Embedded Files
1991 - Meeting.
I met Siggi in 1991, when I was playing co-lead guitar in Psychotic Waltz on our first European tour. I can't remember the city, but he came to one of the shows in Germany to see his friend Uwe Osterlehner, who was playing guitar in one of the opening bands, Deathrow. (The other opening band was "Life Artist")
Siggi and Uwe were working on a side project called "End Amen" and they asked our drummer, Norman Leggio, if he'd like to stay a while after the tour and record drums on the album. Of course he said yes. I had nothing going on back home to hurry back to, so I asked if I could just hang out, I loved being in Germany. They said OK, and then they asked if I wanted to lay down a few guitar solos while I was there. Like Norman, of course I said yes!
Siggi taught me a little bit about using Cubase for sequencing keyboards and samples, which I would later use on Darkstar and Psychotic Waltz albums. He used an Atari 1040 computer with ONE whopping MB of ram! The rest of the analog tracks for End Amen were recorded in a local studio by Harris Johns.
End Amen is born...
Me & Uwe in his home studio
Siggi, Uwe, Norm and Me During End Amen recording
Me with headphones, Harris Johns mixing
Harris patching cables, Siggi chillaxing
1995 - Darkstar I
Siggi and I kept in touch and I'd see him each year when i was back on tour with Psychotic Waltz. He had an idea he was working on that eventually turned into our Darkstar project... Dark synth music with a heavy metal edge and melodic Pink Floyd-ish guitar solos & overtones. Me, being a huge David Gilmour fan, I was all in.
He showed me some sequences that he was working on, and I really liked what I heard. So i took cassette tape versions home with me (still didn't have the Inter-Web yet) and I starting writing guitar parts. I also started coming up with other songs for the project that I'd mail him and he'd add his own parts/sequences/samples to them. I was using my Korg 01W keyboard for synth sequences and bass & drum tracks, and I'd bounce them down to 2 stereo tracks on my 4 track Alesis cassette tape recorder, and use the other 2 tracks for my guitar rhythms. Then I'd bounce that down to a stereo mix and then overdub my solos on the remaining 2 tracks... quite a pain. But the Beatles did SO much more with SO much less... i can't complain.
It was after one of our European PW tours in '95 that I again stayed behind and lived with Siggi for a week or so, to record my guitar parts. The credits mention "Castle of Lords" studio, which was actually Siggi's 24-track ADAT studio in Frankfurt that he had built in an old WW2 bunker that he leased from the government and rented out the rooms to bands for rehearsal.
Siggi would drop me off at the Institute of Art office in the mornings, where he had a small basic studio setup, and I would write guitar parts for the rest of the material that he had. Then in the evenings we'd head to his studio and I'd record the actual tracks there.
Once my tracks were done, I returned home to San Diego. I left my cassette tapes of sequenced bass & drum guide tracks with Siggi to use as reference mixes for the drummer and mixer, Oliver Werner, and my friend & bassist, Martin Iordanidis.
I had met Martin after the Dynamo festival when we opened it back in 1991. He also was in a band called "Soul Brother" who opened for PW on one of the Mosquito tours... I'm bad with dates. It was his guitarist Athanasios Karafalidis ("but we just call him Saki") who let me borrow the Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier amp that you hear on this cd.
The artwork was done by Travis Smith, it was actually his first album cover before he started doing our Psychotic Waltz albums, among many, many other bands. It boggled my mind how cool it was, and that we were able to put a 20 page full color booklet together with inspired art for each song.
Since I was into Psychotic Waltz full time, and Siggi had his own things going on with his studio and his Institute of Art record label, (which Darkstar was on) we were not able to put together a touring band for this project. So we never played the material live. We considered it, but it just wasn't feasible at the time for either of us. This was destined to simply be a one-time-studio-side-project... or so we thought.
1997-1998 - Darkstar II
Psychotic Waltz broke up in 1997 after our last European tour. (Until our 2011 reunion) So i suddenly had a lot of free time. By now I was using this ultra-high-tech contraption called "the internet", and an amazing program called "AOL". Yes, i had mail. Siggi and I kept in touch, and we decided that we should make another Darkstar album. We even had a great name in mind... "Darkstar II". Catchy eh?
But instead, we "came up" with the title "Heart of Darkness". Even though we had the internet now, evidently we didn't put it to good use, because neither Siggi nor I knew that there was already a book with this same title that had just recently been written... in 1899! DOH! By the time we found out, it was too late, the CD was already released.
But i get ahead of myself...
For my demo tapes this time around, I was using a Cubase sequencer rig similar to the one that Siggi had back in 1991. I synced it to an 8 track ADAT machine (Digital audio recorder for 7 guitar tracks!) and to my Kork 01W which handled the synth, bass & drum sounds . Siggi came to visit me in San Diego while he was on a summer vacation, and I showed him what I was working on. We exchanged cassette tapes again, and also a floppy disc with a new keyboard sequence I had just made that he took home and worked up into the song "Infinite Distance". The basic melody was mine, but the final overall sound, the synths, the drums, the Arthur C. Clarke samples, that was all Siggi.
