“Inspirïert von Lena Liri” double album.
Evening descended like a heavy shadow, settling over the plateau in a dense twilight. Work was in full swing: the soldiers were loading and securing crates, someone was shouting into a radio.
Gusts of wind swept down from the mountains, tearing words from people’s lips and carrying them away, forcing everyone to shout over it while crates and covers were pressed down against the ground. The wind hurled dust into the beams of the floodlights, where it flared into myriads of sparks before vanishing into the darkness. It felt as though the plateau did not want to let us go. The wind caught at the sides of the jeeps, at the straps and fastenings, as if trying to hold the cargo back until we ourselves decided whether we were ready to take it away.
The air had grown dense, like the air before rain. Moisture was already gathering in it, but the sky had not yet surrendered—it was only accumulating its weight, stretching the seconds between gusts. The air smelled of cold stone, dust, and ozone, as if lightning had already struck somewhere far away and only its scent had reached us.
Under the floodlights, the metal of the jeeps looked not black but dark gray, as though it had already absorbed the color of the stone. The dust had not yet settled and hung in the air, catching the light like fine metal shavings. Somewhere nearby, a crate clanged, and the sound did not scatter into the air. It seemed to cling to it, becoming part of the same overall weight.
Clara and I stood to one side, where the light was not blinding and we could speak normally. A guitar in its case lay beside us. I touched it absently, checking the fasteners.
“You know, I keep thinking about that echo, ” I said quietly, trying to hold on to the thought amid all the noise. “Even the fragments we captured in the Cathedral… there’s a depth in them we could never recreate in the studio.”
Clara was not looking at me. She was watching the silhouette of Sanctum Ferrum, as though trying to preserve not the sound itself, but the space.
“There’s space left inside them, ” she said. “Not emptiness. Space—the kind sound settles into and remains.”
She paused.
“We didn’t so much record it as catch the moment when the cathedral itself became an instrument.”
Jürgen approached. He was carrying a folder of route sheets. He glanced at the Cathedral, then at the crates.
“The important thing is not to let that silence become too heavy. At this altitude, silence is louder than the wind. It presses down on you if you don’t know where to place your foot.”
Hans stood a little farther away, leaning against the side of a jeep. Hearing this, he snorted and rapped his knuckles against a wooden crate.
“Silence is never heavy. What’s in the crates is heavy.”
He nodded toward two soldiers struggling to drag an enormous box across the rocks. They swayed from side to side like reeds in the wind.
Hans grinned.
“Especially if you can be carried away yourself.”
Konrad, who was checking the fastenings on our jeep, straightened up, rubbed his hands on a rag, and called out:
“If we’re hauling sound, then we’re hauling whatever holds it, too. Let it be heavy. As long as the fastenings hold.”
He bent down and tugged at a cable, checking its tension.
“I tightened these crates so well they’ll probably hold themselves together before the straps do.”
Hans smirked.
“There. Everything under control.”
Jürgen closed the folder and nodded.
“The road will tell us.”
I looked at the Cathedral. Its silhouette was already almost dissolving into the darkness, yet somehow the feeling of its space remained. We were not taking finished music with us—we were taking a trace, an imprint of the place: footsteps, depth, the reflection of sound against stone, the dense silence in which sound acquired weight. And some things could not be recreated. They could only be preserved.
Later, I understood that there comes a moment when you stop adding sound. Not because you are tired, but because any movement beyond that point will destroy the form.
Form.
For a long time, we could not understand exactly what we were missing. We had enough material. Over the years, we had accumulated a language of our own: rhythm, noise, guitars, mechanical pulse, heavy textures. We knew how to make sound dense. We knew how to apply pressure. We knew how to sustain tension.
But material needs form.
And we found that form not in music.
I found it in words.
Lena Liri’s poems were not inspiration in the usual sense. Inspiration is a spark. It comes and goes. This was something else—recognition.
I read her lines and saw in them the precise geometry of what we had been trying to play. The rhythm of the words began to coincide with our own rhythm. I would close my eyes and listen to how those lines settled into the music—almost the way sound settled against the walls of the Cathedral.
It required more than translation.
It required remelting.
Our sound had to enter the form without destroying it.
That was how Inspirïert von Lena Liri came into being—a music that does not intrude upon a space, but remains within it.
The album was born slowly and painfully, as though metal were cooling inside a mold, gradually taking on its final shape. Little by little, it divided into two volumes. They remained part of the same breath, but they sounded different.
