A Deeper Kind of Slumber

I have here used one of my own pieces of previously-created art for the cover of this legendary album. Known to fans simply as ADKOS, I actually know people who have this at the top of their 'most favourite albums ever' list. Certainly this album takes you on a journey, and where you end up is not the same place as where you were when you began listening. Brooding, moody, and incredibly creative, this album and the band's previous release Wildhoney redrew the maps on what metal was supposed to sound like.

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Here at the beginning of this album I should state that Tiamat's front man Johan Edlund is himself no slouch when it comes to producing the graphics for his band. My work owes a debt to his own, and at a time when I was making the break with my commercial career to producing only what I personally felt that I should be creating, Edlund's own graphic creativity was a timely reminder to me that often-enough when producing such images, it's best just to do stuff and see what happens. In direct contrast to the way in which I had become used to working in my career - of necessarily first producing a sketch for approval by a client (which I was contractually obliged to do, but which I always disliked because it tied down the end result before I had even begun to paint) - just letting an image evolve, just giving it the space to become, is my own preferred way of doing things.

Prey

This track is another of my personal favourites, and my video for it reflects much of what I feel about Johan Edlund's lyrics. Love produces victims as surely as it generates happiness, and the line 'No love without a prey' reflects a more honest emotional reality than all the uncountable 'love me do'-style lyrics put together. The osprey I photographed at the museum where I used to work.

My video of Prey on YouTube.

Paradise

This haunting Bruce Springsteen cover about loss and coming to terms with grief is a bonus track on The Scarred People.

The Scarred People

My personal interpretation of this title: the scarred people are women and children: scarred by being forced to be child soldiers in civil conflicts which by their nature are mostly internecine, by being the victims of rape when rape is used as a weapon of war, by being the victims of rape and abuse in any circumstances, anywhere, including domestic circumstances, and when those abuses are perpetrated by authority figures in positions of trust, from family members to priests. Even in the infrequent examples of the male perpetrators being brought to book, their sentence is always a statutory one. For the scarred people, their victims, the sentence is always life.

Amanethes

The title of this album loosely translates as meaning Elegies. It came a full five years after the release of Prey, and was in every way worth the wait.

Alteration X10

A track from ADKOS. 'What you believe in, you will find'. Ah, so true. If you believe in the realities of heaven and hell, you will find both. I have here used as the central image a piece of art which I originally created for a proposed series of books on the supernatural that I was hoping to have accepted by a publisher. Of the various reasons that I have been given over the years for my work being rejected, the reason given by this particular publisher is my most treasured. "Sorry, David", the art director told me over the phone, "but it's just too scary."

Gaia

If there is one song that should be nominated as an anthem for our troubled age, then I am nominating this one. Released both as a track on Wildhoney and on the Gaia mini CD, the lyrics are a major wake-up call for our blundering mismanagement of our planet. These lichens and tree branches I photographed in a remote and beautiful region in southwestern Australia.

Dusted with a late season frost, these leaves I photographed in a Yorkshire field.

Ammonite fossils which I photographed in the Naturalis natural history museum in Leiden. We fight to save certain species, but in nature extinction through one cause or another is as natural as the death of an individual.

Phantasma De Luxe

Originally created as a primary image for my Phantasma De Luxe video. Complex and mysterious, this track is one of my personal favourites in Tiamat's whole oeuvre. With some help from other YouTube commenters I managed to unravel all the archaisms that so enrich Johan Edlund's lyrics.

My video of Phantasma De Luxe on YouTube.

Sleeping in the Fire

A cover of the original song by W.A.S.P., this is a track on the Cain mini CD. In his memoirs the artist Benvenuto Cellini describes a boyhood memory of glimpsing a mythical fire-dwelling salamander writhing in the depths of the family hearth fire. When he told his father what he had seen, he had his ears boxed - not, apparently, for telling tales, but because his father was so taken with the incident that he hoped that the boxing would make the vision in the flames indelible in his son's memory. Apparently it did. For the central image here I have used one of my oil paintings.

The Pentagram

As the two markers on the lower circumference indicate, the difference between a pentagram whose apex points heavenwards and a malign inverted pentagram is not 180°, but a turn through a mere 36°. The separation between good and evil is, it would seem, considerably less than we imagine. A bonus track on the Prey CD, with lyrics from the poem by Aleister Crowley.

Brighter than the Sun

A track on the Skeleton/Skeletron album. This is one of various situations seen elsewhere in my work in which I first sculpted the central figure and then incorporated it into my image. This album also contains the cover of the Rolling Stones' track Sympathy for the Devil. When finally I got around to hearing the original version, I had already become so familiar with Tiamat's cover that to me the original sounded rather tame and prissy. As the Argentinian author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges dryly complained in another context: the original is unfaithful to the translation.   

Cain

There are two brothers: Cain and Abel. One brother makes a blood sacrifice to God, the other's sacrifice is of grain. God is pleased by the first, and rejects the latter. Evidently God is not a vegetarian.

Skeleton Skeletron

The central image is a detail of a much larger design of human skulls which I originally created to use for the poison star sequence in my Revelations video. The full-sized image contains hundreds of skulls. It took considerable time and patience to put together, and was inspired by the Sedlec Ossuary, the small chapel in the Czech Republic. The chapel is estimated to contain the bones of around sixty thousand skeletons, mostly of victims of war and the Black Death, all of them arranged by the monks in spectacular displays, from chandeliers to coats-of-arms. It is now one of the most visited tourist attractions in the country.

It was only when I had completed this image that I realized I had managed to combine four of my favourite sources: the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, the works of Athanasius Kircher, and Theodore De Bry's engravings for the works of Robert Fludd, together with one of Leonardo's anatomical drawings. In Leonardo's day the Church forbade any dissection of corpses as prying into the works of God. The artist bribed guards to work at night on the bodies of executed criminals, all by the light of fitfully-guttering candles. That's commitment for you.

Wildhoney

Released in October, 1994, and in every way a radical departure from what had gone before. The growling metal vocals on Tiamat's previous releases are here replaced by tracks that by turns are lyrical, epic, introspectively personal, and even environmentally aware. My treasured Wildhoney sweatshirt, which by now is well-and-truly a collector's item, has at last begun to fray at the neck. So should I wear it out, or preserve it for posterity? Ah, what's a poor boy to do?

The Astral Sleep

The title is a fine irony: there won't be much sleeping done when this is playing - on the astral plane or anywhere else. Forty-eight minutes of unrelenting goth/doom/black metal grind, great either for venting stress or for building it up, whichever floats your boat. 

Clouds

The top photograph I took late in the day while flying above the Andes. The photograph below I made many years later from a balcony in The Hague. Clouds a hemisphere away from each other, and even more distant than that in time. Creating images sometimes can allow one to connect the dots in one’s life which before had remained unseen; or perhaps which were there, but which – like clouds – existed too briefly for a connection to be possible.

Sumerian Cry

Interesting that the ancient Sumerian civilization seems to provide a creative touchstone for more than one band in the genre. Carl McCoy's goth rock band Fields of the Nephilim also features things Sumerian in its lyrics. Released in June, 1990, Sumerian Cry was Tiamat's first studio album. Good things came from Sumer: mathmatics, astronomy and writing were just three of them.

A Winter Shadow

I came across this skeletal ghost of a winter leaf while out walking; the full intricacy of the detail only revealed itself once it had been scanned in and viewed on my monitor. Lying on the damp ground the fragile structure had survived, but in the dry warmth of my studio it soon disintegrated. The resulting scan is therefore all that remains: the ghost of a ghost.

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