The moment when steel stops resisting the melody.
It was the age of heavy metal. Klara was already playing in an orchestra, and she no longer had time for the band.
With the arrival of Hans and Konrad, Metallherz had gained weight and density. We had energy; we had anger. We sought “wildness, ” convinced that industrial metal was, above all, the art of noise. We wrote songs in the vein of Rammstein and Eisbrecher, but despite all this, we still lacked our own face. This left me restless.
The Birth of Form.
On that October day, when the leaves were already beginning to turn yellow and fall, we came to Jürgen’s workshop not for music — but for form.
Before us stood a sculpture — the shadow of a ghost seen in the Cathedral or born in my imagination and captured in a sketch. A grotesque knight-golem, assembled from industrial scrap — torn gears, joints of lathes, pieces of rebar protruding like ribs. We needed a symbol for the KriegesPhantom album, but the war had already pressed heavily with its eerie energy, so the model was meant to be neutral.
Jürgen, clad in welding goggles, looked like a priest of a strange cult. Every seam was accompanied by a flash of an electric arc, illuminating the entire room but darkening the eyes. I was cutting another part, trying to find logic in the process, but the metal stubbornly chose chaos. The roar of the angle grinder sliced through the air.
And then, something happened that changed everything.
Clara, tired not so much of the roar but of its meaninglessness, stepped into the shadows of the shop. There, against the wall, like a beached whale, stood an old Petrof piano — forgotten, covered in coal dust, with keys yellowed like bones.
Her touch brought the instrument to life.
It shouldn’t have worked. At least, I was sure of it.
The first sound was so misplaced that I didn’t even immediately realize what had happened. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t demand attention. It simply emerged — and stayed. The metal didn’t answer with a screech. It didn’t enter into an argument. It was as if someone had suddenly removed the excess tension from the equation.
She played cautiously, almost by touch. She wasn’t trying to “fit into” what we were doing. And that is exactly why everything around us began to change. The noise didn’t vanish — it lost its aggression. The rhythm didn’t break — it became heavier, more meaningful. The space of the shop, which until then lived in a constant conflict of sounds, suddenly found structure.
I watched and didn’t understand how it worked. By all laws of acoustics, the piano should have been drowned out by that roar. The rounded sounds of the prelude should have been immediately torn apart by the scream of the grinder and the roar of the welding transformer. But the opposite happened.
The melody did not argue with the metal. It held it.
Clara’s keys didn’t fight the metal — they harnessed it. I froze. I saw how the crystal melody entwined the rough rhythm like ivy clinging to the frame of a rusted structure. The metal became heavier. The melody — sharper.
— “Keep going!” I shouted, overriding the hum.
In that second, I understood: in our music, we were trying to be solid armor. But armor without a living body inside is nothing but scrap metal. For steel to sound truly terrifying and majestic, it needed a heart. Not thickness. Not protection. But vulnerability — that which can be lost.
Melodic Metal.
Thus the concept was born: Metallherz — steel in which a heart beats.
And later — our “melodic” style. It is not symphonic metal in the classical sense; it is more industrial-architectural with melody and symphony, colloquially dubbed by someone — Heroic Industrial.
On that day, it became clear: something had to change. We needed Clara again. Not just at the microphone — but here, at the keys, keeping the sonic storm in check. Not behind a synthesizer, where Konrad was incomparable and irreplaceable. But behind a piano, capable of diluting the metal without weakening it.
In that chaos, I suddenly caught the spectral outline of a melody. Not a song — rather its shadow, not yet having found its form. Something where the weight does not suppress but emphasizes, where the metal does not scream but speaks. I stood still with the blueprint in my hands. Rough, dirty industrial power did not drown out beauty. It became its foundation.
At that moment, I realized: you cannot choose between the hammer and the heart. You must make them beat in the same rhythm. I didn’t know the name then, and I wasn’t thinking of anthems. But it was there, amidst sparks and dust, that what would sound a year later in “Metallherz” — the self-titled single with its final recitative and the light breath of a piano that doesn’t argue with steel but completes its thought — was first heard. As well as in composition No. 5, “Stahl und Seele, ” from KriegesPhantom.
There, in that strange balance between roar and silence, I felt a rhythm that beat not in the ears, but somewhere deeper — in the chest. It was the tension of two origins, not feuding, but holding each other. Steel and that which, inside it, had not yet cooled.
The sculpture we were slowly assembling would serve as concert decoration, a temporary installation, but we had already begun building something far more lasting. We found the formula — inside every mechanism, a living heart must beat.
The Knight Without a Name.
I don’t remember the moment I decided he should be exactly like this. Not a man. Not a machine. Not that ghost from our trip to Object 9.13-1-111. A Knight.
In those days, the music stubbornly refused to take shape. It was heavy, angry, but fell apart like a poorly welded seam. I drew, crossed out, drew again — and kept returning to the same image: a figure assembled from what had already served its time. Gears, chains, fragments of mechanisms. Things that no longer performed their function but still remembered the load.
My hand itself placed this strange object in his palms. It is not a sword, but a hybrid of a guitar neck and a flywheel. An instrument on which a melody cannot be played, but with which the heart of a vast mechanism can be started.
Jürgen looked at the drawing and said that it could be welded. Not “should, ” not “is worth it, ” but specifically — could. That decided much. We began to assemble him slowly as a concert artifact. I learned to hold the electrode, to listen to the metal, to feel the moment when it still yields but no longer forgives mistakes. My seams were uneven, too alive. Jürgen did not correct them.
While Clara played, the metal ceased to be just material. It began to obey not effort, but melody. I realized I didn’t want to give this knight a name. A name would make him a character. And he was something else.
He is a shell. A body for the sound.
He stands because he must stand. He protects not people and not ideas — he protects the vulnerability hidden inside the metal.
When I signed the corner of the sheet, I realized: we are not assembling a stage decoration. We are assembling a proof. Proof that even the heaviest construction is meaningless if no place is provided within it for a heart.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)