Dark Tranquillity "Skydancer/Of Chaos And Eternal Night"

Skydancer is the debut studio album by Swedish melodic death metal band, Dark Tranquillity. This release was the last recorded output to feature vocalist Anders Fridén, later of In Flames, who was fired and replaced by then rhythm guitarist, Mikael Stanne. Incidentally, Mikael Stanne was the lead vocalist on the first In Flames studio album, Lunar Strain.

The album was re-released in 1999 by Century Media Records as Skydancer/Of Chaos and Eternal Night. It was also remastered and reissued later in 2013 in celebration of the album's twentieth anniversary.

Sundin described Skydancer as "unique" within the band's catalogue due to its "weirdness and eccentricity", which caused him to look back on the album as "more of an acquired taste rather than a breakthrough release." When asked how far the band has come since the release of this album, Niklas Sundin stated:

Skydancer is a very weird album and there really isn't anything else like it – for good and bad. Most of the songs contain 20+ riffs that never are repeated in the same way, and the integration of clear vocals and acoustic guitars were extremely unorthodox for its time, as were the advanced use of counterpoint and recurring musical motifs. Not to mention the lyrics. It's unashamedly pretentious and a good example of the kind of over-the-top seriousness and attempt to define the world that one only can achieve with a young person's worldview. The teenage mind that knows and understands everything.

Sundin recalled "a real sense of excitement throughout the songwriting process, and it felt like we really were onto something new and original that we needed to capture on tape and let people listen to as soon as possible."

Sundin, while noting that the band were well prepared, recalled that "studio recordings back then were always stressful. Our budget only allowed for ten studio days for recording and mixing, so there wasn't any time to fine-tune things, and we often had to use first takes even if they weren't perfect. There was a good idea of we wanted to accomplish, but we lacked the studio knowledge to communicate it to the engineers, who in turn were clueless about extreme metal, so there were lots of tension and misunderstandings."


Niklas Sundin observed that the album was not properly remastered at the time of the 2000 edition, and indicated that the twentieth anniversary edition would mark the first proper mastering of the album. Describing the production as "the weak point" of Skydancer, and qualifying that "there are limits to what one can do without access to the separate instrument tracks," he expressed his opinion that "everything sounds much better now. The album is so old that there wasn't even any proper mastering done the first time around; all songs had a different output volume and are sonically very incoherent."

Recorded at Studio Soundscape, Gothenburg, May-June 1993.