Uit het piepkleine bergstaatje Andorra komt Persefone. In 2004 bezorgden ze ons al een grote verrassing met het uitstekende album ‘Truth Inside The Shade’. Aangemoedigd door de vele positieve respons op hun inventieve mix van death metal met progressieve invloeden, begonnen zij al spoedig te werken aan een opvolger. ‘Core’ werd een ingenieus concept dat in drie hoofdstukken de geschiedenis van de Griekse godin van de onderwereld (Persephone) in magistrale muziek omzet. Soms denken we aan Opeth of Borknagar, even later heeft de muziek de progressieve kracht van Dream Theater of Symphony X, maar bovenal levert Persefone hier een geweldig album vol technisch vernuft en emotionele rijkdom af. Een uitgebreide voorstelling is aangewezen en gitarist Carlos Lozano was zo vriendelijk om ons rond te leiden in de wereld van Persefone.
About three years ago, Persefone was a nice surprise for me when you released the debut album ‘Truth Inside The Shades’. Now ‘Core’ even shows a huge improvement on complexity and progressive overtones. Let us start at the beginning. What were the plans when you founded the band? Who are the core members and can you tell a bit more about the first musical actions of Persefone? Hello Vera and all the people reading this interview. The main intention when we started the band was to create the music we wanted to listen to and to share our time with other musicians with similar visions and goals. Our first line up was really similar to the actual one so we have been doing this all these years. This could explain that the core members of Persefone are the ones that have been here since the very beginning: Jordi, Toni, Miguel and me. But to be true, we don’t deal with this. Every Persefone’s band member has a great importance, so we could say that without Marc Martins (vocals) and Marc Más (drums), the band probably would take other paths. Right now, we have the most stable line up ever in Persefone. The first actions of Persefone were dedicated to play covers to get an idea of what we would do later on, and to create the first album ‘Truth Inside The Shades’.
It took not that long before the first album was recorded. ‘Truth Inside The Shades’ came out. How do you look back at the results of this first effort? Sweet season! We had never known any season sweeter than this. When ‘Truth Inside The Shades’ was released, the press feedback was really awesome. Even in our best dreams we couldn’t imagine that reaction. Hundreds of interviews, reviews and support from fans that discovered Persefone at that time! We are very proud of what we achieved with a first album.
You are from Andorra and that is quite exceptional for a metal band. Isn’t it more difficult to run a band in a small country between “not so into metal” countries like Spain and France? Indeed. It’s very difficult being from Andorra. First of all you have to explain everybody where Andorra is. Our exotic country isn’t liked that much by first listeners that prefer giving a chance to a Swedish band or so. Besides, since Andorra is not a part of EU, when we have to play out of here (what is really easy due to the extremely small size of this country), we have LOTS of problems to take the instruments and material out. I want to say that music is not related to the place you are born. Just your influences, your taste in music and the people you have around defines the final result. Persefone has nothing to envy from any other band in the world - except for sales numbers (laughs)
Did you play live after the release of ‘Truth Inside The Shades’? And can you tell something about these live experiences? Just some local gigs. As I said, we have a lot of problems to take the material and instruments out. We went to south Spain and Andorra mainly. It was really nice to see that even in Albacete, a small town in Spain, we have some fans following our steps.
The new album ‘Core’ has a concept about Persephone, the Greek goddess you named the band after as well. As concepts always intrigue me, I would like to know more about this concept? Well, the idea of working on this concept was the name of the band itself. We thought that we could honour Persephone dedicating the album to her and telling her beautiful and dark story. This story comes from the Greek mythology. She was a muse before being a goddess. Her name was “Core” and became “Persefone” once she felt in love with “Hades”, Lord of the Underworld. But before this, there’s a complicate drama where Hades is victim of a children game, and “Core” is hijacked by him. Demeter, his mother, stops feeding the earth and chaos arrives to the world. Well, it’s really complicated to tell this story in a few lines, so I’ll encourage you to read carefully the album lyrics. Every song is the point of view of one of the main characters: Demeter, Hades and Persefone herself. It’s a really nice story.