I asked my former PW guitarist Brian McAlpin if he'd like to work on a song with me for the album. Maybe make a little of that PW magic. He was up for it, so I'd drive an hour up to the mountains where he was living and spend the night and we'd work on the song that eventually became "Flight To Nowhere". One of my favorites. We'd also play some serious Heroes of Might & Magic 3. Fun times!
We decided to record the instruments and the local vocalists in San Diego. We needed musicians for the rhythm section, so I recruited a couple high school buddies of mine: John McKenzie on drums, and Danik Thomas on bass. I also played bass on one song, "Flight to Nowhere". Some of the drum parts didn't work out though, and we wound up having to use the demo (sequenced) tracks, which obviously wasn't ideal. They weren't even good sounding drum samples, but it was all we could do.
One major new addition to Darkstar 2 was the addition of vocals. I had some pretty cool vocal ideas rattling around in my head, but i suck at singing. So i asked a few friends who didn't suck... A big THANK YOU to them all for saying yes!
First there was Detlef Kloss. I met him at a PW end-of-tour tribute show, where his band Pantokrater played. I really liked his voice and we kept in touch. So i sent him a cassette with lyrics and a crappy guide vocal for the song "Not Today", and asked him if he'd like to record it. I met up with him at Siggi's studio in 1998 when i flew over to help record him and mix down the album... and do a bit of vacationing.
Next up were 2 local buddies of mine: Steve Summers from the band Sprung Monkey, and Dominic Moscatello from the band Mower. Each with a distinctive style that added a lot of melodic aggression to the song "The Sound of Nothing".
The 4th singer was Sonny Hollis. A friend of a friend who, by chance, I just happened to hear singing in my room mates bedroom one day when she was visiting. I really liked the soft approach in her voice, and thought it would be perfect for the song "Transitory Angel". Thankfully she was up for it.
Our engineer was a local San Diego guy named Woody Barber. A very funny guy to work with, unless you got on his bad side. He passed away many years ago unfortunately. But he did a great job capturing all of our performances onto 2 inch reel-to-reel tape. We bounced it down to three 8-track ADAT tapes so i could easily bring them to Siggi's studio in Germany to mix.
I flew to Germany in 1998 with those tapes, my guitar, and my sequencer. The goal was to mix down the album and do some traveling, skiing, and site-seeing. There were the usual technical problems of course, and some unusual ones. But we were getting it done, and we were pretty happy with it. Of course some things could have been better, but that's life. And then one day, i was laying down an extra guitar part that i worked out in the studio, when Siggi came in the room and interrupted me with a very concerned look on his face, pointing to the phone in his hand, then pointing at me...
It was my mom, calling from San Diego. She had gotten the studio phone number from my childhood friend and former PW artist, Mike Clift. I suspected perhaps my grandma had passed away, she was in her 80's by then. But no, to my disbelief, she told me my dad had died. A car accident while vacationing in Mexico. A side-swipe hit and run flipped his friend's truck over that he was driving, and broke his neck. Siggi had met my dad a couple times while visiting the states, and liked him very much. He often told me how lucky I was to have such a cool and hip father, and I agreed. It was my dad, after all, who taught me my very first guitar chords and songs. We called it a night and had a beer in my dad's honor and just told stories about him.
So the song titles which had already been named sort of took on a new meaning for me. Not Today, Transitory Angel, Infinite Distance, Look to the Sky, The Last Drop of Light... Do they not seem like a eulogy of sorts? Weird. Even weirder, was when I got home i realized I missed his voice, so I called his phone to see if his answering service still had his outgoing message... and to my surprise, it was still active. The message was kind of surreal, so I recorded it, just so I wouldn't forget it: "Sorry if I can't get back to you, but I'm really gone. Busy, but I will get back to you". It gave me goosebumps. I emailed Siggi a copy of the recording, because he wanted to plant it somewhere on the album as a tribute. You can easily hear it, if you listen long enough.
The last step was finding the right artwork. Siggi somehow actually met H.R. Giger (Designed the Alien from the movie.... Alien) and he agreed to let us use a piece of his artwork for the album cover. He was OK with Travis Smith embellishing it, which i think wound up looking fantastic. This time Travis created a mini fold-out poster instead of a normal booklet.
And that was it. The album was done. Got released. Got some great, some good, and some mixed reviews. But again, we didn't have a band to put it on tour. A studio project it would forever remain. We've stayed in touch over the years, and often considered doing a Darkstar 3, but it just never materialized. We saw each other a few more times, once while I was on vacation in Europe in 2003, and a few times at the PW reunion tours from 2011 thru 2019. We had a lot of great and humorous times together and I'm truly glad our paths crossed that fateful day in 1991.
- Dan Rock
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