Interview Godless Enthropia (By Carla Morton)

Interview with Claudio Colla, the bass player of the Italian Death metal band, Godless Enthropia.
Hi Claudio, how are you?
Hi Carla, I’m fine, thanks a lot, I hope you are as well. Happy to be here, share some thoughts and discuss some topics.

When were Godless Enthropia formed?
The band started between late summer 2012 and autumn/winter 2012/13. Simone, Godless Enthropia drummer, and I were coming from a previous experience in Beyond the Unholy Truth, a thrash-death metal band led by former GE guitar player, Stefano; sure, we were doing some gigs, even some very interesting ones (sharing the stage with Tuscan horror-themed metal 4-piece Story of Jade is the main example occurring to me), and we were planning to hit the studio back, but something was wrong with the planning part, especially since we weren’t succeeding in replacing the old singer with a reliable and skilled one. Therefore we decided to go for a fresh start: the three of us together, but with a brand new monicker (I conceived the name “Godless Enthropia”, the other guys loved it and chose it among a lot of other ones I proposed), keeping just some of the previous songs, rearranging them with much more care to the details, and, most of all, trying to give life to a much more professional project. I started writing new lyrics for the music Stefano was composing, and, after some tryouts, Fabio joined us as GE first vocalist.

The only release you have is ”Politics Of Fornication” from 2014. Tell me about it.
Actually, there’s a previous one (just in digital copy, as “Politics of Fornication”, since we always wanted to keep the physical release for our first full-length): “Dystopian Metaphors”, released in December 2013 (you can find it downloadable for free at the same page I suppose you listened the forementioned “Politics…” from: https://godlessenthropia.bandcamp.com/), together with a music video, “Sister Beheading”.You can tell the style changed completely from DM to PoF, especially since Godless Enthropia first line-up split up during the first months of 2014: the main music writing duties passed from Stefano to myself, and, while DM display a more levelled production work, with PoF, as well as introducing the new line-up (our current singer Davide is the lead vocalist there, while the guitars were recorded by Gabor, a former temporary member who didn’t want to get involved in live activity), we were willing to go for a more natural, raw sound, more rooted in the death metal tradition. Though we see some details could have been handled differently (I think nearly any musician, and, in wider terms, anyone who deals with works of “art”, ends up seeing even the smallest flaws in his/her own releases, after having reviewed it hundreds and hundreds of times), we still love how the two tracks included sound, especially the second one, “Palace of Fornication”. We didn’t ask ourselves questions like “Which kind of bands we want to sound like?”, or “Does such songwriting require a more old school production?”; we just went spontaneously for something we thought was working, could be recognizable, and, overall, depicted us in that particular phase of the band. I, for myself, am particularly fond of “Politics of Fornication”, since it’s the first of the music releases I took part into I wrote all music, metrics for the vocal lines and lyrics (I already dealt with the latter two parts in “Dystopian Metaphors”) for. It’s not up to me to tell if it’s an extremely good work or not, but I’ll certainly love it to death.
Are you going to release new material soon?
We are working really, really hard (telling you “We’re working our own asses off” wouldn’t have been assoigné as needed) on Godless Enthropia first full-length. It’s taking a lot of time, and we hope we can release it in the second half of 2016, since we don’t want to rush things. We want this album to be something we’ll be proud of all our lives long, but in order to achieve that, we’ve got to refine composition, lyric-writing, arrangements and, when we’ll be on, all studio passages, with the most care we’ve used towards anything (well, almost anything, at the very least) ever. As I usually say to my mates, Godless Enthropia first full-length will be one of the most important things we’ll be doing in our lives, not just music-wise. Not because it will necessarily shock the extreme music panorama (though we’ll be certainly working for it to become something that worths be presented as a very good effort), but because we kind of achieved the needed maturity, harmony and awareness, both as a band and as music-making individuals. Anyway, we are definitely looking forward to put the best of ourselves in Godless Enthropia first full-length.

