Time of heroes.
Topography of sound.
The hangar for repairing heavy armor was located far from the front line. But the breath of war was felt in every detail. It didn’t smell like creativity here. It smelled of transmission oil, cooled scale, and diesel exhaust. The air was dense and heavy. It seemed to hold the presence of machines created not for creation.
In the center of the hangar stood a T-90 tank. Its armor was still warm. A matte surface covered with the scars of ricochets, soot, and the mud of roads that don’t exist on civilian maps. I ran my hand over the cold armor. A thin strip of black soot remained on my fingers. In the news, all of this looked different. There, war was a set of frames—flashes, smoke, short captions under pictures.
Here, it had weight, temperature, and smell. Two wars existed simultaneously. One on the screen. The other on this armor. The hangar itself seemed like a giant membrane stretched between our reality and what lay beyond words—there, where the red zone began.
Membrane and Steel.
We had everything for our sound. Demon growled with the precision of a surgical laser. Bulldog delivered that exact analog grit that fans of Rammstein and Eisbrecher dream of. The rhythm section worked like Swiss watches cast in lead. We played the music of machines and war. We mimicked the industrial idols whose influence on us was already beginning to fade.
Once, their sound seemed the limit of heaviness. Now, it was increasingly clear: it was just a well-oiled machine. We were still using their language. But that language was ceasing to be ours. Back then, we thought heaviness was an amplifier setting. That darkness was a key. We played at industrial like children play with toy soldiers.
- Beautifully.
- Safely.
- Make-believe.
And then reality kicked the door in. The news stopped being background noise. It became the only thing that mattered. In one day, our perfectly tuned guitars seemed like toys. Our mechanical aesthetic suddenly looked strange next to real tracks grinding asphalt. The world had changed.
“Zeit Z” album.
And our music had to either die of shame or become something else. We stopped polishing the chrome. We went where it smells of gunpowder and soot. A time that flies so fast it doesn’t have time to settle in history textbooks. It rushes past, leaving an inversion trail in the sky and a ringing in the ears. You can’t “play” here. You can only record.
Jürgen built the bass line so that it resonated with the tank’s hull. Hans hit the drums as if driving rivets into the machine’s armor. Konrad caught the interference that saturated the air. But the longer we played, the clearer one thing became: this was no longer music. It was the pressure of the era passing through us.
The hangar itself turned out to be a strange instrument. Every drum beat didn’t disappear immediately. It rose to the high ceiling, passed along the steel trusses, and returned as a heavy hum. Sometimes it felt like the space around us was playing. The steel accepted the sound, held it for a few seconds, and only then let it back—slowly, as if reluctantly. That was the first time I realized that sound can live inside a construction. As if metal is capable of keeping it in its memory.
At some point, Hans stopped. The sticks hung in the air. The drums still echoed dully in the iron walls of the hangar. No one said a word. Somewhere deep in the shop, water dripped quietly from a punctured radiator. Outside, heavy armor drove slowly past. The tracks screeched briefly against the concrete. We stood among the cables and amplifiers and suddenly understood a simple thing: all our amplifiers sounded quieter than this world.
Point of No Return.
It was there, next to the cooling tank, that we understood: honesty in music is not about frank words. It is a moment of ultimate tension when art becomes a conductor between the inner world and a harsh reality, where every sound is not just a note, but an exposed nerve of human experience. It is the ability of music to live through extreme states, turning pain, fear, and hope into a universal language of human experience.
There is too much hatred and aggression in the world now. And music—even the heaviest—must remain something else. Sometimes honesty lies not in releasing music. Sometimes honesty is leaving it where it was born. Because music should not turn a real war into a media effect. Upon our return—we all needed a reset.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)
P.S: “Zeit Z” is the foundation on which “KriegesPhantom” album would later grow. But if “KriegesPhantom” is the ghost of war, then “Zeit Z” is its hot breath.
Song Zwei Kriege / Metallherz — listen, read lyrics and translation.