TOM GABRIEL FISCHER: 'CELTIC FROST Must Reappear The Right Way'

CELTIC FROST frontman Tom Gabriel Fischer has launched his official blog at this location. The blog will include very personal insights from Tom, including news on the recording of the new CELTIC FROST album. A couple of Tom's recent entries read as follows:

"[February 16, 2005] It was almost ten years after our decision to terminate CELTIC FROST when we began meeting again to talk seriously about writing and recording a new album. The seed for a new album had been planted during the extensive work for the 1999/2000 re-issue project. The atypical occurrence was that we didn't do this because some record company, management or promoter had offered us money for it. Quite the opposite: over the years, we have received countless proposals to reform, some of them extremely lucrative. But we turned down every single one. There have been instances (even very recently) when certain parties offer us an insane amount of money to play even one single show, but we have always declined because we didn't want to see CELTIC FROST, a band whose most classic moments are those of innovation, aggressiveness and courage, reduced to an oldies-but-goodies show. There is no question, we love CELTIC FROST's older music, and we will perform plenty of it in concert. But we don't believe a band like CELTIC FROST should be sustained merely on the strength of past achievements.

"We actually began working together again because we simply felt like it. Because we actually do love CELTIC FROST. Because our life, our existence has been shaped by CELTIC FROST, by the band's music, by the people we met through our work with the band. Because it always felt like CELTIC FROST's mission had not yet been fulfilled, by far, due to so many obstacles the group encountered the first time around."

"[April 3, 2005] We have been hosting an American engineer for a few days here in Zurich, with whom we talked about co-producing the final recording sessions as well as the mixing of the new CELTIC FROST album. It is the first time that we stepped out and played the music for the entire album to somebody outside the band. Not even our manager has yet heard that much new CELTIC FROST.

"The engineer, perhaps best called Sparrow-Hawk (for a reason),is quite accomplished and has been involved in major projects over the past 12 moths. His expertise is unquestionable. And yet I felt uneasy almost from the first minute. His capabilities and accomplishments are what we would have killed for in the early days. And yet, this Friday, we had a discussion for hours in our rehearsal studio about how to proceed during the actual recording sessions. Although I did understand his reasoning very well and agreed with it from a technical and professional standpoint, his approach all seemed so far removed from what CELTIC FROST must be, from what our ideology and our sound is. From our explosions of directness and rawness.

"I was professional but very frank, and so was he, and the rest of the band largely sat there in stunned silence. I believed I was defending the very heart and soul of the approach which made classic FROST albums such as 'To Mega Therion', 'Morbid Tales' and 'Into the Pandemonium' possible in the first place. I also merely kept to what we had been discussing and developing within the band for many months now. And still, I was apparently quite isolated with my concerns.

"We played for Sparrow-Hawk on Saturday, and we all went out for dinner and drinks later on. But there was this feeling of distance and, very subtly, a lack of mutual understanding. Perhaps this will be a loss of a huge opportunity. But we have worked so incredibly hard on this album, and we have only this one shot at getting it right. There have been too many instances when we have relinquished too much control, and the results were always utterly destructive.

"After so many years, CELTIC FROST must reappear the right way. And there are so many other well versed engineers out there."