Triptykon Complete Unfinished Celtic Frost Work on “Requiem”

by Kevin Johnson Friday, June 5th, 2020

Triptykon: Requiem (Live At Roadburn 2019) Although they formed in only 2008, the avant-garde extreme metal band Triptykon has released a new live album that’s been over 30 years in the making. Band founder Tom Gabriel Warrior led the group at the 2019 Roadburn Festival to complete the three-part Requiem, first started by his former band Celtic Frost.

“Celtic Frost recorded the first installment of what was intended to eventually become a three-part Requiem (missa pro defunctis; i.e., mass for the dead) at Horus Studio in Hanover, Germany, in early 1987,” label Century Media explains. “The finished piece, titled ‘Rex Irae’, was released on the band’s illustrious avant-garde album Into The Pandemonium, in June of the same year. Warrior had begun working on the piece in 1986, but the timeline for further work on the two remaining parts of the Requiem was intentionally left tentative.”

Celtic Frost would release the third fragment on the 2006 album, Monotheist, but the second fragment was a mystery until Triptykon’s performance last year. The group, anchored by the massive bass of Vanja Slajh, performed the three-piece suite in full alongside the Metropole Orkest. The second track, “Grave Eternal,” has an epic 32-minute run time.

Watch Slanjh and Triptykon tackle “Rex Irae” in this clip: