Jürgen Stahl. Episode 2: Where Metal Sings Differently.
The Way Back.
The trip to the Iron Cathedral proved to be heavy. Not the road itself, but the thoughts on the way back. That silver strand in Jürgen’s hair—it didn’t appear for no reason. That incredible surround-sound system of the Temple. That cave, which wouldn’t leave my mind. Not the void itself, nor the amazing acoustics, but the presence. I didn’t yet know what kind of sound arose there, but it was as if it had a memory and continued to live in the walls afterward.
I asked Konrad almost mechanically:
— “Are you ready to record the disappearing factories yet?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
— “Yes, ” he finally said. “Only now I think it’s not just about the factories.”
— “Then we’ll have to return here.”
Sanctum Ferrum would not let go. Not the scale. Not the darkness. But the feeling that the stone and metal there know more than they show. I was constantly listening to the car, to the suspension, to the hum of the engine. To the way the wind caught the roof rack. In the darkness, every sound seemed like a continuation of the Cathedral. The click of the suspension, the slight creak of the mounts, the vibration of the chassis on turns—everything sounded too distinct.
At some point, I caught myself with a strange thought: I always listen to the metal when Jürgen is near. It’s foolish. He lives at altitude as naturally as others live on the ground. For him, a cable is an extension of his hand. A beam is a support. The wind is a working environment. But metal sometimes snaps. And then, everything is decided in a fraction of a second.
After one of his expeditions, I asked him about a fresh scar on his neck that looked terrible to me.
— “This is the Seal of Hephaestus, ” he answered shortly, reserved, even with a smile, as he usually did regarding his “adventures.” No details.
And now, after the Cathedral, where the sound seemed to have a memory and did not dissolve into silence, I suddenly heard that very moment in my imagination—the short metallic crack that separates “holding on” from “falling.” Perhaps that’s why I’m always more worried about him than I show. There was nothing to do on the road, so I recorded this story as I “heard” and felt it now.
The Vertical.
Back then, Jürgen was a top-clearance industrial climber—the kind of man who took the jobs others turned away from. Drilling rigs encased in ice as thick as an arm, where metal becomes as brittle as glass. The stays of suspension bridges in January, when they emit strange sounds—not quite a groan, not quite a song. Emergency chimneys of power plants that engineers postponed until spring, preferring not to think about what might happen before its arrival. Jürgen did not wait for spring.
In February of that year, the military was looking for a contractor. An accident had occurred at a restricted high-altitude communications hub. The radio relay tower stood on a jagged peak, at the very edge of a gorge—like a bird of prey ready to plummet into the void. A gale-force wind, coming from the glaciers where the air becomes as sharp as a blade, had torn one of the load-bearing guy-wires. The structure did not collapse, but its behavior changed: the metal began to “play.” Not to rattle or creak—specifically to play, with that incorrect, high frequency felt not by the ears, but as a vibration in the chest. In these conditions, a vast steel construction trembles like a string ready to snap.
At such an altitude, the air becomes a hostile environment. The wind doesn’t blow there—it attacks continuously, trying to knock you off your feet. Gusts of up to thirty meters per second are capable of shifting the center of gravity for fractions of a second—enough to lose one’s footing. A helicopter cannot hover here—the air is too unstable; turbulence would break the flow, tossing it like a wood chip in a riptide. Ascent is possible only along the outer contour of a mountain ledge, via narrow metal rungs driven into the stone, over the void opening below. Beneath your feet—air. No platform, no right to error.
Officially, it was called “high-complexity emergency restoration works.” Jürgen agreed without much discussion—he is a professional, he loves the height and the mountains; besides, it was good money, which he brought back along with the scar.
Sometimes, when Jürgen says that sound holds differently at altitude, I think: he knows how metal sounds on the brink of collapse. He knows this not from textbooks or stories. He heard it with his body, his blood, every cell that screamed from the cold and fear. Although fear is not characteristic of Jürgen.
— “There is no reality in fear, ” he would say. “There is only an assessment of potential risks and the taking of measures to neutralize them. And fear is merely one of the projections of a future that hasn’t happened.”
And he knows how silence sounds when the construction finally holds. It is a sound heard only by those who stood on the edge and did not break.
The whole way, I drove immersed in thought and drew mechanically. I don’t know why I depicted Jürgen exactly like that—without a helmet, without the usual safety rigor. In reality, he never neglects safety. But at that moment, I didn’t see the equipment. I clearly saw his face—focused, taut, as if the wind were hitting his skin directly. It wasn’t the gear that mattered to me, but the expression. The moment when a man remains one-on-one with the altitude.
I knew no other details of this incident. The ascent was performed at night due to the urgency of the work, and it was precisely during the stabilization of the structure that Jürgen received this burn-scar.
It happened seven years before the creation of Metallherz.
(from
the notes of Viktor Stahl)