AETERNUM SACRIS INTERVIEW

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!

Originally published on Filhakikat.net.