During the recording for the second studio album "Into the Pandemonium", in front of the bombed Aegidienkirche in Hanover. March 1987, Fred Baumgart[/caption]To mark the occasion of Martin Eric Ain receiving a posthumous Tribute Award by the pitiable Swiss Music Awards on February 9, 2018, Noisey/Vice Switzerland commissioned me to draft a very personal commemoration of my friend, Hellhammer's last bassist, and Celtic Frost's co-founder. The following, with kind permission by Noisey/Vice, is an adapted English translation of the original German-language article as posted on the date of the event.
The assignment to write this article arrives at night, as I am on my way home after a concert in Zurich, Switzerland, in a tram of the line number 2. A coincidence. Since Martin's death, I have lived through uncounted moments that illustrated the unbearable finality of his absence. And on this tram line, at this hour of the day, such moments accumulate most profoundly.
It's not just that the nightly city had become Martin's domain in the course of the past twenty years, and that I always knew that he was active somewhere, in one of the bars and clubs he managed together with his partners. And that the end of such omnipresence now serves to make the city seem dismal and empty, in spite of the pulsating nightlife all around me. It's also that tram no. 2 passes so many locations that once played a role in one way or another for Martin and me.
The beginning of Langstrasse, for example, where some of Martin's bars are located and which thus became one of the hubs of his life. The building in which we watched, in 2006, Celtic Frost's first video clip in 16 years, following the band's reunion. The district court, whose entrance served as the setting for a Celtic Frost photo shoot in 1986. Martin's former apartment at Badenerstrasse, where he had created his infamous "black room" without doors and windows, and where both important and desolate events took place. The notary's office, where we sealed the reunited Celtic Frost's business affairs in early 2006.
The tree, where Martin abandoned his bicycle during a fit of rage in 1986; the bicycle remained leaning against the tree for years afterwards and became a running gag within the band. Stauffacherplatz square, where we used to meet for coffee, to discuss band affairs. Bäckerstrasse, where Martin opened his Laserzone DVD store. The Volkshaus venue, where we witnessed uncounted metal and new wave concerts in the 1980s. And the vast Sihlfeld cemetery, the gate of which served as a backdrop for a major Celtic Frost photo session in February of 2006.
It is also the cemetery where Martin's ashes were laid to rest, eleven years later.
None of these locations would be of any such significance had Martin and I never met. With the exception of his family, I was likely the one person within his universe with whom he traversed the longest path; a friendship of 34 years. Our affiliation couldn't have been any more life-changing.
We first ran into each other in 1983, when we both attended the infrequent Quo Vadis disco in a basement hall of the reformed church of Wallisellen, the town where Martin lived. This event had been created in light of the Zurich youth riots, in order to distract the adolescents of the village from venturing into the evil city. Quo Vadis mainly featured charts music, but out of pity, the DJ also played some Heavy Metal for the handful conspicuously black attired teenagers who would invariably arrive from the surrounding, godforsaken villages. We were these teenagers, and these few precious minutes of our music were exactly the reason why we went there.
My band Hellhammer had already existed for over a year, and we had recorded two demos. Martin and his friends immediately caught our eye. It was mutual; in our own individual manner, we all radiated an aura that was one part radical and one part wounded soul. Martin's clique soon appeared at our rehearsals, in a bunker two villages down the road. They would come on their bicycles, across steep hills, during the heat of the summer, on coldest winter days, and at night, through pitch-black forests.
Martin was 15 years old, I was 19. In many ways, he seemed as fanatical as I was, and we soon became each other's most important friends. His intelligence and thirst for knowledge were utterly impressive. We spent uncounted nights dissecting any topics that occupied our impassioned minds: parents, music, history, society, religion, art, band strategy, and so on. And we both learned immensely from each other due to this intense intellectual and emotional discourse.
Hellhammer's existence emboldened Martin to also form a band. We helped and made our instruments and rehearsal room accessible to them. In autumn of 1983, Hellhammer needed a new bassist, and it was quite obvious that Martin was destined to fill this position. But he didn't have the confidence. Instead, he supplied Hellhammer behind the scenes with a constant flow of sophisticated ideas, designed to improve our image, lyrics, and professionalism. Martin submitted his thoughts not simply in the course of conversations, but also by means of detailed memoranda, signed with "Mart Jeckyl", a reference to the two personalities Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde.
A few months later, I finally managed to convince Martin to join Hellhammer, but he still felt he wasn't good enough. After two weeks of playing with the band, he appeared at our rehearsal room and declared: "As a member of Hellhammer, I have determined that I am slowing the band's progress. I am therefore firing myself for the benefit of the band!" And that's what he did.
In December of 1983, we recorded our third demo, the tape that would eventually lead to an international record deal. Martin assisted us in a mere advisory role, as he had done before. But everybody involved knew beyond any doubt by now that he really was a part of the band and finally needed to join permanently. He became a permanent member right after the demo recording sessions. We immediately shot photos of the new line-up and included them when we sent the demo to the record company in West Berlin. Events were thus set in motion that had an enormous effect on our lives and eventually resulted in an international career. The naive teenager years spent in our utterly backward farm villages was definitely coming to an end.
A mere five months later, we sensed that our collaboration required a more unconstrained platform than Hellhammer could provide it. Martin followed my example and left his apprenticeship too, and we began our new project literally with an empty sheet of paper. This was the birth of Celtic Frost, during the night of May 31 to June 1, 1984.
Unlike many others who simply excelled in hollow talk, Martin was one of the few people who were prepared to embark on this difficult journey with me, uncompromisingly and against substantial opposition. He was self-thought and became an extraordinary bassist. He hardly wrote any music, but his contributions on other levels were of similar importance for the band. To a large extent, Celtic Frost's uniqueness depended on our creative collaboration. We had begun as an underground band in a mildewed bunker, widely ridiculed in our native country of Switzerland. And now, Celtic Frost travelled around the world as a headliner, and our albums made a substantial impact, from Tokyo to New York, in the eyes of media, audiences, and peers.
It is difficult to identify Martin's true deeper motivation to join me in this quest. It was likely primarily an act of rebellion against the rigid, religious environment that had dominated his youth. Once this purpose was sufficiently fulfilled, the musical path increasingly lost its importance to him. He had already disassociated himself from Celtic Frost before the band succumbed to its inevitable disintegration in 1993. Martin subsequently became an intuitive entrepreneur and involved himself with activities that often represented a glaring contradiction to the values he defended so fervently in his youth.
It was much the same after we reformed Celtic Frost in 2001, released the colossal Monotheist album after years of work in 2006, and toured around the world again in 2006 and 2007. In spite of first agreeing with me that the reunion would be a long-term undertaking, Martin confided to me towards the end of the tour that he thought we had "proven ourselves sufficiently", and that a further album was thus unnecessary. Compared to the comfortable and lucrative life he led running his clubs in Zurich, he felt drained by the strains of touring and operating a band often utterly untamed on the personal level, in musical surroundings that had changed substantially since the 1980s. Martin's focus was already elsewhere, and I realized that the reunion served a different purpose for him than it did for me. The absolute nadir was reached when he revealed to me that it all had been "an act" for him at any rate. Although that disclosure was symptomatic for him, the reunion had run its course for me too, after this.
Martin was a complex and often contradictory person, and there existed moments when I found myself wondering if I actually knew him at all – but I am certain he would write the exact same about me as well. We were very similar and very different at the same time. Martin could be generous and cordial, but also pedantic, cold, and stubborn. In the course of our long affiliation, both of us at some point managed to destroy what was most important in the other person's life, thus leaving each other deeply wounded. And yet, at the same time we owed each other the course of our existence and the fulfilment of our teenage dreams that once had seemed so unrealistic.
We were always aware of all of this, even during the years we did not collaborate and saw each other only rarely. Martin was a constant part of my consciousness, and when I formed a new group after the final termination of Celtic Frost in 2008, I still wrote every single song for his ears. And wherever I am playing in this world, I inevitably find myself thinking of him – and I frequently took care to let him know about this when he was still alive.
Our friendship was often a symbiosis of intrinsically incompatible contradictions. Nonetheless, and in spite of at times fervent disputes, we always eventually managed to overcome such tension and convert it into something deeply creative and unique. Something that rendered redundant both perceived and real boundaries, something that will last far longer than our mortal shells.
Tom Gabriel Fischer
http://fischerisdead.blogspot.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMIPbZ56HRI
Take my soul away into the dark
Dreaming a thousand morbid dreams
No tomorrow when the wind caress my mind
Could I ever return, it would be my doom
Tom Gabriel Fischer has written great homage to Martin Eric ''Ain''. Celtic Frost/Hellhammer are a legend.
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