Part III: Resonance (Modulation): Crystal Heart
A Coat of Arms of Steel and Light.
From the moment the band was formed, we sought a sound that would resonate with the roar of factory presses—a sound felt not with the ears, but with the gut. We wanted to play rugged Neue Deutsche Härte: cold, rhythmic, uncompromising. Almost mechanical, like an unstoppable conveyor belt. But the denser our sound became, the clearer I realized: the cold steel was missing something. Something living inside.
When I ran out of notes, I would go to the workshop and work with pliable forms—plasticine and clay. Sometimes an idea is easier to sculpt with your hands than to explain with words. But the material did not always obey me. My first attempts were clumsy until Valentin Sveshnikov noticed them—a sculptor to whom I brought my pieces for casting. He didn’t just correct my crooked drawing. He taught me how to build form correctly.
In the Sculptor’s Workshop.
Sveshnikov’s workshop was spacious. High ceilings reached upward, expanding the volume so that the sound of footsteps dissolved somewhere beneath the metal beams. Wide windows provided cold, diffused light—the kind in which no unevenness can hide. It smelled of damp clay, plaster, and metal.
In the center of the hall stood a huge figure of blue, still-damp clay. Saint George. The horse, frozen in a tensed stride, leaned on the back of a flattened dragon. The spear entered the beast’s head with frightening precision—not as a gesture, but as a final decision. It was not yet a finished work. In places, the surface remained rough, the handprints not yet smoothed. But the entire construction stood—heavy, massive—and there wasn’t a hint of instability in it. I caught myself thinking that I was looking not so much at the image itself, but at how it held together.
I brought Sveshnikov my work—one of the figures for a new composition. A demon, currently without wings or a guitar. Small, sculpted from modeling clay. Unlike the monumental rider, my piece lived its own, completely uncontrollable life. It changed shape from the warmth of my hands, from the temperature in the room. It drifted. It lost its rigidity. It was unbearably frustrating. However, inside the sculptor’s clay figure, a steel rod and wire were hidden—the framework upon which this entire colossal mass rested.
Sveshnikov looked at my plasticine devil for a long time. Silently. He turned the figure in his hands as if trying to feel for something inside that wasn’t there.
— “Beautiful, ” he finally said. “But your form has no form.”
It sounded like an absurd pun. I didn’t understand right away.
— “There are only muscles here, ” he slightly adjusted the plasticine with his rough fingers.
— “Of course, ” I said, missing the irony, “he is strong, after all.”
— “They have nothing to hold onto, ” the sculptor smirked.
It was a blow to the gut. I, a degree-holding engineer who assembles guitars with millimeter precision, had simply forgotten basic physics.
— “Well… there’s no frame here, ” I said, as if making an excuse.
He shook his head.
— “A frame is technique. That’s not the point.”
He took a pencil, holding it in an unusually strange way, point facing away from him. He quickly drew several sharp lines in a sketchbook. In literally five seconds, he made a sketch of a running athlete, then an old man sitting on a bench, and a girl walking.
— “Form must have visual pivot points and levers. Bones.”
He spoke calmly, as if about something obvious.
— “If you don’t feel them—nothing else matters.”
He handed me the sketchbook. The lines of the sketch were rough, almost schematic. But there was already a stability in them that my work lacked.
— “Build this first, ” he said. “Then everything else.”
He kept my demon. He said he would cast it in plaster—then it would be possible to cut away the excess, define the form, and bring it to perfection. Then he suggested I come and learn. Just like that. I took it purely as a sculpture lesson then. It was only later, standing at rehearsal under the dull roar of amplifiers, that I realized—he wasn’t talking about clay.
Any form requires support. Even sound. We were making the same mistakes. Our music had the “meat, ” but nothing to hold it up.
The Symbol.
That was how this model appeared. I sculpted it differently this time—starting from the internal frame, the pivot points, and the rhythm that was supposed to hold it. Much later, I cast the composition in metal. Along the edges of the steel structure, which resembled an industrial clock, stood two winged figures with guitars—demons of industry. The very same raw energy, noise, and fire that we release on stage.
And Clara inserted the most important part into the very center—a faceted crystal. A heart clamped in the grip of gears. Back then, it was just a heavy statuette on a wooden base. No lofty explanations. No invented symbols. I just felt that our sound should look exactly like this.
Only later did it become clear that the very nature of our music was cast in this accidental composition. Like in old Gothic arches, where the load is distributed across three supports. When the casting was ready, I suddenly realized that I was holding not just a sculpture. The composition looked almost like a coat of arms.
At the time, I paid little attention to it.
To me, it was simply a finished piece of work—two winged figures at the sides and a heart at the center, encased within an industrial mechanism.
But Clara studied the casting for a long time, as if she could see something more in it.
Years later, it was she who transformed that heavy tabletop sculpture into the band’s emblem. She added banners and inscriptions, arranged the composition, and assembled the separate elements into a complete coat of arms.
Thus metal, the heart, and the demons were united for the first time in the symbol that would one day stand above our stage, welcoming the audience before every Metallherz concert.
I wasn’t thinking about symbols then. But now I understand: everything was already in that scheme. The figures of the industrial demons with guitars are not mythical creatures. They are that primal, dark energy that Jürgen and I release on stage: the raw riff, the grinding, the noise, and the fire. We play heavy enough to wake the demons inside the listener.
The heart in the center—synthetic red quartz—is a transparent crystal faceted into the shape of a heart and encased in a heavy steel frame. In its depths, thin crimson veins seemed frozen, like cracks in cooling lava. When light hit the facets, it didn’t just reflect—it began to live inside the stone. Red flashes moved slowly in the depth of the crystal, as if a small fire were smoldering there. Sometimes it seemed the heart glowed from within.
Quartz is capable of amplifying vibrations and resonance. Perhaps that is why Clara chose this material. The guitar cables lead directly into the mechanism, as if the sound were meant to power this strange engine. Back then, I only thought that metal had finally found its opposite.
Cold mechanics of steel.
And a transparent, living light trapped inside.
The heart is the embodiment of Clara. At that time, she wasn’t yet the frontwoman of the band. Her true role—to become the air and light of this mechanism—would be revealed later. But even then, looking at this crystal in its steel vice, I understood that something else was sprouting in our music: melody, emotion, a pure pulse.
Metal creates the rigid form. But the heart gives it life.
Our music is not a prison for the heart. Rock and Metal are a heavy blacksmith’s hammer. It methodically strikes the steel shell, striking sparks, until the mechanism heats to its limit and the crystal heart begins to glow dazzlingly from within.
Because it is impossible to contain. It demands rhythm.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)