New song, now shows!

Hello out there,

real quick - we finally did a sort of online release of one of the songs from our upcoming album, which will most likely be delayed to mid-2016. After all, we're a merry round of busy bastards and have lot of things to do, musical and otherwise, that unfortunately tend to get in the way of recording and mixing an album. However, check out "A Whisper From The Concrete Below" either below or to your right, and drop by at bandcamp and download it. This song has replaced "Godhate" as a show opener since December last year.

Also, keep checking our concert dates - there are a few new ones.

All the worst,
Mithras

Hey out there,

this is Mithras. Been a while again, but we're still here and still busy. We recently did a few live shows, the first one with Solbrud from Denmark in a small little cellar in Frankfurt. I had driven all the way from Berlin to get there, as I was gigging with my other band and another side project, and Nihlathak was tired as fuck from a party the night before. The gig was pretty good though, but note the glitter curtain behind us on the - otherwise epic - pic below.

Dreikönnigskeller Frankfurt, March 2015.

Solbrud ripped it up that night as well, so all around a nice little underground black metal concert not too far away from home.

"Stuttgart, we are in you," April 2015

Back to rehearsals for a few weeks, before we took off for Stuttgart and Oberhausen in April. "Gaby's Gruft" in Stuttgart, were we opened for Pest Empire and Fortress Black (Narvik had canceled their appeareance. This was also the gig mentioned in the post earlier, that was supposed to be "boycotted" by the NSBM scene. Which as far as I know didn't have anything to do with Narvik's cancellation.), turned out to be a small Goth bar in a basement that smelled, to quote Nihlathak, "as if someone had wiped the floor with fucking onions." Not to mention it got worse once we lit up the frankincense, everyone in the audience was smoking, and Pest Empire started the hazer from hell, which led to visibility in there going down to zero. Anyways, a pretty good, if a bit sweaty and smelly, gig in the end with pretty good audience turn.out. It's really funny how different audiences react to the different parts of our songs... while in Frankfurt the d-beat and more thrashy parts really got people moving, Stuttgart's people seem to love the blast beats.

Gaby's Gruft, shredding for Satan...

... while trying not to hit our heads on the fucking chandelier.

After a long night drive back to Darmstadt and a good night's sleep, we loaded up again the next day for our gig in Oberhausen, supporting Thyrgrim and Northern Plague. Well, good venue, well-organized concert, just the attendance was sub-par, as Satyricon were basically playing next door. Actually, there was an okay amount of people, but they looked a bit lost in the large hall, and I guess our rock star friends from Thyrgrim were expecting a bit more. Anyway, nights like that happen to everyone - for us, it was totally fine, and we pulled off a short, but sweet show to pretty good audience reception. A necro-quality video of "Children of a Nuclear Dawn" was shot, see below. Sperrfeuer had some trouble with a sliding drum stool there, but it's still a pretty good live version - only that the sound quality is utter shite.

Fun fact of the night - one of our chandeliers was standing in the breeze caused by the stage ventilation. We had put new candles on it before the show, and after 35 minutes there was just a huge pool of wax on the floor, and the candles had vanished.

Anyways, got a speeding ticket on the way back to Darmstadt fro driving FUCKING 120 ON THE AUTOBAHN AT NIGHT. But all in all, a pretty good weekend with two good shows - it always feels best doing two or more shows in a row.

Currently, we've been rehearsing "Astronomy" a lot as Nihlathak and I will record vocals coming Tuesday. But I'll write more about that another time.

Stay tuned,
Mithras

Recordings in February

This is Mithras writing. Here’s a little studio report from our recent recordings. You might want to check Rene Hofmann's site out for more technical details as he may write something about the recordings as well one of these days.

After the recordings to our last album were a bit rushed due to lack of time and fuck-ups in the preparation phase, we decided to record our next album in several steps, the first of which was recording three songs a few weeks ago. We wanted, again, to record live, this time in our rehearsal room. Of course, we don’t want a rough rehearsal tape, so we recorded the basic tracks (bass / drums / guitar) live and fixed it up with guitar and vocal overdubs, the latter of which still have to be done. Producer of our choice is again Rene Hofmann, who specializes in recording bands in their rehearsal spaces.

