“We were too young and too involved to see the greater context of anything,” reflects Triptykon frontman Thomas Gabriel Fischer, looking back on his days with Swiss metal legends Celtic Frost. “We didn’t really think of creating anything pioneering or modern.”
And yet, pioneering they were. Under the name Tom G. Warrior, the guitarist and singer left a lasting scar on the metal landscape, leading Celtic Frost through five albums between 1984 and 1990 before the band finally crashed and burned. (A reunion album, Monotheist, would be released in 2006.)
Despite the indifference—or in some cases, outright antipathy—of the mainstream music biz, Celtic Frost won a devoted worldwide following with their dark, experimental and extremely personal aesthetic. Their music continues to influence extreme metal practitioners to this day, even though Fischer happily admits that he’s not a shredder in the classic sense.
“My entire career is based on expressing my personality through my guitar, but certainly not on being a technically proficient guitar player,” he says.
“It is a completely different approach to guitar playing. I stood there as the young Tom Warrior, with these raging feelings inside of me, of having been an outcast, having experienced violence, having experienced a difficult youth, being completely ignored by the Swiss scene at the time, all of these things—I stood there in our stinky rehearsal room in front of my Marshall, trying to express these feelings.
"I was standing there on my own, trying to figure it out, learning step by step how to do this feedback, how to do this tone, how to express what was inside of me. So that’s a completely different approach than if I’d paid somebody 50 bucks to teach me for two hours where to find these notes, you know?”
Celtic Frost in the