sábado, 3 de febrero de 2018

ELIZABETHAN WALPURGA - INTERVIEW


Good evening, thank you very much for agreeing to answer these questions, how is everything going in Recife?
R. Matos - Not too bad at all. We expect more in this year 2018, because in the last and recent months of 2017 were very weak compared to the previous ones. We had few concerts in the city, reflections of economic problems that we all spent in Brazil, problems related to corruption that almost led Brazil to fail socially!

1. The origins of the band go back to 1994, at that time you called yourself Ecumenical Damnation, what led you to create the band? Why did you decide the name of Ecumenical Damnation?
R. Matos - Well, on behalf of the whole band I would like to thank Fran Rocha for this space given to us here at Black Metal Spirit, so that your readers and fans can know a little bit about who we are, where we came from and why we do black metal in Brazil.
The band was born out of my particular need to become a songwriter, for at that time I was bassist of a detah metal band called "Infected", very much in the vein of bands like Morbid Angel primarily. The dozens of bases I composed did not fit into Infected's proposal and the guys did not want to change the style, nor did I. I showed Breno and Erick Lira, who are brother and my friends since we were very young and they were already playing very well in 1994. They like very much and we start the band right away.
The initial spark was our big idols the Iron Maiden, Accept and Mercyful Fate, but when we met the first albums of Septic Flesh “Mystic Places of Dawn” and Horrified's "In the Garden of the Unearthly Delights" we were motivated to compose something that could represent the mixture of these bands so distinct in a single dress and we chose the death metal to represent our music. Initially we had Murilo Nóbrega and Rogério Mendes, who were then drummer and vocalist respectively of a local death metal band "Decomposed God", which makes an extremely brutal death metal. So the idea of ​​the name was Rogério Mendes, who wanted to synthesize our desire to make a different music from the one we listened to until the beginning of the 90s.

2. From that time there is no edition of the band and after a year you changed the name of the band to the current Elizabethan Walpurga, why this sudden change of name? Why do you choose the name of Elizabethan Walpurga?
R. Matos - Things did not progress at that time more because Murilo and Rogério could not give to the band the time that I, Breno and Erick gave at this time. When we did not have time to play, we spent the nights from Saturday to Sunday playing and drinking run and coke, lot of run and less coke! Things did not evolve and when Belchior de Melo, who was Infected's drummer where I played, saw one of the last rehearsals with Murilo, Belchior really liked the band. With the departure of Murilo and Rogério, Belchior ge tinto the band and invited Mal'lak to join the band, who was vocalist of the black metal band called Darkness Emperor. Mal'lak brought a whole philosophy that until then, we had never had the opportunity to know in our lives. He brought Luciferianism to our knowledge and told us that he had an idea of ​​writing about vampirism, but about a very personal view of it, based on his studies. His voice always sounded like an extremely strong voice resembling that of a vampire himself, and he could actually be! The sound changed a lot because new bands that we new at that time, so I, Breno and Erick started to listen to bands like Dark Tranquility, Sentenced, Katatonia, Amorphis, In Flames, Anathema, Cathedral, Paradise Lost and a little later Emperor and Satyricon. After that time, about 1995, 1996, we get ready to make Elizabethan Walpurga´s sound.
But who gave the name to Elizabethan Walpurga was Leonardo Mal'lak!

