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k0juki · 8 months ago

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Wolf in sheep's clothing

Dark!Joost Klein x fem!reader

Warnings: (Joost is not famous in this!) stalking, bad behaviour, maybe paranoia? mentions of killing and mentions of dead people... NOT EDITED!

English is not my first language, so feel free to point out any mistakes or errors!

Wc. over 1500

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You always thought that you met Joost by accident. But was it really? With him you never know, and now you were pretty sure that it wasn't by accident. He is a man with charm, that's a very dangerous thing.

His blue eyes held more darkness than you had ever seen in anyone else. But there still was something in them, you just hoped it wasn't too late for him.

And even now that you aren't together, you still hoped there was some way to save him.

"By safe on your way home." Said your mother through the phone you had between your ear and shoulder.

"Yeah mom, I will. Don't worry, okay? I love you, bye." You ended the call and made your way home on the busy streets of Amsterdam. It was getting colder this time of year and you feared it would start snowing in a few weeks.

You hated that you had to lie to your mother, but it was for the best. She knew about your and Joost break up and she worried about you. And she would definitely get crazy if you told her the truth about your real parting.

It was a short trip home from the grocery store. Just around the corner, by the book store, where you always walk by. But you tried to walk here only during the day, not night. You saw in the news many times before how some doubtful people robbed other people near your apartment. This wasn't the best street to live on, but it was still your home after all.

The place you loved no matter what. Yes, it has some advantages and disadvantages, but what hasn't. And after you and Joost broke up, you tried to avoid this this shortcut as much as possible. You always thought that someone was watching you going through here, and now that you and Joost weren't together, you felt this feeling growth.

But it wasn't this unfamiliar gaze that scared you. No, you knew it very well who exactly it was. He is the one you should avoid, to hide from and to fear. Maybe you didn't know where he was, but you knew he was close.

You speed up a little and adjust your jacket around you with bag full of food in one hand and the other in your pocket. "It's alright Y/n, no-one is here, there's nothing to be scared of." You kept telling yourself, you were ready for everything.

"Y/n"

It was so quiet, you almost didn't hear it. You stopped in your tracks and slowly turned around. It was him, in all his glory. You didn't say anything. You couldn't, it was like he took all the oxygen and you just couldn't breathe.

"Y/n" he repeated and took a step towards you. But you couldn't move, it was like you were glued to the floor. Looking closer at him, you saw behind his glasses how his right eye was a bit swollen and purple around the corner. He didn't look good, in fact he scared you.

He stopped a few centimeters before you, practically breathing right in your face and you were sure, you were breathing just as hard.

"Wha..." you couldn't bring yourself to even speak properly, but you had to for your sake. "What are you doing here?" It was a simple question, but you didn't expect him to answer truthfully.

"I'm here to see you."

"No," Stepping back, you took your other hand out of your pocket, keeping distance between you and him. "You can't be here."

"Why not." This dull look in his ocean eyes wasn't the one you fell in love with, he wasn't your Joost. The one that cared for everyone so much all the time, even though he didn't have to. This wasn't your Joost that told you how much he loves you right when you woke up in the morning and before you fell asleep in his hold.

This wasn't him. This was someone else.

"You know why." Came out as a whisper. "We are done." You turned back around and continued your way home, you didn't stop even when you heard his voice calling after you.

"You can't keep doing this Y/n!"

He wasn't coming after you and you were glad, you just hoped you won't have to see him again.

As soon as you saw your apartment, you sighed and walked inside the building. He was gone.

Opening the door, you were greeted by loud meowing. It was like your cat brought you out of the trance. He was hungry and rubbed his head against your leg.

Kefir. He was a present from Joost and the name was an idea from him too. He knew how much you liked milk, so you immediately agreed. Your little nonstop meowing little Kefir.

You put the full bag on the counter after you made sure you locked the door. That night you couldn't sleep, how could you, and all because you saw something you shouldn't. It didn't had to end this way, but he had made his choice.

How can you hurt someone, let alone kill. This was twisted. Beyond disguising. And what was worse, you didn't told that to anyone, too scared to say something to someone. But you made your choice to break up with him. It didn't make you feel any less guilty, but you had to do something, anything at this point.

And you knew that if you looked out of the window, behind curtains, you would see him here standing with a cigarette in his mouth. How he was watching you every night for the past month since you broke up.

He scared you. Joost scared you.

---

You woke up later than usual, but there was no wonder. When you went to sleep, the sun was already up. When you looked out of the window, he was no longer here.

