The Vision Bleak
| The Vision Bleak | |
|---|---|
 The Vision Bleak at Prophecy Fest 2017 |
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| General information | |
| Genre (s) | Gothic metal |
| founding | 2000 |
| Website | www.the-vision-bleak.de |
| Founding members | |
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Markus Stock (alias Ulf Theodor Schwadorf) |
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| Tobias Schönemann (alias Allen B. Konstanz) |
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| Live cast | |
Drums |
Sebastian "Alsvartr" Körkemeier |
Electric bass |
Marco "magico" Habermann |
Electric guitar |
Josi Mattox |
The Vision Bleak is a gothic metal - band from Germany . It consists of the musicians Markus Stock (alias Ulf Theodor Schwadorf) ( bass , guitars , keyboards , vocals) and Tobias Schönemann (alias Allen B. Konstanz) ( drums , vocals , keyboards - also vocals, drums and piano at Ewigheim ). The band name means loosely translated "gloomy prospects".
history
The band The Vision Bleak was founded in 2000 by Markus Stock, who appears under the stage name Ulf Theodor Schwadorf, and Tobias Schönemann, who goes under the stage name Allen B. Konstanz. The demo EP Songs of Good Taste , which contains four tracks, was released in 2001.
After the eight-year career of his metal and folk band Empyrium , Schwadorf broke it up with the release of the Weiland album in 2002 in order to concentrate only on The Vision Bleak and live out his musical ideas there, which he could not use with Empyrium . In addition, a band should be created that also performs live.
In November 2003, the Prophecy Productions label , on which Empyrium had already released, released the single CD Lone Night Rider , which included the title track and the song Elisabeth Dane . Both pieces can also be found on the debut album The Deathship Has a New Captain ; this followed three months later on February 23, 2004, also released by Prophecy Productions. A music video was shot and published for the song Wolfmoon . The following year, on August 29, 2005, the second studio album Carpathia - A Dramatic Poem was released .
In January 2007, The Vision Bleak began studio work on the third album in the recording studio Schwadorfs Klangschmiede Studio E . In March they published a two-part video on their website, which offered insights into the recordings of drums, guitar and bass and thus a small foretaste of the upcoming album. Here you can see Konstanz playing the drums for The Black Pharaoh Part II and Schwadorf playing the guitar and bass for The Demon of the Mire . After more than six months of work in the studio, the album was released on August 31, 2007 under the title The Wolves Go Hunt Their Prey .
The fourth studio album Set Sail to Mystery was released on April 2, 2010 via Prophecy Productions. Like the previous albums, it was recorded in Schwadorf's sound studio Klangschmiede Studio E. The recordings took place from April 2009 to January 2010. This long period was due to the use of the recording studio by other bands. The soprano Sophia Brommer and the tenor Thomas Helm took part as guest musicians. On the second CD of the Special Edition you can also hear Niklas Kvarforth, the singer of the Swedish band Shining , in an alternative vocal version of the piece I Dined with the Swans .
On September 27, 2013, Witching Hour, the band's fifth studio album, was released, like the previous releases on Prophecy Productions. For the song The Wood Hag , the label released a music video in stop-motion technology in advance in early September .
style
Concept and texts
In terms of text and in creating the gloomy musical mood, The Vision Bleak are based on horror literature and horror films , from which topics, text passages and samples are used, for example.
The 2001 Demo CD Songs of Good Taste contains four tracks. One of them is a darkly romantic cover version of the hit Nights in White Satin by The Moody Blues . The other three pieces also have a dark, romantic mood and lyrically deal with the effects of atmospheric nocturnal nature on people ( To the Silent Waters and The Sleepy Song ) and the melancholy of life ( The World Today ).
On the debut album The Deathship Has a New Captain , the song Horror of Antarctica refers to the horror story Berge des Wahnsinns by HP Lovecraft , from which the eponymous template for Dreams in the Witch-House (on the follow-up album Carpathia ) comes. Night of the Living Dead is based on the film of the same name and Wolf Moon covers the film The Wolf Man . The first lines of the refrain come from the poem The Tyger by William Blake . The song Elizabeth Dane contains various samples from The Fog by John Carpenter and follows the theme of the film music throughout. The individual pieces on the album are introduced by announcements by Otto Mellies , the German dubbing voice of Christopher Lee , which contributes to the gloomy atmosphere through its characteristic depth.
The follow-up album Carpathia with the subtitle A Dramatic Poem is a concept album and is also based on Lovecraft's literature. It tells the story of a businessman who travels to the Carpathian Mountains to take up his inheritance there. Through deep, hard guitars and mostly orchestral accompaniment, an atmosphere is created that creates the thought of veiled and misty forests in Romania and underlines the plot of the story.
