After the release of The Sacrilege Of Fatal Arms, I started to record an album which was going to be entitled The Day Of Wrath. In the middle of the recordings the studio was completely destroyed by a fire, whose origin is still shrouded in the mist of post-war vendettas. I saved my skin but not the tapes, of which only an unmixed cassette survived. We were consequently forced to re-start the work in a different studio. Dies Irae resurfaced from the ruins of The Day Of Wrath and is the most complex and artistically rewarding of the five albums reissued by Belle Antique. The concept acts on two levels: a series of paradoxical philosophic questions connected with love, life and afterlife, culminating with the killing of the loved person in order to guarantee her eternal life . . Every passage is crystalline in its logic, though elliptically expressed in the flashes of poetic metaphors. The second level is personal. The lyrics, the artwork, the music feature over five hundred references, quotations, tiny clues which could reveal (to the most careful and prepared listener) all the influences which have fed my soul through the years. From a lyrical viewpoint I was particularly delighted by the way I managed to describe the killing ("and the virgin blade kisses, freeing, your white throat") and by the last monologue of the man in a strait-jacket followed by the orchestral grand finale. From the musical viewpoint I still have a preference for the frightening "Incubus" section. In fact, I had composed and recorded two of them, one should have been featured on the European version of the album, and the other on the American pressing which was cancelled at the last minute. The material we recorded for Dies Irae filled altogether over 700 minutes of master tapes: the tiny clips which are part of the "Incubus" were in fact long compositions of which only a few seconds have been randomly chosen, illogically, as it happen in the worst nightmare, which is uncontrollable by reason.
- Mario Panciera / Mr. Doctor / Devil Doll interview, Burn Magazine, 2008
Their fifth album, Dies Irae was released on this day in 1996 and is still the most recent, publicly available, DEVIL DOLL recording!