"Are you hungry?" You asked the cat and he just meowed as you made your way to the kitchen. You put kefir granules and got ready for the day.

Then you made your way to work and after the whole day, you had to say, you had enough. All those rude people and their bizarre ideas how you could do your job better.

When you went home you couldn't help but notice certain things. He wasn't here. Normally he was right there waiting in some dark corner watching over you or going behind you in crowded streets.

You didn't think much of it, thinking he finally stopped following you around like a lost puppy. You took a deep breath and stepped inside the building and made your way to the fourth floor. As you opened the door, you knew he was there, in your home that used to be your both.

You immediately noticed, but it wasn't for your cat, because he came to greet you as soon as you opened.

You knew he was here because he didn't follow you home. It was a strange thing for him to do, but you got used to it.

"How did you get in?"

You heard his chuckle and saw him step to the light of your living room.

"I don't want you here Joost. I made that clear." You said to him feeling confident, but that didn't mean you feared him any less.

"I didn't mean to scare you that night, you know?" He admitted and made his way slowly to you.

"Do you..." You began "Do you want me dead?"

He didn't answer that, you didn't expect him to. He looked at you and after so long, you finally saw something in his eyes other than emptiness. It was like he recognised you.

"Dead?" Joost asked and tilted his head to the side. "Y/n, I don't want you dead."

"Then why do you keep doing this? Why are you scaring me? Why did you kill that guy?"

"I love you, can't you see that?"

He looked desperate and ashamed of himself. Like he didn't recognise himself too. Looking down he pulled you closer by your waist and put his head on top of yours. He squeeze your waist and then whispered.

"You don't get it, I had to do it."

"Why?"

"Because of you. For you."

Now it was your turn to be quiet. Too scared to say something. You didn't return the hug he was holding you in and he noticed. You closed your eyes as you felt them fill with tears of psychical pain and regret for someone's life they couldn't live.

This only made him hold you closer and harder. You took a deep breath and whispered.

"It doesn't have to end this way."

"No, it was always going to end this way."

---

Don't copy or translate my work. Also the picture is not mine, credit goes to owner.

A/n: idk how I should feel about this... it's not edited so... :))

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celestialmazer · 22 days ago

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Making Nosferatu Sounds Even More Cursed Than Watching It : i-D.co

DOUGLAS GREENWOOD - DECEMBER 27, 2024

Mild spoilers for Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu below

Robert Eggers’ psychosexual horror movie was made by a team of exacting and brilliant artists. Here, they tell us how 2000 rats, Sky Ferreira and Pinterest played a part in it.

In Nosferatu, the legendary silent vampire movie, the insidious Count Orlok harbours an obsession for someone so intense that it conjures insanity in those he touches. For director Robert Eggers, who this week released his long-gestating take on the tale, that obsession – less evil, equally as effective – is directed towards detail, the minute elements of a movie most people don’t pay attention to. In every frame of it, you’ll find locket necklaces that transcend era, sagging town streets, and corpsified costumes – all designed to be accurate to the period and the character.

A chilly and elegantly made psycho-romance, the material is ripe for such treatment. Set in Wisborg, a fictional German port town in the 1830s, Eggers’ take on the film focuses on Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) a young woman whose mind seems disturbed by the encroaching presence of an unknown evil force. Her financially struggling real estate agent husband Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent on an assignment to meet Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a mysterious isolated man interested in local property. While a haunted Ellen holes up with their friends the Hutters (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin) in the meantime, little does Hutter know that he’s luring the evil force closer to his most desired object: his wife.

Eggers faithfully recreated the look and feel of a German town in the 19th century plagued by the arrival of a demonic vampire by doing “a whole lot of damage on Pinterest,” Egger says, during a conversation in London’s gothic St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel. An obsessive researcher (hence the palpable earthiness of his debut The Witch, and the salty taste of his strange period comedy The Lighthouse) here working with his biggest budget yet, Eggers had the time and team to go down the rabbit hole. Pinterest led him to books in the library, which led him to their bibliographies, which opened whole new worlds. To make sure everything was accurate, he brought in consultants on everything from Transylvania to the occult. The result is his most astonishing, all-consuming film yet.

This kind of accuracy is “just what I enjoy for my movies,” Eggers says, “but it also is nice because all of my collaborators know what the goal is.” Here, Eggers and a handful of the film’s hundreds-strong creative team – cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, costume designer Linda Muir, production designer Craig Lathrop, composer Robin Carolan and researcher/advisor Florin Lazarescu – delve into the details of how Nosferatu was formed, in all of its wretched glory.

