1. Hello my friend, pleasure to have you on Rotten Pages ´zine. How are you doing today? Let us set the scene first. Where do we find you right now? Please describe your surroundings.
Hi, stoked to appear on Rotten Pages! We are currently in Besançon (France) in my home studio. This room of my house is dedicated to music: guitars hung on the walls, amps and cabs all over the room, etc … This is where all the misdeeds of Kymris are invoked in the form of demos (guitars/bass/vocals tracking, drum/synth programming).
2. What was your personal journey like in discovering metal – can you tell us about some of the early bands that captivated you and then provided the impetus to pick up an instrument and play?
Speaking for me (Kevin), I've spent a massive amount of time going to local gigs with my friends. I grew up in a French town near the Swiss border and there was this great association called Darknation that arranged gigs in bars, pubs, festive halls and even barns. There were many great bands from France and Switzerland (Mumakil, Kronos, Flayst, Arguel, Vakuum, Tedh Secret, Yog, …)
3. Band is existing since 2020, overall what has has been the greatest challenge the band has faced up until today?
For the half of us, Kymris is the first band experience with the goal to do live music. For some of us, it was even the first musical experience. Starting from nearly zero into a musical genre as demanding as metal was not an easy task. We were lacking all the basis as a metal band.
Like, how to have a good sound when playing in small venues because you have to set it up by yourself. Hopefully, we've met a lot of people in our local metal scene who were kind and patient enough to help us. There is a very good fellowship in our area and we are so grateful to be part of it.
Also, it was quite difficult to find a drummer. I think we've waited one year before finding Gilles. We've started to compose before he joined us. We had 3 or 4 songs with drums programmed by a guitarist that he took over and brought very interesting drumming into.
4. Your debut album, “Mythes et Légendes de la Comté” delivers a powerful, massive, and melodic sound. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the album and how it felt to release your music to the world?
We all have multiple influences among the band. From modern metal to black pagan/folk through melodic death metal and so on. All those influences have converged into this album. We can even find some classical music writing approach like in the intro of "La clef de feu" which is written as a fugue.
5. Tell us about the recording sessions, any specific challenges, surprises, or obstacles to get through?
We went to Disvlar Studio, quite close to our town Besançon. Stef did incredible work during the recording, mixing and mastering. I personally love the way he works because he is kind of old school and this adds some authenticity to the music.
6. There’s a real trick to doing melodic death metal right, and clearly, you’ve done it. To you, what makes a good melo-death song?
We like riffing very much, having fat rhythms with galops, aggressives sixteenth notes etc … and nice guitar or synth leads, very emotional, things that you can sing again and again without being bored. To me, melo-death is a kind of combination of that and the challenge is to combine it in a way that conveys what you want to share with your listeners.
7. How do you manage to incorporate melodic elements into your music while maintaining the aggression and brutality of death metal?
Interrupting brutal or aggressive riffs with a more melodic section brings variation and emphasizes the former or the latter. This is the "horizontal" way of seeing it. The "vertical" way of bringing brutality and melody is by building sections on top of each other without being "cacophonous". Being 2 guitars, 1 bass and a synthesizer helps a lot. For instance, at the end of "Les deux bossus pt.2", both guitars are doing the same heavy riff while the bass and the synth are doing questions and answers. Since we are using 7 string guitars, we can handle the low frequencies and let the fretless bass express herself as a melodic instrument.
8. As far as I can see, your themes are heavily inspired by myths and legends. Given that, what would you tell us about the main character the old man “Colbus”?
Based on a local myth, there was an elder living alone in the forest named Chailluz near Besançon. This old man was giving advices to all kinds of living creatures (even the magical ones like La Dame Blanche or La Vouivre). These creatures paid good retributions in exchange of those advices. Colbus was the person who cut the throat of this elder in the hope of stealing his treasure. Unfortunately for him, he found nothing and was cursed. To me, this story depicts the murder of knowledge/wisdom by greed.
Every myth has its own moral and you can interpret it in different ways regarding your personal experiences, your vision in life. I like myths very much because you can always apply them in real life in a metaphoric way. This is a very important heritage and it prevents us from making the same mistakes as our elders.
