Interview Anomalie - English

During the Cernunnos Pagan Fest, I’ve had the chance to talk with Marrok, leader of the Black Metal act Anomalie. We’ve discussed about composing, personal development and even politics, a myriad of topics for a very interesting interview!

Radio Metal Sound: Anomalie has started with Between the Lights which is a quite dark and depressive album. Now I feel like it’s more rooted in spirituality. Therefore, I’d like to know if you’ve started the band with the idea of a path to recovery through spirituality or is Anomalie just a planless outlet you’ve done?

Marrok: Yeah, basically it came very naturally… It was always the intention to be just a channel for expressing myself and the development that you can hear from one release to the next one is basically going step by step along with my personal development. Of course, the first material was written when I was 19~20 years old and almost 10 years later you’re not the same anymore. It just came how it felt right.

Radio Metal Sound: That explains why it’s still a one-man band

Marrok: Exactly. There’re bands that should be bands and there’re projects like this where it should be just one mind creating the things. It’s not only me who has any influence on the final outcome because although it’s written by one person, I always have in mind to take especially my drummer with me to the studio because I can write drums, I can kinda play drums but it’d a pain in the ass to do everything on my own and why the fuck should I do it if I have somebody close to me who is just way better than me in executing what is written already?! Yet, for me it was never a ego thing to do everything on my own and music is still a thing that brings people together and that has some kinda uniting effects so it’s something of both but in the creative side it will always be just my things

RMS: I’ve read an interview in which you said that you wanted to keep “some rebellious spirit alive”. Do you still agree with this statement and do you try to keep this spirit in Anomalie?

Marrok: There’re different interpretations to these words because on the one hand it means that on the musical side I don’t want to be one of those who you already know what to expect for the next album, repeating oneself is something I don’t get. I don’t understand why some artists repeat themselves for 20 years, even if it sells – though most if the time they don’t even sell. There’re big examples but there’re also small examples who are caught on their own quite narrow dimension. So this thing is meant musically but it’s also a feeling: I’m more and more returning to the roots of my beginning in the whole music scene but I could never go back so it’s always like going forward and with that doing something you haven’t done before. You’ll lose and gain audience because some people will agree with what you’re doing and there’re not many people who will like everything because it’s something different everytime. That’s something that not everyone likes because they’ll prefer to have something that they already like. And when it comes to the lyrical content, it was always a bit sad for me to see so much written response from the media side when it’s presented as something mainly negative. I was never a depressive type of guy but it took me some years to express myself, to be able to have those vibes of hope and this rebellious mind of not taking things how they are and just complaining but to take your own future in your own hands. Not just talk about everything, how bad it is, do something in the way you can change it. Of course, there’re big things that are upon everyone and we have to live with it or we just leave our whole circumstances, our country or whatever, and start somewhere else or whatever, but even that is our choice. That’s one of those messages that, in a more suitable and esthetical way, I want to express between the lines and not just reflecting a rather negative world without giving any opportunity in the content of the song. That’s something that I want to keep alive.

RMS: The feelings between your work are manifold: there’s despair, there’s hope, delicacy and so on… Though I personally feel like you’ve already answered this question – at least a bit –, I’d like to know if you consciously want to keep the ambiguity within your work

Marrok: It happens partly consciously but everytime I do something new I think I know what’s coming next and what’s my plan, how I want it to sound like and what it’s about, but in the end the only important thing is to keep the authenticity alive. Whatever you do, people should believe what you do, they should feel the honesty in it. I don’t want to tell anyone how to live, to preach about anything. I’m not an old guy, I’m not a super wise wizard or whatever, we’re just reflecting what we are going through and that nobody’s perfect but the only important thing is that what you hear is a hundred percents my heart at the time when it’s released. That’s the main goal and the only thing I try to keep for the future as well.

RMS: I’d like to keep on dwelling on the theme of composition and I’d like to discuss the idea of lyrical composition because I’ve noticed that a lot of your songs, especially on the last album, sound like stories. Visions sounds like tales, so I’d like to know if these stories are solely based on your personal experiences of if you want to add something more like cultural or artistic references?

Marrok: It’s not easy to answer because in the end the product you can hear in the final song is always just my attempt to put in words and in sounds what moves me at a certain point. It’s not always related to special scenes but sometimes it’s just something that moves me in dreams. I try to put in words what is important to me and to have this very intense atmosphere. For me it’s still very difficult to find the right words for this kind of music because I’m way better at expressing myself instrumentally than by writing lyrics. So it always takes a while to find the right balance, to match the reality side of the lyrics and the spiritual side of the music. In the end it’s somewhere in the middle I’d say.

RMS: As such, you've said that your music was kind of a depiction of yourself. Do you think that music has helped you to mature in anyway?

Marrok: By setting the goal to create a new record, I force myself to reflect on myself, to reflect what has changed since last time, to think of things way more in details that you would usually do, especially with topics that you're not comfortable to think about, that may be painful. In a way it's a pretty effective therapy to force oneself to revisit your own state of mind of two or three years. It's kinda interesting to see the differences of how we've been as people a few years back from now and I kinda enjoy it to have those timestamps with each record. The older it gets, the more interesting it is to leave it aside for three of four years and to get back to it and it sounds like somebody else. Still you find yourself somewhere there but you can definitely say "this thing moved me a lot back then but I managed to deal with it and it changed me a lot". It's kinda a mirror for yourself. 

RMS: It opens a very wide horizon of questions but we don't have much time so I'll ask my two last questions: I know that not all artists are at ease with it but I wonder if there's a "political" point of view in Anomalie. Not in the classical meaning of “politics” but mainly through the criticism of greed, the question of defence of the environment, as it may be seen in some texts of your last album, especially in the end of One With The Soil. 

Marrok: I think it's a part of our human nature to look around ourselves and see what's going on and it's important to question things that are happening also on the political level around us because one way or the other it affects us. I don't want to have that too much in my creative outcome but sometimes it just feels right to throw in some questions that are directed to the society (as mankind itself) as it's the same forces that drive the human nature into the dark side of behaviour. Wherever we are on this planet, there're the same things with just different names. Gods or evils, it doesn't matter, it started with the old gods that had the same position all over the world just with different names. I don't see any point in focusing on local politics (and even European politics are too local) but as an artist I prefer to keep things on an overall level that relates to everyone as human beings and not to a certain group of people or whatever. It's just partly there, sometimes a little bit, but honestly, I don't care too much about people that are not in my inner circle so overall politics are for other people, not for me. 

RMS: And this last question: I'd like to know what does the future hold for Anomalie? 

Marrok: I have to move around some things because of the pretty tight schedule with Harakiri for the Sky, but this year will be a year where we will record a new album. We're not sure when yet, when it'll fit, but something is coming. 

Sadly, our interview had to be shortened because of the concert preparation but it’s still been a very pleasant time. Thanks a lot to Marrok and don’t forget to listen to Anomalie!