CELTIC FROST Mainman Ventures To 'The Godless Rural Settings Of HELLHAMMER's Rise'

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

"In the course of the past three weeks, while working on the manuscript of the HELLHAMMER book, I ventured twice to the godless rural settings of HELLHAMMER's rise in the early 1980s. I encountered an area that had been changed, to the point of being mangled, by greed, ignorance, and egotism. This was hardly a revelation. I had always been made aware by the local inhabitants that they felt I was vastly mismatched among their mental and behavioral structures.

"It was an experience of distinctly mixed emotions and recollections to visit the places where, so many years ago, we enwrapped ourselves with the darkness of Hellhammer's music in order to seek distance from a world we detested and refused to surrender to. Now, it all seems dead. The aura of these locations, once so pronounced, has all but disappeared, in spite of the inherent personal history. The building under which we rehearsed, the paths we walked uncounted times, the spots in the forests where we took our earliest photographs, they are all lifeless now, and there exists no trace of the untamed fire that once affected everybody and everything around us.

"And yet it is alive within ourselves."

Check out Fischer's self-portrait, taken on the steps to the Grave Hill bunker, HELLHAMMER's former rehearsal room, Birchwil, Switzerland, October 26, 2007.

There exist countless HELLHAMMER demo bootlegs, but they all utterly fail to capture the true aura, to represent the band as it actually was. They have been compiled from dismal multi-generation copies of the original tapes, and they are invariably riddled with factual and historical errors or outright lies. Former HELLHAMMER members Tom Gabriel Fischer, Martin Eric Ain, and Steve Warrior have decided to rectify this situation once and for all. "Demon Entrails" is the first official release of the legendary HELLHAMMER demos "Death Fiend"/"Triumph of Death" and "Satanic Rites" since the original limited cassette editions in 1983.

This release has been specially re-mastered from copies of the original master tapes under the supervision of Tom Gabriel Fischer, and the demos now represent HELLHAMMER exactly as the band sounded when recording these songs in June and December of 1983. Drawing from a wealth of previously unknown historical material and artwork as well as hundreds of unreleased HELLHAMMER photos from 1982 to 1984, "Demon Entrails" will also feature all lyrics and essays detailing the individual demo recording sessions.

"Demon Entrails" will be released as an opulent oversized double CD and as a gatefold triple vinyl album. Both versions will feature a lavish booklet and a poster. There will also be a third, bare-bones low-price CD version, designed to cater to markets which will not carry the standard CD due to its irregular size.

The release is scheduled for February 2008, through Prowling Death Records/Century Media.

From the forthcoming book "Only Death is Real - An Illustrated History of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost", by Tom Gabriel Fischer:

"HELLHAMMER was much maligned, both during its existence and for years afterwards. It was maligned not only by much of the press and most of the metal audience, but also by me and several other former band members. It was, for a long time, difficult for most of us to come to terms with HELLHAMMER's often chaotic and radically varied legacy. Moreover, it was frequently very challenging to come to terms with how others interpreted HELLHAMMER and how they referred to and expanded upon what we had once created.

"It took years for the accumulated unease to subside. It took years to disassociate ourselves from the perceived stigma, and to be able to properly evaluate HELLHAMMER within our own, very personal context. What many others knew long before me took quite a while for me to identify: that it was perfectly fair and overdue that we looked at HELLHAMMER realistically and in a manner sufficiently dignified to do justice to the work of a number of very unique people who shared the same vision at a very unique point in time."