Restringing

Setting up drums

We set up our stuff on a Sunday afternoon, kicked everything that was not needed out of the room, installed space dividers to keep crosstalk between the instruments down to a minimum, and covered everything up in molton. Thomas, the drummer of my other band Wight, showed up at some point to help us with the drum set up and to lend our drummer his snare, which is quite a work of art. We had a quick rehearsal afterwards and ran through all songs once again, before it was off for food, some beer and bed.

Rene joined us early Monday morning, and it took us until noon to complete the recording set up. Picture below shows Sperrfeuer in control of his and Nihlathak’s headphone mix, while I usually record without headphones.

Sperrfeuer Heretic in control of headphone mix

And off it was… the first song we recorded is called “A Whisper From The Concrete Below,” It  went in smooth and quickly, even though it contains a clean guitar part (something I notoriously suck at) and a bass solo (which we haven’t really done before either.) We decided to proceed directly to the next song, “Astronomy,” which goes back to lyrical and structural ideas by Sperrfeuer. Contrary to what some may think, it’s not always me who starts off a song, even though I do come up with most guitar riffs… or more like, the guitar riffs come up with me. This was supposed to be the “evil” song with intertwining extremely fast and very slow parts that aren’t that easy to get right, and quite technical riffing. Technical by my low standards, anyways. It is also in Drop C tuning, which we don’t usually use, and doesn’t work well with the Stratocaster I usually use. So I had to build myself a guitar from parts specifically for this song, which is the ash Strat with the solid rosewood neck you can see in some pictures. I ended up using it for almost all rhythm guitar overdubs in the end though, as it sounds quite fat.

Nihlathak tracking psychedelic bass madness

As expected, the song cost me a bit of nerve, and I did fuck up a lot. I eventually had to use FUCKING HEADPHONES while recording to get it right. However, Nihlathak and Sperrfeuer, who had been struggling with the song as well, were suddenly rock solid (read: better prepared than me), and we managed to get a good take of the entire thing after a while, albeit with some little guitar bits in dire need of editing.

Mithras overdubbing the fuck out of "Astronomy"

By this time, it was getting late and we started running out of energy, but after getting a bit of a reality check on my guitar playing, I wanted to end the day with something cool. So I went in and recorded a fuckload of lead guitar overdubs for a little bass/guitar harmony thing we have going on in “Astronomy.” Feeling all like Brian May, I could go home satisfied and have a few beers with Nihlathak, who was staying at my place for the recordings, as he lives a few kilometers away.

But really, “Astronomy” wasn’t all that bad. “Children Of A Nuclear Dawn,” which we have been playing live since, well, almost forever, proved to be a bitch to record. We should have thought of that before we came up with a 11 minute song that is mostly fast… anyways, it took quite a while to nail that motherfucker down, and because we can’t have our drummer blasting away for hours on end, we needed to give him a break. So the guys chilled (and bored) out on the sofa outside our room, while I went in to record guitar overdubs. That turned out to be relatively easy, with actually a lot of one-takes on the rhythm guitar parts, but a lot more takes for the solo guitars. Turns out, the two guitars I have fit together very well and provide a very full sound. I can assure you, the recordings already sound better than the last album… which is true for bass and drums as well.

Playing "Children Of A Nuclear Dawn" for the 57th time

So, after Sperrfeuer had relaxed and recovered a bit, we recorded the missing parts of “Children…”, and I completed overdubs for that song as well. Done. Now, Nihlathak and I need to go to Rene’s Wasted Life Studio to record vocals sometime during the next weeks, and we hope to maybe release one of the recorded songs in advance. Meanwhile, we’re working on more songs for the album. All the basic stuff has been written already, but we need to learn or re-learn a lot of it, clean up some lyrics and arrangements, fix up solos etc. We will definitely record the rest of the album this year, and then we’ll see how and when we release it. It’s going to be a while, but mark my words, it will be worth the time spent waiting. We hope to present a few more songs of the new album during our next live shows (we already did a few at our recent gigs.) So I’d advise you to move your ass there to get a bit of a preview.

