Shine

I wrote this song for my wife Ayuma (you may check out her own stuff at MySpace): We've met on New Year's night in 2005/2006, and from the very first time that I saw her I was simply attracted to her shining and beautiful energy - as if all of a sudden a warm summer breeze would have touched me on that cold and chilly winter night.

Since then my life has changed in many ways: Ayuma and me learned from each other, and she made me see the world and myself in a different light. We then got married in 2008, and it feels like our love is growing with every day (and also every argument, as we're both capricorn).

Seems like both of us have found what we were always looking for, and so "Shine" is my way of saying "Thank you" to Ayuma for the time and the love that we're sharing, and I do hope that this song somehow manages to capture all her beauty, her warmth, her energy, her empathy, her spirit and her soul.

Here Comes The Night

This is the first track featuring my wife Ayuma as Antichrisis' new female vocalist. As it was her first performance for Antichrisis she was a bit nervous if everything would work out fine, but I think she has done an awesome and impressing job.

The song itself deals - just like "Crossing The Line" with some kind of apocalyptic vision of the last days of the earth, but there is one thing that is even stronger than death, that simply cannot be conquered by the forces of evil - and that is love: "You will meet me on the other side!"

The idea to that song came to me while I was exploring new sounds with Spectrasonics' brilliant new Omnisphere-plugin: Suddenly there was this strange buzzing sound being heard in the song's intro that started to built the foundation of "Here Comes The Night" - a happy little accident as Bob Ross would have said.

Ocean's Too Wide

I have to admit that I simply love SynthPop acts like Soft Cell, early Depeche Mode (before they went all preposterous and pompous), Human League ("Travelogue" and "Reproduction" are such brilliant albums), Yazoo or early OMD - and so I wrote "Ocean's Too Wide" as a kind of tribute to those heydays of Electronica. This track also contains a very fine pipes-solo by Näx as well as vocals by Ayuma and Frank as well as an outtake of a spoken performance by Joolz.

Crossing The Line

A very sinister song about some kind of Armageddon: Finally the fates decide that this planet is having it up to here with mankind and that creation could be bloody well better off without human race, hence they're calling the Angels of Doom to straighten things up. The middle-part of this track might have become a bit sanguinarily and violent, but then that's Angels of Doom for you (Maybe it's all because I've just recently re-read the highly recommendable novel "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman).

The funny thing about "Crossing The Line" is that it originally started as a very heavy piece of Doom Metal much in the vein of early Sabbath, but then I layed my hands on the keyboards and couldn't stop until it transmuted bit by bit and much to my own surprise into a Tibetean Dancefloor track.

Stone Rain

"Stone Rain" is a very strange track blending lots of different musical influences such as Panjabi percussion & chantings, classic vocals, gothic metal and electronic sounds. Its lyrics deal with the subject of breaking-up and what it feels like when you're abondened and each accuse of the once beloved person hurts like a rockfall or - as I've put it in this song - a rain of stones.

Starfish

This is a short instrumental that I've written long time ago as a score for an imaginary movie. Somehow this slightly melancholy tune stuck with me for several years, my wife loves it and so I thought I should record it to see what might happen.