It always starts with the mood boards

Robert Eggers (Writer and Director): I did digital portraits of all of the characters, putting actors’ faces into paintings, and for every location and major set piece in the movie.

Jarin Blasckhe (Cinematographer): Rob’s gonna bring a lot of references to the table. [As cinematographer,] I see it as my job to sort of synthesise them and turn them into my own expression.

Linda Muir (Costume Designer): I put together my own little book of images and swatches of fabrics appropriate to the period of the film. I pull from my costume books, close ups of paintings, fashion plates, and photographs of authentic garments housed in museums or online auction houses. An amazing resource book is Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns Organized by Motif, Style Colour, Layout, and Period by Susan Meller; Joost Elfers.

CREDIT: AIDAN MONAGHAN/FOCUS FEATURES LLC

The location scouting was vast, but fruitless

Eggers: We scouted [cities like] Lubeck and Wismar and Gdansk (which was in Germany in that period). They had the architecture, but none of them had a massive amount of streets left intact because of World War Two. Even if we wanted to, there wasn’t a city that would have served our purpose.

And so they built the film at Prague’s Barrandov Studios

Eggers: Bernie [Bellow], our line producer, and his team were able to facilitate building all of these things, because I get the architectural specificity that I’m looking for.

Craig Lathrop (Production Designer): [Eggers’] beautiful and horrifying script was full of design opportunities, and all of the roughly 60 sets seemed to have something that was oddly tricky and specific. The streets of Wisborg were by far the largest sets we built. I wanted each building to have its own personality. None of the sets are perfectly square or plumb, and on Wisborg’s Old Town Street, the medieval houses have a certain amount of sag. We graded all the streets so the characters would move up or down the streets with the exception of the exterior of the Harding’s house (it is on a canal, so that street is flat). By controlling the palate and the dressing, we tried to ensure that when you see the streets in the early scenes, it’s a bustling port town. Once the plague arrives, those same streets would feel ominous and frightening.

Eggers: Sometimes the sets were literally coming apart on hinges midway through a take and coming back together again.

Lathrop: [Like in] the opening shot. Ellen is sitting up in her bed, calling to an unknown spirit. When she gets out of bed and moves toward the window, the wall with the bed alcove split open and swung out of the way with all of the set dressing attached, in a choreographed dance with the camera so that we could end the shot looking 180 degrees in the opposite direction, with a head-to-toe profile of Ellen and Orlok’s shadow.

Though it did venture into the outside world sometimes

Eggers: I think Bram Stoker might have seen an engraving of Hunedoara Castle when it was in disrepair, and that it [might have been] his template for Castle Dracula, so we shot that castle for [Count Orlok’s castle’s] exterior. In the cemetery scenes, we had to find a part of the cemetery that was large enough to accommodate building a large mausoleum. There also weren’t a lot of headstones around. We had to bring in 30 headstones to populate it.

Eggers designed a new kind of Orlok…

Eggers: I knew he would be a folk vampire, instead of a monster like the Murnau film, or an Anglo-literary vampire like every other Dracula.

… that dressed like a Transylvanian nobleman

Eggers: There’s never been a version of Dracula or Nosferatu dressed like a Transylvanian nobleman with authentic Hungarian attire from the 16th century.

Muir: Textiles for Orlok had to evoke a past some 250-300 years before the period in which we find all of the other characters, so I looked at paintings, illustrations, garments housed in museum collections, and books illustrating the Transylvanian military from around 1560 to the mid-1600s. I tried to find as many examples as possible of what a dolman (tunic) or mente (overcoat) or kolpak (hat) or footwear could look like within this period, along with sash, buttons, and embellishments suitable to the clothing of a nobleman of great wealth and privilege. Once completed, Orlok’s costuming had to then be distressed (corpsified) inside and out, [because his] centuries of rotting flesh affect the inferior layers and the environment affects the exterior.

Bill Skarsgård found a nightmare-inducing voice

Eggers: Bill worked with an opera coach to lower his voice an octave. We didn’t do a lot of ADR [automated dialogue replacement] for him. Sometimes we pushed his voice into the subs to give it even more body, but it’s not EQ manipulated to make it deeper or crazier than it was. That was him.

Eggers wanted to “embrace the romanticism” of the story

Robin Carolan (Composer): It’s almost like a love triangle to some degree. So I think when it came to the score, I wanted to write it as if it was this sort of fucked up marriage.

