Any form is held together not by beauty, but by its points of support. Remove them, and even the most beautiful thing will collapse without a sound.
A Coat of Arms of Steel and Light.
We wanted to play rugged Neue Deutsche Härte: cold, rhythmic, uncompromising. Almost mechanical, like an unstoppable conveyor belt. 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. But the denser our sound became, the clearer I realized: the cold steel was missing something. Something living inside.
And when I ran out of notes, I would go to the workshop.
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 came into being. I sculpted it differently this time—working from the inner framework, the structural points of support, and the rhythm that was meant to hold it together.
Much later, I cast the composition in metal. At the edges of a steel structure resembling an industrial clock stood two winged statuettes holding guitars—the demons of industry. That raw energy, noise, and fire we unleash onstage.
And Clara placed a faceted crystal at the very center.
A heart caught in the vise of gears.
I set the casting on a wooden base. The metal was heavy and cold, and there was a sense of finality in it—as though the form had finally stopped shifting.
“It looks like a coat of arms, ” Clara said quietly.
She did not reach for the sculpture. She simply stood beside it, as if afraid to disturb its newfound stability.
I gave a small grunt.
“It’s just a composition. Two figures at the edges, a heart in the center. A triangle. Like Gothic arches: three points carry the entire load.”
She tilted her head slightly, studying the installation as a whole.
“A triangle—yes. But you only see the framework. I see how it breathes.”
“Breathes?” I smiled. “It’s steel and quartz.”
“Exactly. The steel keeps it from falling apart. And the quartz… catches the light. And every time, it gives it back differently. Look. When the light hits the facets, it seems to pulse. As if the rhythm you’re building suddenly became visible.”
Passing through the facets, the light sank deeper, breaking apart inside the stone into thin crimson reflections. It seemed as though a tiny flame had truly been trapped inside the transparent mass.
“You’re saying this is our sound?” I asked, no longer smiling.
Clara smiled, but there was no triumph in it—only quiet certainty.
“It isn’t the sound. It is what holds it up. The metal holds the form. The heart gives it life. And we… we simply have to make sure we don’t break the connection between them.”
For a moment, it seemed to me that she was not talking about the sculpture at all.
She was talking about the band.
About the way we held together.
“Then let it be our coat of arms, ” I said, nodding toward the composition. “If it’s meant to mean something, let it mean this.”
“Let it, ” she agreed, and there was something almost like relief in her voice.
“But don’t call it a symbol. Not yet. Let it simply be. The thing that holds us together when everything else begins to fall apart.”
Later, Clara would turn that heavy tabletop sculpture into the band’s emblem: adding ribbons and inscriptions, rearranging the elements and assembling them into a unified coat of arms.
That was how metal, the heart, and the demons first came together to form the symbol that, years later, would greet the audience before every one of our concerts.
Back then, I wasn’t thinking about symbols.
But now I understand: everything was already there in that design.
These are not mythical creatures. They are the primal, dark energy that Jürgen and I unleash onstage: raw riffs, grinding noise, and fire. We play hard enough to awaken the demons inside the listener.
The heart at the center is synthetic red quartz—a transparent crystal cut into the shape of a heart and locked inside a heavy steel setting. Deep within it, thin crimson veins seem frozen in place, like cracks in molten lava.
When light falls on the facets, it does not simply reflect—it comes alive inside the stone. Red flashes slowly move through the depths of the crystal, as though a tiny fire were smoldering there.
And for a moment, it seems that the heart is glowing from within.
And beating.
Clara chose the quartz for a reason. She liked the way it brought together cold transparency, light, and the very idea of resonance.
The guitar cables run directly into the mechanism, as if the sound itself were meant to power this strange engine.
At the time, I thought only that metal had finally found its opposite.
The cold mechanics of steel.
And the transparent, living light trapped within it.
The heart is Clara.
Back then, she was not yet the band’s frontwoman. Her true role—as the air and light of this mechanism—would reveal itself later. But even then, looking at that crystal locked inside its steel vise, I understood that something else was beginning to grow inside our music:
melody.
Emotion.
A pure pulse.
Metal creates the rigid form.
But the heart gives it life.
Two sources of raw energy at the edges.
And the heart between them.
Only later would it become clear that this was exactly how our music was built.
It is not a prison for the heart.
Rock and metal are the heavy blacksmith’s hammer. They strike the steel shell again and again, throwing sparks until the mechanism glows white-hot and the crystal heart begins to shine from within.
Because it cannot be contained.
It demands rhythm.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)