XAON (EN)
1 – Hello, thanks for answering to our questions. What are you guys currently up to?
Hi! Thanks a lot for your time! Musically, we’re working in our future set-list in order to gain some freedom and some fluency when the instant to play it in front of a crowd will come. We already do it some numerous times (last time was in overture of the great At the Gates and Paradise Lost) but every time we play together, we realize that we could do something special during the show. Something in order to show to our crowd that without all of these headbangings, these screaming banshees who’re throwing beers, these guys who’re sweating and moshing, we’re a bunch of melancholic and lonely guys. Some scrawny mavericks, some square pegs face to some round holes who would be engraved under depression and isolation, all alone in our cold and silent nirvana. Alone in our rehearsal room, knitting like old ladies, drowning under an aqueous bitterness, some long and vaporous strings of reverie, dreamlike compositions, oneiric musical acts, living some existences that we couldn’t even bear. So we’re working in order to appear on stage better than the last time and to give to you and to them a feverous and rumbling show, as if we had to die just after having switch off our instruments and gears. We have to be ready for another something special, ready to sweat again, to let pour blood and tears upon the sonic maelstrom because during the fall, in October, we will play in Europe, three shows in overture of a great and famous band from Sweden and in November, we will embark in a sumptuous tour, in overture of the legendary Sirenia, Týr, Relicseed and the Canadian masters: Unleash the Archers through Europa for 18 shows! It will be a blast! I barely can wait!
2 – First off, could you make some history of the band?
Oh! It’s the classic and well-known story! When I was a stray teenage, just after a gloomy party, a nearly outsider came to me and began to tell how much he warmly loved a Swiss band that I heard anything of them. This band released just one demo and one EP. He spoke very well and I was watching him, passionately sculpting the ice of his prose and at the end of his speech, gave me the EP-cd of this Swiss band and disappear. At home, when I finally came back, I met a strange entity in my room: this EP-cd was an abnormal, marvelous, fascinating, harsh, violent, disturbing but quietly loving entity, a breathing fresco, an object that I religiously listened a thousand times per month. Maybe ten years after I stole the Pencil from the machine in order to use it on my own, I discover on Internet, an advert: A Swiss band was searching a new bassist and with a strange trick of faith, I realized that it was this band which had released this breathing fresco. I didn’t let this opportunity pass me by. I applied the better I can and I got the job. We released an album, did some tours, did a lot of shows with them, it was some pretty cool, intense and rewarding moments but and I still don’t know why, the former guitarist of the band and me became very grumpy face to the path following by the band. Time flew like birds escaping face of the first symptom of Plague and the other musicians are playing happily with any devotion, any utter passion and any interest. They became totally disconnect from metal and its dark and profound energies. Thus, we decided to wait for the very first hiatus of this past band in order to jump on the opportunity to create a new band: Xaon. A new band dedicated to play some devoted, heavy, powerful and melancholic songs under the radiant aegis of some great names like MY DYING BRIDE, KATATONIA, WINTER, the mighty PARADISE LOST, TYPE O NEGATIVE, the German VALBORG, AUSTERE, DAYLIGHT DIES, SATURNUS, ULVER and SOILWORK. This band was for us like a psychic cork-remover. As a dries fountain, to have a new band with musicians only devoted to heavy and gloomy music was a pure act of resurrection. We wrote lyrical contents and compositions in a six months period. During the recording of the lead vocal parts, we stood astonishing and thrilled by the vocal high skills, the presence and charisma of the Franco-American singer Rob Carson and we packed up him with us, as a permanent member.
3 – How could you describe your sound?
