The Iron Cathedral. Episode 3: Acoustics.
Selecting the location.
Contrary to every principle of fortification, the western wall was pierced by enormous arched windows whose glass had somehow survived the centuries.
It seemed impossible. Time alone should have shattered them long ago, not to mention the storms and natural disasters that had swept across these mountains. Yet the panes remained intact, reflecting the fading light like fragments of a forgotten age.
The central stained glass window, once ablaze with gold and blood-red malachite hues, now remained only as a ghost of its former splendor. The image of Saint George on horseback, his spear piercing the dragon, had faded into little more than a pale silhouette. The colors were nearly gone, as though the memory of that victory itself was slowly being erased by time.
For some reason, I was reminded of Sveshnikov’s workshop. There, another George—not yet finished, sculpted from raw blue clay—was confidently pressing his spear into the head of a defeated monster. Here, all that remained of the victory was a faded trace on the glass, as if the centuries themselves had gradually erased the memory of what had once been vanquished.
The side windows had fared differently. Most of their stained glass was long lost, leaving only the lead tracery behind. Through those empty lattices poured a cold, relentless western light.
Most likely, this had once been the location of the altar.
Now nothing remained of it—no pulpit, no ornamentation, not even a trace that services had ever been held there. Only a broad, level platform before the immense windows facing the sunset.
Not far from the windows, among the worn stone floor slabs, we came across another Latin inscription carved directly into the floor:
SANCTUM FERRUM
“Well, there’s the name, ” Conrad said.
“The old name of an old cathedral, ” I nodded.
Beneath it, almost hidden beneath layers of dust and lichen, was another inscription—this one in Greek. Whatever it meant had long since been forgotten.
Hans ran his hand across the stone, brushing away the grime and revealing the letters:
The letters had been carved by a hand that trembled or rushed—their strokes unequal, the incisions varying between cavernous depths and gossamer traces. Dust of ages lay settled in the grooves, thick as burial soil.
Probably, an altar once stood in this very place. Now nothing remains of it—neither the pulpit, nor the ornaments, nor even traces that services were ever held here. Only a vast, level platform stretches before the colossal windows facing the sunset.
That was where we chose to record.
The decision seemed obvious.
The space was open, the vaults rose especially high above us, and the hall revealed itself here in all its monumental scale. We unloaded the equipment, ran cables across the stone floor, and began preparing for the session, never once asking ourselves why the builders had set this place apart from the rest of the Cathedral.
At the time, it felt natural to assume that the acoustics belonged here.
After all, this was the point toward which every gaze had once been directed.
Everyone who entered the Cathedral had ultimately faced these windows.
A heavy suspension of millennial stone dust hung in the air, settling on the vocal cords with the very first breath. The crypt-like smell of dampness and rust contrasted sharply with another aroma—ozone, melting insulation, and the hot tubes of our amplifiers. The grave-like cold, eaten into the granite floor slabs, pierced through the thick soles of our combat boots and crawled up our veins, making fingers stiffen on the fretboard before I even took the first chord. The Cathedral seemed to be testing us.
The Recording Ritual.
We came here for the acoustics. But it very quickly became clear—the acoustics had come for us. In a concrete bunker, sound dies. In a Gothic hall, it ascends. It returns. But this was not reverberation—it was a Warning.
My Demon guitar seemed to go mad, catching elusive vibrations. As soon as I plugged it in, the indicators began flashing in a rhythm that did not match my pulse. The rhythm was foreign. It obeyed neither tempo nor time signature—and yet it was not chaotic. There was a structure in it, too complex for chance and too alien for human music. For a moment, it seemed to me that the instrument was not reproducing a signal but was tuning itself to something that had existed here long before us.
Hans, a man who cannot be frightened, turned pale.
— “There’s something here…” he whispered, looking at the vaults receding into the gloom.
Fear lived here, making the uninvited guests feel uneasy. Only Jürgen, for whom extreme is a state of soul, remained calm, though his face betrayed a wariness. When Hans struck his double bass drums, it sounded like a cannon shot announcing the start of a siege. The echo did not fade for minutes; it wandered through the hall, returning to us distorted, as if someone in the depth of the mountain were singing along with us on an infrasound frequency.
And this “singing along” was not a reflection. Extra overtones appeared in it—sounds we did not produce. They layered on top, forming a second part, slow and heavy, as if someone were playing with us, but with a different understanding of rhythm. It felt less like a dialogue and more like an attempt at synchronization.
Clara was not with us that night. Here, only the male, primal aggression of industrial metal held sway. When Jürgen unleashed the slap of his bass upon the hall, the low frequencies hit the chest with the physical density of concrete. From this sound wave, fine debris showered down from the high Gothic vaults—the temple trembled, as if shaking off a centuries-old numbness.
