Thy Catafalque

Entry Level: Tamás Kátai Discovers Stormwitch

31620_photo

Entry Level is a new series where musicians re-examine the records that piqued their interests in heavy and loud music as children and young adults.

My first encounter with metal music came in the shape of a German heavy metal band, Stormwitch. They toured a lot in Hungary at the end of the 1980s and dropped a live album entitled Stormwitch Magyarországon – Live in Budapest. For some reason this stuff was sold for a ridiculously cheap price all over the country both on cassette and vinyl. It was so cheap (I still remember, 30 forints, half a dollar at that time) that all of my friends, including me, bought a tape for themselves for fun. It was packed into a spectacular cover art as well. I was 14 then and I enjoyed computer game music mainly, so this was something very different and wild and after a couple of weeks we all admitted that the album was not bad. Not bad at all.

Years later I realized it was pretty bad, really cheesy, pompous heavy metal and the whole live setting turned out to be fake, recorded in the tour manager’s living room in front of a handful of screaming fans. But nevertheless I loved it and it let me in to a genre that defined my whole life later.

Tamás Kátai is the multi-instrumentalist and mastermind behind avant-garde metal band Thy Catafalque. Naiv is slated for a January 24th release on Season of Mist.
Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.