3. In this way a period elapsed from 1995 to 2002, looking a little behind, I guess the black metal scene was not very extensive in Recife, what do you remember from that time? Did you feel like a pioneer? What has changed in the black metal scene in your area since you created Elizabethan Walpurga to this day?
R Matos - True, black metal was almost a novelty in Brazil. We already had excellent bands like "Sarcófago" and the first works of Sepultura like the Morbid Visions.
We already knew the Lord Blasphemate band, who is from our region. Hellhammer (Savio Diomedes) was and is a musical and philosophical influence even today in our lives. Shortly before us, Vital Santos created the band Malkuth band, one of the biggest names in our metal scene, firmly doing exteme, pagan and antichristian music until the present days. We were not feeling as a pioneers, because we were part of the metal scene of the city and everyone was knowned, everyone knew who we were by name and we admired and respected the quality bands of the time. The differences were smaller than the particularity of dividing the same spaces, the same youthful rebellion of our time. The differences were in the gutter of the cheap and filthy bars, from where we left at 5 in the morning after a night watching 4, 5 bands totally different from each other. There was a certain romanticism, if we can say that there was, but there was mainly respect, because it was not anyone who made heavy metal at that time in Recife and expose yourself was a social act of rebellion as well.
The black metal scene in Recife and in Brazil has changed a lot since then. People are less open to others, they demand unthinkable things from others, like you can not wear clothes that are not black color, or you can not listen to bands that are not trully  satanists, in fact, that is a great absurd things, from my point of view.
It's all very superficial, distant, because young people today do not get involved in local bands, they do not go to concerts, they do not buy our cds, but they do it when a great international headline visits our city. We also love some big and successful bands, but we support the underground movement and thing for the few grumpy and old ones like us!
People here once respected you for what you were, for your attitudes. Today there is a false respect, for people only seem to respect what you appear to be and not what you truly are.


4. In your beginnings you edited a couple of demos, "... the Darkness ... the Wrapping Tranquility ..." and "Desire", what memories do you have of the recording of these demos and how do you think they have stood the test of time? ?
R. Matos - The first demo was recorded totally disorganized on our part because we did not play the bars properly and only realized how bad it was when we edited. So we only preserve the music “Vampyre”, which was originally recorded in the first demo in 1997. If you listen to Vampyre first record what was done in extreme metal on the world scale, you will realize that we had a lot of original musicality in our favor, since very few bands did any good at that time. 
Since most people only listened to our music now, after 2016, it seems that we had certain influences that we never had, as all respects the careers of bands like Cradle of Filth or Dimmu Borgir, because we only came to know such bands after 2007, thats no false modesty, if there is something that resemble these bands is because we made our first compositions under the influence of the same bands and not because we copied their music or to be influenced by the music of these artists, among others mentioned, as Judas Priest, Dissection or The Kovenant also.
We prepared well to record the demo Desire. I think we recorded in 35 hours in total. At that time we left the whores to record and then returned to the sexies orgies night ... Although we achieved our goal in that, we did not divulge the demo well and few people knew our work at that time, we barely left Recife. I'm sure that if any record producer heard us back then we would be hired, but the time passed, we finished the band in 2002 and everything was filed away. When we decided to go back in 2015, we decided that the first act would be to record all the songs we did between 1994 and 2001, so only now, after we have Walpurgisnacht, will we record some really new things.
The songs remain current, in my view, since few bands like Elizabethan Walpurga walk on such different strands within the heavy metal universe, but also bringing elements from outside heavy metal, such as classical music, Armorial movement music and general arts that occurred in Pernambuco state in the 70s, having much influence in medieval provencal music, Iberian music. So what you listen to when you play our Walpurgisncht, you will hear a sound made in the 90s, but recorded with the technology of the 10s and the 21st century. Of course we play differently, we are better and more mature as human beings and we know exactly what we want to do in relation to our band, but the essence is the same songs. You notice this when you listen to Vampyre from 1997 or the 3 songs we recorded in the demo Desire and we re-recorded now in Walpurgisnacht, the musical idea of ​​the thing was already made in 1999 for us, we only brought all this now, because we could not leave that part of our history in total obscurity, to be forgotten.

