Fast forward to crimson frost, pt. 2
posted on 09 Jun 2006 under category History
In 2004, Aerik joined Rampage, reinvigorating the band and my interest in making music, and after Displeasures… I realized that my earlier rock-solid insistence on doing a ‘black metal’ album at all costs was doing just that - costing me all. And it was mainly talking to Aerik that made me realize this, which is why I thought it was weird when in late 2004 he said “Dude, I have a great idea for a new release - CRIMSON FROST.” It was his reasoning that showed me how savvy he really was at this sort of thing. He noted that I talked about Crimson Frost for quite a long time, so people knew it existed in some form and therefore bringing it to realization would be a big move. The twist to it, though, is that people wouldn’t know quite what to expect since it would have Aerik’s input on it.
Also, it wouldn’t require a huge investment of mental resources. As you all know, he prefers shorter releases, so his idea was great: re-do the two tracks from New World Blasphemy and add one or two new ones. He already had ideas for a title track “Crimson Frost”, and he could easily write more. We talked about adding some covers by Mayhem and/or Judas Priest, or maybe re-doing some of his Lunatic Hymn songs as Rampage songs, but none of that felt right. Eventually he hit on the magic formula: he was a big fan of UHR labelmates Gomorrah, and as a tribute to the band (which had recently ended when the members committed suicide) he wanted to rerecord one of their songs - or, properly, re-interpret it. He liked the driving sound of “Lucifer, Our Father”, it was easy enough for us to figure out, and since Aerik intended on completely writing new lyrics from scratch he liked that title as a new starting point. So, quickly, we had our four songs picked out.
The ideas didn’t stop there, though - somehow in the discussion of the Gomorrah song it came up that Dante from Eyes of Ligeia had just bought a drum kit. We intended to jam together at some point and do something with it (perhaps a lo-fi black metal thing similar to Gomorrah), but then Aerik suggested we see if he could do the drums on that one new-cover of “Lucifer Our Father”. In talking with Dante, we realized that we could go one better, and actually have him do live drums for ALL the songs. Shocked and surprised that things seemed to fall together so well, we proceeded quickly for the planning, lyric writing and music arrangement for the new material, and then over December 2004 and January 2005 we knocked out the four songs that would comprise the core of Crimson Frost. We were set to work out the release on UHR almost as quickly, getting the disc out there early in 2005, but Fate realized she’d been asleep on the job of fucking with Rampage, and so she struck back with a vengeance…
But we’ll get to that tale after we discuss the songs for Crimson Frost first.
(Of course, the cat is now out of the bag with regards to Gomorrah, so perhaps the above should be reworded that the members of Gomorrah died by cancer of the pseudonym. Aerik, of course, knew it was us all along, and we liked doing the boombox basement black metal recordings, but Toby had also been doing better, more clean and pro-sounding drum recordings for Eyes of Ligeia, so we wanted something more in that vein of sound. As you can hear, the results were quite good. It’s a shame we never got those covers recorded, but I’m happy with what we got.)