A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

##The Story of “Sisters of Death”

After the beauty of the sunset comes the beauty of twilight, and then full night. While L__ is used to the dark, the lit darkness of the world above is like nothing he has ever seen before. The great orb of fire in the sky is gone, and after it comes many smaller orbs of fire twinkling in the great distance, bathing everything he sees in a silver glow that, if possible, makes him want the world even more.

Then two large, pale, silver orbs rise. While as large as the sun of the daytime, they are dim, and the light they bring to the world inspires and fuels his will. As he gazes on them, he remembers the long-lost legend of the Sisters of Death…

Pale twin orbs swim through the oceans of night
Bound together in myth as in life
Your power flows from your silver rays through me
Filling me with strength and urge to kill

Phalarei
Celaeni
Bound together
Alive as Sisters of Death

The sisters, it is told, were sentenced to death just as L__ was, for murder of their own kind. They were so unspeakably evil, however, that even the sunlight would not kill them. They came to the surface and continued killing, building the legend of their own evil, until they were cast from the world into the sky, where they rise every night, killing the sun until morning, bringing their former home of darkness to the world of the surface.

Cast out, too, in ages now long past
Cursed to live alone, I feel your rage
From my heart within, your light without
If I kill like you, will I ascend?

Phalarei
Celaeni
Bound together, alive
Alive as Sisters of Death

The struggle is eternal, as every evening brings the Sisters to kill the daylight and sun, yet in morning they fall as the sun rises. However, if they had more power, they would kill the sun forever, and night would forever reign on the world…

Your silver beauty drives me to attain your immortality
I dream to float and rule the world from my skies
I will climb to heaven upon the deaths of those I hate
And all will be mine to destroy 
At my will

And so L__ sees himself as the fulfillment of this prophecy - that he must fight the world of light, and destroy it, to bring about the eternal night.

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##Writing “Sisters of Death”

This song started out with the clean guitar riff that opens the song. Most of my riffs up to that time were chords or notes, but arpeggios were something I never really wrote before, so I just started playing around on a D chord (tuned down a whole step, of course, so it’s pitched at C, but you know what I mean), playing the chord and then adding the minor sixth. It was never even a song at that point, really, just something to play for practice, until one day when I just came up with the little turnaround at the end. I still didn’t know what I would do with it, but I knew it was the start of something.

Sometime in December of 1996, when we were about to record Bellum for the first time, I worked out the basic story arc and decided to make this riff into the song for the Sisters. I started by just playing the riff clean, then droning on it with distortion. The drone didn’t really work for me, so I started hammering the chords instead and I could feel the basic start of the song. I knew I wanted something more ‘open’ and ringing. I think I was on a Candlemass kick at the time, and I liked the idea of the open, ringing chords interspersed with the riffs and letting the vocal melody carry the song. I also thought about having a grinding, steady type of bass line under it - so even though that didn’t get recorded until I did the album properly I had that in mind even as I wrote it. So, for the verses, I just used the main riff chords, but ringing.

The choruses came from my idea to modulate to a different key, somehow. In “D”, I used the minor second and third a lot in the base riff (D, Eb, and F), so I got this idea to stick with the Eb and F, but instead of D use Db - at that time, I liked to get a lot of mileage out of the half-step progressions. I guess I still do, but I digress. From listening to a lot of Burzum and Mayhem at the time, as well as just taking a nod from the main riff, I used the little trick for those chords of playing root-fifth and then root-minor sixth. I liked the sound of going from D to that Db part for the choruses that I just used a toggle between those two for the bridge part toward the end of the song.

When Paul and I first recorded this I didn’t know how I’d end it - I figured we’d just go out on a chorus after the bridge verse, but when I hit my ‘last’ chord, Paul kept playing, and gave me a nod that meant “keep going”… so, completely out of ideas, I started chugging on the D, then moving up, down, following Paul as he sped up, and then BOOM! - we hit the chorus again, faster, and ended from there. I liked the ad lib so much that I kept ad libbing and played the intro riff again to end it. As I’ve said before, but not often enough, Paul deserves at least as much credit as I do for a lot of these older Rampage songs - and the entire ending of “Sisters of Death” is a perfect example of what I mean.

It didn’t take too much to adapt this to the ‘full band’ for the proper recording, as I already had the bass lines and the intertwined verse chords worked out (if you listen closely, the two rhythms are actually playing different inversions of the same chords for a bigger sound). The lead melodies throughout came from me wanting to take a “Rainbow Skies” type of approach to beefing up the basic chord movement of the main riff - and I liked that little lead part so much I just worked it through most of the song, adapting it for the chorus as well as playing it through all the clean and main riffs.

(I don’t have too much to add to how I wrote this one, except that I wrote it in the car.

Paul lived in Savannah, which was about 4 hours from where I was living in Atlanta, and my wife Jackie and I would go down there to visit her brother, who also lived in Savannah, and so I would also make time to go see Paul. After our last session in June 1996 I knew we’d be down there again towards the end of the year, so I knew to write music in between so we’d have more to record - that’s the reference to working out the story arc in December ‘96, since we were going to visit Savannah after Christmas that year. I had the music basically done in my head, and the title and basic story arc, but I remember being on I-16, the single most boring stretch of Interstate highway in Georgia, and Jackie was driving while I was scribbling and tweaking lyrics in a little yellow steno pad I had cribbed from work. Not exactly the most ignoble way to work on a song that I’ve done, but close to it.)