Amenra: Humanity And Our Symbols
AMENRA breathe a solemn and sincere air into heavy music. They understand that there is a purpose beyond heavy for heaviness’ sake. Volume, repetition and intense timbre have the ability to affect a listener in profound and meaningful ways which exceed their bare, aesthetic qualities. The band has it’s roots in the Ghent hardcore scene and they have carried that hardworking, DIY ethic over into creating a singular vision of post-metal; one which blends dark, humanist spirituality with traditional religious iconography.
AMENRA have been remarkably prolific in their twenty-year existence, having released a profusion of splits and EPs alongside their series of full-length albums Mass I-VI. They form the central congregation within the Church Of Ra: a collaborative artistic collective, which includes member’s side projects and other bands, including OATHBREAKER, WIEGEDOOD, and THE BLACK HEART REBLLION.
Stylistically AMENRA present an austere interpretation of NEUROSIS: combining seismic and hypnotic repetition with transcendent melodic leads, accompanied by confessional whispers and carnal shrieks. Over the course of six Mass albums they have converged on something increasingly singular, but their latest album De Doorn stands apart from that succession. “This is as important as a Mass album, not just something on the side,” insists vocalist Colin Van Eeckhout, “but we asked ourselves: is this Mass VII? We knew it wasn’t. It was made differently. This wasn’t our reaction to lived experience, but the expression of something much more universal.”
“It was a rather unconventional way of writing an album,” remembers Colin, “in a way, we were never conscious that we were writing an album.” De Doorn is a collection of commissioned pieces: an attempt to immortalise the potency of their original performances within a coherent whole. “It started when we performed at Dixmude in West Flanders, for a commemoration ceremony marking the end of WWI. We were commissioned by the city to create something memorable for the people of the area.” Memories of that ceremony would later blossom into De Doorn’s rapturous conclusion Voor Immer (‘Forever’); a reflection on the cycle of loss and renewal which is perpetuated by war and conflict.
“The second one was a fire ritual for the inhabitants of my city, Ghent. It was an attempt at exploring the intersection of art and healthcare, in the sense that art acts as a kind of healing,” muses Colin. “We designed a ritual ceremony around the burning of a sculpture. People were invited to put notes into the sculpture: writing down whatever they wanted to disappear from lives; whatever was bearing down on their existence. That was a real eye opener for us,” he enthuses. “We loved the idea, but we didn’t know whether people would respond to it. Maybe no one would want to put anything in? Given the opportunity though, and lots of people got involved. We also provided the score for the evening: for the most part, that is De Doorn.”
Although De Doorn was conceived within the duality of remembrance and forgetting, it is the collective and universal nature of those experiences which differentiates the album for AMENRA. “We were writing in the function of things that needed to happen that evening,” explains Colin. “The tone of the vocals shifted. The spectator wasn’t so much a witness to our own story but active participants in the communication. I was addressing the people, the fire, and the night: we were going to burn our sadness and solitude together; walk through the fire and cleanse ourselves. It wasn’t our own misery, but a collective expression of grief.” The symbolism of fire, as both destructive and cleansing, was essential for AMENRA to impart the significance of their performance. “Fire touches something primal in a human being. We’re drawn to fire, and here in Belgium, we are not used to having bonfires; they’re not a part of our folk traditions,” explains Colin. “There was a reverence for what was happening, and it was very respectful. We were amazed how many people were drawn to it.”
AMENRA’s live incarnations are renowned for their immediacy and the visceral intensity which emanates fout rom the stage. Their ability not just to fill but connect the whole audience in moments of exalted silence can be likened to a collective religious experience. “In music, or in heavy music at least, there’s a tendency to call a lot of things ‘rituals’,” observes Colin, “but a show is already a ritual. It’s not because you light a candle and burn some incense that makes it a ritual. We want to give things their meaning again, and to create experiences which make people feel connected in the moment, and to give them something which they take home and that will last longer than the memory of a good concert,” he tells us sincerely. “We want them to feel something out of the ordinary, and positive; a connection to other people who all (presumably) have the same thing inside of them which connects and unites them.”
