CELTIC FROST: New Album To Be Mastered This Week

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

"Walking the last few hundred yards towards my home after the final intensive sessions at Oakland Recording couldn't have been more symbolic. Gusts of wind from an approaching storm were bending the trees on both sides of my path, and low, dark grey clouds raced across the sky, swallowing the bleak, fading fall light as cold, tiny droplets of impending rain hit the skin of my face. As if a harbinger of the reactions to the work we had at long last just concluded. My MP3 player had launched into playing NEIL YOUNG's 1969 recording of 'Running Dry', the title of which describes my current state to perfection.

"I am utterly spent, exhausted physically and mentally, although now in a state of strange calm, contentment, and tranquility. How good it felt to leave the studio this evening, knowing I will not have to go back to work on this album again. At last. At last!

"This Schweizer, the assistant engineer in these final sessions, a death metal singer in his own right, said that it had become an album that grows and reveals new things with each listen. His face, his voice, revealed appreciation, astonishment, and bewilderment, all at the same time. It was the same with Walter, our close friend and CELTIC FROST's engineer for so many years, who, theoretically, should be used to our immoderation by now.

"The album will be mastered at the end of this coming week, and it will then pass into the hands of our management. Our work on its music has come to a conclusion, finally, after years of writing, rehearsing, demoing, discarding, recording. And not a week, a day, an hour, a minute too soon.

"But I'm pleased, although far too worn out to be jubilant. It is pretty much as it needs to be. Who knows whether anybody else out there will like this album or not. And some will hate it with a passion. They probably already hate it now, before hearing it. Makes me chuckle. The situation now feels so much like the first Hellhammer demo, which we knew would provoke radically divided reactions.

"But it is as it needs to be."

As previously reported, CELTIC FROST have set "Dark Matter Manifest" as the tentative title of their first album in 13 years. The culmination of some three and a half years of songwriting and recording work, the album was largely produced by the band themselves and financed by their own production company, with additional assistance from HYPOCRISY/PAIN mastermind Peter Tägtgren during the final recording and mixing sessions at Horus Sound Studio in Hanover, Germany. Negotiations with a variety of labels are currently underway, and the album is scheduled for a release in early 2006. Original CELTIC FROST members Tom Gabriel Fischer (voice and guitars) and Martin Eric Ain (bass) are joined by Erol Unala (guitar) and Franco Sesa (drums). The band are now managed by Antje Lange for The A Label in Berlin, Germany.