Was it more difficult or easier to compose when working with a concept? Yes indeed. Working on a concept is always hard but if you add the idea of doing only three songs, everything turns to a new and unknown (for us) degree of difficulty. Probably, when knowing how hard it was to create and release the album we hadn’t done it. But we did it. We created a storyboard similar to a movie’s and we started working on the music in the way the storyboard demanded. Sometimes we had to make adjustments to give the story and music any continuity and some logical sense. Yes, the album is logic and has a structure!! The thing is that the structure is not based on the music itself but in the story. If you read the booklet you’ll find that the music always goes with what is happening in the story. It is a kind of movie soundtrack.
Who wrote the story? And who are the main composers musically? Everyone in the band worked actively on the adaptation of the story. It’s something we like to share on every CD. It’s a way of letting everyone express his feelings about the story. Lyrics and story is the thing we share most. About music, usually Miguel and I do the major part of music, but every band member added some parts to the music since writing seventy minutes of music is not easy to do for two people.
Both albums were recorded at Orion Studios and mastered by famous Peter in de Betou. Can you tell a bit more about the recording process? We are not that different from other bands in our way of doing this. Maybe the only difference is that we had a studio in Andorra good enough to record the album here. This means that we can spend a lot of time recording without looking at the clock and the budget. A regular band spends one or two months in the studio as a maximum time. We spent almost five months. Patience was the main word on every Persefone recording session. We never left something sounding weird. We have time to fix everything. About the process, we follow a typical order: drums, bass, guitars, keyboards and arrangements and finally vocals. Once Aleix finished a first mixing process every band member listens to it carefully and we do some changes and add some production notes to the final mix. Once this is finished, we worked with Peter on the mastering. He is a great professional that always gave Persefone’s sound a new dimension. With ‘Core’ we decided to go and visit Peter. We spent sometime with him, which opened his home to us. We want to thank him for his professional guidance.
‘Core’ was recorded with two new members. Aleix Dorca also has a huge impact on your sound as producer I guess? This new members were Aleix Dorca, who already recorded ‘Truth Inside The Shades’ and became an active member of the band during that time, and Marc Martins who already did the vocals on ‘The Haunting Of Human’s Denial’, the bonus track on the Japanese edition of ‘Truth Inside The Shades’. Aleix Dorca was a very active member in Persefone until his leaving last summer. He worked as drummer and sound engineer. He had a very concrete idea about how ‘Core’ should sound, and that was the way he did. We let him do. He is very creative on this stuff. Besides, he helped to take the progressiveness further than ever in Persefone.
And you have a singer now, which make you able to concentrate on guitar skills, isn’t it? Marc Martins, actual vocalist in Persefone, arrived in the band in 2005, before the releasing of ‘Truth Inside The Shades’ in Japan. But it’s not until ‘Core’ that he really developed his faculties on vocals. Extreme grunts and harsh voices that support the band in the way we wanted to. Besides, he’s a pretty good front-man on gigs. The idea of adding a member just for vocals comes because I wanted to dedicate my efforts just to guitar, since I’m guitarist, not a singer. We are very happy with this line up.
Can you tell a bit more about your didactic guitar video? About two years ago, I got my first endorsement with Crate amps, and to get it, we recorded a video of me playing some parts of ‘Truth Inside The Shades’. A kind of didactic video, but nothing really serious. We send those videos to Crate and we tried it too with a well known guitarist site called www.chopsfromhell.com, where some very famous guitarists collaborate as columnists. We tried to get a place there by sending those videos and they liked them a lot. So we started shooting some more serious video material. It’s not a guitar skills or lessons video. I just wanted to share the way solos, riffs, and many parts of both ‘Truth’ and ‘Core’ are played. It’s what you’ll find in it. For people interested you can buy a copy of the DVD/VHS on www.chopsfromhell.com/advert_lozano_DL1_rom.html. Enjoy it!!
On the new album you moved towards more progressiveness in the vein of Opeth. Clean vocals also remind me a bit of Opeth. I think the band has improved in technical abilities during the last years… Progressive metal is one of our first influences. We love learning something new in music and put it in practice in our music. ‘Core’ needed that addition since the story itself is pretty complex, so, mixing death metal with progressiveness and adding finally a symphonic tone created Persefone’s final sound on this album.
