Year of No Light Interview Is Up 2/24/2011
1.Your working with the mighty Conspiracy Records now how did this come to be?
Johan : Some of us know them for nearly 15 years now. We sent some advance copies to labels we felt close to and when Conspiracy told us they were interested into releasing it we were more than happy as Conspiracy is a label with a strong ethic & a crazy roster. We didn’t hesitate a second !
2. From Nord to Ausserwelt I hear more of a Post Rock and Avant Drifting Rock sound from a more Drone/ Doom vibe has the sound gone more experimental?
Johan : The evolution of our sound went smoothly during the years and was totally not thought to sound more post rock or post whatever you call it. The departure of our singer forced us to evolve a bit faster ! And as we are usually slow it was not a bad thing ! But you will see the next record will also be different.
3. I'm sure you tired on the Isis comparisons .. who you you say that band most is influenced or has a similar sound to?
Pierre: Well, since the release of “Ausserwelt”, the Isis comparison vanished in the air…as Isis did… YONL’s influences range from avant-garde/experimental/field recordings to occult and old school black metal, through drone (Fear falls Burning, Troum), doom (Evoken, Loss, Saturnus…), Deathmetal (Bolt Thrower, Benediction), classical (Debussy), krautrock (Can and co), “shoegaze” (My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive) and (néo) folk (Nick Drake, Current 93…).
Johan : Yes we always listened to lot of different music. Some of us were into metal earlier, some other into indie music, some into noise and some more new wave. Pierre sums up well what we mutually love/loved.
4. Are you live shows very similar to the albums or is it very much a different journey in sound live to you experiment a lot on the tracks on the stage and I can hear a lot of room to do so?
Pierre: the live shows offer a wilder declination of our music. It’s louder and wilder. Embedded in an epileptic storm of light. In a perfect world, it should be an über sonic epiphany.
5. With the shift in line up and the several yrs since last full label on Radar Swarm ... Do you see this line up as very stable and is the band happy with all that is going on now...
Pierre: The “new” line-up is the best thing that could happen to YONL, a kind of rebirth indeed. But we still need to fight with the complexity induced by the band’s new configuration. At the moment, pretty cool things are on the verge for YONL, that’s cool.
6. You seem to have a good push with Promotion in The USA now with this release. Will you be coming over to perform at all?
Johan : Yes since the re-release of ‘Nord’ in the USA via crucial blast we have a strong feedback in the US audience. We definitely plan to come to play there. If everything goes well we will tour at least the east coast this upcoming fall.
7. The Artwork on Ausserwelt has a very Ritualistic/ Fantasy vibe does it tell the story on the album as a whole?
Johan : Yes you can envisage it like that. We gave some ideas to our friend Greg Vezon who did it (like the Böcklin’s ‘Isle of the dead’ painting) and we let him represent what he feels while listening to Ausserwelt. And yes it’s totally part of the record. We envisage every record as a whole ensemble.
8. Do you see the Fans at a Year of no light being a more fringe crowd a mix of Metal, Punks and Indie Rockers as you sound encompasses them all?
Pierre: That’s true. It also seems we have a decent following in the extreme metal scene: it’s cool (we love metal music) and unexpected (we’re not a metalheads). No need to mention it: playing with Gorgoroth is sexiest that playing an average indie-rock gig!
Johan : Yes we always play in front of really different audiences. One day it will be more metal oriented the next day total post rock nerdy-big-glasses guys… But I think our best memories as a band will be some metal oriented shows like roadburn / hellfest or SWR.
And as an example nest summer we will play one day in Hell’s pleasure fest (total cult metal line up) and the next day in fluff fest !
9. Whats the Bands thoughts on the current state on indie/ underground music is there a new rival thanks to Myspace, Facebook and web-zines or is it to easy for bedroom bands to get music out there?
Pierre: E-music sucks as much as corporate musical entertainment and the ego totalitarism running (ruining?) the underground. Myspace is dead and Google is God. But it’s hard to ignore them. Life sucks sometimes.
Johan : It’s true music business has totally changed and today bands spend more time on marketing their band than composing some good music. It’s totally lame but I’m pretty sure only the good records will be remembered in the coming years as usually bedroom bands made a buzz for some weeks and a year later nobody seems to remember them.
10. Would Year of no light want to collab more as you seem to have worked on a few split releases ... Maybe work together with another artist of band on a few songs together.. If so any one you would want to do so with?
Pierre: Definitely yes! But nothing is planned for the moment. We would love working again with Kirk From ffb or with Saturnus, among others.
Johan : It’s definitely something we have in mind. We spoke with Dirk about making something again. Personally I would love to do something with Troum or Tim Hecker or master musicians of bukkake.
11. You have a very well done website http://yearofnolight.free.fr/ tell us a bit about it and are you infavor of having a proper site then just a myspace band page like so many?
Johan : Myspace is made for people unable to code a website !
All of our website is done by our drummer Bertrand (my brother).
We will try to improve it with all the videos / pictures archives we have from the past 10 years but we don’t have enough time to do it !
And yes I definitely prefer a proper website. You know we started to use myspace as somebody created a fake account under our name & people were using it to contact us… It happens the same with Facebook. In the future I think we will delete everything & redirect all on our proper website.
We also plan to open a bandcamp account to post some unreleased songs or live stuff…
12. Thank you for the time any closing words here???
Pierre: Ty for your support and attention!
Comments