Battle Magic is the third album by Bal-Sagoth, released in 1998 on Cacophonous Records. It is the last album to feature Jonny Maudling on drums, who following this album would go on to concentrate fully on playing the keyboards.
The cover artwork for the album features the fantasy character "Caylen-Tor", created by Bal-Sagoth vocalist/lyricist Byron Roberts.
The band were awarded one full month to record, much of which was spent on the orchestral arrangements. The keyboards in "Blood Slakes the Sand at the Circus Maximus" alone took six full days to complete. The opening of "Blood Slakes the Sand at the Circus Maximus" is identical to the score for the film Spartacus composed by Alex North.
Read more about Battle Magic: Track Listing, Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words battle and/or magic:
“Above the bayonets, mixed and crossed,
Men saw a gray, gigantic ghost
Receding through the battle cloud,
And heard across the tempest loud
The death cry of a nation lost!”
—Will Henry Thompson (1848–1918)
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)