Blaschke: I was just trying to make [the cinematography] as shapely and lush as possible, and to embrace that. The current [movie] trend is kind of grungy and handheld, [shot] with available light. I wanted to buck against that and rebel with craft. When [Eggers] says he wants it to look romantic and lush, then that just lets me fall into that instinct.

Blaschke shot on film

Blaschke: I just prefer the palette of it to digital. That has nothing to do with trying to show off… the palette is lovely and befits this film. Digitally the colours would be very clean; [on film,] they’re just much more complex.

Eggers only wanted to shoot in gloomy weather…

Eggers: [It was] one of the only things that really frustrated the studio. They understood, but time is money, and when you’re waiting around for cloud coverage, when you have 200 extras, it becomes quite scary.

… but he wasn’t the only stickler for lighting.

Eggers: The most time consuming lighting setups were moonlit interiors, because Jarin only wanted the light source to be coming from the windows. He also wanted the light source to feel very far away for the most amount of naturalism.

Blaschke: [Typically,] in moonlit interiors in real life, you don’t see jack squat. Sometimes, when shooting those scenes, I had a light for moonlight 70 meters away, shooting over the entire soundstage into a mirror that then sends it back into the set. We had a lot of uncontrolled light everywhere, so we had to close it off. It gets very time consuming.

The Nosferatu typefaces were discussed and debated

Eggers: The Nosferatu title treatment is a kind of strange looking Gothic typeface that I worked very closely on with Teddy Blanks, the title designer. He did many iterations of it, down to changing the serifs ever so slightly to really get what we were after. [And] even though it’s a German speaking movie, we went with a typeface for the subtitles that would have been in an English speaking book from 1838. I think we used whatever type was used for Oliver Twist.

The film had an occult consultant

Eggers: I had an occultist come in and check out all of the books and the paperwork. The only thing that we fucked up – and we fixed it – was the heptagram that Knock sits in [at the beginning of the film].

And a guy who knew everything about Romanian folklore

Eggers: Florin Lazarescu is most famous in western cinema for writing the screenplay for Aferim!, but he’s a novelist and a poet, and also an expert on Romanian folklore.

Florin Lazarescu (Consultant and Researcher): I acted as a consultant and researcher on anything related to 19th-century Transylvania. I also contributed some Romanian and Romani dialogue and worked on creating the ancient Dacian language that Count Orlok speaks. Sometimes I found myself in unique situations, such as giving the final approval on wooden crosses or ecclesiastical garments inscribed with texts I proposed.

The sound design was cranked up to a million

Eggers: People like to say that even though I’m making movies that take place in the past, the filmmaking is very modern. But I think the filmmaking is not very modern at all – it’s the sound that makes it more modern and visceral. Even if there are scenes with a lot of silence, the wind tones and the creaky doors are very like dialled in.

While the score was loosely inspired by Sky Ferreira

Carolan: Rob and I will kind of have our own references, and some of them can be quite odd. There’s a Sky Ferreira song called “Downhill Lullaby”. I was listening to that kind of obsessively for certain scenes for Ellen’s character. It just put me in a certain mood.

The costumes are hyper-specific

Eggers: [For Ellen] I found a locket from the period that had that heart shape, like something you’d get at a store for a teenage girl.

Muir: A small section of the centre back of Hutter’s waistcoat collar is made of the same fabric as the waistcoat back. It would not be seen as the frock coat always remained on (walking around in shirtsleeves was not really done during the film’s period – unless you are running around a terrifying castle attempting escape). It’s a wee detail that speaks to Hutter’s lack of funds.

Deep thought went into its possessions and exorcisms too

Eggers: [French neurologist Jean-Martin] Charcot made etchings of every hysterical pose that his patients did. Those were a bit of a menu for us to go through. When you read the script, [Lily’ character Ellen is] doing this thing. Now she’s doing this thing. Now it’s really crazy. Now it’s really, really crazy! [Movement director Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, Depp and I had to ask ourselves:] how do we actually do that? When is it sinister? When is it sensual? When is it childlike? When is it demonic? The more The Exorcist-like stuff is not, for me, the most powerful. I think that the [demonic sex] scene with her and Nick, even though it’s in some ways less flashy, is more unique and disturbing.

