Track By Tracks: TINE - A Winter Horrorscape (2025)

1. Winter Comes:

This album intro concept was conceived after the rest of the album was written. I wanted a solemn intro that spoke to the concept of the album and was a nice segway into the more aggressive/brutal songs that come after it. For this song, I enlisted the virtuoso skills of Samantha Bounkeua to compose and perform this intro for Tine. It was a collaborative effort of course, with me providing feedback, ideas, and edits as we went along. I was so happy with Samantha’s work on this intro, that I decided to enlist her skills to perform and record the strings and symphonics I had already written for the other songs. This would help further shape the sound and feel of the entire album.

2. A Feather from Lucifer’s Wing:

The beginnings of this song go all the way back to the early days of Tine. I had written the intro and beautiful melody of this song, but did not have the rest of the song written. The song developed slowly over some years’ time. The lyrics came after the music but are based around Victor Hugo's unfinished poem "La Fin de Satan" (The End of Satan) where Hugo proclaims that “Liberty is born from a feather from Lucifer’s wing”. The music, lyrics, and melody all support this theme to proclaim that Satan should not be the monster of Christian myth but rather should be a symbol of liberty and free will.

3. A Path Through Frozen Woods:

I first wrote the riffs for this song during the recording sessions for “Mergae Maris Profundi” and immediately knew this song had a cold, icy feel to it. This feel would later shape the entire album of “A Winter Horrorscape”. I began writing lyrics that told a horrific story of a traveler lost in a winter forest and this song came together rather quickly. The symphonics were written almost as a countermelody to the guitars, having a life all their own. This was intentional and further adds to the cold mystery of the song.

4. Ex Cathedra:

The main riff for this song was also written during the recording sessions for “Mergae Maris Profundi” and the lyrics took shape as I wrote the music for the song. This song took some time to write, with some of its twists and turns and deep lyrics, and like Lucifer’s Wing is the other exception on the album in that it’s not strictly a winter/cold themed song. The intro of the song was one of the last parts to be written, but I knew right away that I wanted it to be a frigidly cold, spoken sequence to start the song! Ex Cathedra translates literally in Latin to “From the Chair” and refers to the word of the pope in medieval times being infallible and godlike. The lyrics speak to this topic referring to the corruption of the church and the music is intended to be very sinister to convey this meaning.

5. Return to the Black Forest in Winter:

The humble beginnings of this instrumental began from a riff that I wrote on bass many years ago when I was the front man for another band. I never used the riff but kept it in my back pocket so to speak. As this album took shape, I recalled this riff because of its melancholy wintry feel and ideas started developing around it. Before long, a full instrumental was unfolding. What struck me was how the riff from my first Tine album’s intro harmonized well with this bass riff, so I decided to modify that riff and return to that theme. Hence, the returning to the black forest theme. Samantha really went nuts on the symphonics and strings for this song, really developing what I had and taking it to a whole other level. This song is a perfect interlude into the 2 nd ½ of the album.

6. The Scathing Blizzard:

This song was written in 2 days, making it the quickest I have ever written a song. During a writing session, I was jamming with some ideas and things just came together, starting with the chorus riff and branching out from there. From the lyrics to the music and concept, this song came together like a blizzard – both figuratively and quite literally!

7. Triumph at Nineveh:

The main riff for this song came together during the recording sessions for “Mergae Maris Profundi” and continued to evolve from there. The riffing has a triumphant, battleground feel to it, which is where the song got its title, which evolved to eventually take shape from my fascination with history and Byzantine culture. The meaning behind the song and its title directly relates to a battle in ancient times between the Byzantines and the Persians during the winter near the ruins of Nineveh. In a bit of a twist of history, winter has been personified as a sentient force that has swayed the battle in the direction it wished. Another interesting fact about this song is that it is the session drummer’s (Nikola Dušmanić) favorite song to play on this album.

8.Winter Horrorscape:

The title track, so to speak, of the album started off as a bass riff which I wrote during the early days of Tine. I intended the riff for a song I was calling “Gargoyle” at the time, but that song never really worked out and the riff was put on the back burner. Years later, under a “cold” new set of ideas, I revisited the riff, and the inspiration began to flow. The wind sounds heard throughout the song are the same wind samples heard in the first Tine album in that album’s intro instrumental, “Enter the Black Forest”. The lyrical themes of this song explore winter as a malevolent being and are the crescendo of the theme of the album. It is through the music and the lyrics that I express the theme of this album and seek to transport the listener to a different reality.