Devilution rots, but crimson frost re-sprouts
posted on 04 Aug 2006 under category History
Devilution, the release that would have compiled the four Crimson Frost tracks, four songs from the Displeasures… EP, and the Websingle, was conceived when Evil Edith of SJP offered to release us in February 2005. By June 2005, as I described before, she lost her dedication, and rather than continuing to talk her back into a release she originally suggested, we decided to say ‘fuck it’ and do it ourselves.
It was at the worst possible time for us, though. Through the past year I’d been working hard on the ‘home stretch’ for getting Death Beast released on Barbarian Wrath. Writing, recording, mixing, getting the artwork and masters together, and all that kind of thing ate up most of my free time. Business was picking up as well, and Aerik had just graduated and so was in the throes of moving to the big city and looking for work. Neither of us had time to do any more recording or working on other Rampage projects, and neither of us had time or much inclination to search for another label. We did talk to a couple, but everyone else’s release schedule was full. Though, in checking, waiting while they checked, and the eternal volley of contact, that ate up nearly six months - so from June to December the album just sat in mothballs.
Then, as always, Aerik had a great idea.
Much like the first time, he just e-mailed me out of the blue. “Let’s release Crimson Frost - do it like this:
“And maybe add the websingle tracks as bonus tracks”
Now, this was the first time I ever heard of the title “The Winter of Damned Souls”, and it may not seem like much to just add an intro and outro to an EP, but for some reason his urgency and the excellent title he picked inspired me.
By that time I had just gotten my new Strat, so I started thinking about what to do for an intro - and then it hit me. Remember how I said I built the intro/lead line in the song “Crimson Frost” from an old clean-guitar riff I had that never went anywhere? Since it was just two alternating riffs, I thought I could just repeat those a few times, add a lead, and voila - INTRO! Then I had the idea to do the same thing again, but with a distorted guitar and a slightly different lead, and use that as the ‘reprise’ for the outro.
It took me maybe 30 minutes to get them both recorded and mixed. I used the Strat for the clean intro, setting the pickup switch to that ‘out of phase’ setting Mark Knopfler liked so much. I dialed up a nice clean sound with some chorus and then played it - only using a pick for the rhythm, while using fingerpicking for the lead line. It was in standard tuning, which also offset against the main album which is in my ‘normal’ D tuning. For the outro I dialed up a heavy distortion sound with some pretty dense chorus and a touch of delay, and used my SG. At the time I was also recording the Misogyny 2 EP, and that one is down another half step, in C#, so again the outro tuning is different from the body of the album.
(The first time I originally wrote this post, I had the benefit of having blogged that whole year, which you’ll notice is the first year or two of this very blog’s posts. Rather than do the recursive history thing, you can just go back and use the events above to target the time period and see what was keeping me so busy.
I look back at it now, and I am amazed not by how much I remember, but how much I forgot. And I’m not trying to do that faux-depth-by-paradox thing. I remember now that at the time I was really busy with the shop - I still have the excel files of all my orders, my monthly bookkeeping payments and trade shipments, all of the business end of the files. I have all of the emails archived, somewhere. And even now, while my studio room looks much different from the way it did back then, I can still see the checkered rug on the floor and instantly go back to my monthly inventory counts, I can still remember cutting boxes and UHR album covers, wrapping and packing up orders, noting addresses to print out labels for the next day at work… I remember snippets of a lot of the actions of doing things. But I can still see a name of someone who has sent me hundreds of dollars of orders over those years and still go ‘wait, do I know who that is…? I know that name from somewhere….’.
Memory is strange that way - sometimes the narrative disappears and all you remember are the little details, but still from those details you get the mental or emotional core of the story. Sometimes the details disappear, but you still remember how you got there by the story you tell yourself about what you did. In a way, this blog does both, but at different times.
I should also tell about Iron Witch, another one of those dead-ends that could have gone somewhere neat…)