Bathory - Blood On Ice | Текст песни

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• Bathory
• Blood On Ice

The old Crow's cry the first warning
The rumbling frozen ground the last.
Hooves thundering on the three feet snow,
The icy dawn yet to begin.

Bursting through the icy morning four times five black shadows ahorse.
Steel glimmering in the awakening sun's light,
And blood colours the white snow red.
Cries echo through the dark deep woods.
Open wounds steam in the cold morning air,
And the new day was greeted with a burden
both raped and dead.

Long scalps hung by the old twin headed Beast's standard black.
Women and children brought far north into the land of no turning back
The burning village spread by the wind across the tundra

Cry old Crow cry.

Long tall beautiful people fallen lifeless to the ground
Headless scattered still graceful bodies.
Blood coloured the white snow all around.
Through the dark deep woods to the mountains towering to the sky
The wind carries the quest for revenge and the tale of Blood on Ice.

The Eternal deep dark Woods...
Late daytime...

["Fifteen years have passed. Living among the animals. Learning to read the]
[signs in bark and snow. Never forgetting the sights that morning in the]
[village all those years ago. Pain from inside. Transforming him.]
[Thus he had grown into a Man of Iron..."]

- Quorthon's sleeve notes for "Blood On Ice" -

Blood on Ice is a legend among those who have followed us
throughout the years. Never permitted to forget about its existence,
constantly reminded of it as I was by all the tens of thousands of
letters from our fans that I've received throughout the years ever
since I breathed about it in the press some years ago, Blood on Ice
seemed a very difficult piece of gravel to get out of my shoe.

It seemed to all these thousands of fans and fanzines a
frustrating fact that we could let a complete epic-type of a theme-
album collect dust on a shelf. The truth is it was, of course, far
from that complete, ready-to-be-released epic creation of a theme-
album it was made out to be.

Blood on Ice was an hour long of material recorded during the
same circumstances that four of our albums were recorded... that is on
equipment hailing from the late 60s, early 70s and using a 14-track
demo-style mixing table of home made-fashion (in reality 12-tracks due
to the fact the table itself didn't have any effects of its own -
hence two tracks were used for echoes etc. mind you, sometimes tracks
on that old made tape-machine we used just wouldn't work from one day
to another). This private demo-studio was seldom, if ever, used for
anything serious other than BATHORY and occasionally up until '87 (but
all the time after that) it was actually working as a garage (which in
fact is just what it was to begin with) and not only used car parts be
stored there, but the damn place would function as a repair shop in
between the recording of Blood Fire Death and Hammerheart (and as such
all the time when the latter was recorded)...

Oh, those were the days...

The size of the room where we would 'pile' our amplifiers up
against the wall (if we're talking the first album, that's plugging in
my shitty little 20w Yamaha amp, mind you) and where we would rig up
our drums, was not large enough to allow us to record, say, the guitar
and the drums or the bass and the drums at the same time (hence the
use of clique-track on most of our albums). More than once a very
primitive, not even a second generation drum machine had to be used to
replace the snare-drum due to the poor sound quality. When we did the
first album we didn't even have a complete drum kit but worked with a
snare drum, a ride cymbal and a bass drum only.

Working with such a comparatively limited number of tracks meant
that an instrument and a sound effect such as thunder, wind or church
bell or whatever, could occupy one single track. This became routine
when our music developed and became more and more arranged,
incorporating stuff like harmony backing vocals and acoustic guitars.
At times a track could host the acoustic guitar that started a song
off only to some moments later feature a doomsday type of drum in the
choirs or whatever, maybe paired with a clap of thunder or some other
type of sound effect. Then a guitar-solo would usually follow before
that acoustic guitar would end the song. Of course very primitive and
sometimes extremely frustrating as each instrument or sound effect
would have to have its own particular sound (and volume level) meaning
that the Eq's and effects as well as level would have to be switched
(by hand in those days) while the whole thing was run down onto the
quarter-inch master tape (and this is just talking one single track on
one song - there could be five or six tracks on a song that had to be
taken care of in the same way - simultaneously!). Screw up. And you
would have to do it all over again. Many times we just left things as
they were because we couldn't care less about fuck-ups at that stage
of the recording process. These small 'errors' are there every time
that I listen to a Bathory track and not only will the 'studio-artist'
in me concentrate on picking them out and get upset about them, but
the metal-fan within is never allowed to simply sit down and enjoy the
stuff like so many others.

Many times the recording room would be occupied by more or less
usable parts of old Porsche-cars to such an extent that we had to
record those lead vocals, backing vocals or an acoustic guitar in
every possible confined area such as a bathroom, the cleaning cabinet
or, if possible, any small unoccupied area in the actual recording
room that was just large enough to stand when doing your vocals or
where you could place a chair for sitting down with your acoustic
guitar.

I remember vividly one moment in June '89 when we came down the
Heavenshore Studio to record the material for what was to be the album
Hammerheart. The whole place had not only been stripped of everything
that functioned as sound isolation, but the whole place was filled
with a three foot thick layer of coarse gravel (to be flattered and
covered with a layer of asphalt any day now we were promised). When
we recorded the drums, the kit would have to be placed any way
possible on top of that undulating landscape of coarse gravel, which
only just reminded me of the Sahara desert. And as if that wasn't
enough, there were no lights in the studio. We had to use a small
table-lamp to be able to see anything at all. Don't ask me how we did
it, but somehow we did just that.

To this day I wonder if these circumstances haven't contributed
just a bit to our 'sound' in those days. Just imagine all those car
doors, hub caps and assorted odd pieces rattling along. I recall when
recording Hammerheart, working around these ordeals in a rather casual
way: when I was sitting down doing the acoustic intro for Valhalla,
how the neighbours' motorized lawnmover would find its way onto the
two-inch tape, sort of taking the Viking or barbarian atmosphere away
just a bit. The recording room itself had been soundproof before the
whole place was literally torn apart to be transferred into a repair
shop, so I was now sitting in this cleaning cabinet while the asphalt
was setting in, and the cabinet with its paper thin walls was surely
anything but soundproof. If this makes you drop your chin from pure
amazement, wait until you hear about the lead vocals done in the
bathroom.

Few bands, if any, would accept to record under these
circumstances, I'm sure, and even our patience could be pushed to the
limits occasionally. But still today, when even the most ill-sounding
black or death type of bands have access to the very most modern
recording techniques, using todays DATs and computer mixing
possibilities, I'm not sure whether I really would have wanted to miss
out on those days. It is with a great big fat smile that I look back
on those days when I could stand knee-deep in either hub caps,
packages of washing powder or even laundry while doing my lead vocals
or an acoustic guitar intro, usually with my arms and legs wrapped
around broomsticks, pipes or hoses, while worrying about whether the
neighbour's lawnmover, a bypassing car, an airliner or just a dripping
toilet would find its way onto the tape too much. This certified but
charming hell is forever after immortalised as the Heavenshore Studio,
the very place where Bathory, Under the Sign..., Blood Fire Death and
Hammerheart were recorded... and the original material which lay as
the base for Blood on Ice as well. Especially charming is it that not
only is Heavenshore Studio a legendary place among our fans and known
to most folks with at least one foot within extreme metal, but the
studio as such just doesn't exist anymore other than in the form of a
private garage in a residential area in a southern suburb to
Stockholm.

Recorded not only during these circumstances but also in a sort
of half-hearted way, I was amazed, when listening to the tapes again
all these years later, that the material even held together. Half-

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