Lazarescu: My favourite detail in the film involved an abbess from Bukovina performing an exorcism in Church Slavonic. Initially, it was more of a cinematic cliché, with no real connection to the Orthodox Christian tradition. I researched books, consulted specialists, and convinced Robert that a cliché exorcism would come across as cringeworthy. We replaced the ritual entirely with something plausible: a priest reciting from The Prayers of Saint Basil the Great in Romanian at the bedside of the ‘possessed’.

Oh, and the rats.

Eggers: [For the chapel scene in the film’s climax], we made Vacuform rat mats; these squares of plastic rats that were covered with fake fur that we tiled the floors with. [Then we added] a layer of CG rats on top of that. But there were 2000 real rats. I said 5000 by mistake in another interview. Now it’s gone viral.

#robert eggers #jarin blaschke #nosferatu #nosferatu 2024 #linda muir #craig lathrop #florin lazarescu #film #behind the scenes #vampires #occult #supernatural #gothic horror

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rvr-kat · 9 months ago

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#eurovision #esc 2024 #this might drag on for a few days. robbed of his victory.#also joostice for joost once more

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yapperblog · 19 hours ago

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is the cafe fic gonna be a oneshot or is there a possibility for a pt2 👀

if it’s just gonna be a one part thing then pleeeeease at least make hcs of what their first kiss would be like bc i just realized you so cruelly robbed us of having them kiss lol

and maybe some hcs of how their relationship turns out. will they be fwb? was it a one time thing for them? a relationship? DO THEY EVEN KISS AT ALL???? tell us moooore im so obsessed i can’t stop re-reading it <3333

in my head cafe worker!joost is not romantic and hasn't been close with anyone in a long time. so for him it was like "oh she wants to fuck. so let's fuck." he probably didn't even think about the possibility of kissing. maybe for him kissing in general is something very intimate and he didn't feel this way about reader at first, it was purely physical.

but during one their next late night rendezvous, reader will be the one to initiate it. and suddenly he can't get enough.

ahhhhh!!! you are putting a worm in my head to write more. i might cook up something.

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black-arcana · 2 months ago

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SIMONE SIMONS Says Upcoming EPICA Album Is 'All About Reinventing Yourself'

In a new interview with Mexico's Euphonico, vocalist of Simone Simons of Dutch symphonic metallers EPICA confirmed that she and her bandmates have completed work on the follow-up to 2021's "Omega" album. Regarding the inspiration for the LP's first single, "Arcana", she said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Well, it was kind of a lot of things coming together. Rob [Van Der Loo, EPICA bassist] and I are, besides colleagues, we're also really good friends. And he had a deck of tarot cards with him. And I thought, 'Just for the fun of it, let's do a session. Let me draw some cards and then you explain to me what they mean.' And it was a very enlightening experience, I guess. The song, the music was also written by Rob. And then I came up with the idea, like, 'What if I write a song that's kind of inspired by the meaning of the tarot cards and the session that I had with him and what I think it meant for me at that time in my life and where I am now?' So, yeah, it's a very — how do you say? — soul-searching kind of topic, and that's something EPICA has been writing about for quite a while, but so far we haven't touched on the tarot subject. So I thought this could be a cool topic to integrate in the new album, which is all about reinventing yourself, like a rebirth, renewing yourself. So it kind of a cool thing to draw inspiration from."

Elaborating on the writing and recording process for EPICA's upcoming album, Simone said: "I think 'Arcana' was one of the songs that came together quite quickly. We had many writing camp sessions in Holland. We rented a house where we were meeting a couple times for, like, a week in a row, and we were all just sitting together. And Rob had also kind of a clear view of what he wanted vocal-wise, and then he just let me do my thing. And it went very naturally to write the lyrics.

"The vocal recordings [for the new EPICA album] took place in the summertime, which is a good time to do so because autumn [and] winter is a time when everybody gets sick," she explained. "So, for me, it's great if I'm in the summer in the studio, so I'm in a good shape or not running a risk of getting a cold and that it affects the voice, because I did have to record albums back in the day where I did get sick. And luckily you can't hear it. I know which songs are the ones. But it was a very smooth process. We worked together with the same producer, Joost Van Den Broek, who became a little bit like the seventh EPICA bandmember. And it's great working with him. Yeah, we were diving into all the little details and we were really concentrated on making the songs as a band together.

"I think people that don't know EPICA, they don't know that we don't live in the same village," Simone added. "We live, actually, in four different countries. So for us to get together and really work on the songs is tricky. And we started doing that already for 'Omega', and we really liked that, to clear our touring schedule, because we tour a lot and to really be there together and not everybody at home in their home studios. You get a total different result if everybody's there in the same room; you feed off each other's creativity, and that's very beneficiary for the songs."

