Tempesta Noire were founded by Michael Kohl and Alexis v. Poser in 1991. Early the following year, the first self-titled tape was released and gained very good feedback especially from Italy and France. The tape was promoted in the free radio “Dreieckland” and this way a contact was established to Glasnost Records. A CD release was planned but Tempesta Noire decided not to go too far too fast.
A second tape was recorded, with the help of Katja Speelmann who played the recorder. Tempesta Noire signed to Resurrection Music but besides a few testpressings, the tape was not released by the label. After a delay of two years, Tempesta Noire withdrew the rights for the tape and moved to A&T Records, who founded a special sublabel for Tempesta Noire, RosenFeuer Productions. Finally, in 1996, the second tape, ‘Birth after Death’, was released with a booklet including exclusive artwork by the painters Bernhard Kinzler, Silvia Reutter and Michael Marrak. The tape received a lot of positive reviews.
In 1997, the third and final tape, ‘Magicians of the West’, was released and brought Tempesta Noire into the pages of many national and international magazines.
Several contributions to compilations followed. The year 1998 saw the release of the first of three 7”es, ‘Eternally (Vanishing Awareness)’, a song that has been voted amongst the ten best darkwave songs in a South-African online-zine. ‘
The Outset for…’ was the second release from the 7” trilogy in 1999. The same year, Tempesta Noire gave their only live-concert so far, aided by Bernd Vayu Roesner, who became a fix member of the band and the two guest musicians Bettina zur Rocklage and Oliver Theile, the latter had also appeared on the track ‘Time’ from the last single.
Due to the bankruptcy of A&T Records, Tempesta Noire moved to Triton, who wanted to distribute the remaining 7”es and release the third chapter of the 7” trilogy. At the end of the year, Alexis v. Poser moved to Manchester, England, and Tempesta Noire were at rest for twelve months. After Alexis’ return, in 2001, Tempesta Noire recorded and released the third and final 7”: ‘Wolves and Cathedrals’. It was a song from their earliest years in a new version, coupled with the band’s first cover version ‘A Ship is Burning’, which was licenced directly from Tony Wakeford and found his approval.
The same year saw Tempesta Noire’s tenth anniversary special: a very limited boxset release, designed by Bernhard Kinzler, including all three 7”es, the first with a special inlay sleeve, a CD containing the band’s favourite tracks from their tapes and unreleased songs plus an art-booklet, with corresponding collages by Bernd Vayu Roesner to every song on the 7”es.
Now the band began with the preparations for their latest project, a conceptual CD album on Triton Records. The basic theme was ‘quest’ and the CD artwork, the title and the tracks were supposed to correlate to this topic. Again, Tempesta Noire were aided by a few guest musicians on this album: Bettina zur Rocklage (Ferrum), Martina Braig (Woodlawn) and Oliver Theile (Access Denied, Ariane V). In 2002, ‘66° 33’ North’ was released and again, Tempesta Noire received a warm welcome from all reviewers.
They were voted the Best German Neofolkband in an online-zine, even though they never intended to play pure neofolk, but always presented a unique mixture of neofolk, wave, electronics and world-music.
Since there had been several questions in interviews about the political opinions of Tempesta Noire and some attempts to line the band with right-wing ideologists within a certain musical scene, it is important for the band to state that Tempesta Noire are not political. They have not belonged, do not and will never belong to a musical scene that uses fascist or right-wing ideology. The band will not tolerate any attempts to connect them to specific groups or put them in a context of political ideologies.