ANTEDILUVIAN (Eng.)
– Hi, thanks for your time. What are you currently up to? How is everything doing right now with ANTEDILUVIAN?
Greetings. I am working on several projects and spending the majority of my time in Austria at the moment. We are currently actively working on new ANTEDILUVIAN material.
– First off, what’s the origin and meaning behind the band’s name?
Antediluvian means «before the flood». It is an English word derived from Latin.
– Your latest album, «λόγος», was released over a year ago. Now that you can look at it with some perspective, is there anything you would change about it? And if so, why?
Recordings are always approximations of an ideal, especially when you are trying to maintain an organic sound while also introducing extremely chaotic elements into the structure. When you work intensely on a creation for many months, that ideal becomes more and more difficult to reach. And, at the same time, the creation itself gets reduced to the mechanics: the mathematical structures underlying the whole thing. The ideal was unobtainable and it was not even clear anymore how the new material mapped onto our goal of pushing further in the direction we started with “Through the Cervix of Hawwah”. Now I can say yes, the recording was in fact a good approximation of the ideal, and yes, we achieved our goal. As such, there is nothing I would change because it meets these criteria. Anything that I would do differently now will be reflected in the new material, but only through the experience of “λόγος” is that possible.
– With this latest album you reached a new level of experimentation with chaotic sounds full of darkness. What affects your experimentation and soundscapes?
The process of creating new music is not satisfying if it feels as though the process itself has not changed. The key is to never get too comfortable.
– How much of your feelings and mood through a certain moment in time is channeled or portrayed in your sound?
It is clear that the current state of an organism must affect its creative output, but it would be difficult to say how much. Any portrayal or channeling is not intentional, however, stressors do increase the amount of creative output in my case. I try to keep my life chaotic to feed the creativity.
– Anyway you are a band that evolves with each new release so, do you know how could your next album sound like? And talking about this, have you started playing around with new ideas?
Given what I said about the process of evaluating “λόγος”, I think it would be difficult at this time to say much about the new creations. I am always trying to push myself to play more intricate and more unexpected things on the drums. I am always trying to write riffs that would surprise even myself, and given my intimate knowledge of all ANTEDILUVIAN songs, I hope this means that the album as a whole will defy expectation beyond what I can imagine.
– Could you say this creative evolution is also linked to a personal growth?
Yes, definitely. Art is a process in the way that science is a process. It is an attempt to evaluate and interpret reality as we perceive it through our human sensory systems. Creative processes therefore always involve self evaluation, and this self evaluation in turn leads to growth.
– With such a personal sound, I would like to know what have been the main influences for the band, both musical and non-musical.
Everything we know, especially the things we appreciate, influence our output. It would be difficult to identify what the main external influences are, it might be easier for a listener to come up with hypotheses about this because it is hard to separate oneself from ones creation. One thing I do think has been important in the development of our sound, especially once we got past the demos, has been the very different perspectives Haasiophis and I bring to the table. This collaboration has lead us to change the way each of us write music and produced something we wouldn’t have made alone.
– And I also wonder how do you use to work in the songwriting process.
A set of riffs and their full song structure is usually written out in its entirety by Haasiophis or myself in isolation before we begin working together. There are a few exceptions; «Towers of Silence» was written using a random number generator by our bass player, Nabucodnosor, and then arranged by Haasiophis. «Scions of Ha Nachash (Spectre of the Burning Valley),» «Through the Cervix of Hawwah,» and a few other songs were made with combinations
of riffs both Haasiophis and I wrote. Then there is a stage where minor changes occur as we work together, and I begin writing the drum parts. Haasiophis typically writes lyrics for a release once all the music is complete or near completion.
– Your lyrics are always really integrated in your music, everything flows so natural and everything fits well together but, where do you draw inspiration from to write your lyrics?
All lyrics are written by Haasiophis (with the exception of those on Septentrional Theophany, written by Jason Campbell), so I cannot speak for myself here. But he described the process to me by referring to his action as that of «a vessel transforming complex elements into base excrement».
– All this about this latest «λόγος» being said; how could you describe it in just 3 words?
«Progressive, organic, chaos» might work although it might describe ANTEDILUVIAN in general.
– And finally, what are your near-future plans?
As I said, we are working on new material, I am hoping we will record in what still counts as the «near future», but it will be many months yet at least.
