Aégis

Aégis is the third studio album by Norwegian gothic metal band Theatre of Tragedy, and the last album of their musical period defined by gothic stylings and Early Modern English lyrics.

Music and lyrics

As with Theatre of Tragedy's previous albums, the lyrics are written in Early Modern English which sounds very different from modern English: Vaunt! - Devil tyne - Wadst thou wane fore'ermae? (from the song "Angélique"). The subject matter is drawn from a range of European folklore and history: Venus and Poppæa are from Roman sources; Aœde, Cassandra, Bacchante and Siren are drawn from Greek mythology; while Lorelei refers to a Nix from German stories.

Track listing

Notes

Personnel

Theatre of Tragedy

Singles

From this period there were 2 releases.

Theatre of Tragedy

Theatre of Tragedy was a Norwegian band from Stavanger, active between 1993 and 2010. They are best known for their earlier albums, which influenced the gothic metal genre.

Biography

Theatre of Tragedy was founded on 2 October 1993 by vocalist Raymond István Rohonyi, guitarists Pål Bjåstad and Tommy Lindal. Drummer Hein Frode Hansen had recently quit his former band Phobia and started looking for a new musical project to play in. A friend of his told Hein that a band called Suffering Grief was looking for a new drummer, and after contacting them, he joined the band. At the time, Suffering Grief was composed of vocalist Raymond István Rohonyi and guitarists Pål Bjåstad and Tommy Lindal. No bassist had joined the band yet, but Eirik T. Saltrø had agreed to play with them in live concerts.

After finding a rehearsal place, the band decided to work upon a couple of piano arrangements composed by Lorentz Aspen. The vocals, at the time, were mostly entirely composed by raw death grunts.

Massacre Records

Massacre Records is an independent record label based in Abstatt, Germany.

The label was founded in 1991 by Torsten Hartmann. The label is specialized on bands of the harder varieties of metal. Connected to Massacre Records is the marketing and music wholesale Metal Merchant, the sub-labels Blue Rose Records and Gutter Records for the singer/songwriter genre and for German metal respectively and the music publisher Sylvian Music. Massacre Records distributes also the albums of the gothic metal label MCM Music.

From 1995 to 2000, Massacre Records maintained the sub-label Swanlake Records for gothic metal and folk metal. The best-known artists published on Swanlake were Skyclad, Atrocity, Theatre of Tragedy and Liv Kristine.

The best-selling albums released on Massacre became Velvet Darkness They Fear and Aégis by Theatre of Tragedy, and Werk 80 by Atrocity.

Artists

Current

Unsorted

Theatre

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art and stagecraft are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from ancient Greek drama, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical language, stage writing, and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that differentiate theatre from the other performing arts, literature, and the arts in general.

Tragedy

Tragedy (from the Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia) is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in audiences. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.

From its origins in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Jean Racine, and Friedrich Schiller to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of August Strindberg; Samuel Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering; Müller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon; and Joshua Oppenheimer's incorporation of tragic pathos in his nonfiction film, The Act of Killing (2012), tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change. A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin,Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon, and criticized the genre.