The history of "Back From The Void"
by Wolfgang Hierl

The first parts of "Blind Archer" were written in 1997. "On The Archer's Hill" was performed live on stage for the first time on October 10 1997, followed by "Harvest" in 1998. They were always meant to be the beginning of an epic piece that grew until 2001 when we finally decided to record it. By that time it had exceeded 30 minutes, being the longest of High Wheel's songs. "Sleepless" was written in early spring 1998 being one of the very few High Wheel songs which I started by writing the lyrics, followed by completing the musical score afterwards. This song catches the joy of the beginning spring and is one of High Wheel's most optimistic tunes with a great finale. "Void" has been in my computer for some years almost completed (except the vocals) as well. But it was the last to enter the running list of the new album, because we never played it live and didn't know what to think of it in the beginning. Actually, its former title was "Sudden attack of the flying killer-moles", but we decided to change it into "Void" and that's how we got a title for the album. Some parts of "The Screamer" were written quite before we finished "There". The plan has always been to get a little suite out of the existing material, because the lyrical concept needed a longer complex three-parts piece. "Blasted by screams" was added last. It sounded really odd in the beginning of rehearsals and we didn't know what would become of it. But it finally worked. The last song to join the album was "Dark". In fact, it's only Erich and me who were involved. That's why we focussed on it after the recording of the basic tracks, although the idea to do a song based on the medieval song "Es ist ein Schnitter heisst der Tod" has been in my head since 1997. Erich's lyrics came in while Andreas and I were in the studio and then we could put it on tape. The first song of the album, "Try An Error" was written last. In the beginning we were not very pleased with it, and it went through some changes before we finally got the version we recorded in the end.

After rehearsing in May 2000 we went back to the studio after a 4 years absence in June. Fortunately it hasn't been a total absence of each of the band members, cause every now and then we have been recording different music, that's why we felt still at home and had a really good time. The engineer and co-producer Peter Rixner is a friend of us who already collaborated with the band on "1910" and "There". He is in charge for the sound and for giving us feedback on what we want to record. There's a lot of his skill and creativity in the recordings. The studio is not far away from our homes, that's why we got started pretty well and did most of the recording in June and July of 2000. We were really happy with the sound, especially the sound of the bass seemed great to us. Then we had a break of one month. In that time most of the vocals and lyrics were written and recorded afterwards along with missing guitars, flutes and keys from September to December. It took such a long time, because we wanted to focus on the vocals more than we did in the past and not record second-rate stuff. The classic section on "Man In The Cloud" was completed in July. A dear friend of ours, Pia Horn, did the violin section by dubbing about 5 violins, supported by Erich who did the double-bass and a higher cello-like double-bass voicing and, finally, I put some flute and the vocals on. In July we also created the soundscapes of "Void" and the complete songs "Dark" and "Archer". The last thing to be finished was the lead-vocals of "Arrows" and "Hall Of Fame" which we recorded in early December. Mixing had already begun, cause we decided to do mixing and recording simultaneously for I didn't get fitting lyrics for some parts of "Blind Archer". Actually, the lyrics are my chief concern, and as we all are no native speakers it takes some time to find the right words to express your intentions. Even more complicated if you're working on a long piece with a difficult storyline and have to get certain parts of the plot into the songs. Therefore, mixing was completed in early January 2001. It was done mainly by Peter and me, cause we found out that it leads to nothing if each member of the band is hanging round in the studio with focus mostly on what he played (...more guitar, more snare,...). So we made a mix we played to everyone and that's where they came in. Some important changes were done after having all the band listening to the tapes. Moreover, we've been playing together for more than 10 years - that's enough time to know what each one of the band likes or dislikes. We all trust in Peter's choice, anyway. In early February we did the mastering in the same studio and the recording was completed.

By that time the artwork was almost completed, but almost just proved to be not enough. Due to problems between the band and the guy who did the artwork it took some more month to get the whole stuff done. We ended up redoing most of the artwork ourselves with Peter in November 2001.

This is one of the reasons why it took so long to release the new album. Another reason is the search for label/distributor. In agreement with Ipso Facto-manager Tom Otten we tried to find a bigger label, cause we felt that our album was really good and should find more fans than we could reach with Ipso Facto. But, as time went by, we got a lot of nice mails all telling us how great the stuff is, but - sorry, not for us, not now, not like this, and so on. The same with distributors. Yes, we're interested, but no, not quite for us. Even worse, some prog-labels didn't even answer. We already thought we were totally wrong with our feelings about the albums, but the reactions we get now show us that we were right. So we finally released the album in early 2002 with Ipso Facto once again like all our albums before.

Up to now we got a lot of nice mails of people all around the world who really like the album, and of people who don't like it. Fortunately there are much more who like it (Thanx). This shows us that we've been right with our feelings about the album and go on recording and playing live as long as we can heave ourselves on a stage and there are people out there who want to hear our music.