CELTIC FROST Frontman Slams Germany's METAL HAMMER Magazine

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

"So, Metal Hammer, one of Germany's most important magazines for heavy music, published a prominent news item on CELTIC FROST in their most recent issue. No, we have not yet distributed an official press release, nor has anyone from Metal Hammer bothered to contact either one of the band members or CELTIC FROST's management. Instead, they read this blog. Come to think of it, 'read' might not be the appropriate term to use here. For to read something, you need to be able to actually understand the language it is written in. Unless, of course, you are content with not understanding even one single line, and, yet, still have a big mouth and announce to the world what you haven't understood.

"Empty pages need to filled, after all.

"Under the title of 'CELTIC FROST at a Dead End', the article makes reference to the information posted in this blog and states that the band is experiencing severe difficulties, that we have suffered disagreements with the producer of our album and have thus let him go, that work on the album has been interrupted until further notice and that the album's release is in jeopardy.

"Reading this piece of 'journalistic' smut several times, we cannot see how this possibly relates at all to the information in my blog. Particularly so as this blog is often very detailed and candid. The waste written in Metal Hammer's news item almost amounts to willful defamation.

"Not only are we working on the album more intensely than at any time since we began this project, but it is also coming together exactly as we had hoped it would, and we are getting very close to the final recording and mixing sessions. Not a single break or interruption is on the agenda until the album is finished in late summer. The songs sound precisely as we wanted them to sound. Moreover, our recent efforts to involve a co-producer for these sessions and the mixing are an entirely optional route. What's more, these efforts have apparently been successful. And I only write 'apparently' because nothing has been signed yet. We all know the music industry.

"We don't intend to relinquish control over the making of this album. We know exactly what we want our sound to be like. There cannot possibly be anybody in the world who understands heritage and rituals of this group better than we do. As I wrote on the H2CF board, the reason we have been talking to potential co-producers is that we are of course far from being faultless (and very obviously so) and that we have been perhaps too closely involved with the music for this album for too long. Involving a fresh and creative mind constitutes a necessary injection of objectivity. We believe that it is essential to be open to outside ideas, provided they suit our project and provided that we retain final decision power. And that we will.

"Note that we have not yet even worked with a co-producer on this album. Let alone having suffered problems with one during the recording process. Almost everything we have recorded so far was done by the band themselves and engineered by Erol.

"The so-called 'difficulties with our producer', as published in Metal Hammer, are therefore presumably the results of a ludicrously hamfisted attempt by the magazine to translate to German what I once wrote in my blog about a hapless applicant for the co-production job, whom I had called Sparrow-Hawk. Sparrow-Hawk, however, was just as impaired in his approach as Metal Hammer is now, which is why we never progressed to actually working together. And that's exactly what I wrote in my blog. For the literate, that is.

"One thing is certain, however: once the new album is out, there will be plenty of such published negligence. To state it nicely. Klaus Kinski, for example, put it slightly differently.

"In the meantime, in the real world, we have added female operatic vocals to 'Os Abysmi vel Daath', and the effect is eerie and radical. Cornelia, the singer who recorded with us, has a strong background in modern classical music, which is something we have never before attempted to combine with our music. The results are accordingly unorthodox, but I like the outcome a lot. We will hone these vocal lines a bit still and then have her also add some more harmonies. And for two weeks now we have worked on a completely new version of Martin's 'A Dying God coming into Human Flesh'. This is an unusual song, and Martin has also just recorded the lead vocals for it. I have been asked to also record a version of the lead vocals, and we will later decide as a band which take to pick. But I feel Martin's version contains emotions I will never be able to emulate."