Quiet Observer

Go gentle into that Goodnight

When I started out writing this song I just had a rough idea in mind. I wanted to be just a single guitar and I wanted it to sound like it was night and there was a bonfire. And since I am who I am, I wanted it to be sad.

I think I was mostly inspired by One Moonlit Night by Beautiful Death which should be pretty obvious when listening to both tracks after another.

In later stages I had planned on handing the song over to Fabis Tunes who had already done such fantastic work on Tree Soul. I just wanted to let her do whatever came to her mind with it. I already did for the song what I could do.

In the end I went a similar route but with Farina who had already done vocals for basically all Quiet Observer songs. At this point the song still had no lyrics because - and I still do so - thought that putting into words what I thought it should mean would restrict what it was.

When finalizing everything in the studio Farina then asked me whether I had some lines she could say in the end and after working on the song nonstop for an entire day I also agreed that that would be the best direction to take it.

That's how we ended up with those last words of goodbye.

The word Simê is taken from the in-universe language Ureikesh and means darling. This makes this a lover's goodbye and strongly implies the protagonist of the song to be an orc.

Bright Daughter of the Sun

Who is the bright daughter of the sun?

A question I didn't even ask in the beginning of writing these lyrics. It has a nice rhythm to it and so I went with it. Maybe it was something I picked up from listening to Eluveitie at the time. I did steal quite a few things from them for this song.

Though it's never mentioned in the song, in the end I decided on Indeera. She is a human deity from the old part of the pantheon. She comes from a time when agriculture and fertility made up the highest ranks of the gods. Through the eras Indeera had multiple domains or aspects: the sun, grain and harvest, the holy mother.

This song tells the story of how her people was conquered by invaders from the east. They brought new gods. Conqueror gods. Warring gods.

Do you see thematic parallels to Eluveitie songs, yet?

I came up with this specific story when watching videos on who religion and worship in Europe changed in pre-history. From maternal pantheons focused on agriculture and fertility to patriarchal pantheons often brought by war.

An example of this would be the different godly families in the norse pantheon.

This is the first song with grandiose orchestration but I hope to explore that style a lot more and refine it.

Tree Soul

Tree Soul for sure was an experiment.

I wanted to pull back the composition as far as I could. After writing The Final Day I made multiple attempts at writing another album or grand or epic songs. That was until I discovered WEH and the Ingenmannsland album. I was hooked on Neo Folk. And I wanted to make something like that myself.

Originally I had envisioned this as a cycle of nature themed songs. I had the titles planned out as Tree Soul, Ocean Spirit, Ember Mind, Storm Heart and Earthen Innocence. To this day only Tree Soul has been recorded but I plan on continuing the theme.

On the previous album I had worked with the names Chaos, Cosmos and Equilibrium for the characters. And that is something nicely continued here. Tree Soul might not be a traditional name but an evocative one, don't you think?

With that idea I started building characters around those names.

Without wanting to promise too much a future project will focus on the sisters Ember Mind and Storm Heart.

While Tree Soul was not the beginning of the Nature Cycle as I had originally thought of it, it was the beginning of the Rune Cycle which currently counts 3 entries.

If I remember correctly, both the lyrics for Tree Soul and for Ocean Spirit were written on the same day while I was taking a walk around the fields and forests of where I live.

The Final Day

The Final Day was the first complete album I had ever written. I was extremely excited working on it.

I put every idea I could think of in there. Anything I had heard in a song around that time went into it. I wanted it to be this grand story. The creation myth of my world. I even hired Felipe Machado Franco for the artwork. I knew he had done the cover for Beyond the Red Mirror by Blind Guardian as well as multiple accessory pieces to it and I needed that as well. Nothing else would do for my vision.

The album would be the finale of an ancient story. A cycle of day following night, following day, following night. And on its final day it would all end. The morning of creation would dawn and the night of destruction and nothing never fall. The gods create the world but this time something is different from all the other days. Their children are awake. Godlike themselves. And so they see themselves in them; in all their divinity and all their flaws. So in the end they sacrifice themselves to save their children.

In the larger story of this world, these children form the first gods of this realm. An unsatisfying answer to the question "where do gods come from", I know. "Other gods" is not what you want to hear.

I remember very little about my writing process during that time. I think I started working in Guitar Pro 5 back then. Everything had that distinct midi sound and I think especially in the intro for Everything From Nothing you can really hear that.

