August, 2016
Eerie sounds flowing freely among melodies carrying bleak, desolate feelings that let the one to have crush on a doomed love… Music of your last breathes…Aeternum Sacris…
I’m honored to meet with Aeternum Sacris, one-man band from Japan. You released A Doomed Love EP by internet the latest. What do you want to say about this album, its genre and target audience?
My dear friend, the honor is
mine! For a “A Doomed Love” like everything I do, there is nothing planned at
all, it’s just what I feel at the moment. There’s no target audience, but what
I really love is people like me who listen and enjoy good music no matter the
genre, from metal to jazz passing through new wave and shoegaze, etc.
Your music is surrounded by eerie
sounds flowing freely among melodies carrying bleak, desolate feelings that the
listeners crush on. Please tell us more about your main focus in music and what
do you want to emphasize while creating your art?
I love textures and sound layers
for I somehow started playing music because of the shoegaze and dream pop
movement from the 90’s. I’m influenced by bands like The Cure, Echo and the
Bunny men, The Mission (UK), The Chameleons (UK), Breathless, Fields of the
Nephilims, so one can think about my music as a mixture of all those bands but
in a metal style. Main focus on music is to transform what I feel into sound;
there are a lot of guitar melodies, keyboards and details on each song because
that’s how I feel things, because I’m very complicated person!
What are stories of the lyrics
used in A Doomed Love album?
“A Doomed Love” was something
that I needed to do, because I was passing through difficult emotional times.
“It was not love” is a very old song from 1998-99 which is about my first so
called real love and what happened when we broke up. “She” and “Doom Metal
Girl” is about a girl I have met, it’s her story; she is a very special woman
who is always coming and going like a comet visiting the earth. Just after a
long time, when you start to forget her, as a comet she returns for a little
time and then disappears again. That’s how I compose my music; all the lyrics
are real and from experiences. The song “Snow” from my other music project
Autumnale Laburnum is about her!
The cover work of A Doomed Love
reminds me ghost within us trying to escape from our body-prison. What is the
concept behind this work?
It is about how painful memories
can trap us in a veil of sadness that is subtle to notice as a thin mesh always
covering us, every day at every moment, even when you think everything is fine,
and it turns out that it’s not! Even when you smile you are crying inside.
Loneliness of this modern life makes it harder to overcome the pain! In the end
we become some sort of a ghost hunting our own life!
Album with a name A Doomed
Love… What does love mean to you? What
is the dark side of love?
Love is so important that I
cannot believe in it! The dark side of Love is about its importance, if you
have it with you, then you’re complete, but if you don’t have it, then you are
incomplete and completely wretched. I have seen people doing bad things to themselves
because of a lost love, so love is a very complex thing to really understand,
it doesn’t matter what vision of love you have, the scientific or the spiritual
vision, it’s still a complicated thing to live with, it can be the cure that
saves you or the poison that kills you!.
Many bands release special
editions or albums including bonus tracks for Japan. Far from Europe but should
have been very alive metal music market at there. What are your thoughts about
that?
Metal here? I think it’s more like
a Visual Key than anything else, but don’t take my word as the truth. I don’t
know too much metal bands since I have paid no attention to the metal scene.
Japan has exclusive works on
horror/thriller genre in cinema which are disturbing and hitting in scenario
that some of them have also remake versions. The Grudge, Dark Water, Kwaidan,
Noroi-The Curse, Another and Audition & Over your Dead Body from Takashi
Miike among the ones in my collection also. What are reasons of this success on
horror genre? Do you have favorites?
There has been a horror vision
since ancient times, you can see also a lot of great illustrations made by the
great Katsushika Hokusai and others, but even modern Japanese people are not
believers in religious way, they tend to be very superstitious. There are also
some “haunted” places like the Aokigahara forest that makes people still
believing in ghosts and related things. So we can say that it’s a part of the
Japanese culture. Japan is so calm and peaceful that people need to feel that
they are alive and also need something which is hard to feel it. However I
don’t watch any horror movie or anything that can trigger any stress related
response in my brain, since the brain can’t understand what you are watching is
not real. I always try to keep myself in the better mood as I can, taking care
about every part of my existence, I mean my body, my mind and my spirit!
Japanese horror culture often
involves with the threat coming from water. Do you think if this fear of water
related with tsunami that Japanese have been experiencing as a natural disaster
for ages? You also have an album called 11.03.2011 dedicated to ones passed away
at Tsunami.
Very good question, I think it’s
the same for any place with a big concentration of water, oceans, lakes,
rivers. There’s always a horror tale or a mythological creature living inside
the water. Even when water for Buddhism symbolizes purity, clarity and calmness,
you can never see at the bottom, in the depths… and people tend to fear what
they can’t see, more if it’s dark, and the imagination is always prone to think
about dangerous things, of course this is an evolution feature to stay alive.
