Prog Metal news & releases(Ministry Of Lost Souls)

The album is the fourth album in the quadralogy.

Back in 1999 I started to write music for a follow up album to Deggial. Lets call it Album-X. I wrote 7-8 songs for it before I one day played 2 songs (later named "Secret of The Runes" and "Asgard") to former guitarist Kristian Niemann that I had written for a side project (which in the end never happened) and he said "Hey, those songs should not be used for some project, they belong in Therion!" I didn't know how they would fit in with the THERION album I was writing on and didn't bother much about it until I woke up one day and had the idea tot to make a nordic concept album, in which those two songs actually was perfect. So Album-X had to be put on hold and instead the Secret of The Runes album was made.

In 2003 we went back to the saved songs to record a new album (Album-X, remember?), but meanwhile we had written a lot more songs and now all of a sudden we had enough material for 3 albums! Let's call them Album X, Y and Z. They formed a trilogy and we decided to record two of them and release at the same time and saved the third one for the future. So we recorded Sirius B (Album-X) and Lemuria (Album-Y) and Album-Z was saved.

2005 I got the idea for a completely different kind of album due to some songs I had written and the decision was made to put Album-Z on hold a bit longer and in 2006 we recorded Gothic Kabbalah instead. However, we took 2 songs from Album-Z ( "Der Mitternachtslöwe" and "Adulruna Rediviva") and put on the Gothic Kabbalah album and because of that this record got connected to the trilogy and thus we all of a sudden had a quadralogy.

In 2009 it was finally time to start record the Album-Z, now entitled Sitra Ahra. As we had taken 2 songs from it and put on Gothic Kabbalah, there was space for some new songs to be added as well.

The above is very important to understand, as this means only a few of the songs on Sitra Ahra are written in recent years. The majority of the songs are from the same pool of songs from which Sirius B and Lemuria was created from, meaning they were written between 2000-2004 (there was even a song from 1999, but we decided not to use it on the album in the end).

By no means they are to be regarded as "leftovers". These where songs equal to those ending up on Lemuria and Sirius B, we just divided the songs we had on 3 albums. This really created a unique approach to the songs as I have evolved so much musically since those songs were written. I think of it in terms as a vintage wine that becomes better and better with the years.