Go Inside the Recording of Immolation’s ‘Dawn of P…

Today Decibel celebrates the official release of Into Everlasting Fire: The Official History of Immolation. Decibel Books’ newest limited edition hardcover explores the legendary New Yorkers from their beginnings in the nascent tape-trading underground through their current standing as one of the most beloved bands in death metal history. And Decibel is proud to share the second and final excerpt from the 460-page hardcover book authored by Kevin Stewart-Panko.

The following passage takes readers back to Berlin in early 1991—not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall—where inside Harris Johns’ Musiclab Studios the members of Immolation began recording their landmark debut LP, Dawn of Possession.

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With the Philly party pad’s congratulatory cake decimated to crumbs and new drummer Craig Smilowski freshly added to the ranks, hazed into the fray with six weeks of military-like rehearsal and repetition to get the music and material into his muscle memory, Immolation finalized plans to jet over to Berlin in order to spend a month recording with Harris Johns at Musiclab Studios. Here, the unperturbable producer had previously worked the console in the creation of Coroner’s debut R.I.P., Kreator’s Pleasure to Kill, Exumer’s Possessed by Fire, Voivod’s Killing Technology and Dimension Hatröss, and Sodom’s Persecution Mania and Agent Orange.

“There was a guy named Ed Farshtey,” begins Dolan about the German odyssey, “and he used to do a ’zine called Book of Armageddon, book shows in New York and Brooklyn and he was also working at Roadrunner. On my first trip out to Milwaukee for one of the early Milwaukee Metal Fests that Autopsy and Obituary played, I went with Ed, Josh [Barohn], the bass player from Suffocation when they were starting out, and a bunch of other New York guys. Ed was a good friend of ours and he actually bought us plane tickets to Germany. It was so old school. He brought the physical tickets over to my house and said, ‘Good luck, have fun and make a kick- ass record.’ Then we went over to Germany.”

As mentioned previously, Immolation was given three producer options by their new label, each of whom was a recognizable name that had carved out its own sound and success throughout the ’80s. Of the three, they were all-in on working with Johns. But if A&R man Monte Conner was leaning one way or another and trying to suggestively steer the band in one direction, he didn’t let on. Though he did have a personal favorite and was glad Immolation went down the path they did.

“I was a huge, huge fan of Harris Johns back then,” he gushes. “The guy was one of the key producers in metal and all the records he was doing sounded amazing. You’d have to ask them to confirm this, but I’m pretty sure it was me who suggested Harris. Looking back, I thought very highly of him back then and he was in the stable of people I would have sent any band to, so I’m pretty sure it was my idea and the band agreed because he was doing such great work.”

Despite Conner’s deep abiding respect for the friendly German studio whiz, it remained a surprise that a rookie band like Immolation, who had previously only recorded at small studios, were being given the green light to roam unsupervised and record the first album of their first recording contract 4,000 miles away in another country. Especially given reports of Roadrunner’s notoriously strict balance sheet and Wessels’ pince-nez approach to keeping an eye on the money going out versus the money coming in. Especially the money going out.

“It worked!” exclaims Conner about how they managed to massage the budget enough to send Immolation overseas. “I don’t remember what we signed them for, but it probably wasn’t a whole lot. I would guess something $10-12,000 for their deal, but whatever it was, we made it work because I wouldn’t have been able to send them to Harris. I believe there was no way we could have worked in flights and hotels. It had to have been a residential studio, so the studio rate probably included accommodations as well.”

Upon arriving at Berlin Tegel airport in the spring of 1991, the members of Immolation found themselves as starstruck youngsters in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe a few months after the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and hardline communism had come crashing to the ground, literally and figuratively. They may not have had to be reminded to focus on the job at hand, but there were distractions that a bunch of literal kids had to juggle and consider. Curiously, in the decision to use Musiclab, fly to Berlin and incur all the financial and temporal expenses to do so, they had hardly spoken to, let alone met, Johns beforehand to confer about how the task at hand was going to be approached and tackled.

“If anything, and at the very most, we let him know about certain equipment we needed,” recalls Vigna. “I know Craig wanted a Sonar kit, but I don’t think we had too many discussions about much of anything else. We pretty much met him and went into the studio as soon as we got there. He was super-cool, super-nice, super-hospitable and super-easy to work with. We were young kids traveling to Europe and working with a producer who was very well-known to do our first record. It was a pretty big deal and kind of intimidating.”

As familiar as Immolation was with Harris Johns, Harris Johns was not nearly as familiar with Immolation. He recalls being given one of their demos to check out after the studio time had been booked but knew little else. What he did know was that a bunch of New Yorkers who had never recorded a full-length album before were coming over to spend a month working and living in his studio. And that was about it.

“It didn’t seem weird to me that they didn’t record in New York,” Johns remembers. “It was pretty normal because other bands came from Brazil and Canada, but thinking about it, it is kind of funny because there are many, many studios over there in New York. But Immolation heard some stuff I did and liked it and wanted to be different from the others.”