There are some Japanese authors
whom books are translated into Turkish also like Kenzaburo OE, Haruki Murakami,
Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. What I see as a common
point of these authors is suicide theme. What are your thoughts about them and
suicide itself as it is known that there is an ancient hara-kiri culture in
Japan?
There are always good and bad
things about everything; one thing that I don’t like from here is being an
ultra-organized, systematic, methodical first world country. There are too many
laws, too much behavior protocols that in the end make you a faint-hearted
person. So to be a part of the society you have to be a “good guy” always
smiling, always diligent doing what the person in charge says. If you are a
man, you lose the “man thing”, the beast inside and become a pussycat, and then
you are against the evolution. It is the biggest reason of too much Otaku
culture that some of those guys feel like they are little children. So, what
happens when your beast inside starts to take control of you? You can’t handle
that fight inside of you. Your real nature is against what people expect from
you! Then you become crazy or kill yourself! I don’t really care about society
or what others thinks about me, so suicide is a matter that I was never
interested to make a self-research because it was never an alternative for me.
Do you think if art is born from
misery?
Somehow the best music in my
opinion was made under the influence of sadness and misery. So, I think it’s
not the only way, but certainly is one of the most creative and prolific tool!
There is an intense darkness and
melancholy that catches the listener and drag into desolation in your music.
What does melancholy mean to you? How do you like black metal in terms of
musical and ideological senses?
I was not a happy child; the most
of my life was a melancholic journey in solitude. Eventually I learned to be a
friend of that melancholy; even fell in love with her, music became a way to
translate what she told to me. About the Black Metal, I like the speed,
aggressive feel on it and love the tremolo picking and that darkness! But I’m
not interested in any ideological thing about anything, for me it’s just music
and not a “religion” or a way of life, that’s because I don’t like any kind of
fanaticism so I just see things by giving the importance it deserves!
Japanese language is very rich
and ancient. Do you have interest in Japanese writing styles? Have you ever
thought to write lyrics in Japanese? How would it sound like?
Every language has its phonetic;
somehow that can make you sense a certain feeling. For example I always felt in
love listening female singers singing in French then listening the same song in
other language. I don’t like how Japanese sound in metal as I don’t like how
Spanish or other languages sound in metal, so there’s no way of me singing in
Japanese!
What are the things you
criticize/appreciate about Japanese culture or lifestyle in Japan? As Japan is
also known with its strict commitment with traditions that new generations do
not want to take it into their lives as it was before.
What I criticize is
Work-work-work-work-rest-work-work-work-work-rest-rest-rest-work-work-work-work-work-work-work-work-work-work-rest-
(insert here the over time) -sleep-sleep-sleep-sleep-sleep (repeat everything
until you die, thanks for your service and goodbye!). So I hate how consuming
has Japan become, everything is about to buy new things and people pay too much
money for things that have no real values, sorry louis vuitton! I also don’t
like the “Asian” culture of praising guys that looks like anorexic androgynous
whatever. Too many protocols, too much keeping oneself inside a shell, friends
and even couples are not friends and couples; sometimes they don’t even share a
real important bond together.
What I appreciate from here, are
that people don’t care about your life so there are not too much gossipmongers,
almost zero violence here; people don’t need to carry guns or to be some kind
of a Bruce Lee to feel protected. It’s very difficult to see a bare hand fight
that here is a very secure country. Girls can wear whatever they want and guys
don’t even notice, I mean you can see an awesome girl with an awesome body
using a little, very little skirt, and no one cares! In other countries she
would be harassed by some guys trying to mate like animals with her! The
different sub-cultures are living together in peace, no one cares about the
look of no one, you can both see a lady wearing a kimono and a lolita, etc.
Respect is the thing other countries are losing while you can feel it at every
corner in here.
What are your plans for Aeternum
Sacris, you have been releasing EPs so far, so will there be an album in the
future? What about live shows?
I was working with a Chinese
record label to release the first album “We Are But Dust And Shadow” but these
guys are unprofessional so I ended up by breaking things with them. I’m working
with another record label and there are others interested to work with me, but
sadly I have no time because of “work-work-work-work-rest…” thing. So far, I
have completed 3-4 albums and all of them have full of very great songs from
the first to the last!
Please share your last words…
My last words are, always live as
it is your last day on earth, live with honor, respect others, defend the
defenseless, don’t be a coward and fight for what you believe, keep dreaming
and believing in life, enjoy everything even the saddest times and love, and
say your love when you love one, sometimes people need to hear!
