Tom Gabriel Fischer
metal music pioneer
Born in Zurich in 1963, singer and guitarist Tom Gabriel Fischer, aka Tom Gabriel Warrior, is known for his strong fighting spirit. He founded the extreme metal trio Hellhammer at the age of 18. That was his music school. The metal musician with a wealth of radical ideas would soon attract the attention of the Zurich underground scene. After the EP release of "Apocalyptic Raids" (1984), Tom Gabriel Fischer broke up Hellhammer, paving the way for the meteoric rise of Celtic Frost, the heavy metal band he founded soon after. This legendary band inspired musicians worldwide, in and beyond the metal scene, among them Nirvana, the Foo Fighters and Marilyn Manson, to name but a few. In seven ground-breaking albums (especially "Into the Pandemonium", 1987), Celtic Frost introduced, among other things, classical instruments into their sound cosmos and blew up genre boundaries with extreme playing styles and vocal techniques (e.g. growling), style breaks and eclectic fusion. The band’s lyrics were inspired by the symbolist writings of Charles Baudelaire and the fantastic horror literature of H.P. Lovecraft, while H.R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist, put his artistic imprint on the cover of "To Mega Therion" (1985). In 2019, Tom Gabriel Fischer completed a three-part Requiem for Celtic Frost with his current doom-metal band Triptykon. The work for orchestra and band is dedicated to Celtic Frost founding member Martin Stricker aka Martin Eric Ain, who died in 2017.