For the most part, Harris Johns was Noise Records’ go-to guy and Music Lab was the go-to spot when it came to getting quality productions completed. Johns was an important part of the German metal scene. He personally knew many of the bands he worked with and would hang out with them outside of the studio setting. Noise president Karl-Ulrich Walterbach’s roster of bands consumed most of the calendar at Musiclab—Celtic Frost, Deathrow, Watchtower, Grave Digger—but once Johns produced Pestilence’s Consuming Impulse album for Roadrunner, other labels caught wind of his acumen at the console and began hitting him up.

As his client list expanded, Roadrunner continued to send bands and work his way, including Brazilian crossover band Ratos de Porão, who flew to Berlin to record their fifth album, Anarkophobia.

“I thought they were very friendly guys,” says Johns about his first impressions of Immolation. “They were witty and funny but talked a little too fast and too ‘New York’ for me. My mother tongue is German, even though I had an American father, my English has never been totally perfect, even to this day. I liked their stuff. I did Pestilence two years before them, so I had a rough idea of what it was going to be like, but it was a nice surprise because I liked them better than Pestilence.”

Located in a timeworn school building at Templehofer Ufer 10—“That was the address we had to remember in case we got lost and had to tell a cab driver in order to get back because there were no cell phones or anything like that,” laughs Vigna—Music Lab Studios was Johns’ location where he created not only a recording studio but also a convenient, attached living environment. This gave artists the opportunity to immerse themselves in their work. It kept distractions to a minimum and essentially allowed bands to take advantage of spur-of-the-moment ideas, roll out of bed and hit the ground running and/or work late into the night. There was also a B-room studio designed for pre-production, demos and less intensive works. “I remember I would go in there and rehearse my solos and other parts before recording,” says Vigna.

The living space, which consisted of multiple small bedrooms, a living room area, a kitchenette and a bathroom, allowed musicians the luxury of not only being close to their works in progress but also allowed them to avoid having to worry about finding and paying for hotels. Never mind being able to skip the exercise of having to commute through a strange city on a daily basis.

Because the extent of Immolation’s recording experience was limited to Sleepy Hollow Studio in Dobbs-Ferry and The Loft in Bronxville, with Smilowski having spent even less time recording at a local Philly studio called Snugfit, Johns took the first day in the studio and had the band set up, then loosen up, in order to get them used to the environment that would be their home for the next month.

“When we first got there and got everything set up, Harris was like, ‘All right guys, I want you to play through all the songs for me. Pretend that you’re in a rehearsal room. Just jam them like you would at home,’” says Dolan. “Once everything was in place and mic-ed up and ready to go—it was a big thing getting Craig’s drums in there because he wanted a specific kit with a specific snare drum—Harris was in the control room, we played through the songs with me singing. We did it maybe once or twice and he’s like, ‘Come in and check it out. What do you guys think about this? Can we use any of this?’”

“We got into it right away, no problem at all,” says Johns. “I did my usual thing, like doing a soundcheck, doing test recordings and talking to the band about what they thought and what they wanted.”

After hearing the results of the first run-throughs of the Dawn of Possession material, the band knew they didn’t want to use any of what they just played. They wanted to eschew playing live and record in conglomerate pieces as is customary for studio works.

“After he asked us if we could use any of what we did, we were like, ‘Fucking fail. Negative!’” asserts Dolan. “He wanted to capture the energy and rawness of the band, but we were fucking up and there were things that could have been better because we didn’t know his intent. We shut that down and said let’s just do it the way we should be doing it and that was cool; he wasn’t pushy about it. So, we tracked everything the way you normally would and went through the whole process.”

One highly amusing story came about by happenstance when Johns wanted to know something about the band: what they tuned to. The funny part was that the band was unsure of themselves.

“We didn’t have tuners,” laughs Dolan. “So, when we would come to the rehearsal room and if I played something and it sounded weird, Bob would say, ‘You’re out of tune.’ So, I’d say, ‘Hit your E string.’ He’d hit his E string and I’d tune to him, but he wasn’t tuned to E.”

“We didn’t really know what we were tuned to,” picks up Vigna. “I knew how to tune the guitar itself, and we could all tune our instruments, but never really paid attention to what key we were in. We knew we wanted to make things heavier, so we probably just tuned down more and more as time went on, not realizing just how much we did. That being said, whatever it was that I was tuning to, that’s what it was. When we went to the studio, Harris is like, ‘Okay, here, use this tuner and we’ll figure it out’.”

“He asked us what we tune to,” says Dolan. “We were like, ‘We tune to Bob.’ He was blown away. Then, he went and got a proper tuner, got Bob to plug into it so we could see what Bob was tuned to and we learned that we were tuned to C standard. So, C standard is equivalent to Bob. We were very green and none of us owned a tuner. As long as we were in tune with each other, we figured everything would be fine.”

Outside of the shocking hilarity of it taking Immolation existing as a band for three years and then flying to Berlin to record an album to discover what they themselves tuned to, the recording of Dawn of Possession was relatively frictionless. Smilowski finished his drum tracks in three days flat, leaving him 25 or so days to hang out, watch “and enjoy the experience of recording and being at that level. It was a learning experience and I was interested in seeing how the recording process would be produced and the ins and outs of that.”