5. In 2002 comes a period of silence for the band that lasted until last 2016, what happened so that you would take the step of stopping the activity during this time? During these fourteen years of inactivity, some time you thought about ending the band or on the contrary, at some time during this period were you near to return? How important was the inclusion of Arthur Lira and Leo Mallak to return to the activity?
R. Matos - Well, the band ended in 2002 when I migrated to live in the USA. Originally I used to live in nearby Boston, but then I spent more time living in Philadelphia. During this period, I dedicated myself to listening to bands that were not well known in progressive rock from the 1970s, but I went to dozens of metal band concerts, mainly in Philadelphia. I could not understand that there no had been any metal bands that put us the same proposal we had at the Elizabethan Walpurga and every time I contacted Breno and Erick, I would say that "one day the band would come back" and they would laugh at me of course!
I definitely come back to Brazil in 2007 and at the time, I was reorganizing my life and everyone's life in the band was also very confusing, as each was in the beginning of their respective professional careers.
Meanwhile I was still negotiating with Breno the band's return, since Erick and Mal'lak had already come back to the band. We did not think of inviting any of the old drummers. The most present for us in the first round was undoubtedly Belchior, but he also migrated to the USA in 2001, a year before I went, still lives near Boston and is already an American citizen, so, there were no more common tunes with us. The other drummers who played with us in 2001 and 2002 also did not come as a good option. Arthur is Breno and Erick's cousin and much younger than us. He was a big fan of the band and when he was a kid, sometimes he saw our acoustic rehearsals at the home of the Lira brothers' mother! So, playing monstrously as he plays, it was not difficult to recruit him into our sonorous mission! Arthur is a being from another planet. He recorded all the drums on the album from 9 AM in the morning until 3 PM in the same afternoon day, and only stopped 30 minutes to eat pizza and drink a soda! Fundamental for that process he was, because I do not know if we have another drummer in the city with such technique and who knew the sound of the band. I never thought of burying Elizabethan Walpurga. We were never close to returning until we found in Breno's house a K7 tape with rehearsals of the album's unpublished songs that allowed us to record the songs with the same atmosphere that we built in the late 90's and we did it with a lot of attitude and conscience, of what we can do from here on out and thats it, I guess!

6. How important was the split edited with Lord Blasphemate so that you decided to re-record new material and start to shape "Walpurgisnacht"?
R. Matos - In 2014, Savio Diomedes invited us to release the demo Desire on a spllit cd with Lord Blasphemate, bringing their cult-like demo with the same name of the band from 1993, as part of his new Label called "Ordo Draconian Black Label". It was the lever that removed us from total inertia.
We remake the demo, because we do not have any of the original records anymore, and we sent the revamped demo to Hellhammer.
The call from Hellhammer was what motivated us in the foreground. Soon after we decided to return the band, we heard some polls about "Which bands would you like to meet from the 90's" or “which band did you want to return to with your original line-up”, but what motivated and motivates us most is the sensation of pleasure that we realize when a headbanger or a metalhead like our sound, this is priceless!
With the material in hand we began to plan, but we did not get everyone to make the same schedule so we could rehearse to record. It was then that in May of 2015, Breno told us that he would spend two years in Portugal to do a master's degree in music at the University of Aveiro. It was a shock, because at the moment Breno was asked by several local artists to make concerts or to play in his album projects, because as Breno is a music teacher and is a professional musician, he obviously does not limit himself to playing exclusively in the band or inside heavy metal. He has great projects outside the EW, such as "Noise Viola" or "Treminhão".
But we did a very fair planning.
A week before Breno traveled, we start to recorded on the last Sunday of August of 2015 and sequenced the following monday and on following tuesday 90% of the album was recorded, leaving only Mal´lak´s vocals and Erick´s solos to be recorded.
In the meantime, Nenel Lucena, who did all the recording, was our sound engineer and in some moments even gave us ideas of how to do certain thing, that we lacked in the times of rehearsals, because they were only 9 days of rehearsal with 3 hours each one of duration so that Arthur could play the songs with naturalness, mixed (by Nenel Lucena) the songs of "Walpurgisnacht" 7 times before we decided to go ahead.
There were did 5 times the mastering attempts until we reached the final and desired result.
We put a lot of information into our songs, our compositions are layered, overlapping one on top of the other, producing what we want as sound, with music to expose our philosophies of life, even if in a dramatic theatrical way to a distant time in an Europe so distant still! Things that we live without the lucidity of life, that impregnate us as things that we already lived before we live and die again!