“It’s the same with symbols,” continues Colin, “it’s about offering people possibilities and opportunities to connect with things.” AMENRA’s work – their music, artwork and apparel – is rich in religious symbolism but, unlike so many of their peers, they do not aim to satirise or corrupt those symbols so much as re-appropriate them. “That’s what we do: we appropriate. Maybe it’s the only occasion you can do it?” wonders Colin. “We want to give them back their original meaning, or even to give them another meaning; something which is just as powerful. The cross for example, can be a symbol for sacrifice and belief, but not necessarily in God. Symbols compel you towards a certain way of thinking; there’s something peculiar about symbols, and the strength we give them. It’s an interesting matter to work with,” he considers. “We also have the tripartite claw symbol, which symbolises how life can be taken away from you very quickly and how you must therefore withstand in life. We can draw a certain force from these symbols in the way a true symbol ought to.”
De Doorn (‘The Thorn’) is itself an example of AMENRA’s symbolic appropriation. They are perhaps most associated with Christ’s suffering: a humiliating and painful final taunt before his crucifixion. “It was never intended to be linked to the crown of thorns,” Colin explains, “although there is certainly a connection there. I was obsessed with thorns and thorn branches, and loved their aesthetics,” he opines. ”They all have different forms but the same function, which is protection. They protect things of value. A plant has thorns to protect its flower, seeds, or fruits, from anything external which will cause it harm. I love the idea that something in nature creates a weapon for protection.”
“For the album, I transposed that idea onto a human being,” he continues, lost in thought. “We all grow thorns to protect ourselves from harm: we develop our own methods, our own thorns, and we all carry around wounds that have been inflicted by other peoples thorns.” De Doorn reprises AMENRA’s core visual motifs: monochrome photography and sculpture, presented in stark, minimalist style. “I had all these different thorn sculptures made in bronze, and each thorn branch represents a musician that is a part of the album,” explains Colin. “We all put things we have learnt into making this album, as well as things which have inflicted harm. Some of the simplest things might be the most important in life. That’s the idea behind the thorn metaphor and the artwork,” he concludes.
OATHBREAKER vocalist and Church of Ra affiliate Caro Tanghe lent her talents to AMENRA as they recorded De Doorn. “The five of us had come to a point where we had done all we could do,” remembers Colin, “and then Caro came in a tore into it,” he beams admiringly. Together Tanghe and van Eeckhout perform their own unorthodox interpretation on a traditional gothic duet; subverting the duality of ‘beauty and the beast’. “Normally, the woman takes on the melodies and clean singing, while the man screams on top of it,” explains Colin, “but here it’s the other way around. I love the dynamic of the male and female voice: it makes the music feel more universal, and I love that, but it doesn’t need to be done in a conventional way.”
AMENRA eschewed another convention on De Doorn, choosing to pen all of the lyrics in their native Flemish. “If we’d decided at the start to make an album, we probably would have gone for English,” he discloses, “but it was originally written for a Flemish audience, and it works especially well in the storytelling style.” Their lyrical inspiration comes from the Kleinkunst tradition: particularly the work of Zjef Vanuytsel, whom they covered on a single released last year. “It’s storytelling performed in a singer songwriter style. It has a way of talking about things in a really trivial way, but it’s dark and poetic and hard to pinpoint. It’s so truthful and simple that it becomes beautifully sincere and direct. It’s very relatable, not written in complex prose. It’s like hidden high-art: constructed in a very thought through way, but to read it it looks like ordinary storytelling.”
As the band makes preparations for their next tour, they will be aware that they are setting out into a fragmented and isolated world. As we collectively prepare to move on from the strictures of the pandemic, we will all engage in our own moments of remembrance and forgetting. De Doorn was originally conceived for live performance, and to create moments of collective catharsis: in that sense De Doorn couldn’t have been more timely and, as the material is brought into a live setting once again, it will be addressing a changed world. Beyond that? Nothing appears on the horizon. “We’ll keep on creating,” Colin reassures us, “even if nothing happens, we’ll make music – but, you have to ask yourself whether the art you’re making is relevant. We don’t mind taking time to write something that is worth being documented and listened to by others.”
De Doorn is out now via Relapse Records.
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