On the third album, The Wolves Go Hunt Their Prey , Schwadorf and Konstanz attached importance to harder guitar work, although the atmospheric character of the music should not be lost. Lyrically the album deals with wolf mysticism, for example the song She-Wolf takes up the werewolf mythology and the title of the instrumental intro Amala & Kamala refers to the story of two girls raised by wolves, based on true events (see Kamala and Amala ) , as well as with Egyptian mythology . For example, the song By Our Brotherhood with Seth deals with the characteristics of the Egyptian god Seth . The album contains a trilogy with the theme of the black pharaoh ( The Black Pharaoh Trilogy ), which refers to HP Lovecraft's work The Haunter of the Dark , a classic work of horror literature. The first part of the trilogy is an introduction. In Lovecraft's story, Nephren-Ka, the black pharaoh, performs idolatry in the name of the god Nyarlathotep, giving him the shining trapezoid after which the second part of the trilogy is named ( Part II: The Shining Trapezohedron ). The luminous trapezoid is a window between time and space around which Nephren-Ka can build a dark temple. The third part of the trilogy is titled Part III: The Vault of Nephren-Ka , so it takes place in the crypt of the Pharaoh.
The fourth album Set Sail to Mystery refers consistently to literary templates and historical events. As on the previous albums, elements from HP Lovecraft's literature are partly taken up again. The song The Outsider refers to Lovecraft's eponymous short story from 1926. Mother Nothingness (The Triumph of Ubbo-Sathla) focuses on the element of Ubbo-Sathla , a part of the created by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith extended Cthulhu Mythos . In A Curse of the Grandest child reference is to a curse from the drama Manfred by British author Lord Byron taken. Descend into Maelstrom is based on the short story Down into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe . The lyrics to I Dined with the Swans take up the story of the German serial killer Peter Kürten . A Romance with the Grave was influenced by a poem by Heinrich Heine . He Who Paints the Black of Night is based in part on Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray .
The fifth album Witching Hour is a concept album dedicated to the witch myth . The song The Wood Hag refers to the children's fairy tale Hansel and Gretel . The Cannibal Witch is about the man-eating witch Baba Jaga . The historical figure Doctor Faustus and the fabric of Faust provided the template for sorcerers . The text describes a meeting of Faust with demons and the devil, with whom he makes a pact. Pesta Approaches refers to the personified plague and, according to Markus Stock, was inspired by the Svartedauen illustration series by the Norwegian painter Theodor Kittelsen . The song The Call of the Banshee takes up the mythological figure of the Banshee , a female spirit in popular belief in Ireland, who heralds an impending death with her scream. Valkyrie refers in a similar manner to the female spirit creature Valkyrie in Norse mythology . The song describes a battle, after the outcome of which the Valkyries bring the dead warriors to Valhalla .
music
The Vision Bleak play atmospheric metal with influences from gothic metal , doom metal and symphonic metal and describe their style as Horror Metal .
On the demo Songs of Good Taste , some pieces such as The Sleepy Song are still musically and vocally reminiscent of Finnish Dark Rock ( HIM , Negative ), but this disappeared more and more in the course of the band's history and with the take-up of horror themes.
The characteristic calm, but at the same time lurking atmosphere, which underlines the textual concept, which underlines the textual concept, is enhanced by sometimes alternating acoustic, piano and orchestral passages with hard, fragmentary, but rhythmically very catchy guitar riffs , the picking up and weaving of the often very simple music themes from horror films (e.g. in the song Elizabeth Dane ) and language samples. In connection with this, orchestral background tones are often used. The singing that Allan B. Konstanz uses is mainly clear and deep. This alternates with Schwadorf's high screeching vocals.
Discography
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Albums
- The Deathship Has a New Captain (Prophecy Productions, 2003)
- Carpathia (Prophecy Productions, 2005)
- The Wolves Go Hunt Their Prey (Prophecy Productions, 2007)
- Set Sail to Mystery (Prophecy Productions, 2010)
- Witching Hour (Prophecy Productions, 2013)
- The Unknown (Prophecy Productions, 2016)
Singles and EPs
- Songs of Good Taste (Demo EP, 2001)
- Lone Night Rider (single, Prophecy, 2003)
- The Kindred of the Sunset (Tour EP, Prophecy, 2016)
Sampler contributions
- (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth on A Tribute to Kill 'Em All (Supplement to Metal Hammer , February 2013 edition, together with Eisregen )
Video albums
- The Wood Hag (2013)
Web links
- Official website
- The Vision Bleak at Allmusic (English)
- The Vision Bleak at Musik-Sammler.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Releases. The Vision Bleak, accessed June 20, 2018 .
- ↑ The-Vision-Bleak.de: Videos in the "Sounds of Terror" section (accessed: April 20, 2008)
- ↑ See Schwadorf's comment "The Bad News" in the official video The Vision Bleak at Studio E from August 5, 2009. (Last accessed: April 6, 2010).
- ↑ Markus Lemke (October 4, 2013): Video interview with The Vision Bleak from September 27, 2013 . In: Metal-Hammer.de.
- ↑ officialcharts.de: Charts DE