7. How was the process of composing and recording the new album? I think I understand that in "Walpurgisnacht" there are several tracks that were composed in the first stage of the band almost twenty years ago, how do you decide to include this material in the new album and it was very complicated to adapt it?
R. Matos - No, as I mentioned in an answer above, all songs were composed between 1994 and 2001, there was only no record of them in this first phase. With the exception of the intro "Exordium", all songs are compositions of the first phase of the band.
The recordings were very intense, because there was not much time for mistakes, so we did everything very quickly, a lot of concentration, a lot of professionalism and especially with a lot of virtuosity, because in total they were just over 45 hours of recording to everything you listen at the "Walpurgisnacht´s album"! In the next work we will do things more calmly, more time to do tests in the studio, in order to achieve greater perfection. We also wish to insert more acoustic parts, but with other instruments besides the acoustic guitar like violin, cello and wind instruments.
Another difference is the fact that at the time (1994 to 2001) the lyrics were not well translated from portuguese to english. Therefore a new translation of the original lyrics was made in Portuguese and with that some parts changed drastically. Since Mal'lak did not have any time to study these changes, he had to sing at the time of recording, what he did in 5 hours in total without prior reserhal, and then return to Natal city, where he lives, with no chance of returning to Recife city in a few months, since his youngest daughter was born or about to to be born. And the vocals was perfect and the sound of the voice he got to put on that day was better than we expected, but after he recorded it, I felt some gaps caused by these changes in the song lyrics. So I added my backing vocals on the songs to give more consistency, more drama. Before, I only has sing some pieces of vocals back in time from the “Desire” recordings,I just did some vampyric shouts  as "Udo Dirkschneidians" screams from “Balls to the Wall” album!!! It has changed the way we play, because today we play the songs more cadence and feel good performing the songs the way we play today. We always listen to references that when we play alive it´s seems the same as we played on the CD, but this is not true actually, because on the recorging we put up to 4 guitars doing different things and in different parts, but the way Breno and Erick build the chords, allow them to fill spaces. When I listen to Breno playing, I think there are two guitar players playing at the same time, because he always puts third notes, fifth notes and so we are giving more texture to our sound.


8. "Walpurgisnacht" has been published for more than a year. How were the reviews received about the album? Are you satisfied with the final result?
R. Matos - As recorded in 2015, we spent more than a year to released the album. We had no support, no open door for the cd's exposure, so we hired a press office, Metal Media helped us get to Voice Music, which released Walpurgisnacht on October 31, 2016.
With the help of Metal Media we also arrived at Shinigami Records months later, but at this time we also received proposals for one more Brazilian label and one European label, but we opted for Shinigami Records and we are pleased with Walpurgisnacht's statement, even though we think that if we had more support, of the specialized media.
Luckily we only received positive reviews from the metal media of Brazil, all without exception were positive. We get support from some radios stations and webradios stations in Brazil, Bolivia, USA, Canada, Portugal, Spain, Finland and Germany, which leaves us immensely satisfied, since there is no commercial relation in these facts, everyone plays our songs because they think it´s cool and this is very gratifying for us.
But we know we can do more. We are looking for labels that want to form a partnership to release Walpurgisnacht in LP format or in tape or even to release our future releases. We have a lot of songs and we want to record an EP now in 2018 with 3 or 4 unreleased songs from this new phase of compositions.

