2015 was a busy year for Delain’s frontwoman Charlotte Wessels. More than ever her main band is determined to conquer the world of symphonic metal, and saw a huge stride forward in accomplishing that goal through grandiose shows around the world. In Delain’s infrequent downtime Charlotte somehow managed to conceive of a new ambitious project along with a couple other prolific musicians, and that project is Phantasma, and we look at the curiosities that surround the story-driven concept…
With a release that we discovered was not only a collaboration of big names in metal, but also an intricate story that threaded it together as a metal opera, and one that has been physically written as a book. We asked Charlotte just how she had the time to write and develop Phantasma along with other brilliant metal songwriters, and shed a little light on the dark yet radiant story.
Read an excerpt of the interview here and listen to the full interview below:
So we heard the album a couple weeks ago, we were pretty impressed by it – it was very unique! Can you explain the Phantasma project a little more?
Sure! The Phantasma project is by Georg Neuhauser [Serenity], Oliver Philipps [Everon] and myself. We have created this concept record based on and that centre’s around the included novella called ‘The Deviant Hearts’. It’s basically a book and all the songs work together with characters, in the scenes or challenges from the story, offering a more poetic perspective to it in a way. The music is very diverse, offering different angles of this rock metal area, you know one being very much ‘classic rock’ influence, One being very proggy and myself being more alternative. It’s a very lush record centred around this story, and we’ve tried our best to make it special!
It certainly is! How was the project conceived? Have you thought about doing something like this for a while?
Actually I didn’t! It was Georg who initiated the project as he really wanted to make a concept-style record, and he then asked Oliver who joined him on that, and the thing is they both really like the musical style and the challenge of doing a concept record like that…but they both didn’t really have an idea of what the concept itself should be!
I have worked with Oliver for over 10 years now, and I worked with George on their ‘Death & Legacy’ album. So I know them both very well, especially Oliver, he knows that I basically do all the lyrics in Delain, and knows that I like stories! He was the one who suggested I might join in and work on that very concept, but I was very hesitant because he asked if I wanted to do something like this.
To be honest I never considered doing a concept record…mainly because there are some concept records that I really like that are amongst my favourite records in the world, but there are also a lot that I really dislike, and I was very worried that I, without the experience or even the long-time ambition of doing something like that, would dive into it and it would be…well I couldn’t make it personal and special!
I thought for a very long time about how, and whether I was going to do it, and I guess for me I was really excited about the challenge from the very beginning, but I was very confident at that moment that I was going to do the book…
So that the songs could stand on their own?
Yes exactly! Without needing filler music to get the story from A to B. But with the book included that gave me a lot of freedom to do a concept record on the one hand with the songs really following the story chronologically, but still have the freedom of having them stand on their own and not having to connect every tiny bit – because you can read the connection from the book!
When I figured out that this could be a way to do it, then I felt confident to say OK you know? Let’s do this! And I went into it 100% after that!
