1. Hello, Desmotes. It’s a pleasure to have a little talk with you. How is everything going?
Hello! Thanks for having me. Right now I'm quite busy recording new Material for Fiat Nox and writing new songs for the second Vomit Division album.
2. The Archive of Nightmares, In Contemptuous Defiance and Demanifestation (Hymns of Destruction and of Destruction and Nothingness), were released very closely; however, there are some differences among them. How do you see Fiat Nox regarding sound and lyrics? What do you consider the strongest points in each production are?
The Archive of Nightmares and Demanifestation were written pretty closely but never matched lyrically or vision-wise for me. I think, The Archive Of Nightmares is a solid, multi-faceted, yet cohesive black metal album. Demanifestation is rather focused on dissonance and chaos.
3. I read you are not so happy with some aspects of Demanifestation… What things are they and why are you not so happy with them?
If you spend too long with something and listen to the same songs over and over again, you simply lose the distance to it and thus the ability to judge it somehow objectively. In the case of Demanifestation, the vocals are no longer embedded well enough in the overall sound and the drums don't have enough power in my eyes.
4. There is something I like about Fiat Nox: you are not the typical Black Metal band that just want to sound raw, you have a perfect combination of raw, melodic, technical and even dense music, all of it with the same dark feeling and environment. How did you opt for this kind of Black Metal? Would the fact that you play in other bands made you start writing something different in order to stand out from your other bands?
Thank you! I think the way I write music is more due to the fact that I also listen to pretty much all kinds of music. Fiat Nox has been around for quite a long time and the other bands never had any influence on the way I compose.
5. As I mentioned before, you just released a considerable amount of productions in just a couple of years: your first full length (The Archive of Nightmares) and Demanifestation emerged from darkness through Crawling Chaos Prods. and In Contemptuous Defiance, that was released practically immediately after Archives, via Personal Records from Mexico. How did you get to sign for these two record labels to release your material basically at the same time?
We were already planning the release of the album and the EP with Crawling Chaos, then a message was sent to us by Personal Records, asking us whether we were interested in releasing an album on that label. Since the deal was very appealing, we settled for an EP. Both labels were involved in the planning of our releases and were more than relaxed about it. We really appreciate the support from both of them, since they enabled us to release a lot in a short time.
6. I love the covers of The Archive of Nightmares and Demanifestation… Each one has a special feature that got me from the balls and just made me enjoy them as an extra piece of art apart from the music itself. The first made me feel as if I were in a Lovecratian or a Tolkienian world, whilst the second one, from the choice of just having that tone of reading and the image of this guy suspended in the air in an illustration kind of influenced by Doré took me out of this world. Who are the illustrators who were in charge of these covers? Did they work under any concept given by you?
Hellish Visions is the artist, responsible for the covers of The Archive Of Nightmares and Demanifestation. When we needed a cover for The Archive Of Nightmares, I sent her the lyrics of the song and in addition to that an example picture. The rest was all her doing and the cover turned out absolutely stunning. For the DEMANIFESTATION EP I gave her specific orders, since I had that idea in my head for years.
The In Contemptuous Defiance cover was already drawn by Vhan Artworks & Printing and we immediately bought it because it matched the EP we were recording.
7. Lately, most of the German bands I have heard are basically Black Metal. How big is the BM scene in your area? Is this the most predominant Metal genre in Germany? What other bands between BM and other genres would you recommend?
There are hardly any black metal bands in our area, and the ones that do exist belong to the newfangled, humanistic, politically-minded bands that tend to blurt out statements rather than good music worth listening to. Exceptions prove the rule, of course.
But black metal in general is a genre that you don't really find very often in my eyes.
Few people appreciate the genre, even fewer want to play it themselves, and very few have the talent on their instruments to really produce something audible creatively. Bedroom one-man projects are of course on almost every corner, but whether you want to listen to them.... I don't know.
I recommend checking out the following bands and albums/eps, if you're in love with Extreme Metal:
Zwielicht – With Love From Sinister
Sargeras – Return Of The Dancing Whores
Laere – Solve
Hallig – A Distant Reflection Of The Void
Cult Of Extinction – Ritual in the Absolute Absence of Light
The Chainsaw Demons – Whisky & Blood
Ur-In-Stinkt - Necrosound Anarchist
Dogs Of Gomorrah - Closed Gates
8. I hope I am not wrong, but I think you mention in an interview that you would like to play Heavy Metal. Is that true? What kind of Heavy Metal? Why playing that genre and not something extreme as Death Metal since it has more in common, in some way, with the genre you play than Heavy?
No, you're not wrong. I love bands like Judas Priest, WASP, Dio, Fifth Angel or Manowar,
To be honest, most Death Metal bands bore me, there are exceptions of course but not enough for me to say I'm a Death Metal fan. That genre never got me like Black or Heavy Metal for example.
Classic Heavy Metal is just pure energy to me.
9. Let’s talk about Demanifestation… It has received really good reviews on different websites. Did you expect a response like this?
Honestly, I still think the songs themselves are great and expected positive reviews accordingly, but the aspects people focused on and praised ended up being different than I would have guessed
10. Fiat Nox is the Latin expression for Let it be night, but night can be the symbol for many things. What is the connotation of night for you and the idea the band wants to express?
The night means peace, silence, concentration and creativity. There are no distractions, no consumption. The focus is on oneself. If you take our slogan "Light The Torches", it essentially means Let all, which is unimportant, be obscured and conjure your own fire in the darkness.“
11. You play in many other bands, all of them having something in common: Black Metal. Tell us a little bit about these bands, their style and peculiarities.
For me, the bands differ immensely despite the similar genre. Vomit Division is snotty black/thrash with heavy metal and punk influences that lyrically deals with the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll theme. Voreus is simply pitch black destruction, Funeral Procession is old school black metal and Fiat Nox is an outgrowth of nearly four decades of an ever evolving genre. Funeral Procession is simply old school in every respect: pure, ice-cold black metal and much rougher than Fiat Nox. The latter, on the other hand, put more emphasis on the combination of different influences and developments of the genre. Lyrically, the bands diverge in that Funeral Procession's lyrics focus more on death and night or darkness, with an anti-religious aspect playing a role up to and including the album. Fiat Nox is lyrically either much more private or deals with the works of authors like H. P. Lovecraft.
I have never consciously limited myself to one genre, nor have I consciously sought out (more) black metal bands, but this genre just seems to attract me in almost all of its facets.
12. Many bands have been producing video clips using parts of movies. If you had to choose one song for a video, what song of Demanifestation… would you like to use? What movies would you like to include in this audiovisual?
Great question!
I consider Cosmos Into Chaos the perfect choice. Combining it with scenes from Beyond The Black Rainbow would make a perfect clip in my opinion. I'm talking about those scenes, where Nyle undertakes the procedure to achieve transcendence, gets drenched in the black liquid and experiences otherwordly visions.
13. Thank you for your time and disposition to answer these questions. Is there anything else you would like to say?
Light the torches!
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