When I was still writing it, I didn't know who would sing the part of Cosmos. I know I would sing Chaos since I could only do harsh vocals and obviously it's my album so I want to sing on it.

Jonathan would be Equilibrium because he could do both harshs and had just recently taken lessons and had improved a lot on cleans. And of course he was my best friend so I wanted to involve him in as much of the project as I could.

At some point Jonathan suggested asking his sister Farina who had probably the most experience of us all, singing in a choire for some time already.

I think the last interesting tidbit I always want to remember is when Jonathan once said "I want to hear an entire album of this" or "I want to see this live" when I played him Hymn for Mortals. I was so fucking proud of myself that day.

Recordings for this project were kinda insane. Some of the highlights include the absolute meltdown both vocalists had, when we were trying out things for the chorus of Sunrise. They both still hate that part.

Dumb as I was back then I didn't plan any vocal demos in advance and we just went into the studio blank. On top of that the chorus is constantly shifting between 4/4 and 7/8 which does not help and making the entire song major probably also didn't work to our advantage.

Michael, my sound engineer and producer knew a place where we could record all of this essentially without paying rent. And what a place that was.

It was an old farm house in the middle of nowhere. A huge old dog guarding it. That dog on one occasion stole Farina's lunch.

Littered on the ground around the place were a large number of animal bones. Probably leftover from feeding the dog. A couple days after we completed recording another band Michael was there with even found an entire cow skull.

A man we never spoke to but saw on multiple occasions stored sacks of rice in the staircase that lead up to the studio.

We had to cancel one recording day because there was a power outage.

There was no toilet.

But still we somehow managed and in the end we had an album on our hands.

Maraa

Pilgrimage to Karraighe

The Pilgrimage to Karraighe was an idea I came up with while having dinner on vacation with my family.

Some time earlier I had saved that stock image that you can see on the album cover because I thought it looked extremely cool but I didn't know what to do with it. During those days away from home it then hit me:

I love the whole thing of using the ruins of our civilization as the ancient monuments of the next. So what if there is a city built in the ruins of ours? And the specific ruins in this case are a giant bridge.

I didn't much think about a story for this one. I wanted to turn it into a small exercise for myself: write an entire EP in just a month.

All the large ideas (the holy city, pillars of liquid stone and the name Karraighe) were something I had within the same evening as the overall plan. I even started working on a chapter for Weltentod exploring the idea.

This ancient ruin, now bustling holy city with a living god at its top.

I wanted to write how this god and the protagonist of that chapter were old friends but forced by circumstance to kill each other.

During that time I had recently rewatched Ergo Proxy and that might have influenced some of these ideas.

So anyway, I had this challenge of writing an EP within a month of returning home from vacation and I got to it.

I think the first song I wrote was Journey's End. Originally this one was the one supposed to be Pilgrimage and there were only supposed to be 4 songs. 4 songs I had already planned out still on vacation - or at least the titles.

After I completed that first song I realized it didn't really fit the theme of a pilgrimage and sounded a lot more final. So I added a fifth song.

I think The Holy City I wrote within just two or three days. It really went insanely fast.

I think this exercise was also the first time I tried experimenting with an accordion in my composition. Something I definitely want to bring over to Quiet Observer at some point.

Collaborations

RISTRIDI - Dark Solstice

Dark Solstice has a lot more uplifting character than Isolation.

I think Michael told me he wanted a continuation of the journey of Isolation but uplifting. For me this manifested as stepping out of a cave.

I think the central idea of what I mean by this comes through in the monologue at the end of Break the Silence.

Despite all that, Dark Solstice was not intended to have a deeper concept connecting all the songs. I approached every song on its own and met them, where they were.

On this one I also didn't do all of the lyrics. I think Michael and I contributed in roughly equal parts.

RISTRIDI - Omega point part II: isolation

My first collaboration before even releasing my first album.

Jonathan was on Omega Point Part I for a song and asked to sing the entirety of Part II. Through that connection I was then asked to write the lyrics for Part II.

I remember sitting there in Michael's bedroom trying to revise the material for an exam while he and Jonathan were working through the songs. Me just there on standby if anything needed changing.

While generally the Quiet Observer material is more in the realm of fantasy and myth on the RISTRIDI albums I got the chance to focus on more grounded material.

I'm not entirely sure when I decided on the story behind Isolation but if I remember correctly it was a very natural process writing it. I don't know what that says about me when talking about an album mourning a lost life.