Upcoming live shows + nazi asshattery

Ave,

this is Mithras. We have a few gigs upcoming, which we look forward to:

29th of March in Frankfurt/Main with Solbrud from Denmark
10th of April in Stuttgart with Narvik, Fortress Black and Pest Empire

The wannabe trueness police clowns over at Mr. Zurawinski's infamous internet tough guy site have already started crying over the "NSBM FUCK YOU" on the poster of the Stuttgart concert and labeled us "leftist faggots". So be it, we don't need you idiots around, stay home and fuck yourself in the neck with a rusty knife.

We're already blacklisted by quite a few black metal promoters in South West Germany due to our refusal to play with NS bands anyway... but luckily, there's also a large black metal underground that doesn't have anything to do with far right idiocy. This should be about Satan, the left hand path and being able to do whatever the fuck you want, not about Hitler, the right arm path (ba dum tss) and being told what to do. The Luciferian light has no colour or race.

To end this with a quote: "WE TELL, WE ARE NOT TOLD!"

This is South Hessian Black Metal, fuck everyone.

Busy days

Hello folks,

we'll be having a nice little concert on January 31st in our hometown, be there! Our friends from geÄst were supposed to support us, but couldn't make it because their drummer left the band. They're looking for a new guy - maybe you - and will definitely join us for some future gigs once the problem is solved. Doom/sludge lords hessaja will fill in for them. Also, Thakandar from Osnabrück, an obscure and criminally underrated black/death metak quintett, will join us as a special guest. Do not miss their show, as they only play about once or twice a year these days, and they're actually really good.

Furthermore, we'll have a first recoding session for the next album in early February, as well as another gig on March 29th in Frankfurt, supporting Solbrud from Copenhagen, Danmark.

We have also joined Undergrounded's band support, so we hope to kick some more asses this year. 

Here's to 2015!

Come forth the end-of-year rant!

Only that there will be none this year, as nobody has managed to piss me off recently enough to justify ranting and rambling. I'll take a short moment and reflect on how 2014 has been going for us, though.

Basically, we have played only a few live gigs and spent most of the time in our rehearsal space. It's not exactly been a busy year, but a very creative one, and we have managed to come up with almost an hour's worth of songs. We'll be recording some of them in early February, the rest will follow as soon as we have time, money and the ability to play them flawlessly. As much as I still think the (much criticized) harsh and dirty sound on our last album was the right choice for those songs, I think we will take a slightly different approach this time. We will still record live in the studio, but our new stuff has turned out to be a bit more intricate and complicated songwriting-wise, so they deserve a sound that's a bit "cleaner."

Speaking of songwriting - have I mentioned before that we're actually working on a kind of concept album? Not that we have some kind of storyline, but the lyrics are a lot more connected this time, as opposed to the last album, where I wrote them over a period of 5 years. From the arising world political situation at the time (mind you, BEFORE the Ukraine and IS clusterfucks) we decided to deal with the topic of dystopia and the decay of industrialized societies. It's probably been done to death before, but we'll present our take, dealing with the shit that's been going on and a left hand path view on it. Hopefully without delving into horror-movie-we're-all-gonna-die-covered-in-blisters-and-fistraped-by-demons scenarios.

And we're quite serious about it... I mean, I personally don't expect a thermonuclear apocalypse anytime soon (which is why it's not really appearing on our album either), but the party as we know it might definitely be over within our lifetime. Now you decide whether that's a good or a bad thing, opinions on that probably even vary within the band. Which is reflected in the lyrics, which I didn't write all alone this time.

Anyways, stay tuned and visit us at our concert on January 31st in Darmstadt, we'll already be presenting a few songs off the upcoming album there.

I close this with a thank you to my band mates who have worked with me tirelessly to craft one after the other piece of black art. 2015 will stand in the sign of the Tyrant. Now, enjoy New Year's Eve, everyone.

THIS IS SOUTH HESSIAN BLACK METAL - FUCK EVERYONE!!!

-Mithras