"The Dark Side" press-release

Frank Peterson always enjoyed wandering around cool monastery halls and shady cloisters - a passion with consequences, as it has now turned out. "I visited the Escorial monastery in Spain years ago. I had a Walkman with me and was listening to some rock music, but somehow there were unusual sounds merging in." A monks' choir was singing Gregorian songs in the hall next-door. Since then, the producer has felt like a discoverer and inventor in one.
It was shortly after this that Hamburg-born Peterson co-produced the first Enigma album with Michael Cretu in 1991. Despite condescension and ridicule from certain critics, Peterson firmly believed in his concept of crossing pop with religious music. And more besides: "Being somebody who comes from the pop world, it was practically a life belt," he recalls now, "I really could no longer deal with the narrow formats you were restricted to when producing." His determination, as everybody now knows, paid off: Enigma's MCMXC A.D. was an international chart-topper and is to this day the best-selling German-produced album of all time. It has sold 14 million copies!
Since then, Frank Peterson has spent a great deal of time perusing his record collection. Enigma was followed by the Gregorian Chants - rock and pop classics from the last four decades 'covered' by monks. "To be honest, I'm always looking for songs that simply have a chance of working after adapting them to the Gregorian musical scale. It doesn't have any semitones, which rules out a huge amount of material."
Strange though it may sound: for thousands of fans, the sound of this extraordinary project was the music event to mark the millennium. Between 1999 and 2000, Masters Of Chant - Albums I and II each went gold in several countries. The success train continued with Chapters III and IV, which likewise won international accolades.
October 25 sees the release of the fifth Gregorian album, The Dark Side - and Frank Peterson has again discovered a selection of tracks that can be sung by monks. In the process, he remembered a strange thing that happened to him once while he was the man behind the sound of Sarah Brightman. "Our tour bus back then," recalls Peterson fondly, "was taken over by Marilyn Manson, and for some reason I left behind a CD with a remix of the theme from 'The Omen' on the bus. A few weeks later, Manson's management called up to express a big interest in recording 'Ave Satani' with me." Although that has yet to happen, "I have now realised the idea of crossing harder-type sounds with the Gregorians."
Whether the opener, "Hurt" by the Nine Inch Nails, "More" by the Sisters Of Mercy, Evanescenses' "My Immortal" or "In The Shadows" by The Rasmus; a dozen or so songs, also including The Doors' "The End" (a hidden track), see the Gregorians gently moving on from the comparatively peaceful melodies of preceding albums. "At our early concerts", says Frank Peterson, "there were still Goths sitting next to middle-aged couples in churches. This album sees us, to put it crudely, sending the old folks home and inviting the young generation." Peterson chose his timing carefully and, indeed, very wisely. "I do think that we've been seeing a counter-movement to all those fancily dressed pop stars. Horror movies are hugely popular, Gothic Rock is in the charts. People are looking for something very unusual, something that connects to their own realm of fantasy - and Gregorian offers just that kind of different dimension."
A genius for new ideas and a musician driven by passion alone is the kind of image of Frank Peterson that he himself, at least, prefers "not to see. I freely admit: Gregorian was an idea that originally started on the drawing board, where ten singers would meet up in the studio about once a year and sing what the team had selected." Songs that struck him as well as colleagues Carsten Heusmann, Jan-Eric Kohrs and Michael Soltau as monastery-friendly. Gregorian has since developed its very own source of momentum: "Each one of us has sacrificed a lot for this." Gregorian saw Frank Peterson launch a distinct and extremely successful genre. And now, The Dark Side proves that this concept is capable of not just surviving but evolving. A rare phenomenon in the music industry.

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