CELTIC FROST Frontman: 'I Have Never Claimed To Be A Pleasant Person'

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

"CELTIC FROST was not formed to please everybody. I have never claimed to be a pleasant person. And the reactions of those who expect otherwise are bemusing.

"If anything, CELTIC FROST exists to achieve the opposite of pleasing everybody. There are enough conformists as is. Even — or particularly — in heavy metal. I am continuously being asked how the metal scene has changed over the years. The truth is, very little has changed. Yes, the internet exists and computer technology dominates recording studios and art departments, but the psychological geography and the dynamics of the scene and industry are exactly the same as they were when I began with Hellhammer a long time ago, when CELTIC FROST self-terminated years later, and when I was part of the APOLLYON SUN project yet later again. A scene, a music, which at its birth was revolutionary and at least in part infused with the indispensably provocative byproducts of the youth upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s has become conservative to a distressing degree. By and large, it consists of perpetual copying and self-repetition.

"CELTIC FROST, by design, is a confrontational project. Or else the group loses its prime legitimation to exist. If some don't feel pleased by that, so be it. Instead of lamenting, maybe they ought to consider investing their thus wasted energy into actual projects of their own, into at least an attempt at originality, and into trying and persisting as Martin [Ain, bass] and I have done since we began to play together in 1983.

"'Monotheist' has become what is perhaps the most profusely public CELTIC FROST album ever. The overwhelming acceptance of both the album and the band's return has made us feel deeply and humbly honored. And yet, in the aftermath of the release of 'Monotheist', it seems to be impossible for some to accept, much less to comprehend, that a band would actually go and record an album without aligning itself with what is trendy right now or what was important in the band's past. That a band would actually lock itself away to simply record the album that gestated inside of the minds and emotions of the band members without constantly listening to other bands in order to copy what is the tenor of the times. Uncounted motives, links, and intentions have been implied, insinuated, and interpreted into our proceedings, almost exclusively by individuals who haven't got the faintest idea what drives this band or who we are as people. Such reactions are, to some extent, also a geographical phenomenon. As has been a tradition ever since the inception of this band.

"I have never attempted to fit in, not in my private life nor musically. I couldn't give a lesser toss about fitting in. Fitting in, to me, is the manifestation into flesh of surrendering as an individual. If anything, the writing, recording, mixing, and consuming of 'Monotheist' invoked an intense and intimate darkness inside of me that was deeply reminiscent of what 'To Mega Therion' conjured for me, so many years ago. But that is just my own personal and subjective experience. It is also something that neither I nor anybody else could ever plan or intentionally duplicate."