Avandra: The Sky Is The Limit

Having only just released their sophomore album Descender to critical acclaim, Puerto Rico’s AVANDRA were set to take on the world – but the world, as we now know, had other plans. “It definitely had quite a big impact on plans we had for this year” is the honest, and all too common, assessment of mastermind Christian Ayala.

“First we were slated to begin recording our ‘OG’ third album in March and the same week we were going to begin tracking drums, Puerto Rico set a curfew and released an executive order that basically demanded all citizens to stay in their homes,” – meaning the band couldn’t use their drum studio for an unknown amount of time. So the band postponed the album to hopefully begin recording early 2021 and the band were left at something of a loose end.

Skylighting was a surprise, and one they didn’t initially intend to make. Christian was left with only a master’s thesis to worry about, and rather than have it consume every waking moment he turned to video games “to play some games [he] had left in the back burner for a long time.” Fans of sci-fi and space games will no doubt have heard the name Elite: Dangerous before, and it’s in this perhaps unlikely setting that an idea took root. When asked what had inspired Christian to start writing again he replies, “the game doesn’t have the best soundtrack so I decided to write a song I would like to hear as I played, and that’s where the music for Celestial Wreaths came about.”

An unflattering assessment of the soundtrack, certainly. Lyrically inspiration came from the events going on around the world, including in Italy where people sang from their balconies to give each other hope. “Many people’s lives were ‘twisted upside down’, leaving them stranded in a sea of meaninglessness,” Christian philosophises when we put to him how the pandemic impacted the creation of Skylighting. The aim was “to provide a sonic cure to the anxious and stressful mood so many people were/are going through” and this is evident from the lush, introspective prog rock on display throughout the album.

The master’s thesis did still rear its head here – “lyrically, as part of my way to copy with everything… I decided to dive deep into my master’s thesis, which is a combination of philosophy and neuroscience… and so a lot of the lyrics were inspired by that”. Thematically, the lyrics and even motifs “are various interpretations of Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Return… My thesis is that life is not a circle, meaning we never truly re-tread the steps we have taken before, but there is always a slight modification in our actions.” These cerebral concepts don’t just inform the lyrics, they underpin the entire creative process behind the creation of the album; Christopher expanded on this, saying “the song Eternal Return is an application of [Marcel Proust, influential French novelist]’s notion of the eternal return, where you have an eight string guitar repeating one melody, then the bass, then the keyboards. Towards the end, it reinterprets parts of the first three songs and integrates them into its own qualitative experience.”

AVANDRA not only create introspective arrangements then, but there’s incredible amounts of thought and philosophy behind all that they do. When asked if the pandemic would lead to any great philosophical shifts in the world or in how people live, Christian was just as thoughtful and as impossible to paraphrase. “Sheldon Solomon wrote a very interesting book called Worm at the Core, where he talks about the idea that death is the motivational center for all human action… we are not aware of such a motivation for it lies deep in the core of our unconscious realm. Within every individual there is a moment of sublimation of this “worm”, be it a close family death, a personal brush with death, so on. This is in turn causes a lot of people to hold fast to their belief systems, be it religion or specific cultural norms which they feel will comfort them in times of dire straits. With this virus, we are seeing something unprecedented, and it’s the sublimation of that death-anxiety on a world-level. This then is manifested in a myriad of different ways, from the clinging to nationalistic values, to the need to destroy such values and posit new ones that go together with the horrors of the pandemic… So, in a way, I think this new reality will remain in the psyche of all the citizens of Earth, be it as a trauma or a lesson learned, or both.” If this seems overly pessimistic, it isn’t meant to – as the saying goes after all, every cloud has a silver lining. “I think a lot of people are finally following their passion. People have turned their art projects into businesses and if it weren’t for the pandemic they would have never gone for it. I think creatively, a lot of bands are using this opportunity to create and channel in with the ‘zeitgeist’ for inspiration.”

With Skylighting, AVANDRA wanted to provide something positive to take from such an unrelentingly miserable year, with their heady themes of eternal return and the introspective nature of their music, all underpinned by this optimism and faith in humanity that perhaps, things will get better and people can be better and happier.

Skylighting is out now via Layered Reality Productions. 

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