Nothing Stays Buried: An Interview with Mirror of Deception
A dolphin skull, a Victorian ghost ship, and Bronze Age bones in a German river. Mirror of Deception’s sixth album knows that nothing stays buried.
Jochen Fopp, guitarist and co-founder of the German doom metal band Mirror of Deception, was collecting driftwood and stones on a beach in the Los Lagos region of southern Chile when he found a dolphin skull lying in the sand. He was visiting his now-wife Constanza, an artist who works with natural materials near her home in that region. The skull was exactly as the sea had left it. He lay down on the ground and photographed it without moving anything: the stones around the bone, grains of sand settled into the hollows, a large hole at the back of the head. In the background: the Pacific, cloud cover, a wooded island. He filed the image away and thought nothing more of it for years.
Mirror of Deception have been making doom metal in Göppingen, Baden-Württemberg since 1990. Fopp and Michael Siffermann, who goes by Siffi, are the band’s co-founders and the two constants across thirty-six years and six albums. The current lineup adds drummer Uwe Kurz and Pascal Schrade on vocals and bass. Schrade, a guitarist in his own right, had followed the band as a listener for twenty-five years before joining in 2023. Transience, their sixth album, was released in March 2026 through their own Estuarial Records, and recorded with Michelle Darkness, vocalist of the Stuttgart gothic metal band End of Green, at Darkland City Studio. The same collaboration produced The Estuary in 2018.
The album opens with a ship’s log and closes with a river. Both are records of the same thing: the evidence that time buries but never destroys.
Doomnation Radio: Mirror of Deception formed in 1990, and Transience is your sixth album. At this stage, what does the band mean to the people in it that it could not have meant at the beginning?
Jochen Fopp: It is a refuge, an escape from everyday life and all the changes and challenges it throws at us. And therapy, too. People and many things come and go but this is the thread which has been running through most of our lives. A constant, a safe haven and a big part of who we are.
Pascal Schrade: Having joined the band in 2023 I am still very close to the perspective of a fan. Knowing the band 25 years as a listener and personally now over 20 years, and having shared stages many times with my other projects, joining the band itself was a daunting task. I’m very happy to be able to help in shaping what the band can become and also to keep it somewhat fresh while remaining true to the roots. Recently I have talked to Josef Müller and Andreas Taller, who were part of the longest running Mirror of Deception line-up, and they told me that Uwe and I have received their official blessing after the release of Transience. Which meant a lot to me.
DR: The Estuary and Transience are separated by seven and a half years. How do the two records relate to each other thematically, and did the time between them change what you needed to say?
Jochen: It is a new album with new players, influences and contributions. The one thing that has never changed is the two guitar players and I believe we have found our style, our musical expression early on. So it is building up on everything we have done before while expanding and evolving naturally. Pascal is a guitar player himself and as a longtime friend and fan he knows exactly what he expects “a Mirror of Deception song to sound like,” as he recently said. As for the lyrical content: new topics arose in the past few years and for some reason I took more of a nature documentary approach as a starting point this time around. Some lyrics are personal and reflect the most recent sections of the journey through our lives.
What the Sea Holds
“Death, Deliver Us” opens the album and belongs to Pascal Schrade, who brought it to the band after reading Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. In the novel, Dracula travels from the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Varna to the English coastal town of Whitby aboard the Russian schooner Demeter. Stoker tells the entire chapter through the ship’s log: the crew disappears one by one over weeks at sea, and the final entry is written in the captain’s handwriting as the vessel runs aground with no one steering it. It is one of the most compressed horror passages in the English language, a man recording his own undoing in the flat prose of maritime record, as if precision could hold the incomprehensible at arm’s length.
DR: “Death, Deliver Us” is drawn directly from the log of the Demeter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the ship that carries Dracula by sea to Whitby while the crew disappears one by one, with the captain’s final log entry written as the ship runs aground. Nautical themes have appeared in your work before. What is it about sea voyages and their particular kind of helplessness that keeps drawing you back?
Pascal: This one is actually on me. I had the same impression when listening to previous nautical themed songs and was impressed and intrigued by this particular concept. I have not specifically looked for a song in this vein but after reading the book, the topic offered itself to me. I did not expect this song to become the opener for this album when I introduced it to the band. I’m very glad how it turned out in the end, especially that it fits in so well with what Mirror of Deception has done previously.
Jochen: We live more or less in the middle of mainland Europe. It takes at least 6-10 hours to get to the Mediterranean, the North Sea or the Baltic Sea. What you’re not permanently exposed to probably holds a deeper fascination.
