Crimson frost, phase 1 - new world blasphemy
posted on 03 Feb 2006 under category History
I started recording the Rampage material that I had written between 1993 and 1998 in January 1998. By that time I had been into this newer wave of black metal for a few years, picked up most of the bigger-name classics (De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Transilvanian Hunger, Pure Holocaust, Vampires of Black Imperial Blood, etc.), and decided I wanted to try moving in this direction. Since I had three and a half albums of songs backlogged already, I thought I would just bash out what I had quickly while I spent time writing and thinking up ideas for this newer black metal stuff. By Halloween 1998 I had knocked out the first Misogyny EP and This End Up, and started work on Doom Metal. In my series on the Doom Metal album and what would become Monolith to an Abandoned Past, I talked about how I finished that first song (the song “Doom Metal”), heard the improvements I’d made in production and sound techniques, and decided I wanted to do Bellum Infinitum instead. There were a couple of smaller factors here that played into it all. First, I was impatient - I wanted all my old stuff done so I could get to the new black metal stuff. Second, Bellum was a completely finished album, while I still had two or three songs to write for Doom Metal. Third, I was getting into some of the more epic side of black metal then (Graveland, most notably), and while the styles are different, the mindset and mood of Bellum is closer to this type of black metal than the Doom Metal stuff is.
To help assuage my impatience, I knocked out that Immortal cover in an afternoon, then started working on Bellum. Also in there was that Darkthrone track for the Destr0y Productions tribute, so that helped as well. But once Bellum was out the door, it got worse.
I had agreed to that split tribute to Hellhammer, but most of 2000 was me wasting time trying to write black metal and getting mostly nowhere, trying to finish the Doom Metal stuff and getting nowhere, and pushing UHR and Bloody Leg Studios out of sheer frustration. While my other activities got far ahead in 2000, Rampage didn’t do much of anything.
So, by the beginning of 2001, I was adamant about changing that. To that end, I started seeking out more black metal bands to get on UHR, and maybe work out some kind of split, thinking that would encourage me to get stuff written. I met the guys from Enbilulugugal, Chernobog, Cross Sodomy, Black Torment, and a few other USBM bands, and eventually got the New World Blasphemy split worked out between Cross Sodomy, Song of Melkor, and Rampage.
I was just moving from one house to another in December 2000, and the last thing I did in the old house was the recording for the Hellhammer tribute. In 2001, once in the new house, I upgraded my computer, and then found I had to upgrade my soundcard and software, and in the playing around while waiting for those shipments was when I stumbled across the song pieces that would form the two songs Rampage recorded for New World Blasphemy. I’ll tackle each song individually in separate entries, though both were basically written and recorded concurrently in March-April of 2001.
(Also not mentioned above, for the summer after finishing Bellum Infinitum, I spent several months doing preproduction and then recording and production of the Festering Sore album. I really need to integrate this part of my past into the greater history. Someday.)