We are obviously able to explain how Xaon’s music doesn’t sound.. We have a very clear idea about it but it’s a more difficult path to say how it supposes to sound at your ears. For us, we wish to write some music that it could be appreciated like a complex and well-prepared salad or a tasty piece of meat. With a lot of complex fragrance, feelings, emotions but where the melancholy, the futile wandering of a lost human being, the discomfort, the useless revolt, the angst and the feeling of powerlessness have to dominate everything. If I speak about some terms like powerlessness or futile wandering, it evokes me this strong idea that runs through the whole lyrics for “Face of Balaam”: A too painful or complex quest. A quest that looks as a Gordian knot. Impossible to solve and to stay intimately the same, in the end. Impossible to resolve and to stay hidden behind his pageantry and habits. A quest that needs some brutal maneuvers or inner realizations. What’s preferable? To accomplish an existential quest even if I’m feeling complete but scorched, burned alive in my depths or to stay in these delicate, soft nescience of myself, the forehead under the everlasting cold and silent streams of the Lethe that’s flowing around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld. For example, on the EP’s first track: “How we become Ephemeral Birds”: there’s a smooth bridge with a cello part. It doesn’t represent a proof that we wish in fact, to put a “classic” solo like every rock song. This smooth part has the role to give a contrast in a middle of the grey and harsh energy that dominate in this song. This kind of nuance can be found in every of our songs (but more into the lyrics or the kind of voice that Rob used).
4 – What are the band’s main musical influences?
Like a lot of people, we listen a lot of stuff but for Xaon, I know that some band from the wave of Swedish death metal is quite important for us like Dismember, Merciless (I can’t get bored with the “The Awakening” album. It’s a short but perfect shoot of Obscurity, phobia and what lurks behind the Wall of Dementia), Ofermod (with a more black metal vibe), Tiamat (“Clouds” and ”Astral Sleep” are jewels, mixing aggression and veil of darkness), Centinex, Grave (I’m really fascinated by the voice’s colours of the Jörgen Sandström’s growls, so it’s easy to guess that “Into the grave” is, for myself, a pure jewel too), Sacramentum, Dissection, The Crown, Entombed, Liers in Wait, Carbonized, Eucharist (Ah! The album “A Velvet Creation” is just majestic!) and yet too many to mention.. and we like too some gloomy, wet, grey, melancholic bands like Katatonia, Paradise Lost, Celtic Frost, Mourning Beloveth, My Dying Bride, Anathema, Edge of Sanity, Type O Negative, Saint Vitus, Funeral (the norvegian band!), Doom:VS, Officium Triste (“Ne
Vivam” album is a pure diamond on an altar made of charcoal), Tryptikon and Paramæcium.
5 – How is the feedback for your new album being?
Pretty difficult to know; simply because we’re at the beginning line for this promotional journey. We hope that every metalheads will be able to find in our music streams something that resounds positively in their inner cloister and bring some power, courage, strength, armor that permits a safe meditation or shelter for his everyday life. We are just at the inception of our story.
6 – And are you personally satisfied with the final outcome?
Yeah! Of course but I’m feeling that we can make some things at a higher level.
For example: the production, the shape wrapping our sound is clear, huge, massive but for my taste, pretty generic, plain and not particularly distinctive from the vast ragbag of the other metal European production. When they will discover our band and sound, this kind of production will amaze several metalheads but I’ll personally more amazed by a more hobbling production (but logically more distinctive, humanly marked/spotted, more “I tried doing this shit at the higher level that I actually can because I want it and I love what I’m doing but it isn’t perfect, I know”) than a flawless, “super-professional” but plain production. Yesterday, when I was going to work, I listened an album that I usually don’t heard a lot (because I need to have a certain mood to listen this kind of music): “W4: The Green Album” from Canadian band: WOODS OF YPRES. This album has (regarding my taste, always) some grey and intriguing gems (tracks like: By the Time You Read This (I Will Already Be Dead) or Retrosleep in the Morning Calm, I Was Buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, of course and Wet Leather) but some details of this opus are pretty intriguing because they seem too childish (some backings, some mixing choices, the aberrant lyrical choice on the song “Wet Leather”, etc) to be put in the same crucible that for example, the bone-crushing melody or the heart-piercing voice melody (maybe on: “By the Time You Read This (I Will Already Be Dead)”. We feel, when we’re listening this album, David Gold tries to compose a certain kind of music that he would like, with its highlights and its ridiculous lack of taste (my subjective view, always). This specific contrast between all of these points sculpts and helps to sleek these contrast in order to obtain a strange but specific, kneaded by human and technical paradoxes, album. Yes, I’m very proud of Face of Balaam opus. Rob and Vinc did some marvelous job and it was outstanding to have the luck to work with them, some of our song like Veins Like Burned Trees (The Awe That Walketh In Obscurity part.1) brings tears to my eyes when I realize that the blend of our efforts has created something so special and so beautiful but We’ll stay not blissfully benumbed. We will do better for our next release but until this, please take a seat, a drink and have the pleasure to enjoy this music at a maximal level, the same level we felt when we composed this piece!