9. You’ve managed to incorporate other elements in your perception of Melodic Death Metal. I can find folk and pagan elements and all that below an atmospheric veil. Is this something that came along the way naturally for you or was it carefully planned since day one?
David, the singer, is very into pagan music so it was a request from him at the very beginning. We started to scratch a bit about folk and medieval instruments, how do they sound, how do you play those ones. Atmospheric and "folk" instruments are recorded with Sylvain's synthesizer on this album. But we managed to buy a dulcimer, a hurdy gurdy and some fife. We are now learning how to play those so we hope to integrate them in a next album. Stay tuned ;)
10. What is your creative routine? Is there some piece of gear you wouldn’t be able to work without?
Books, ears and passion. This album compiles some myths and legends that inspired us. We worked directly from the concept of the myths, what kind of emotions we wanted to share with our listener as if he was living the story in the book. This starts by reading and thinking about the story you wanna put into music. Then you're putting the story, your personal experiences and your emotions into perspective. Finally, you're asking yourself "how can I make the listener feel what I feel right now?". Most of the time, the answer is to pick your instrument and track what you have in mind :)
11. Regarding the lyrics, you stick –like most French bands– to your native language. Was this decision made because you feel more free to express yourself that way or some other reason (they sound more exotic for example)? Do you feel this as a limitation?
Because our singer has a terrible English accent (laugh). French is kind of a difficult language and your lyrics can easily sound dull and boring if they're not written correctly. But to us, if it is well written, it sounds great. This was a real challenge and we've spent a long time writing lyrics in the way we are not just copy/pasting the books into our songs.
12. You are an independent band, are there any difficulties in France for such an act? Tell me a bit more about the Finnish scene. Any notable bands we should research?
For this album we've handled all by ourselves: production, promotion, distribution. This was very instructive and since we are a band of six members, we can split tasks. It took a huge amount of time but we think that it was necessary in order to learn how things work. At our current level, for now, it is manageable.
As I said earlier, we have a very good metal community around us and they gave us very good advice, we gratefully thank them for that! I'm thinking about our friends Flo and Fanny from Abyssal Ascendant, they do a great brutal death based on H.P Lovecraft writings, the black metal band Panoptycon who shared our first stage last year, and many more.
Finding places to play live is not easy when you're managing the booking by yourself, but we are lucky enough to have good people, associations, bars, venues in the eastern part of France. I know at least 5 places where you can listen to live metal music just in Besançon.
I don't know much about the Finnish scene (laugh) so I'll speak about the French scene instead, we are all great fans of bands under Antiq Label (Véhémence, Grylle, Moisson Livide, …) if you are into metal with folk instruments, you should check out those bands. We also love tech death, there is a great French band named Gorod.
If you're into brutal death you should check Kronos and our friends mentioned earlier from Abyssal Ascendant.
In a melo-death register you should check out Destinity, or our friends from Swarmageddon.
13. How would you describe the band in terms of your live performances? What have been some of your favorite venues and shows through the career that you’ve played?
We are trying to create ambiance and atmosphere while playing live. We deeply think that performing music in live is a great thing, but captivating a listener into our world in addition to that is wonderful.
14. What are the basic criteria by which you choose the places where you would like to play live? Is it about lineup in the case of festivals, the nature of the action, or even approach of the organizers?
There are no criteria at all. We just check that we can perform in decent conditions and that's all for now. We are still performing close to where we are based for now. Since we are all used to listening to live music, we already knew about the venues before performing and we know that the atmospheres are always great in those places.
15. What would you like to see Kymris accomplish that you have not been able to achieve yet?
We'd like to be able to play at some festivals and/or abroad to export our music. In Switzerland or Germany for instance. Playing a festival abroad will check those two goals haha!
16. On an international level, how has your music been received? Do you try to promote your music on a large scale?
We had some orders from Canada and Switzerland. Probably because they are french speaking countries (at least some part of it) but we've also got some orders from the UK. At the beginning, we were addressing our music to our local scene since we are speaking about myths that took place in forests or towns near us.
We weren't expecting those orders but that's a good surprise!
17. We have come to the last question of the interview. What are the last words for fans out there?
Read books or ask for your local stories, myths or legends. This is the only way for humanity to avoid repeating the same mistakes. We hope that our album gave you the incentive to know more about the one we've put into music. We'll see you on stage to tell you more about it …
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