9. There is one thing that is clear once the album is listened to and it is the diversity of styles that the listener can appreciate in the compositions, styles that go from the heavy to the metal, going through the black or the classical music, is it very complicated to translate all These influences and styles in your music or rather for you is a natural process?
R. Matos - We have almost always received very positive reviews regarding this diversity in our music, and how the songs are different from the things fans listen to in other bands. We have already seen some contrary comments about our music too, but we do not bother when we have a negative review, after all, everyone has the right to like whatever they like! We find it so normal when someone loves our sound or when they hate it, and we do not judge anyone for it. I have great friends who do not like the band and make their critics, but if you do not like my band does not make you my enemy, as if you like us don´t make you my friend!
For us this mixture of sonority, musicality is very natural, because we have always been so during our lives.
We liked The Beatles as a kid and we listened well before we started listening to Heavy Metal. Every night we came down from our apartments to play together, it was a great mix, but this exemplifies that we never separate the music by styles or by labels, but by what we like and what we do not like.
It is very difficult to display all the layers of all the different sounds I am made of and that I have appropriated, and everything that comes from influence, before listening to Progressive Rock, before listening to Heavy Metal, before listening to Rock and Roll music and before listen to modern things "from my modernization cave". Beautiful works that I listened to in my childhood as the first 3 albums of the Quinteto Violado ("Quinteto Violado " 1972, "Berra Boi" 1973 and "Feira" 1974) or the albums of banda de Pau e Corda from Recife also from the 70's!!! It was the construction of my sound identity.
We are influenced by other artistic aspects, as in The Beatles, the Quinteto Armorial, Hermeto Pascoal, Paco de Lucia, Andrés Segovia, Ulisses Rocha and André Geraissati, as well as other guitarists such as Santana, Steve Vai, Marty Friedman, Yngwie Malmsteen , Joe Satriani, Andy LaRocque and Allan Holdsworth. We as a songwriters of the band are also has large influence and inspiration on  classic music. The composers J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Paganini, Béla Bartók, Hector Berlioz, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Gustav Holst among others were the ones that most influenced the sound of the band. We listened to a lot of 1960s jazz like Miles Davis, much progressive rock like King Crimson, Gentle Giant and Van der Graaf Generator, Pink Floyd, very jazz rock stuffs, pop music as Depache Mode, The Smiths, The Sisters of Mercy and The Cure, timeless modern thing like Univers Zero, Magma, Deus Ex machina and Panzerballet!
For us it is very natural to mix different elements of different songs, but to sound like a single thing music, dark and furious!

10. "Walpurgisnacht" has a fairly successful balance between the melodic line, the aggressiveness and the combination of different styles. Can we say that Elizabethan
Walpurga has her own style, an identity difficult to find in other bands that adhere to more established patterns?
R. Matos - Exactly, I've never really heard anything identical to what we do. I think the way we do realmeten there are no other bands the same or similar.
I know bands that do different things inside the metal, but not exactly like we do. I've been told about looking like some bands, but when I heard I did not see great connections between our sound and what other bands do.
We put different elements and believe that music, like any other great human art comes from within you and that for more technical elements that an instrumentalist can learn or capture, nothing substitutes the natural talent, nothing beats the true state of composition of a true artist. This is not to be copied. You can play a piece of Bach with perfection on every note, but creating what he created are things that do not come out of nowhere!
Unfortunately this does not perish us to be seen with good eyes in Brazil. Many metalheads even accuse us of being pretentious, but we do not yield ourselves with negative or positive criticism, as we know well our way in metal music, and we think we will show some surprises in the songs that are to come, since the songs of Walpurgisnacht are compositions from the 90s, from when we were still young and we thought differently from how we think today.

11. It should also be noted the production of the album that allows you to enjoy the full length of the album and we must also highlight the sound of the bass that is a very bad instrument in the productions, were you clear from the beginning how I wanted to sound "Walpurgisnacht"?
R. Matos - Yes it's true. When we decided to record Breno was very emphatic that we should do the recordings with Nenel Lucena, who had been Breno´s  student at a music school in the neighboring city of Olinda.
Nenel is a born talent, as well as being a great sound engineer and musician. He plays brilliantly guitar in band called EVOCATI and he plays a lot of drums also, so I think he takes a lot of advantage over other local producers, because the exception of the extreme metal recordings is the drums, I guess.
However, it was not easy to assemble the album. As I said earlier, Nenel made several mixes and mastered the CD finalization several times before we were satisfied.
As we recorded a lot of information, especially on the guitars, acoustic guitars and backing vocals, if the work was not conducted with immense sensitivity we would not achieve the desired success!
Well, luckily I own the band (laughs ...) we're actually are a “Demoncracy” and we don´t say absolutely nothing for each other about whats to do or play. Every note you hear on our cd was composed by the instrumentalist who played it. Each one makes the lines he wants, obviously we give the directions to the drummer, but in essence he also puts what he really wants on his drum.
I'm a bass player and I like music that puts the bass in front of the compositions. I admire great bass players who like to stay on the same level as guitars. So I often prefer to do something other than guitar lines to give my instrument a lot of emphasis.
I am quite influenced by bass players such as STEVE HARRIS, TIMI HANSEN, PETER BALTES, STEVE DiGIORGIO and CLAUDIO CRO-MAGNUM LOPES, but I am even more influenced by the bass players of the Progressive Rock bands of the 70's, who I am more of a fan than my big idols as RAY SCHULMAN, TONY LEVIN, JANNICK TOP, GIORGIO PIAZZA, ROMUALDO COLETTA, ROGER WATERS, ERIC PLANTAIN, JOHN WETTON and GEDDY LEE. These guys, regardless of the music they played in their respective bands, left their mark precisely by drawing bass lines that positioned themselves as authentic musicians, I say in front of the music. I would not content myself as a musician in doing just a repeat of what most extreme metal bassists do. So when I make the bottom line I simply follow what my feeling says about that melody and I am quite self-critical of what I create. But each one is each and each one must do what gives for you more satisfaction.