DR: “Currents” is built in part on drone technique and throat singing, with melodies drawn from Swedish folk music. The liner notes describe Scandinavian folk as a long-standing influence on Mirror of Deception, running through the spirit and structure of the songs without ever appearing as traditional instruments. How did that influence arrive, and how do you recognize it in your own music when it surfaces?
Jochen: I have been a fan of folk and world music for a long time. At some point I discovered Swedish contemporary folk bands like Hedningarna and Garmarna, but also the Tuvan band Hun-Huur-Tu. I was fascinated immediately. I showed Siffi some of their music and the throat singing. He liked it and gave it a try. It is nowhere near their mastery and he never had lessons but he has added it here and there over the years. As for the Swedish folk stuff: it’s nothing conscious, it’s just another ingredient from the big patchwork of influences we build upon. Usually I do realize it afterwards. For instance the melody at the end of “Currents” could also easily be imagined to be played on a nyckelharpa, an old Swedish instrument similar to a hurdy gurdy.
What surfaces in “Currents” draws from both directions: the drone work and throat singing rooted in Central Asian practice, the melodic character rooted in northern Europe, arriving together in a doom metal song written by men who live hours from any coast.
DR: “Haven” introduces guttural vocals for the first time in the band’s history. That is a significant door to open after thirty-six years. What made this the moment for it, and what did it change about what the song could do?
Jochen: As I remember it, initially it was a joke by our producer Michelle. He felt there was some empty space and something needed to happen there. It was more like “hey guys, this part is lacking, the instrumental passage is too long, please come up with something for this.” Sort of a place holder. We were flabbergasted at first but soon realized how well it fits in and it gave some extra spice to the song. Plus we liked the idea that it would come as a total surprise to anyone familiar with us.
Meanwhile Siffi has adopted it for live gigs. But let’s be real: we are talking about a few seconds here and we can assure you that we have no intention to become a death metal band. But what is ironic: when we started, we liked traditional doom like Candlemass just as much as early Paradise Lost. So our band could have evolved either way.
Pascal: The guttural vocals actually were a suggestion by our recording engineer Michelle Darkness. When we initially added this part to the song we didn’t even know ourselves if this was a good idea or not. In the end we decided to keep it and are very happy about it. This is actually something that many people mentioned when listening to the new album. Being fans of death doom ourselves this was kind of our homage to it. With Uwe being a death metal drummer, who knows where this might lead us in the future.
What the River Holds
DR: “Meander” closes the album with the Tollense Valley in northern Germany, a quiet river landscape that archaeologists identified around 2011 as the site of Europe’s oldest known large-scale battle, where an estimated two to four thousand warriors fought around 1250 BC. The site was hidden by the river itself for over three thousand years. What made that place the right ending for this record?
Jochen: This was the final song we wrote for the album and it evolved over time. I saw a documentary about the Tollense valley and it made quite an impression on me. The tranquil, meandering river and then the human remains underneath and the brutal damage that was done to these people. It is still being debated if it was Europe’s first known battle or a large massacre, as there was hardly any warrior gear or weapons found. Apart from bronze arrowheads embedded into bones. And what was remarkable was the enormous amount of victims. Because in these times there were only a handful of people living per square kilometer. Not hundreds or thousands. It was probably an annual market or a trade gathering.
It is a testament to the fact that people have always been good at harming and killing each other, driven by greed, jealousy and hate. But even if time forgets, everything will come back to light at some point. It is in no way meant as a glorification of battles, violence and tragedies. Our lyrics are often based on or inspired by real events in one way or another, and open for the listener’s interpretation. Each and everyone is walking around with some ancient scars and wounds that have never healed. So it all made sense to us. And when we had the song finished there was no question that this would be the final track on the album.
DR: Transience was recorded again with Michelle Darkness of End of Green at the mixing desk. A producer who already knows your vocabulary is a very different working relationship than starting fresh with someone new. What does that continuity give you, and what does it demand?
Jochen: We have known each other for so long and he has a strong vision and deep understanding of who we are, what we need and what we should sound like. And he knows exactly how to get us there. At this point we can’t imagine working with anyone else. With this new line-up and him it worked like a breeze as well. We recorded the album in three sessions over almost 2 years. We finished 2-3 songs at a time, recorded them and then worked on the next ones. His only demand is that we bring good songs and we come well prepared. And if he has doubts he will tell us. But that has not happened yet.
DR: The cover photograph was taken by you on a beach in southern Chile, years before the album existed. It shows the skull of a young dolphin washed ashore. Why did you choose this photo, and how long did you sit with that image before it became the cover?