I looked at the Cathedral again—dark, motionless, as though it were an answer in itself.
“We used to think heaviness was impact, ” I said. “That you had to break through space. But now I think real heaviness is the mass of stillness. The ability to stand on its own, without supports. It doesn’t scream. It simply exists.”
Hans narrowed his eyes slightly.
“Then call the album Bastion. It’ll be a wall.”
Clara looked at him, then at me.
“And the second part will be what passes through the wall.”
She thought for a moment.
“Valkyrie. I like it.”
“It doesn’t break the wall, ” I said quietly. “It finds the gaps, the cracks, the old seams—and draws air through them. Your voice and the orchestra. Like light through stained glass.”
Konrad snorted.
“Then the wall has to be strong. But not deaf.”
Hans scoffed.
“As long as we don’t have to take it apart.”
That was where we ended the conversation.
The silhouette of the Cathedral almost disappeared into the darkness.
Bastion.
Bastion turned out to be colder.
More mechanical. Almost architectural.
It was the language we knew best: strict rhythm, dense textures, guitars building a massive structure around the listener.
We recorded it in a studio where the air always seemed dense and dry, saturated with the smell of hot tubes and old amplifiers. The space was enclosed, almost hermetic. Monitor lights reflected off the metal surfaces of the equipment, and sometimes it seemed as though the room itself was turning into a machine.
The music was built layer by layer.
The rhythms sounded like the march of machines. The guitars settled into heavy slabs, creating a pressure that released neither the musicians nor the listener.
Working on Bastion, I felt a familiar confidence. We knew this language. We knew how to build tension, how to maintain density, where to leave an impact and where to add another layer.
But gradually, I noticed a strange change.
I thought less and less about what needed to be added.
More and more about what could be removed.
Clara was not part of Bastion.
And that was precisely why this part of the album became, for me, a farewell to the industrial language we had spoken for so many years.
It was as though we were finishing work on something familiar while already understanding that, from this point on, we would have to speak differently.
Valkyrie.
When work on Valkyrie began, the album changed its breathing.
The recordings moved to a different space—a studio where Clara’s orchestra worked alongside us.
Everything sounded different there.
Instead of dense isolation, there was depth. Instead of dry acoustics, there was a living reflection of sound returning with a delay, as though the room itself were participating in the music.
The first rehearsals made me uneasy.
We were used to controlling every detail of the sound, but an orchestra lived by different laws. Sound breathed, moved, sometimes slipped beyond precision. There was more freedom in it than I was ready to accept.
But that freedom gradually changed the music.
With Clara, the sound began to rise upward.
Her voice did not sit on top of the instruments. It passed through them, like light through stained glass, changing their color and shape.
The orchestra did not replace the industrial rhythms—it expanded them. It gave the music a sense of space and scale that electronics and guitars alone could never achieve.
The industrial power remained, but it was no longer enclosed.
The rhythms stopped sounding like the work of a machine. They became footsteps.
The guitars stopped being mere weight. They became lines leading the music forward.
The music stopped pressing down.
It began to move.
And with that, my own work in the studio changed.
Where I had once tried to strengthen every detail, I now increasingly wanted to remove what was unnecessary.
Leave space.
Allow the sound to exist without coercion.
For the first time, I understood that the strength of music is sometimes determined not by how much you put into it, but by how much room you leave inside it.
What Holds.
Only later did I understand that the album had not simply divided itself into two parts.
It had explained us to ourselves.
We had always spoken about heaviness.
But for the first time, we felt that heaviness was neither volume nor pressure.
It was support.
Bastion became that point of balance. The place where sound stops fighting and begins to stand.
And Valkyrie turned out to be what that framework exists for in the first place.
A voice.
A breath.
That inner heat that makes metal do more than sound—it makes it live.
Industrial rhythm no longer suppressed emotion.
It held it.
Like a structure holding the heart of a machine.
We did not yet know what to call it.
But we already understood that we could no longer play any other way.
Soon these sensations would become several precise formulations that we would call the Metallherz Protocol.
But at that time, they were not words yet.
They were a state of being.
The album would become truly monumental. And Valkyrie would turn out to be radically different from our previous music—and from what was usually called symphonic metal.
We were no longer fighting the silence.
We were building inside it.
Metal no longer needed to be heated to prove its strength.
Now its task was to hold the form.
When you play the track, it does not attack the listener.
It exists beside them—like a structure they can enter.
All of that was still ahead.
For now, we were simply heading home.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)