But the most uncanny thing was seen in the behavior of Konrad’s machines. His industrial synthesizers, usually obedient to a rigid rhythm, suddenly began catching a foreign signal. Through the dense electronic hum, an otherworldly white noise broke through, the crackle of static electricity and phantom moans that the equipment seemed to draw out from the stones themselves. We weren’t just extracting sound—we were opening the old scars of this place.
And like any scar, they held the memory of trauma. Sometimes, in the pauses between the strikes and the noise, it seemed to me that what rose from the depths was not sound, but a memory of sound—distorted, stretched, devoid of a source. It belonged neither to us nor to the instruments. It was older than the very idea of recording.
We played KriegesPhantom frantically, aggressively, loudly—like people shouting into the darkness to ward off predators.
The Phantom.
By day, the place seemed empty. By night, it stopped pretending. On the night of recording the final track, the light didn’t just go out; it was as if it were sucked into the gloom. The darkness did not arrive instantly—it “gathered.” Like a liquid flowing down the walls and filling the volume. The space ceased to be uniform: in some places, the darkness was denser, almost tangible, while in others, pale remnants of form remained. And in these gaps between the layers of gloom, it began to seem that the hall had a much greater depth than we had seen by day.
If the generator had simply died, I wouldn’t have been surprised; the load and conditions were extreme enough. But the diesel engine continued to roar. It did not stop working for a single minute. The voltmeter needles swung and dropped even though the generator was outputting full power. The current simply vanished. As if through invisible arteries, it fled from the wires into the walls themselves. It seemed the cathedral was taking the electricity to give it to the sky.
The light began to fade like life in the eyes of a dying man, and a sudden storm intensified with unnatural synchronicity. The equipment died in agony. First came a series of dry clicks—the fuses on Konrad’s racks gave up, cutting the electronics from the grid. Then, with a breaking groan, my tube amplifiers choked, as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of their red-hot glass lungs at once.
The thick black cables on the stone floor sparked threateningly, twitching in death throes while the Cathedral greedily sucked the life out of our tech. It was digesting industrial power, turning it into its own ancient, chthonic energy, leaving us standing in the dark with useless pieces of wood and metal in our hands. We were left in absolute blackness, in the womb of a stone monster, surrounded by shadows resembling ancient warriors.
The sudden hurricane brought thunder and lightning that seemed focused on us, creeping closer, feeling out the arrow slits, trying to break inside.
The strangeness was in something else. The sounds of thunder did not come from above. The vibration came from somewhere below, from within. It seemed the storm front was forming not in the clouds, but somewhere there, in the womb of the rock or the dungeons of the temple itself. It was the source of this apocalypse.
Only Konrad could explain the nature of this phenomenon. Perhaps it was he who said then:
— “It’s not a storm. It’s an Arc. It has shorted the sky to the earth.”
Then these ruins seemed to me not abandoned architecture, but an awakened, hungry organism. Sound sometimes materializes. That night, it chose a form.
A flash of lightning outside the windows snatched a giant silhouette from the gloom in the depth of the hall. A statue? A ghost? Or a trick of a tired mind?
It was a Knight. A giant in plate armor with his sword ready. He was not looking at us; he was looking through us, guarding this pass of eternity. My body reacted faster than my mind—I was seized by an absolute, primal paralysis. The air in the hall suddenly thickened, compressing around my chest like a heavy invisible cuirass, making it impossible to take even a gasping breath.
In this crushing silence, I heard the echo of someone’s heavy steps and the sound of metal sliding over stone, like a heavy blade. But the most terrifying part was that this grating sound existed not only outside. The clang of steel against granite resonated with a foul, cold vibration directly in my teeth and bones, finally erasing the line between a trick of a tired mind and physical reality.
That night our sleep—if that state can be called such—was anxious and intermittent, as our agitation was already at its limit. The wind became not just louder—it vibrated as if trying to enter my ribs and make my blood resonate differently. Its powerful gusts made us shudder at the thought of what was happening outside, beyond the walls, in the darkness of the endless and mysterious mountains, where the storm seemed to have found a new, sinister power.
The album remained unfinished. By morning, the storm had gone and everything returned. We did record a few tracks, after all. In fragments. The rest were added later, spontaneously, and became part of the 2025 release by force of circumstance.
We left without looking back. Immersed in thought, we processed what had happened. But we took the main thing—the Sound. The scarlet dawn revealed a view of the old cathedral—ghastly and beautiful at the same time. Perhaps, once the first shock has passed, we will return here for new sound, for new inspiration.
I tried to explain to myself what I had seen. But the explanation always sounded weaker than the recording. I still don’t know: was it a ghost? Or did the resonance and the voice of the Cathedral itself play with us? But that which is on the recording—the breath of the abyss—was heard clearly.
The compositions of KriegesPhantom are not just music. They are a report from the border of worlds. We did not return from there entirely. And the time will come when we shall go there again.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)
Listen to the song KriegesPhantom II / Metallherz, read the lyrics and translation. Album “KriegesPhantom.”