Castrum was founded on a dark and stormy night in the year 1995 by the two unholy souls Insanus (guitar/keys) and Morsus Sordahl (vocal). During this year they worked mostly on lyrical and poetic conception as it was quite hard to find musicians in Croatia that were interested in playing this type of extreme music...

All was quite untill late 1996 when Set joined the band on drums and Fra. Mortes on bass. After recording their first promotional demotape (1997) entitled "Nocturnal Eden Behind Serpent Eyes", Castrum recieved quite a positive response in many underground fanzines throughout Europe and across the seas.

After the recording of this promotional demo, Set left the band and Castrum gained an aditional guitarist under the name of Dirgloch. The only problem now was that Castrum was now left without a drummer... so a studio drum machine was used to record their debut album.

Castrum returned to the dungeons to record their first full lenght opus entitled "Black Silhouette Enfolded In Sunrise" which offered 8 tracks of bewitching symphonic and epic black metal enchanced with vampiric poetry and dark atmosphere... Soon after, Castrum were then signed to Folter Records in 1998.

Because of the sudden departure of their drummer, a studio drum machine was used for the recording of the album and two open air concerts (Under the Black Sun I & II) along with other gigs in Germany, Slovenia and Croatia.

1999 was the cursed year for Castrum as Insanus had to leave for his military service...which caused a slight delay in the release of the new album. Despite this setback, Castrum entered the studio again in January 2000 to record their second full lenght album untitled "In the Horizons of the Dying Theatre". Fra Mortes Amalthea then took over the vocal duties and the album was finally finished just before he had to enter into his military service and just after Insanus completed his.

This magnificent second opus offers 11 tracks of purely symphonic black metal like none other including a "metal-ized" cover version of an ancient Croatian folk song. Althrough a drum machine was used once again to record the entire album.

Source : http://www.myspace.com/the.true.castrum