Asked if there is a main songwriter in EPICA or if everybody contributes to the songwriting process, Simone said: "Everybody gets to write songs. And some songs, I think the guys did write demo songs on their own, because we all have our home studios, and when we were together in the writing camp, then we were sparring off ideas and sending each other the files, and then everybody was working on a random song at the same time. There was a funny moment where, I think, Coen [Janssen, EPICA keyboardist], Ariën [Van Weesenbeek, EPICA drummer], Rob and I were sitting in the living room area, but kind of far apart from each other, and Coen was working on a song and he thought he had his headphones plugged in, but it was running out of the speakers. And then we said, 'Oh, cool. That sounds great. Which song are you working on?' And he was, like, 'Oh shit, you guys could hear what I was working on.' So it was everybody in different rooms. Isaac [Delahaye, EPICA guitarist] was in the attic playing the guitar, and I had to wait until very late before I could go sleep 'cause he went on writing music, recording guitars until almost one o'clock in the morning. But it was a really lovely experience. And everybody gets to write songs and everybody gets to work on those songs. So, we all put our little own salsa on the songs. [Laughs]"

"Arcana" marked EPICA's first new release since "Omega" and the collaboration EP "The Alchemy Project".

The single is now available on all streaming platforms. It also includes "The Ghost In Me (Danse Macabre)", EPICA's recently released collaboration with Europe's second-most visited theme park, Netherlands's magical De Efteling, and their much-anticipated new attraction, Danse Macabre.

The previously released music video for "Arcana", directed by Remko Tielemans, can be seen below.

In a recent interview with Spain's Mariskal Rock, Simone stated about EPICA's upcoming album: "I'm so happy with the songs, I'm so proud how everything turned out and it's gonna be another amazing EPICA album. We added a couple of new elements, but also went back to the roots, the old EPICA. And yeah, I just can't wait for people to hear this.

"I loved 'Omega' and we toured so much with 'Omega' and had wonderful experiences, but then when you reach the end of a touring cycle, you start to get itchy and feel, 'Okay, now it's time to do the new album. Can we do it as good or maybe even better than the last album?' That's always the thing we strive for, ways to renew ourselves a little bit. And we feel a very strong spiritual connection also that it's our ninth album. So there's gonna be themes around the symbolic meaning of nine, the number nine."

Elaborating on the musical direction of EPICA's next album, Simone said: "The songs are heavy. There's a beautiful ballad, a very cinematic song, very uptempo, very doomy, melancholic and amazing, amazing power riffs. It's the most epic EPICA, I think, so far. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I'm feeling it. I'm very happy with it. I'm proud of it."

In November 2022, EPICA released "The Alchemy Project" through Atomic Fire Records. The EP was co-written and performed with diverse guests ranging from extremists like FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE, Niilo Sevänen (INSOMNIUM) and Björn "Speed" Strid (SOILWORK) along with melodic masters like Tommy Karevik (KAMELOT),keyboard legend Phil Lanzon (URIAH HEEP) and Roel Van Helden (POWERWOLF) to a once-in-a-lifetime song with Simons, Charlotte Wessels and Myrkur.

Just one day after the release of its anniversary reissues "We Still Take You With Us" and "Live At Paradiso", EPICA celebrated 20 years of existence live in September 2022 at 013 in Tilburg, Netherlands, the same place where they played their first show (supporting ANATHEMA) back in 2002.

EPICA was formed by guitarist Mark Jansen after leaving AFTER FOREVER in 2002, and the band quickly gained attention outside their home country, taking big steps towards becoming the leading symphonic metal superpower they have long proven to be. After their ambitious debut "The Phantom Agony" (2002) and the surprisingly eclectic sophomore work "Consign To Oblivion" (2005),the road took them to new heights via their first concept masterpiece "The Divine Conspiracy" (2007) and their global breakthrough "Design Your Universe" (2009). 2012's opus "Requiem For The Indifferent", 2014's bedazzling "The Quantum Enigma" and "The Holographic Principle" (2016),cemented their reputation as not only one of the hardest-working metal bands in the business but also as one of the best. With "Omega", the final part of the metaphysical trilogy they began with "The Quantum Enigma", they reclaimed the throne without so much as the blink of an eye, amassing three million-plus streams during the first week of the album's release.

Photo credit: Tim Tronckoe

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#simone simons #epica #interview #Youtube

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