Diabolical Masquerade - Death's Design (2001)

Avantgarde Music ■ AV 55 LP

Released August 21, 2001

Produced by Blakkheim and Dan Swanö

Edited, Assembled and Mixed by Dan Swanö, Ryan Taylor, Sean C. Bates

Mastered by Peter In De Betou

Side One:	Side Two:
Movements 1-9	Movements 10-20¹

It's difficult to pinpoint the causes behind my original exposure to this release--it stemmed, no doubt, from a combination of my college friend who introduced me to the wider worlds of metal and the metal-based message board I spent a good deal of college hanging around. Dan Swanö's endless appearances and projects (he has 293 credits on Discogs--more than Nicky Hopkins, for the moment!) surrounded his name with an aura of awe, and the release is just peculiar enough to catch my attention readily--in both sound and construction. 

As I've already noted,¹ the work is split into not just 20 movements but 61 individual parts that are pressed as separate tracks. You may also notice that this is listed as an "Original Motion Picture Soundtrack", which it most definitely isn't. There is no movie (Swedish or otherwise--there's a making-of documentary for one of the Final Destination movies, but that's it) with the title Death's Design, and this isn't really a soundtrack, though it does sound a bit like it could be. Then again, Easy Rider taught us that most any songs could be a soundtrack. But the construction and faux-soundtrack status aren't everything: this is also a wildly eccentric, eclectic, and vaguely erratic disc. An Estonian string quartet (though five string players are credited, so something's not right) is involved, as are both Blakkheim's endless instruments and Swanö's (particularly the keyboards).