TRIPTYKON/former HELLHAMMER/CELTIC FROST singer, guitarist, and main songwriter Tom Gabriel Warrior has issued the following:

"I had waited 30 years for this.

It is not a coincidence that Triptykon practices in a rehearsal room decorated with ANGEL WITCH photos and record sleeves. The importance of Angel Witch’s music with regard to my own path cannot be overstated. Hearing Angel Witch’s groundbreaking and utterly dark 'Baphomet', on the legendary Metal For Muthas compilation in 1980, was a revelation beyond any description. As was Angel Witch’s eponymous debut album, that same year. It hardly ever left my record player. Kevin Heybourne’s songwriting and playing style in Angel Witch spoke to me far beyond most other music I had ever heard, and it became - along with BLACK SABBATH's Vol. 4 and VENOM's Welcome To Hell - a most crucial inspiration which eventually encouraged me to try and form my own group. These were the very roots of Hellhammer.

I couldn’t help reflecting on all of these things, of course, as I was standing at the side of Jalometalli Festival’s second stage some time after midnight on August 15th, 2010, watching Angel Witch perform shortly after we in Triptykon had finished our own set on the other stage. I had wished fervently to see Angel Witch live when I was a teenager during the NWOBHM years of the early 1980s; alas it never became possible. Angel Witch, not unlike Celtic Frost, subsequently traversed a variety of musically contradictory and inconsistent periods. But now, all this time later, what had already transpired by means of reports from friends in the scene in recent years was confirmed beyond any doubt. I was witness to a concert by an intoxicatingly revitalized, spirited band. Iconic songs such as 'Baphomet' or 'Angel Of Death' radiated a staggering, modern darkness and heaviness.

Kevin himself was most gracious and patient in enduring my pathetic fanboy worshipping after the concert, and I am deeply indebted to Angel Witch’s Will Palmer for making all of this even possible in the first place. It meant the world to me. I have become a musician in my own right in the many years since Metal For Muthas, but as I stated recently onstage in London, I owe infinitely much of it all to Angel Witch."