Diabolical Masquerade

Diabolical Masquerade was a Swedish one-man black metal band. All music is written and played by Katatonia guitarist Blakkheim (Anders Nyström) who wanted to have a band where he could compose more extreme music while Katatonia were exploring more mellow moods. The music leans heavily on avant-garde melodic black metal with some death metal and thrash metal influences. Blakkheim wanted to experiment more with songstructure, theme and composition. This is most notably seen on his last project as Diabolical Masquerade called "Death's Design." This album is conceived as the soundtrack to a nonexistent horror movie, with 61 tracks broken up into 20 movements, each with a unique feel and theme. While Death's Design is a more extreme album than any releases by Katatonia in recent years, it also includes many passages featuring various genres and styles, experimenting with progressive rock, progressive metal, ambient, classical music and rhythmic, percussion based passages. It is for the most part an album which expresses a plot through the feel of the music itself, much like the orchestral soundtrack to a movie might, and by doing this Blakkheim proves the creativity that extreme music can reach in the hands of a skilled practitioner of his trade. In early September 2004, it was announced that Blakkheim had put the project to sleep after not having found the necessary inspiration while working on a fifth album.