Diabolical Masquerade

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Diabolical Masquerade was a Swedish one-man musical project. 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 whilst 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 song structure, 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 Swedish 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 released 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 Nyström proves the creativity that extreme music can reach in the hands of a skilled practitioner of his trade.

Blakkheim worked together on the project however, with Dan Swanö. 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.