12. The vampiric theme was not present in the beginnings of Ecumenical Damnation, but it was later, why do you find the subject of vampirism interesting to talk about in Elizabethan Walpurga?
R. Matos - Leo brought the idea of ​​writing about vampirism blending with what he was reading at the time, Anton LaVey and Aleister Crowley's books and a Vampirism Bible, I do not remember the author of that last reference. Then he followed the beginning of the philosophical construction that Hellhammer (Sávio Diomedes) has created and Mal'lak always told us about the Luciferian movement being of such magnitude that it enchants any spiritual restlessness, and from there arose the interest in other unconventional forms of religions and we absorbed knowledge of other cultures.
Elizabethan Walpurga (Walpurga of the Elizabethan era) is the celebration of the night of Walpurga (Walpurgis, Walburga, Waelbyrga), the Walpurgisnacht of medieval times, the Sabbat of renewal. It is the night of liberation, the union of the shadows with the pagan ritualistic fire. The doors of the underworld would be open on this occasion of festivities to attract renewing, purifying, stimulating energies. The medieval Walpurgisnacht was characterized as "the night of the witches"!
Many people make reference to the fact that we do not play characterized or not use corpse paint, but we do not think that deserves some prominence. When we want to play painted we will do it or maybe never, but for us play with no Paint is also a form of protest, because we do not need put masks in our souls or paint in our faces to be really a band essentially and philosophically into black metal, because our essence is in the sound that you will hear, a sound that will bleed in your black energies the voice of the spilled blood!
Well, in the 1990s we thought it was cool to approach our philosophical foundations through vampirism, but the lyrics we choose today are not really on the subject. In fact, today we approach Luciferianism in a much more comprehensive, direct and non-dramatic way that may make you think that it is not a matter of reality and not of pure subjective fiction.

13. The first edition of the album was a digital edition and some time after the physical edition on cd by means of the Shinigami Records label, how was the possibility of this edition, are you satisfied with the work done by Shinigami Records? What is your physical format? preferred to listen to music?
R. Matos - The first opportunity in released the album was by Voice Music, that put us in all main streamings of the world of the internet. That was good, because from there some windows started to open up for us.
We know that the ideal would be to launch in physical format the same time we launched digitally, but we did not have a good proposal that would cause us a good exposure of our work, something that only occurred when we released in physical format by Shinigami Records. We are relatively satisfied, but we already knew how the label makes the disclosures of its band cast and so I consider that we are relatively satisfied, but we want more support in the next work, because we take what we do seriously and we want to show our sound in anywhere in the world, and to reach that level we need a harder job to promote EW in countries in Europe, in USA and Latin America.
Breno prefers to listen to his LP albums, he is a great LP´s collector. The rest of us prefer to buy CDs instead of Lps, for convenience, but all have old LPs and K7s, but I prefer to listen in FLAC format at home.

