Enoch Interview

> 1.Can you give us an update on what is going on with the band these days?

I am writing a lot of new stuff. Silvio and Leo left the band nearly 1 year ago and it’s very difficult to find someone that can join in. We’ve been playing together since the mid 90s so, in some way, it’s like trying to start from the very beginning. You know: I’ve always been the main composer but some great stuff came from Leo and Daniele and even Silvio used to give his contribution to the main structure of our songs. So…it’s a very strange moment: a lot of new stuff but Enoch, today, is just two guitar players (me and Daniele). Anyway I’m sure that we’ll work it out somehow...

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> 2.How would you describe the musical sound that is presented on the recordings?

All three albums have different sound. Enuma has a closed and “packed in” sound, typical of 90s recordings and this is what we were looking. Tommy of Nefas was the producer back in those days and if you can feel some death metal sound, well…it’s been his contribution (I mean it in a positive way). Tetragrammaton sounds really left us very disappointed. The producer was a fucking retard who spend all the time telling us all the commercial shitty band he worked with. I guess he wanted our album to sound like fucking in flames or whatever. We managed to get the masters from this asshole, since we wanted to remaster and remix everything, but part of the voice and nearly all the bass lines were lost. A real pity. Sumerian Chants has a very cold and thin sound; we wanted the disc to sound somehow different from a normal recording and this is the reason why we made all the post production on our own; it took us some time and maybe the result could have been better, but I’m quite satisfied about it. It’s very near to what I wanted.

> 3.Your lyrics cover a lot of Sumerian History and Religion, can you tell us a little bit more about your interest in this topic?

Well…I wrote most of the lyrics of Enoch and I like Sumerian myths; moreover I find that they suits perfectly the doom mood. I mean: if you play power metal you can pick from Lord Of The Rings or some other fantasy books, if you play brutal you could maybe focus on killing and splatter, black metal has occultism and norse myth and, when it comes to doom, usually bands focus on the sadness of life or on Lovecraft myths. We never wanted to play sad or depressive music; there are -for sure- all these feelings but we kinda reject the statement slow music = sadness. Sumerian mythology is very dark and the sumerian history is so far that you can just mix myths, history and some personal “revisionsm” or interpretation. It’s a dead and lost society, this means that their history is full of drama, lost battles, slain people and so on and I really like this stuff.

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> 4.The band name comes from the prophet 'Enoch' who was also made more famous by John Dee's form of Enochian Magick, can you tell us a little bit more about your interest in Occultism?

Actually we meant the city of Enoch, built by Cain and named after his son (that’s not the prophet). Personally I’m very interested in occultism but this has not very much to share with Enoch’s lyrics. I hate christianity and I would have never named a band after a prophet. I think that I can speak for the rest of the band, also.

> 5.According to the Metal Archives page the band is on hold, are there any plans to get back together and record a new album?

I’ve seen the page because you wrote this question. We’re not on hold and I can’t tell you who and why wrote such thing. Really annoying.

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> 6.Can you tell us a little bit more about your interest in Ancient History and Mythology?

I guess I already answered to this. From a more generic perspective I’ve been always fascinated by ancient civilisation and from the way myths always influenced society and mankind. One cannot think how our society would have been without christianity and islam… I firmly believe that monotheism is the worse thing ever happened to mankind, I don’t wanna stuck in today’s political shit but,well… I like to think to a scene from Conan The Barbarian, where everybody sit around the campfire arguing which god is the coolest one; obviously it’s just fiction but, you know, if you live with a mythology with many gods, you will never think of killing other people in the name of the "only one true god”. Another great thing of ancient cultures is the way knowledge was perceived; I guess that hermetics and occult stuff had a dominant role in the growing of science and this still existed in alchemic studies or with studies of people like Aleister Crowley...

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> 7.What are some of the best shows that the band has played over the years and also how would you describe your stage performance?

We don’t play live. Never had and, most likely, will never.

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> 8.On a worldwide level how has the feedback been to your music by fans of funeral doom metal?

We’ve been surprised that so many people from really around the whole world got in touch with us. I really can’t remember a single negative feedback, maybe just one guy on last.fm saying that our music was boring but I guess he wasn’t very much into doom metal. I’m not saying that we’re Iron Maiden; we’re a small underground band playing possibly the most extreme metal style so any single person listening to our music is something cool. It’s funny, anyway, that -as romans used to say- “nemo propheta in patria” so we got a lot of positive feedbacks from press and ‘zines but we sold very few cds in our counrty. Got lots of feedback from Russia, Germany and USA but also Romania, Finland, Netherlands, Mexico… It’s cool.

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> 9.The band has been around since 1998 and so far has only released 3 albums, can you tell us a little bit more about the gaps in between releases?

Many, many reasons. First reason is that we all have an everyday job and we’re ok like that (we don’t want to live with music, we really prefer to be free to do the fuck we like and this is not possible if you have labels or managers); on the other side, this makes difficult for us to have time to rehearse and write songs. Another reason is that Silvio moved to another country, then back in Italy, then again to another country, and this, somehow, slow down things. Finally, we play only if we feel like playing and we record an album only if we have good songs, In these years we discarded something like 20 or 30 songs because we didn’t think they were the best thing we could have done at that moment (maybe if you ask the other guys in the band, they would answer that the reason is that I’m a psycho and I make and trash songs randomly).

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> 10.What are some of the bands or musical styles that have had an influence on your music and also what are you listening to nowadays?

Celtic Frost and Bathory in first place. Then, for sure, My Dying Bride, Candlemass, early Katatonia, Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus and definitively Skepticism, Esoteric, Unholy the real prime movers in the genre… I’m a lot into 90s black metal, especially raw bands, like Darkthrone, Ildjarn, early Carpathian Forest, Burzum… This year I liked a lot My Dying Bride (again), Shape Of Despair, Tyranny, Mgla, Soijl, Bell Witch, Missa Mortvm and Funerary. Being on more commercial stuff I also like Behemoth a lot.

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> 11.What are some of your non musical interests?

Reading, writing, making any kind of thing that keep my mind busy. I don’t always want (or have the force of) fight my demons and I prefer to let my mind free… Definitively my passion, beside music, is my motorbike.

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> 12.Before we wrap up this interview, do you have any final words or thoughts?
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Thanks for the interview. I want to say to all that read this: go on our website or on our Facebook page and get in touch if you’re somehow interested in our music. We made CDs because we wanted that people that can understand our mood could listen to it; we believe that there are people with affinity and this is the reason why we recorded our music. So...just drop us a line (find all the contacts here: http://www.enoch.it/cont.html#cont) and always support true underground music.