Harris Johns created a relaxed environment in the studio for the first-timers that allowed them to discover what pace worked best for them. Some of the nuts, bolts and tidbits that arose out of the Dawn of Possession sessions included:

The Kreator Wind Intro
BOB: “We said we wanted to have some kind of wind at the beginning of the song ‘Burial Ground.’ Harris happened to have a few wind sound effects in his arsenal. He picked one out and it sounded cool, he later revealed to us that it was the same wind he used on a Kreator album.”
ROSS: “At the very beginning of Pleasure to Kill, ‘Choir of the Damned’ starts off with a little acoustic part and it has wind behind it. That’s the same wind sound effect, maybe manipulated a little differently, but it was cool to know that and that it was the same thing.”

The Harris Johns Pastry Run
CRAIG: “One time, we were sitting in the control room and it was a Sunday morning. Harris turns everything on and is getting ready to start the day. Suddenly, he gets up and runs out of the room. We’re like, ‘Where the hell is he going?’ And we see on the CCTV cameras that he’s running through the hallway and running down the stairwell and leaving the studio. We’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ Twenty minutes or so passes and he comes back and is like, ‘Sorry guys, it’s Sunday and the bakery closes at noon.’ He had to go get his favorite pastries.”

Playing Quarters, Immolation Style
CRAIG: “We’d play quarters at the end of the day. We’d sit around the dining room table, bounce the quarter and if you’d miss, you’d have to play an Immolation riff on acoustic guitar, which for me was not happening. Those were some pretty fun nights.”

Contributing to the Musiclab guest book
ROSS: “[ Johns] had a book that all the bands would sign and, for us, going through that book was the coolest thing ever. You’d see the Kreator guys, Sodom, Voivod and all these bands that had come before us. We drew some funny shit in there because one of the songs off the first record is called ‘After My Prayers’ and we had the most trouble nailing it down. We had trouble getting tight and it’s a long song. This was when you had to play the shit perfectly straight through in one shot. That song was a thorn in Harris’ side, so we drew a cartoon of Harris jumping out of the window of the studio with ‘After My Prayers’ coming up as a word bubble because it was the bane of his existence.”

“As far as the recording goes, everything was smooth,” says a satisfied Vigna. “Harris made things a lot easier on us just being the way he was and made it a good experience inside and outside the studio, which often helps because it makes you more comfortable. He was very cool, patient and just made it easy for us.”

Outside the studio walls, Berlin (and Germany) was in a period of upheaval and transition. Positive as it was, it was still a seismic shift that engulfed both halves of the city and the entire country. The Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall and the socio-political system that had been responsible for that division—not to mention so much ripping and kick-ass thrash metal during the ’80s—had come tumbling down just over a year prior to Immolation’s arrival. Optimism and promise filled the air; families and friends were still reuniting; East Germans were still acclimating to capitalism’s bounty, possibility and overindulgence. And a short, whistling dude with a skullet managed to sum up how everyone was feeling.

“It was very cool because the Scorpions song ‘Winds of Change’ was constantly on MTV and the radio and was the zeitgeist of what was happening,” Dolan recalls. “Things had just started to open up, but most of the Wall was still up. On the train ride from wherever we were going in the city back to the studio, the line followed the Wall and Harris’ studio was close to Checkpoint Charlie while it was still a checkpoint and not a tourist attraction. Now, the Wall is gone and it’s just a marking on the ground.”

“It was only a few months after the Berlin Wall came down, so there were a lot of sights to see and being there at that particular time was very interesting,” says Vigna. “Harris would also take us out to dinner and take us out to shows. We saw Paradise Lost for the first time when they were in town. He introduced us to another friend of his named Sabine and she would also take us out. It was cool and it made it a lot easier for us.”

Funnily enough, one of the owners of Morrisound, one of the studios offered up as a potential location for the recording of Dawn of Possession, happened to be in Berlin at the same time. The instance involved another band Immolation was familiar with recording at another local studio and Johns facilitated a meeting between all the parties involved.

“Harris had a buddy who owned another studio [Sky Trak] in town,” remembers Dolan. “It was a bigger studio and Tom Morris was recording Coroner’s Mental Vortex album there. He asked us if we wanted to go over and say hi. So, he took us over to the studio while Coroner was there with Tom and we met him and the guys briefly. They were very gracious and allowed us in during their session to meet. Harris totally went out of his way to do things like that to make our stay there very cool.”

In addition to recording what would become Dawn of Possession, ferrying the band around to check out the occasional gig by British doom bands, showing them touristy sight-seeing shit and creating an inviting atmosphere to offset the hard work of creating an album, Johns also ended up introducing Immolation to an artist named Andreas Marschall. The pairing of band and artist would glean a fruitful relationship that would go on to be one of the most significant of their entire career.

“One night, he said he had a friend of his who was going to stop by,” says Dolan. “He said, ‘He’s a good artist and you may want to consider him if you’re looking for someone to do your cover.’”

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To read the full story on the making of Dawn of Possession, order a copy of Into Everlasting Fire: The Official History of Immolation exclusively via the Decibel webstore right here.

Read another excerpt from Into Everlasting Fire: The Official History of Immolation about the band’s signing to Roadrunner Records here.