7 – How could you describe this opus in just 3 words?
Only three words? It could be possible to describe it with three long sentences? No? Alright, when I’m thinking about “Face of Balaam” EP, these three simple qualifiers jump on my mind: Forlorn, Sacred and Rabid.
8 – How has the production process for your new release been?
It was fine. Not very amazing but not totally boring neither. I particularly liked to go with Vinc’ and Rob at the Carsonian Sound Solution studio (check out this place if you want some huge sound and relaxing place to compose/arrange music: http://www.carsoniansoundsolutions.com/) in order to arrange the lyrics and the whole vocal lines. It was some awesome, precious and rewarding worktimes. When we felt that everything was made to sound huge and interesting, we sent everything to Julian at the Parallel Focus Studios. They worked like some lifeless but very efficient robots but I was already far away for these ascertainments. I wished for more and I still do.
9 – And how do you use to work on the songwriting?
That’s really a difficult question. We never rationalize what we done in the Xaon’s seraglio in terms of the composition. We just open our hearts and write some lyrics and play hours and hours. Sometimes, screaming with rage because everything already bore the infamous seal of the “too-common” or the “too-vain” vibes and sometimes, breathing peacefully because we know that we touched at the heart of something cool, nice, groovy, brutal and just: well made. But if we have to think about images, smells, colours, fuel for imagination that we inspire a lot for the Xaon’s music and lyrics, I can evoke the beauty of the high mountains or a cold, cloudy, autumnal weather, the passing of time, the decay and the regeneration of Nature, meditations about suffering or about the loss of faith and death. Very common, isn’t it? …but all of these things’re ringing truly in the depth of our hearts. There’s one more thing: The grandiloquence and the power of Art and Music. For Xaon’s members, Music and metal music is like a vital maelstrom filled with its own energy, its own colours, its own smells and the voices of some living unknown persons or some-one who are dead for too long. Music is like the Roman god: Janus. One head but two visages. Music, sometimes, is simply music and sometimes, it is just bigger. If you want to approach in order to plunge your hand and your forehead into this tumultuous and never-ending stream, you must to fight against yourself, against your desire of comfort, against your bad habit and your pernicious and false excuse. To listen, to understand and to play music or metal music is like a test and you should be able to overtake yourself in order to enjoy it in its fullness.
10 – Finally, what are you near-future plans?
We’re actually working on some new material as you can guess. We have already finish a new album and we’re swimming into our stream of thoughts regarding the arrangement’s possibilities and the capability to maximize the dumping and the implosion of feeling with the adding of some unusual instrument in the realm of rock’n roll music. We will begin to record this new album at the very beginning of the year 2017, maybe.. If we –as persons- are still alive Furthermore, as I already said at the overture of interview: We are working a lot our set-list because we have to be ready for another special event during the autumn, in October. We will play in Europe, three shows in overture of a great and famous band from Sweden and in November, we will embark in a sumptuous tour, in overture of the legendary Sirenia, Týr, Relicseed and the Canadian masters: Unleash the Archers through Europa for a tour of 18 shows! We hope to see you there, headbanging and drinking in the glory of metal with us!
11 – That’s all from our side, thanks again for taking your time to answer our questions. If you now want to add some final words; feel free to do it.
Thanks a lot for these interesting questions and this interview!
Never give up!
Stay totally proud and strong about what you are and became!
Stay aware face to your life, acts and communities and above all, take care of yourself!
Long Live Metal!
http://www.xaonmusic.com/
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Photo Credit: Marco Romero
