Horst Stabenow, who founded Faithful Breath and played bass in it for seventeen years, has died at the age of seventy four. The band announced it themselves.
He was there from 1967, when the group in Witten stopped calling themselves The Magic Power, and he stayed until 1984. That covers almost everything they are remembered for.
The remembering is complicated, because Faithful Breath had two lives. The first was progressive rock, and Fading Beauty in 1974 is still traded as a serious record from that scene. The second started around 1980 with Back on My Hill and turned into heavy metal properly on Hard Breath and Gold 'n' Glory, with Viking helmets and a sleeve that looked like an invasion. German metal in the early eighties was a small room and this was one of the bands in it before Accept filled it.
Stabenow left in 1984, one album before Skol. The band stopped in 1986 and carried on as Risk until 1993, which is where Thilo Hermann came from before Running Wild.