AEPHANEMER have rightly been hailed a big player in the next realm of Melodic Death Metal by critics and their upcoming album Prokopton is concrete evidence of this claim. Their refreshing mix of Scandinavian Melodic Death Metal, Classical Symphonies and Slavic Traditional Music will ensure their place in the metal hall of fame. Rock Out Stand Out’s Lotty Whittingham spoke to lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Marion Bascoul about Prokopton’s themes, the album artwork and her musical influences.
Hello Marion, thank you for joining Rock Out Stand Out today. So you’ll be releasing your new album Prokopton. Where does the name Prokopton come from?
The word Prokopton means one who is making progress. It’s a Greek word that is used in ancient philosophy to describe a person who practices stoicism in their daily lives. This practice focuses on looking at our faults and emotions to achieve self-control and to become a better person. Martin and I chose this theme for the album because this is something that is very important to us.
That explains some of the lyrical content, am I right in thinking it’s about staying strong and focused no matter what?
Yes. In fact, the practice of this philosophy consists of acting in accordance to courage and virtues. So yes, it’s about being a good person whatever happens to you.
Who writes the lyrics in Aephanemer?
In the band, Martin [Hamiche] the lead guitarist composes all the music and I write all the lyrics. We picked and spoke about the theme of the album before Martin wrote any of the music.
It says that it took two years of song writing to create Prokopton, is this true?
Yes, more or less. We started to compose and write songs a few months after the release of our first album Momento Mori. It took two years more or less, maybe less. It might have taken one year.
Do you have a favourite song from Prokopton?
That is a very difficult question. I answered this question in another interview and it was very difficult to pick one song. I think my favourite song is Snowblind. I like it because you can hear our influences clearly. You can hear classical music influences, melodic black metal. It’s an emotional song and I really like it.
Speaking of Dark Tranquility, didn’t someone from the band design the album artwork for Prokopton?
Yes he did. Niklas Sundin, the guitarist of Dark Tranquility, designed the artwork. In fact he designed all our artwork for all our album covers. We asked him to and he said yes. We were happy with this as he is talented at drawing, I really like his artwork. We emailed him some ideas and guidelines and topics for the album. He drew some designs, we picked one of them and we were very happy with his artwork.
It’s difficult to represent the album theme in the artwork as it must not be too literal. It’s so people can relate to the artwork. When we sent guildelines to Niklas, we had the idea of representing Propkopton as mountains. We felt this was a good metaphor of difficulties and personal progress. We gave Niklas some space to create a personal artwork meanwhile it was embodying the sematic in a certain sense.
Where does the name Aephanemer come from?
It’s the merge of two French words. It’s the words éphémère and fânée. Which in English translates to ephemeral and folded. It refers to the autumn season.
How did you pick the band name?
I wasn’t in the band at that time. Martin was on his own at first. I know that he was searching for a band name and it was his little sister who found the name. She proposed the name to Martin. So it’s thanks to the imagine of his little sister for our band name.
What does the rest of 2019 hold for Aephanemer?
The album will be released 22nd March. After that, we have many shows planned. We will tour in the big cities of France and we will be playing in many festivals this summer in several countries around France. Unfortunately not the UK this year. We did play in the UK last year as part of Warhorns Festival. It was awesome, one of the best memories for live shows. The crowd was great and the organisers were so nice. We also played along side Kalmah which was awesome. We really hope to return to the UK. We will be playing in Germany, Spain and The Netherlands.
Thank you Marion for talking to Rock Out Stand Out today and best of luck with the album release.
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