Haven't somehow found the time to update my LJ ... so here's a wee update:
We have a new drummer for our band Fairytale now, and already finished a new song called "Thunder Sword", a really epic Metal song with some Thrash riffs and even some Death Metal growls in the middle part :)
I cannot wait to sing that song live on stage in April !

I did some drawing too, finished some new pictures, tried around with water colors, although I suck at them ... and finally managed to complete a demonhead phantasm again, called "Mephistopheles" ... I like how it turned out, although I wish to get away from computer-colouring my works and instead to that manually ... I ordered some special art-marker-pens, maybe I can work better with them than with water colors ... I'll give it a try ...

I discovered the magic of Led Zeppelin lately, bought their best-of "Mothership", and it's unbelievable I have overlooked such a grandious band for such a long time !
Besides that I am quite addicted to a melodic Death Metal band from Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, called "Agonize" ... they make this old swedish death metal like Gates Of Ishtar and the like ... Julija, a very good friend of mine from deviantArt, recommended them to me alongside with a lot of other bands ... and now I cannot get enough from their music ...

I finally want to move out from home within this year and find my own appartment somewhere around, I hope I won't push it off again ...
I also bought some books about Japanese, I really want to start learning it again, I really liked the language when I took some courses at university a couple of years ago ... but again, I pushed it off ... hopefully I'll just grab a book one day and start ;)

And now my Top Ten playlist at the moment:
Led Zeppelin - Mothership
Agonize
King Diamond - The Spider's Lullabye
Dismember - Massive Killing Capacity
Fight - War Of Words
Queen - Queen II
Machinae Supremacy
Iron Maiden - Brave New World
Blind Guardian - Nightfall In Middle-Earth
Amorphis - Elegy

And of course a lot more, because I always listen to different stuff in my car ..

So far from me ...

Today is the first day of my two days holiday from work :)
It was my dad's 60th b-day yesterday, and tonight we're celebrating it in a nice restaurant.
I hope I can stick to beer and leave my fingers off of schnapps ;D
Have been a bit lazy posting to this journal of late, my focus was more on my deviantart-page.
No big news to be told though ... next week we have a gig with the band, the X-mas markets have started again (YAY ! Mulled wine !!!) ..
Still the weather around here sucks, no real winter feeling ... just rain and grey clouds ... depressing ...

Listened a lot to At The Gates' brilliant Slaughter Of The Soul album, but also to all my Amorphis CDs ... I love everything they did, and the new album "Silent Waters" rocks ...
And of course, my beloved Gamma Ray brought out their new album "Land Of The Free II" ... good old happy metal ... need that album a lot :)
And at work we always listen to "Queen - Greatest Hits" ... it's like an addiction :)

Got myself a cold ... on Tuesday it was really bad, like my nose was filled with concrete ...
right now I still have trouble to breathe and my throat itches and I've got a bad cough ...
Wow, aren't we kinda whiny today ? ;)

Problem is I had to cancel band rehearsal this week, and I fear I won't be okay again next week, so I'll have to cancel the next one too ... and we have a gig on December the 11th !!!

I'm also having trouble drawing of late, until now the whole week I drew about five or six images, but none of them satisfied me in the least ... I hope today I'll change that ...

Besides that: got myself the new AC/DC DVD, "PLUG ME IN" , ... and it's AWESOME !!!
The first DVD ("The Bon Scott Years") is really a DREAM ... he's been such a cool fellow ... I really had tears in my eyes when it ended ... the interviews with him are sooo funny and his voice live on stage gives you the shivers so fuckin' brilliant he was !!!

Also bought the new "Coheed and Cambria" - album "No World For Tomorrow" ... and got addicted to it ... the melodies, the solos, the unique voice ... I love it.

Well, gotta try drawing something again now ...

Hahaha, I HAD to post this, never used corpse paint before, but today I was on a Halloween party and dressed up as a Black Metal fan !!! :D

\m/

Gods, my neck !!!
Yesterday my sister, her bf and I made a trip to Koblenz, because there was a metal festival on a BOAT !
The whole thing was called METAL CRUISE, and we shipped along the Rhine.
It was a great experience, and pretty cool atmosphere.
The best thing however was the billing:
Steel Preacher played a great mixture of 80s Heavy Metal, Thrash, AC/DC and Motörhead, simply cool party music, good for a lot of headbanging too, I can recommend getting their CD "Start Raising Hell".
Pagan Rites struck my nerve, I headbanged throughout there complete set, which consisted of old school Black/Thrash-Metal with satanic lyrics, I was like in a trance ...
It was so good to do that headbanging stuff again, haven't done it for a while, and it's wonderful to simply merge with the music ... needed that, really...
The last band were the almighty SODOM !!!
I love them and the gig was great, even though sometimes there were problems with Bernemann's guitarsound, so in a few songs the only thing we heard were drums, bass and Tom Angelripper's voice.
They played all their all-time hits, but also some really old stuff like "Witching Metal" ...
Sodom simply rule !
After the show we talked to Bernemann (their guitarist), and discovered that he's from Holzwickede, a small town not far from my home.
Was cool to talk to him, a very down-to-earth Ruhrpott guy, no rock-star attitude or arrogance at all ... we even talked about the famous German Ruhrpott movie "Bang Boom Bang", and he told me that some years ago he nearly had taken a job in the petrol station that's part of the movie.
The world is a village ... ;D
The way home was a small odyssey ... first we took the wrong highway and noticed that only after 20 minutes or so, then there were a lot of road works and detours and finally the A1 was completely closed, so we had to take a major detour, until we finally ate some burgers at McD and then returned home in the morning.
But now I have to celebrate my sister's b-day, although I can hardly keep my head up from all that headbanging ;D \m/

So my weekend was great !!!
Especially talkin to you on the phone again, Oliver !!!!!
That Friday my sis and her bf came over and we watched "Heaven and Hell" live DVD and other metal videos, drank a couple of beers and I went to bed around 5 in the morning, only to wake 4 hours later, d'uh !

