Well, can you tell me a little bit of the history of the band?

Nachtmahr was founded in autumn 1996 by Nils (guitars) and Heimdall (drums). They soon found a bass-player in Vainamoinen, who was a friend of them, and a singer in Marco. They intended to play Black-Metal the way they liked to hear it, i.e. they wanted to create music they would like to listen to themselves. So songwriting began. In January 1997, I, Azazel, joined them as keyboarder. With this new element, the music became somewhat more athmospheric and in summer 1997 a first demotape was recorded. As we didn´t promote it very much (actually we sent one copy to german "Ablaze"-mag and that´s all - the review came out about one year later...), we sold about 40 copies. right after this demo we fired Marco, the then singer, and Vainamoinen, the basser, because both lacked engagement for the band. We soon found replacement for the vacant place of the basser in the person of mastema. After having searched quite a long time for a new singer, we gave it up and I took over the vocals. So the today still actual line-up reads Nils (guitars), Mastema (bass), Heimdall (drums) and Azazel (keyboards, vocals).With this new and effective line-up, we played 6 concerts and recorded 3 other demos up to now.

Our songs are composed by the band as a whole. Someone starts playing a riff he thought out at home our just a riff that comes in mind in the actual situation, and then the other members (if the riff is good enough) arrange their parts around the riff, then the next riff is played etc. There´s no single song that would be written by one alone, but it´s always teamwork.

 

Our last demo, which came out first as a CD and some weeks later as a special tape-version, sold about 500 times until now, mostly in Germany, of course. it may be true, that Germany is the biggest market for Black-Metal in Europe, perhaps due to the fact that it has the biggest population in Europe. But there are also some good bands, which came up not only recently.

I see my role as the one who has to create the athmosphere in the songs. The keyboard in our music is not intended to play a leading role, but should serve to fill holes left open by the guitar (as we have only one guitar, it sometimes takes the role of a rhythm guitar) or, as said before, to create a mytsic, gloomy, or whatever athmosphere.

I think that speed is one of the most important criteria for our songs. All our songs have at least one part (most of them all parts) that is played in high speed. Melody is also quite important, but not in the way that it stands over all. What concerns brutality, I think that through speed, brutality gets lost sometimes, because brutality lies more in heavy, groovy, perhaps slow parts. We surely have some parts, which are slow, but they´re often quite short and end up in a blast attack soon.

It is quite difficult to answer this. On the one hand, we increasingly add parts, especially keyboard-parts, that one COULD characterize as classic, but on the other hand we recently cut down the keyboard a bit, so that it appears only once or twice in a song. So surely the keys will NOT become the most important instrument in the future. I don´t think that we will insert new instruments either, because there are only few (acoustic) instruments that would be appropriate for our music and also for BlackMetal in general I think.

 

The old "elite"- Black Metal Bands, like Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor, Satyricon, Gorgoroth, Dark Funeral and so on hold surely an influence for us, as we all like them very much. bands like Hellhammer and Darkthrone are not so strong in their influences, because we all do not consider them as musically above us. What concerns other types of music, Nils and I sometimes listen to oldschool Death-Metal, and heimdall and I also listen to classical music, but that´s all I think.

Our texts ( I think you mean) don´t have any concept behind them. A greater frame perhaps; one could say, they all depict myths, creatures and experiences that have to do with The Night. As the texts are exclusively written by Heimdall and me, and we share often similar thoughts (because he´s my brother), we often write texts about this theme of night´s creatures and legends. But any real concept does not stand behind this.

The same as in the rehearsal room, not too bad, not too good....

As we don´t have any record-deal yet, I don´t think that there will be any tour in the nearer future.

Yes, we all are interested in such kind of things, especially old folktales, myths and legends. Nils studies the myths of different folks and peoples. Though none of us is practising any kind of religion, we all like to study these, and their mixture in modern times (e.g. paganism and christianity).

NACHTMAHR´S WEBSITE : www.nachtmahr.net 

Schattenfürst - CD (1999)