14. How were your beginnings in music, first cds you bought, first concerts you attend? What made you want to be a musician and form a band?
R. Matos - If there is only one answer this answer is "Steve Harris". I am a different person from my childhood friends because I met Iron Maiden early on. I think the albums of the 80's and early 90's are very sophisticated and full of unique energy.
Before listening to heavy metal I listened to pop music as I already mentioned some bands from the 80's. I listened to bands that made progressive music, not necessarily progressive rock.
On November 3, 1986, the birthday of a cousin, André, I was introduced to heavy metal!
The first album I heard was the first sound they played was Iron Maiden's Iron Maiden album and they put the song Phanton of the Opera at the first time.
I barely touched it at that moment, but the night was just beginning, because the same night I listened to the first albuns from Metallica, Megadeth, Kreator, Celtic Frost and Slayer. Soon after that I met great Brazilian metal bands like Sepultura, Sarcófago, Overdose, Dorsal Atlântica, Ratos de Porão, Genocídio, Korzus and much more.
It was a great revolution in my life and since then I am a convicted metalhead! Since that time I started to collect LPs and basically I was influenced by several aspects within the metal, from NWOBHM, through Thrash Metal, through Death metal, black metal and finally progressive metal.
The first concerts were in my hometown Recife. We frenched the concerts of local bands and at the time, Recife was a very provincial city. The first concert of a big band was Sepultura in 1987. The first concert of an international band was Morbid Angel in 1991 and soon after Kreator in 1992.
Then the thing became more common and several names of the Brazilian and world metal passed through the city, especially after we had an exclusive metal day at the "Abril Pro Rock" festival that took place in Recife from the beginning of the 90s and already brought bands consecrated like Motorhead, Exodus and many awesome bands to the festival.
Currently I listen to bands like Septic Flesh, Impureza, Ihsahn, Arcturus, Leprous, Panzerballet, OctaThorn, Lord Blasphemate, Agnideva, Myrkgand, Genocídio, Shioya, Gojira, Ne Obliviscaris, Triptykon, Moonspell, Snarky Puppy, The Aristocrats, Utopianisti, Marco Minnemann, Persefone, Møntsën and Atrorum, but I also listen to a lot of progressive rock, mainly the last live releases of King Crimson, the last records of the Van der Graaf Generator, that is, I still listen to a lot of different things, but as a composer I continue with basically the same influences.

15. How do you see Brazil's extreme metal scene today compared to twenty years ago when you started? What new bands would you recommend?
R. Matos - The extreme metal has grown a lot in Brazil since then. Today there is more openness to extreme metal bands. The headbangers here even prefer things heavier and more extreme than a more traditional heavy metal.
However, I can not see the same determination we had in the 1980s or 1990s. It was all the more difficult in every respect. We were more marginalized, but we still defended what we believed and there was a lot of respect between the bands and their members.
Things seem a bit pasteurized to me today, but maybe it's just a reflection of the advancement of my age.
We can not deny that the internet has made things so much easier. You've got a new band name and you already have access to band material on facebook, youtube or anywhere. Access is easier, but access to get your music to that particular guy behind his computer was more difficult now, because today we have a zillion bands and the competition is more fierce. So people give so much significance to the appearance instead of giving importance to the content!
I believe that just as in the rest of the world the extreme metal has become more and more the same, formatted to make success and provide mainstream for some candidates of extreme metal stars! But that's just my opinion and I do not want to force anyone to think like I think!
I have already mentioned some excellent bands that I have listened lately as Agnideva and Mykgand, who are from Paraíba state close to mine.
I can recommend other excellent local bands from my city like Sepulchral Whore, Hate Embrace, Demoniah, Arktus, Vocifera, Will2Kill, Decomposed God, Pandemmy, Confounded, Evocati and Malkuth and bands from other parts of Brazil like Psych Acid, Scibex (gone but so fucking good), "Pantáculo Místico", Miasthenia, Luxúria de Lilith, Kataphero, Lord Blasphemate, Primordium and Sanctifier (Killer sounds from brazilian Hell 666).

