It's a project over three decades in the making for extreme metal legend Tom G. Warrior.
Founding member and creative force behind pioneering Swiss trailblazers Celtic Frost and Triptykon, Warrior had the opportunity to finish a chapter of his career that began on Celtic Frost's 1987 album Into The Pandemonium, ran through the groups swan song Monotheist, and culminated at the 2019 Roadburn Festival.
Triptykon's Requiem (Live at Roadburn 2019) is the end game, the full painting of the decades spanning project that includes part 1 "Rex Irae", the new, epic and never before heard "Grave Eternal" and 2006's "Winter", all performed live before a rabid audience at one of metal's most eclectic and in-demand festivals with full classical orchestration by the Dutch Metropole Orkest.
Tom G. Warrior caught up with Metal Injection to dive deep into the passion project release Requiem (Live at Roadburn 2019), bouncing back from failures, the lasting legacy of Celtic Frost, forthcoming Triptykon studio album and his defining records that shaped him.
On Completing Requiem
Well, of course it's a significant achievement for us all to to see this finished after 30 years. What can I say? It's a deeply personal project. And due to Martin Eric Ain's death, and Martin being by my side when we started this project in 86, it has become even more extraordinary and more personal. And now the whole thing coming out as a live album during a pandemic, it's quite exceptional because of the nature of the piece, of course, being a requiem. It's morbidly fitting, I guess.
On the Genesis of Requiem at Roadburn 2019
Originally the very young and naive Tom Warrior and Martin Ain wanted to finish this in the 1980s and we thought that it would be finished within two or three years and then we perform it and releases an E.P. But then the band imploded at the end of 1987. And it would take many, many years until we reconvened in the early 2000s in some sort of meaningful lineup. And of course, one of the first things we talked about was to complete the Requiem, which is why we worked on yet another part of it when we released Monotheist album. But then, as tradition has it with Celtic Frost, the band imploded again.
But I always intended to finally finish this piece with Triptykon, because to me Triptykon was very much the successor to Celtic Frost in so many ways. But I wanted Triptykon to have a chance to establish itself as its own band before it was going to tackle such big Celtic Frost projects. So I thought maybe we'll do it in the third or fourth Triptykon album.
But then in early 2017 Walter, the organizer of the Roadburn Festival contacted me and told me that they wanted to introduce a new event at the festival, namely a collaboration between classical music and heavy metal. And since he knew that I had worked with classical musicians since the mid 80s with Celtic Frost, he asked me if I would be interested and I told him why don't we combine the two ideas? Why don't we do the Requiem at Roadburn? And he was very excited about the idea. That's why the timing happened like this and that's why we selected this festival. And I have to say, Roadburn, like you say, it's a very special festival. I think it's the perfect venue for something like this. It's not an overly commercialialized festival. It's not a huge commercial operation. It's a festival far more focused on art and some unusual performances. So I had no hesitation in doing this at Roadburn and I thought it was probably the best festival we could have chosen for this.
On His Personal Reaction to the Project
Given all the circumstances and given the period of my life that was in and all the things that I cannot control, I'm very happy with the way it came out. It was a very complex project, like you said. All in all from me starting to finish the second part of the Requiem to the finished artwork of the album, it's a timeframe of about two years of literally continuous work on this project. So given the size of this project and the complexity I'm very, very happy. And even the live recording with all the limitations that you experience when you record something live, I'm fairly happy with the mix we achieved on the sound and everything.
On Roadburn Festival
That festival is not geared towards commercial maximization of profit and everything. The festival is rather focused on maximizing art, and I'm not talking about pretentious art. I'm talking about bands that are slightly new, or a slightly unusual or slightly more underground. The organisers of the festival really focus on assembling something very interesting regardless of ticket sales and so on. There's some other famous European festivals that are like a supermarket. There's a wrestling village and a children's village and so on, which of course has its justification within the frame.
But Roadburn is really about music, art, discovering new things, and that attracts a very special audience. Of course, it's not just the festival itself, but because of the nature of the festival you also have a different, distinctly mixed audience that is very open, very curious to learn and to make new experiences. And that's why going with a more experimental piece like Requiem, I think, would have been very misplaced in Wacken for example. But Roadburn is perfect for this.
On Embracing & Learning from Failure
My failures really have been failures. And of course I don't shy away from admitting that. I actually think that I grew far more from the failures than from the successes. I think the failures were very humbling, important experiences in my life that made me much more mature than the successes did. And maybe people think I'm just saying that to avoid blame, but I actually think the failures were very necessary.
If you choose a path like we chose in Celtic Frost and Triptykon where you don't do a run of the mill kind of music, but you try to choose to do something different, for better or for worse, then it has to be mountains and valleys. It's completely unrealistic to expect something else. If you abandon the secure path then you have to be prepared for this insecurity. Like I said, it's a maturing experience. To me music is art. Art has never been playing it safe. It has never been just photocopying yourself or somebody else. Art to me has always been sometimes risking your career and looking beyond the surface and going really out there, for better or for worse. So I really have no problem embracing both sides of this path, the good and the bad side. The positive thing that you can take away from the failures, the stuff that you learn and that you should analyze yourself, is a very healthy experience.
On the Legacy of Celtic Frost
Of course I look back on that and so did Martin. We talked about that many times, but we didn't look back in the self-aggrandizing manner. We looked at it much more with surprise and humbleness because none of us could have ever known that these albums would become what you and our audience call classics. It's an immense honor if somebody bestows that title upon the work of a musician. And we felt overwhelmed and surprised and honored and happy that some of our works are rated classics.
Of course you look back on that because they're classics in a way for us too. They mark very important steps in our lives. They mark times when we gathered a lot of experience in the studio, when we matured as musicians, where we tried out new things and when we were granted to work within a very magical lineup. These are all things that are far from given, far from guaranteed. And it's a privilege to be involved with that. We always looked at it that way.
On His Defining Metal Albums
Well, for me personally, it's nothing too surprising. It's pretty much the standards. I would say three albums were extremely important to me for becoming who I am now. The very first album would be Black Sabbath Volume IV, which in 1975 when I discovered this as a young teenager, it was world shattering. It was something I'd never heard before. The darkness and the heaviness of the music was a discovery that I first had to learn to live with.
And then of course later the modernized version of it, the first Angel Witch album was also a milestone for me. And then of course the first Venom album. Taking the concept of Black Sabbath and Angel Witch even a step further and making it even more extreme. I think those would be the three albums that I would list as the albums that set the gate for my career or my path in music. There's many, many more, of course, but these are really the most important ones.
On Upcoming Triptykon Album
It's very overdue. Requiem hasn't helped. We had to sideline the new studio album for two years. We had already started working on it and we had to pause that again because there was no way, of course, that we could have turned down Roadburn. And this is an enormous opportunity to do the Requeim on such a level. But yes, we are working on the new studio album. And I'm very hopeful that we finish it this year and that even if the album proper doesn't come out this year, it probably will come out next year, but that we can still release some new music as an E.P. or some way, shape or form, maybe digitally. We can give some music to the fans already this year. We're definitely working on that right now.
His Parting Thoughts
As anybody who knows my music understands, I approach my music, not technical, but I'm approaching it far more like a painting. I try to create an image, an emotion, rather than a technical feast and Requiem of course is a perfect example for that. It is very cinematic in its approach and in its emotion far more than it succumbs to the current trend of having a technical Olympic games on your album. I look at our instruments as a kind of brushes and we are painting on an oral canvas and Requiem being so broad and being so long really gave us ample opportunity to dwell on that and to develop that. Juding by the audience reaction when we played it, it came across that way.
