calm islands of beauty in this storm of heaviness and uncontained ideas.

"Peter [Tägtgren, co-producer] told me last night: 'I knew right from the first meeting with the band that this production wouldn't be an easy one.' And, in spite of the truth in this statement, he meant this as a compliment. We both looked at each other today after a draft mix listening session and knew that this is an album unlike any other. Fans, friends, and peers have been visiting the studio during the past weeks, and they always leave here in utter astonishment. I don't know what they expected. Or had they been afraid of what they might get to hear? Surprise, excitement, and relief seem to merge into one and the same expression.

"Some in the band, and some in the band's management, have asked me to refrain from writing too much and too often in this blog — and elsewhere — in order to preserve some of the mysteriousness that surrounds this band and this production. But I disagree, and I want to write. The riddle that is this group is not something that needs to be artificially contrived or nurtured. It is something that has continuously defied even our very own attempts to dechiphre it. And my writing here is hardly so pedantic and detailed as to reveal 'too much' of the personal inner workings which propel what is taking place within CELTIC FROST. On the contrary, I strongly feel that it would be unwise and utterly ungrateful to cease providing this platform of information to those who make all these grand concepts possible in the first place: our audience.

"And so show the reactions I receive every single day."