16. Concerts have always been an important part of the band, both in your beginnings and today, what concert do you keep a better memory of and why? How has the public that attends your concerts changed in these years?
R. Matos - Well, in the first phase of the band we did an anthological concert in Recife with Krisiun as headline, and with the bands As the Shadows Falls and Infested Blood. It was our first concert in Recife and the reaction was surprising. People did not expect to hear a sound so different and made in our city. I remember clearly seeing the Kolesne brothers observing our show in the dressing room, it was a glorifying sight. After our concert we got together in the dressing room and we were highly praised by everyone in the band and we bless the joint all together (lol).
Recently we did a very nice concert opening for Absu in Recife in 2016, it was fantastic and the production recorded the concert on DVD.
The receptivity of the public has always been the best possible. People come to us after the concerts to thank us for the show and to bring a live sound that seems to be made into a recording studio, given the resemblance to the original cd.
Formerly the metal fans went to the concerts because there is not so much fun available in our city, but nowadays you do not even have to leave the house to have real fun, so every day we see less public going to the shows and buying material from the bands undergrounds We need to reinvent or process things differently if we are to reach our future fans effectively, as the music world has changed considerably in the last 20 years and will continue to thrive. We need to snoop on this!

17. What future plans do you have for the band in relation to upcoming releases and concerts?
R. Matos - We have already confirmed some concerts for 2018. We are still negotiating some shows and we already have some confirmed that will soon be announced by the respective producers!
We must play in other cities in the northeast of Brazil such as Natal city, Fortaleza city and Petrolina city. We are with our agenda open to producers who want to take the sound of Elizabethan Walpurga to their cities, just contact us and pay our cheap price! It's really expensive for a band to come out of the Brazilian northeast and go play in big urban centers in the southeast of the country without sponsorship or financial support, but we're willing to play where it's possible to play.
We are writing our first video clip. I'm writing a script for filming a clip of Clamitat Vox Sanguinis and as I've previously informed you, we are aiming to record an EP with unpublished songs to be released in the second semester of 2018. Well, we are still thinking about how things will progress in this year!

18. Thank you very much for taking the time to Black Metal Spirit, if you want to add something for the followers of Elizabethan Walpurga, this is the place. I hope the questions are to your liking.
R. Matos - Thanks so much to all the fans who follow the Black Metal Spirit. We feel very satisfied in getting to you through such a concise website, where true metalheads are looking for information and news about new sounds like EW´s music and bring to the metal scene new horizons!
Thanks so much to Fran Rocha, who gave us that space to bring as you what we are as well.
Visit our Facebook page and give us your like! Take a look at our Youtube channel, some songs made available and soon we will make available the complete cd in our channel.
We have not yet been able to internationalize our products, so it should not be easy to find our Walpurgisnacht cd for sale in Europe or in USA, but you can still find the direct physical version on Shinigami Records and with us from the band. We still have about 200 copies with us and we want to expand the versions of the album in different formats, so if you have a cool label that brings a true proposal, talk to us cos we are willing to reach new horizons! You also can listen to our music on the best streaming plataforms like Spotify, Deezer, Amazon.com and Bandcamp.
We are a Black Heavy Metal band from Northeastern Brazil and we are not here to play games with nobody, we are here to produce high level of art and we do not mind the judgment that others make of it, because we love what we do and we do not do it for the others, we do for ourselves!
We bloody your sound and bloody our feelings, our souls into our songs, because we are ELIZABETHAN WALPURGA, we are a metal band from Hellcife \m/ 666 and we are At War With Lucifer \m/



TRANSPARENT EDITION
This masterpiece contains four tracks filled with negativity and raw energy. The superior composition which always stay true to black metal despite their atmosphere enthrall and inspire you every time you listen to them. This is a milestone of the Dutch style!

Powerful, yet full of pain; furious, yet mourning; technically and atmospherically crafted, this album will immediately satisfy you. LASTER write enthralling songs in perfect balance between superior composition, a harsh mood and Black Metal, which they live to the fullest. A Masterpiece!

First 100 copies in white color, second 100 in transparent and 300 in black color.

Tracklist

1. Alles wat mij bevalt, ontvalt me 13:37
2. Tot de tocht ons verlicht 10:03
3. Ik - mijn masker 15:03
4. De verste verte is hier 6:05

Total: 44:50


HAZTE CON ÉL EN : BLACK METAL SPIRIT STORE O DISCOGS


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