Interview: ENTORX

Entorx’s guitarist, Sascha Dorr, took off his time to answer some of my interview questions, where he talked about the band’s new album entitled as Faceless Insanity.

Hi and thnak you for this interview! Beginning with the first track of the album, „Overture: Condamnation’’, we can hear some speeches of the US presidents Obama and Trump, right?
Hi Carla, thanks for your time and interest in our band, really appreciated! Yes, our intro track starts with some quotes from official speeches by Obama, Trump and some CIA „dudes”. Word against word! The intro was created in the context to the following track on the album, „Black Dawn”, which is about a prison inmate innocent serving a failed sentence in Guantanamo Bay…

Then we can notice that the album is about the world problems we are facing today: corruption, injustice, political and social problems. Please tell us more about Faceless Insanity’s story behind.
Roughly speaking, it is primarily about mental illnesses, especially their variation and causes. this also includes the points you have spoken to, definitely! The album starts with the mentioned intro track and “Black Dawn”. “Hypocritical Faith” deals with the instrumentalization of ancient religious scriptures with which people are sent to war or incited one another. Damn old topic. Just about every war out there is waged on the basis of religious principles, or at least one gives the impression that there is, of course, much more to it. Classic: Iraq War.
“P.T.S.D.” to “Isolation” to “Madness Unchained” could be seen as a little story, in our opinion the three songs belong together. “P.T.S.D.” starts with the traumatized war veteran who isolates himself (“Isolation”) and breaks through his madness (“Madness Unchained”). The rest is loosely related to the issue of mental illness. “Paranoid Conspiracy” is about paranoia. A look at the booklet shows our guitarist looking around in panic into his smartphone. A simple allusion to how much one could feel “followed” by social media and the transparency of the internet in general these days. “Morbid Rage” is a very atypical song for us, lyrically. The title says it all. In “Doomed” the lyrical self decides to escape its “damned” existence by burying itself. Oneself? Its madness? There is enough free space for your interpretation. A great conclusion that rounds off the album. “Death Machine” is a really old song that was on our first EP Theta Waves. Since the song was in the list of every single one of our 150+ shows so far, we decided that it should be lifted into the modern and should be based on our live performance. Originally, Faceless Insanity was intended as a continuous concept album, the result is this common thread with outliers.

Can we add here also the actual problem we’re facing with covid pandemic?
You could, definitely. What goes on in the minds of many people borders on madness: “World Conspiracy”, “Espionage via App”, “Introduction of a Dictatorship” and so on. That’s pretty silly, of course, but that’s how people are, how to get it “nicely” on social media. You are confronted with tons of theories, evidence and facts, per hour, per minute, per second. There we are again with “Paranoid Conspiracy”, “Isolation” and so on. An exciting topic that really delivers a lot of material for ideas and texts!

It’s very interesting how the sound is oscillating, from aggressive to mellow, same the riffs, the solos. How have you approached the sound and was it a little difficult to go through these oscillations?
This is an Entorx trademark! The songs are not as well thought out as you might think, a majority of the songs were written by Bogdan in one or very few sessions (per song of course). A handful were tried out live in front of the audience and in the rehearsal room, gradually refined, etc. A few of the guitar solos were also only written last minute. There can be advantages and disadvantages to saying “There has to be a solo here” or “Here comes a reggae passage, that will definitely throw you off the hook!” etc. Songs like “P.T.S.D.” and “Paranoid Conspiracy” can do without it, as you can hear. In the end, what counts is that we like the songs ourselves, that we stay true to our sound and it is a very great “treat” that more and more people are celebrating the songs like we do. That’s what Entorx is all about! Writing really good songs and celebrating them with the audience. In the future I will be involved in songwriting. We’ll see how it works, how we get ideas worked out, what the songs sound like and which ones make it to a new release in the end. We will see!

Do you consider that the sound is more evolved on the new album, comparing with your debut Broken Ways?
It grew differently, again. If you look at the jump from our first EP Theta Waves to Broken Ways, the jump was as big as from Broken Ways to Faceless Insanity. With Broken Ways the band just wanted to sound more “musically mature”. The aggression of the first EP got lost a little bit. It just sounded a lot more progressive and varied than before. Still, songs like “Kill My Brain” and “Inaction” are a few very nasty chunks, others are really good live songs like the newly recorded “Soul Disease”, title track “Broken Ways”, funky “Blood Vengeance”, our first ever written song “Human Soil” and so on. Faceless Insanity is a big leap in that it sits in the middle of Theta Waves and Broken Ways: the basic mood is mostly aggressive. The progressive elements are processed more seamlessly into the songs, without missing the variation of Broken Ways; we even go a big step further, in our opinion. You can recognize us on all releases, and we still sound like Entorx, consistently. We are really very satisfied with that!

It’s 7 years between the debut and the new album. Why took you so long to release new music?
This was by no means intended, but it was due to a number of circumstances. We went through some line up changes during that time. For a band that often plays live and is booked, this is a very exhausting time, especially since the band is “just” a kind of “part-time job” for us and the focus has been put on various other things, such as the main job. We handled the situation well, I think. In 2017 the album started to be recorded once. In other words, the songs are basically already waiting there. At that point it just didn’t feel like it was enough, a few songs were missing the finishing touches. At the end of 2018 we finally felt ready to tackle the songs. April 2019 we could finally start recording, until the album was finally recorded, mixed and mastered, it was already March 2020. By no means an easy process, but the output was definitely worth it in the end.

What are your main influences?
All the everyday life out there. As mentioned earlier, all the Corona weirdos out there who have a lot of theories out there are a huge inspiration. In general we like to denounce grievances, their causes and effects. From a musical point of view, bands that we ourselves like to hear will definitely play our part. Spontaneous, as well as mood-dependent ideas are just as important. In any case, we are not planning to sound like “this or the other band”, but rather to do our own thing if possible.

In these horrible times, what are you doing mostly to promote the new album?
Online promotion is currently the most important thing, and maintaining virtual contact with your own old, new and future fans. Of course, we are by no means alone with this idea. There are a lot of really good underground bands and advertisements can overlap or cover one another. The main source of income are and have always been live shows that are currently not available. So far it has been going very well, the number of listeners is growing and the range is growing. However, this is not optimal! Another reason why we are looking forward to live concerts again.

Let’s hope things would get back to normal, and bands will return on stage!
Anyway, we are ready! We can’t wait to unscrew your heads!

Thank you for your time having this interview! It was my pleasure. Rock on!
Thank you once more, Carla! Please every reader here, check out our songs on every online portal you like. If you’d like to support us financially, have a look at our Bandcamp store or write us directly! Without you, we are nothing! Be safe and see you hopefully soon!

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