Jochen: We played around with several album titles and finally got to Transience. I remembered this shot from my archive, showed it to my band mates and that was it. It can’t get any more transient and final than this image. The entire composition made it perfect. The stones, the clouds, the Pacific ocean and the wooded island in the background, the grains of sand on the skull, the big hole in the back of the head. It makes you wonder what happened to this little creature and how it was while it was alive. You realize how sudden a life can end. And the older we get the more we see it happening all around us. Family, friends, people we admire have left us. All of our time on this earth is limited and precious. We are still here though and determined to make the best of it.
I was visiting my now wife Constanza. She is an artist, a craftswoman and works with natural materials like wool, wood, and sometimes also stones and driftwood. So we were collecting materials at a lonely beach close to where she lives in the Los Lagos region of Southern Chile. I discovered this little skull, laid down on the ground and took a few photos exactly the way I found it.
Caroline Leaper-Traitler, a photographer from Vienna, did the colouring and provided all other photos for the artwork. She has previously done the artwork for our 2006 album Shards and it was a pleasure to work with her again.
Thirty-Six Years
DR: You are also the founder of the Doom Shall Rise festival. After years of building the scene from the outside as well as from within, what does the state of traditional doom metal look like to you right now?
Jochen: There is a much greater diversity and I welcome that. I might not enjoy everything equally but I am all for experimenting and bands having their own approach and identity.
Doom Shall Rise was not the first, that was Doom in Bloom festival in 1996. But when we revisited the idea of such a festival in 2003 there was nothing else. So it was the good old DIY principle: if you want things to happen, get in the driver seat. It seems it was the right time and right place and the response was incredible. We hardly broke even because we were naive fans and not businessmen. So it became more and more unpredictable year after year and after the 2013 edition we pulled the plug as previously announced. We’re very proud of what it sparked. We brought some great bands back, we kickstarted the career of others, bands were formed at the festival, lasting friendships, marriages, it inspired others to organize their own events. We proved that something as dedicated as a festival exclusively for doom metal is possible. And things have come full circle recently when the original billing of the very first Doom in Bloom returned for its 30th anniversary to the Chapel in Göppingen, Germany, where 7 out of 8 Doom Shall Rise festivals also took place.
DR: Thirty-six years is long enough to have outlasted scenes, trends, labels, and lineup changes. What has kept Mirror of Deception moving when so many bands from the same era have stopped?
Jochen: We have always believed in what we do, no matter what happened around us or what the hype of the hour was. We did and do this for ourselves first and foremost and we are well aware that on a global scale only few people will care. But that was never our concern. We’ve never had any big expectations and were always grounded by our lives outside the band. This is a labour of love and it is about friends coming together, creating something of value for themselves. If others appreciate that it is a great bonus. And we want to be in control and do everything on our terms. So we have founded our own little label and this is already the second album we have released entirely by ourselves, with the help of a small network of dedicated friends who all had their part in making this and the last album become reality.
There have been lineup changes over the years of course but we still enjoy what we do and always were lucky to find the right people in our wider or immediate circles. Even though members left or we parted ways at some point for whatever reason: everyone was important and had his part in shaping the band. At some point we will stop. But we are not there yet.
DR: Is there already a next direction forming, or does a record like this need time to settle before you know what comes after it?
Pascal: The reception for this record was very positive so far which is very encouraging. Especially the direct feedback from scene-colleagues and listeners alike. So this might indicate the direction we are heading for future releases. There is no lack of ideas. It’s just sorting them and getting them to a level of polish we aspire to.
Jochen: We don’t want to rest on our laurels for too long. We will soon start to work on new ideas and revisit some we have accumulated previously. For this album we had worked with 2 songs that Pascal brought to the table and 3 came from me. We worked on them together and they all came out really great. But most exciting, and it seems best received, were the two final songs on the album: “The Sands” and “Meander.” Both were written by the four of us together from scratch and that’s something I’d like to see and hear more of. There is never a masterplan apart from being ourselves. The puzzle pieces will fall into place at some point and show the full picture. They always do.
The puzzle pieces, they always fall into place. It is the same logic that runs under the whole record: the photograph waited in an archive for years before it became a cover, the Demeter’s log sat in a Victorian novel for over a century before it became an opening track, and the bones in the Tollense riverbed held their ground for three thousand years before the water gave them back. Mirror of Deception have been at this since 1990, in a town in Baden-Württemberg, making records that almost no one outside a small devoted scene will hear. Transience is their argument that this does not matter. Everything surfaces eventually. You just have to still be here when it does.
*
