Art is the placenta of Metal.
Art is the mirror, the nightmare, the dream, the illustration of noise that sells, dispels, compels, and repels the Metalhead, while enticing them all the same, to delve into delicious disgust, giving birth the genre’s character.
Marcelo Vasco, Daniel van Nes, Pushead, Rob Zombie, Derek Riggs, Vince Locke, and others play the same rage and brutality but heard through the eyes.
Now Christian Martin Weiss, a graphics manipulator – the “Francisco Goya” of photography — is emerging as a player among the beautiful bones.
Prog-death forerunners, Alkaloid, hired Weiss to illustrate their explosive debut, The Malkuth Grimoire in 2015. Their vocalist, Morean’s muddy torso made the cover, and inside, Weiss managed to re-craft five sweet-faced, gentle but musically monstrous souls into earthen creatures without sacrificing their identities.
The “wow” factor was so enormous, Weiss was asked to return to work on Alkaloid’s second successful release, Liquid Anatomy, but this time creating eerie calliopiid aliens from the band’s images.
Hannes Grossmann’s brand-new solo project, Apophenia features a child-like young woman in a black and white striped mane looking down from a high surface. The image features a great amount of text and interpretation and seems to be a very curious choice for Grossmann, who exclusively used Milan Hofstetter for both his The Radical Covenant and 2016’s The Crypts of Sleep. It is an unusual sales-pitch for such a loud and luscious album, as well as for both Grossmann and Weiss as collaborators.
“Hannes has spotted these images in my portfolio some years ago and asked if he can use them once for an album,” Weiss said. “Determined as he is, he stayed with that idea.”
The “skunk woman,” as some have dubbed her, is part of Weiss’ series, “Last of Its Kind,” and Grossmann thought she was a good fit for Apophenia’s theme.
Weiss explained the work as, “Objectified and extinguished, without any humbleness and respect for the beauty of creation.” He said it is “a parallel to scientific and human vanity.”
He said, “I own what I see, even if it existed ages before myself…But this is only my own concept of the shots.”
A mystery is how such strong visionaries could work together to create something cohesive and beautiful without a power struggle. Weiss said very simply, “It is a pure pleasure to work with Hannes. He provides complete creative freedom and seems to trust in my vision.”
As for Grossmann’s latest project, Weiss said, “I am looking very much forward to listening to the whole album. Hannes and the musicians he is surrounded with are really driven and stand out of the genre’s standards to me for their skills and their avant-gardistic, eclectic, and multidimensional work.”
Apophenia is set to be released in both Europe and the US on March 11, 2019.
Weiss’ work can be found here: https://christianmartinweiss.wordpress.com/
The Screaming Rayven 