Quorthon's Sleeve Notes For "blood On Ic - Bathory
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
Artist: Bathory