Saturday we played Munchkin (very funny, still VERY nerdy little cardgame ...) and drank some beers (yeah baby BEEEEEER) and watched some South Park episodes (CARTMAN is my GOD !!! ) :D :D

I also finished three new drawings and uploaded them to deviantart, again had this "flow" condition ... luv it when that happens ...

Now I'm workin via VPN, and two cuppa coffee helped me to focus :)

Again re-discovered an exciting CD I haven't listened to in AAAAGES ...
"Still Cyco after all these years" by Suicidal Tendencies !!!
Gods those guys ROCK, totally forgot about them !!!!
"War inside my head" has always been a favourite of mine, a shame I forgot about it ... such a great song !!!

Well gotta get back to work ....

Fall has arrived here ... after the poor summer now it's raining cats and dogs outside ...
Got myself a wee little cold, how fitting.

A lot to do at work, hope my VPN connection will be working again tonight, so I can code a bit from home ... must admit that I can develop best at night, between 8pm and midnight, I'm waaay more productive and focused than in the office at work (where I work from 7am to 4:30 pm).
The Internet is definitely a blessing ... or at least a CURSED blessing ;)

Got some CDs on rotation at the moment:
Sandra Nasic - The Signal
Guano Apes - Walking On A Thin Line
Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine
Black Sabbath - Mob Rules
Gates Of Ishtar - A Bloodred Path

Totally addicted to Sandra Nasic's new solo album, it really rocks, even the electro songs !
Although she's not really a guitarplayer, she played some of the songs herself ... okay, the guitar parts are not as complicated as some Guano Apes songs, but I think they rock and for a solo debut this CD has really turned out great ... and I love her voice, for me she is THE female rock singer, I don't know any other female rock vocalist with such an enormous voice...

Have been a Guano Apes addict for quite a while now, so I always listen to one or all of their CDs once in a while, even if many people hate them (some with the lame argument "They're too commercial!"), I love most of their songs because of the unique vocals and also because I like the guitar and bass parts, the range from funk to punk to rock to metal, ... it's all in there ...

The first Rage Against The Machine album is one of my favourite rock/metal/crossover CDs of all time ... although I normally do not like HipHop or Rap vocals, but Zak is a very cool vocalist with lots of aggression ! And Tom Morello one of the best guitarists I know ...
The songs on this one are so full of power ... and again remind me of the time I first got that album on cassette, 1993 ... that's now 14 years ago ...

I need not say anything about DIO I hope, because it's all in his name: he's a GOD.
I love the songs he did with Rainbow, the Black Sabbath era and his solo works ... for me he is one of the best singers of all time, and I was so glad (and had TEARS in my eyes) when I saw him live last year on Rock Hard Open air ...
This week it's Mob Rules, my favourite song is "Falling Off The Edge Of The World".

Gates Of Ishtar's "A Bloodred Path", well, it was all in my last entry, just a great Scandinavian Death Metal album, not too complex or progressive, still with great melodies and power and with a great natural sound.
AND... they cover W.A.S.P.'s "I wanna be somebody" :)

Well, don't know why I'm writing all this down, but somehow I want to share my thoughts about the music I love with others ... I don't know what I would do without music, I need it every day of my life !!

Oh well ... my first entry here ...
Slept only 6 hours, so I'm quite tired and don't know what to do on such a fine Sunday (wonderful weather outside, still I'm sitting at the computer ... well, THAT's typical for me).
Maybe have a cup of coffee ...
Yesterday was a successful day, because I found some time to draw three new pictures, which I uploaded to my deviantart account.
I don't know why I started drawing again this year, after nearly 10 years of inactivity (I also wonder why I stopped drawing at all so many years ago, can't remember any good reason ...).
Maybe I started again because this year has been overshadowed by a lot of nostalgia, and when still in school I always drew when something was on my mind (back then it was love ;))...and maybe now it's the weight of the past.
I honestly don't know where all the years have gone ... so much has happened, and now I feel the speed of time accelerating a bit more every month.
I have this slight tendency to nostalgia ... right now I'm listening to a CD I haven't put into my player for quite some time (until I "re-discovered" it yesterday), "A Bloodred Path" by Gates Of Ishtar, an album I very much liked 10 years ago and that still hasn't lost anything of its energy.
It's intruiging to see how memories are connected to music ... many of my CDs are connected to a special period of time in my life, and when I listen to them they instantly bring back the "good old times" ... I know I should look straight ahead and not sink too deep into the past, but it really frightens me to see how time has passed and what I made of it, and what roads are open to me into the future.
"Back then" there were a lot of more roads, it seems ...
Not that I'm totally unhappy, but at times I get really desperate ... somehow my life lacks something at the moment, and I don't know for certain what it is (although being single now for 3 years might play a major role in this ;) )... I just remember that some years ago I never felt that way ...
Well, enough emo-talk for today ... maybe I should get me a fresh cup of coffee and start drawing something again...

Oh, and thanks to my good friend Oliver (swx2) I found this place and thought it a good idea to sign up for keeping in touch with each other over the internet.
I cannot really imagine anymore how life worked when I had NO internet (10 years ago) ... it has become such an integral part of my everyday-life now as drinking coffee or brushing my teeth ... again a proof for how time flies ... oh well ... ;)