Viktor Stahl. Episode 1: The Demon Guitar.
When the melody is held not by the ground, but by the air.
My office on the 54th floor of a glass tower looks out upon a leaden sky and a sea of steel. This city never sleeps — it simply changes the rhythm of its flickering server lights, like a musical metronome that falters but never stops. From the top of the skyscraper, the city looks not like a living organism, but like a blueprint of itself — a network of lines along which the dots of cars move, as if someone were testing a model of the future.
But only after my foot stepped onto a steel construction beam unprotected by glass did the sound of the wind cease to be a natural phenomenon for me. It settled in my memory as a task that was impossible to ignore. Sometimes, when I take an instrument into my hands, I feel it again — not as a memory, but as a pressure that cannot be reproduced by conventional means.
I have tried many times to explain to myself exactly what happened then, up there. Was it fear that sharpened my hearing to the limit, or a rare moment when nature allowed itself to be heard without translation into human language? But the more I returned to this memory, the clearer I understood: it was not noise. It was a structure.
I stood beside Jürgen at a height that took my breath away, sensing my own biological inappropriateness in this realm of steel and winds. However, my brother’s existence in this space was the embodiment of a perfect balance between audacity and calculation — every step thought out, every movement calibrated. I, meanwhile, tried not to look down, where the city turned into a schematic map drawn by a mad cartographer.
And it was there that the wind brought music — not as noise, but as a construction of sound.
It didn’t just blow. It played.
A sudden squall plucked the stretched steel cables, thick as an arm, which held the crane structures. It fingered them as if an invisible titan had decided to play on a cyclopean harp forgotten here by the Ancient Builders.
It was not a ring. It was a Hum.
The sound was so low and massive that I heard it not with my ears, but with my chest. It was elastic, like the steel itself. There was no “grit” in it, no extraneous noise — only a pure, dominant note capable of cutting through concrete. It was an attack from which my entire being trembled, and my hands, clutched to the beam, were ready to let go.
In that second, I realized with horror and delight — not one of my guitars could come close to that hum. My “Les Pauls” (Gibson Les Paul Studio) and “Stratocasters” (Fender Stratocaster) — they are good, of course, but they were created for blues, for rock, maybe even metal, but they are too… cozy. They are made of wood that remembers the warmth of the sun.
But I needed a sound that remembers the cold of the stratosphere and a tension of thousands of tons.
I didn’t need “approximately suitable” instruments. I didn’t need the compromises offered by music stores. The sound I heard at the height demanded an instrument capable of becoming its continuation — not just a guitar, but a chamber in which the howl of the wind became a tone. I realized that I needed not just a guitar, but a trap for sound — a chamber capable of holding it just as the stone walls of a cathedral held the echoes of the wind. A resonance chamber capable of containing the fury of the wind striking a steel cable.
I needed an instrument that doesn’t imitate the element but withstands it. Thus was born the concept of Heartforge Metallherz.
Designing it was just as logical as drawing a bridge — the same principles of tension and resistance, only translated into the language of an instrument.
The Demon Metallherz Guitar.
Silence reigned in the design bureau workshop. Not an empty silence — but an expectant one. It was broken only by the clinking of small screws falling into brass cups and the sudden hum of a screwdriver. Against such a background, it is easy to forget that before you is not just a piece of maple, mahogany, ebony, brass, and steel — but an object requiring no less attention than an open skull requires from a neurosurgeon.
“Demon” is not an instrument for a cursory glance. It resists inspection. The first look causes a cognitive glitch: the eye catches the aggressive form, then the predatory gleam, and only later does the mind begin to distinguish plates, overlays, teeth, and exposed “guts.” It is like entering a working factory shop: first — deafening chaos, and then — the understanding that every piston moves along a dangerously precise trajectory.
Beyond the glass of the skyscraper, the city receded downwards in layers of light and steel. Sometimes it seemed to me that height was not a distance to the ground, but a state in which form becomes more honest. There, you cannot hide a weak connection — it will either withstand the pressure or crumble.
Demon looked like an instrument created precisely for such heights.
The paradox of Demon is that, for all its dragon-like aesthetics, it does not look like an interior decoration piece. There is too much engineering stiff-neckedness in it. It is as if it were created for a test bench, where high-voltage electric current tests the strength not of the metal — but of the performer’s nervous system.
I took the guitar, checking not the strings — but the balance. I tilted the body at different angles, as if studying the geometry of tensions within the form. My fingers moved along the neck without pressure, barely touching the frets — this is how one checks not the tuning, but the character of the instrument.
Demon did not demand sound. It demanded attention.
The weight was distributed accurately, almost with engineering honesty. Not a single element seemed decorative — everything looked like part of a circuit whose meaning is revealed only in motion. I caught myself with a strange sensation: some instruments begin to sound the moment they are plugged into an amplifier. This one — began to sound right now, in the silence of the office, reflected in the glass of the skyscraper and in the strict lines of the blueprint nearby. I did not take a pick. Not because I didn’t want to play — but because I understood: an acquaintance with such an instrument cannot begin with the first strike on a string.
Sometimes a form must first be understood by the eyes.
“A guitar with a bad temper is useful. It forces its owner to improve their own just to survive in this duet.”
Jürgen’s Arrival.
The office was almost empty, but I was in no hurry to leave. The sun had already sunk below the horizon. Its rays colored the low clouds with a blush when Jürgen entered.
He walked up to the guitar.
I was silent. Jürgen’s evaluation was never expressed in words immediately — it manifested in pauses.
He slowly ran his fingers along the contour of the body, as if checking the geometry of the line, then carefully touched the metal inserts. He took it, holding it for a second at chest level, as if weighing not the mass, but the balance. A few dry chords — without an amplifier, almost in a whisper. But even so, the instrument responded with a dense, gathered resonance that was felt more in the bones than in the hearing.
Jürgen gave a barely perceptible nod.
— “You heard the wind correctly.”
It was a rare formulation of approval. He carefully returned the guitar to the stand. The movement was almost ceremonial — as if he were returning the object to its place in the construction of the world.
I was about to ask how things were at the construction sites, but Jürgen spoke first — which happened rarely.
— “Now I need my own instrument.”
I smirked.
— “A bass?”
He nodded.
— “But not here.”
I looked at him more closely. When Jürgen spoke such phrases, it usually meant he had already made a decision and was simply giving me time to catch up with him.
— “I’ve found a place, ” he continued calmly. “There, the sound lives differently. It doesn’t need to be amplified. It needs to be held.”
He spoke without pathos — as matter-of-factly as one talks about the weather. But in his voice appeared that special tension that arose only when the conversation turned to height or the void.
— “An old site. Far away. Almost forgotten.”
He paused, as if checking a map in his memory that only he could see.
— “There, the space itself builds the note.”
I felt a familiar sensation — a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. This was how almost all the stories Jürgen dragged me into began.
— “And you want to check it?”
He put on his gloves, as if he were heading not for the road, but back up to the heights.
— “Get ready. We’ll need time. And warm clothes.”
I turned to the Demon. The lacquer on the body caught the evening light, and the guitar seemed not like an instrument, but part of a mechanism that was only just beginning to work.
And somewhere far away, beyond the city limits, the next note was already sounding, the one we had yet to hear.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)