Vocals are very diverse. Is this all the work of new singer Marc Martins or are there more vocalists in the band? Since the beginning, keyboardist Miguel has been the man behind the mellow vocals. Marc can scream like a beast, so we enjoy him doing that. The rest of the band used to perform some extra voices on stage when the song needs it.
Who did female vocals on ‘Core’? A close friend of the band called Marta Masafret. We were looking for a female voice because of the conceptual nature of the album, and it was a really hard and long task since we didn’t know anybody at the moment to do it. Finally, we realized that the solution was closer than we expected. Marta is a pop singer, so in the beginning we were a little bit scared with her voice, but when she sang the first verse, we fell in love with her aptitudes and everything went really well. She joined us again during the ‘Core’ live show we did in Andorra. She’s just an amazing singer.
Can you tell a bit more about the artwork? In the same vein like looking for a female voice, we spent hours and hours thinking about who would create the album’s artwork. One day, I found a nice picture I had where you could read “Annika von Holdt”. I talked with the rest of the band and they loved it as well. The first time we tried to contact Annika she didn’t seem to be interested in working with us but finally, our nice manager Mr. Claus, was a big help and Annika agreed, creating a beautiful cover and artwork based on our three main characters, Demeter, Hades and Persephone. The final layout was created by Claus. The final result was simply awesome.
‘Core’ was released one year ago in Japan. Wasn’t it strange to wait such a long time for a European release? Ok... it’s not that strange if ANY label in the rest of the world wants your album. I mean, our management asked to every label, big, small, independent, from other galaxy..., and everybody answered “No, thanks”, They just didn’t believe in our music as some of them told us. “The three songs concept wasn’t commercial enough”, so we tried splitting each song into mini-tracks, but we get nothing again except from Burning Star Records in Greece that agreed releasing the album. The Japanese people liked the album with the initial three songs and released ‘Core’ in the first place.
Does it mean you are most popular in Japan? Yeah, it seems like things work better there than in Europe. We are really happy they like our music and the support we receive from there is really helpful to carry on with the band. Of course, this doesn’t mean we didn’t have any support from European or even American fans. We have a lot of feedback from people in France, Germany and USA, just to mention some of them.
How did you get in contact with Burning Star Records and decided to accept the deal from them? Our management worked really hard on getting a deal for us with ‘Core’. It has been probably the toughest moment for the band. When you spend two years composing and recording a new album and you receive a negative feedback, everything becomes difficult. Patience was the key, but to be true, in some moments we lost this faculty. But Claus, Lars and all the guys at Intromental are very professional people and never gave up. They knocked on every door in the world and finally, after an extremely hard year, they got a deal for us with Burning Star Records. We have to thank the guys at Intromental and Michael of Burning Star for believing in us.
Are there plans to play live or do some touring? Actually not. The main plan right now is composing, but it’s not a good moment. Maybe next summer we will perform some gigs promoting ‘Core’. Maybe before, but there’s nothing sure at this moment, so I prefer not to say anything.
What are the plans/wishes for the near future? At this moment we are working hard composing our third album, so our plans are to be ready to enter studio again as soon as we can, maybe Spring. About our wishes, that’s odd because we have been looking for a tour for a long time, but at this point, we have decided to move on to our third album. Maybe it will be easier in the future.
If there is any news I forgot to cover, please tell us… Some cool news items are about to come but I can’t speak about them right now, so I encourage you to visit www.persefone.com to know more about the band, the news and if you want to listen and share your thoughts with us, visit www.myspace.com/persefoneband, and feel free to leave us a message. We will be happy to receive it!
To occlude we may give the readers a final recommendation to buy the album ‘Core’ and you can tell me who it will appeal to… Well, if you are a usual listener of progressive or death metal you can get ‘Core’. You’ll find a mix of both styles and a new sound I’m sure you have never heard before.
About three years ago, Persefone was a nice surprise for me when you released the debut album ‘Truth Inside The Shades’. Now ‘Core’ even shows a huge improvement on complexity and progressive overtones. Let us start at the beginning. What were the plans when you founded the band? Who are the core members and can you tell a bit more about the first musical actions of Persefone?
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