What are the lyrical themes?
As you might have read from both “Dystopian Metaphors” and “Politics of Fornication”, Godless Enthropia lyrics are full of graphic images put in words, sometimes directly coming from cinema (mostly inspired, I suppose, by directors like David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier, Sion Sono and Takashi Miike, plus some Japanese anime and horror-bizarre movies, TV series and sagas). I’m not talking about quotes, neither about a whole song based on a specific movie per se (that’s usually not the case): I feel cinema, at least the cinema I love, as the vividest and most flourishing source of inspiration, therefore a lot of what I try to extrapolate from the unconscious and put into words comes from it. We can spot our main themes (especially regarding some of the songs still unpublished, that will be part of the full-length), however, in duality, the doppelgänger phenomenon and psychological issues concerning identity, while Sociology, Linguistics and Politics Theory are certainly feature catalysts. Even if writing is one of my dailyjobs, I enjoy a lot composing, as well as putting into metrics, lyrics for Godless Enthropia, and I live it like a quite natural act: but sometimes, in order to make the lyrics really work, and to make it really flow with the metrics and the general musicality of the song, keeping its inner coherence at the same time, you need to find the right synesthesia, the right metonymy, and in a few cases even forcing in an affix, or a synonym sounding phonologically better. Anyhow, also our singer, Davide, is contributing some lyrics for the album, and that’s really good, because you’ll be finding some variations on the usual style of our songs.

Any influences?
We like people who listen to our stuff to tell us about our songs, and we received a lot of opinions about our supposed influences, usually each of those quite different from one another (let alone subgenre collocations). In order to answer you, I prefer to keep letting listeners decide where to put us, also considering we are still lacking our first complete music work (mini releases might be misleading sometimes, especially considering that a lot has changed from DM to PoF, and even from PoF to our current work towards the full-length, although we definitely laid the premises for the album with foresaid “Politics of Fornication”). All in all, in order to convey a fulfilling explanation of how musical influences work on our band dynamics, I suggest envisaging two axes: 1) A vertical axis, composed by our singer, Davide, and our drummer, Simone: much connected to classic death metal from the 90’s, to its brutal death metal legacy from about last ten years (especially U.S. and Canadian one), and to a bit of grindcore, made of a very raw, piercing sound, with an unvarnished, uncompromised attitude; 2) A horizontal axis, composed by our two guitar players, Simone Cavalera and Wael: much connected to melodic and European death metal, to progressive and airy structures, inclined to gloomy, melancholic, dreamy, sometimes even epic or gothic atmospheres. Being soaked with all of these features, I feel my role in songwriting (as well as playing bass guitar, of course) is getting to a synthesis, hopefully the most interesting one possible. And I feel I’m very lucky to be working in such a multifaceted and variously assorted 5-piece line-up: great, clever guys, passionate in music, with extended and complex tastes, whom I consider awesome friends, as well as valuable band mates.

Are there shows confirmed?
Sure! We’ll be proud to share the stage with Hideous Divinity (a name that probably most people into our beloved extreme metal know very well, since the have become of the most acknowledged Italian death metal bands overall), here in Turin, on October 22 (“Circolo Arci Border” is the club hosting us). Next night, October 23, we’ll get back to “The One Live Club”, nearby Milan, whose stage we had already been on last June (for a very pleasant and blasting gig, I must say), together with Ignotum, currently promoting their first album, and Iena. Afterwards, there will probably be something up for November, together with two very distinguished brutal death metal monickers: on such an occasion, we’ll be likely to get back on Daevacian stage, a very nice club which started arranging bigger and bigger events, and that is all I can foreshadow.

Do you have a message for the fans?
Wow, Carla, thinking of us as a band which have got fans is strange enough, let alone addressing directly to them,actually, as well as people who we usually see attending our gigs, at least the ones in Turin and nearby, listeners very fond of our music do exist; though only through self-made promotion (we decided to keep it that way, at least until we’ll publish the album) we received a quite fulfilling amount of appraisals, even from across Europe in a quite satisfying amount (the ones I’m remembering the most were from Canada, U.S.A., India, Indonesia, as well as several times from Central and South America). We’re obviously talking about small numbers, compared to the whole bulk of people interested in extreme metal (and overall quality tunes) throughout the world, but that couldn’t be anything unlike that, since we have just made a little, initial slice of the path we want to cover, and we are just very happy to have drawn some attention on our music. Besides, knowing there are some guys and girls in your city, in your country, across borders and even oceans who took a few minutes from their time to contact you and tell you they enjoyed your music, plus, in some cases, getting to know they’ll keep listening to it and publicize your songs, is definitely something to be treasured. Anyways, talking on behalf of all Godless Enthropia members, I want to say we are making our very best effort in order to put a very good first full-length album forward, a work that could be worthwhile for ears, brains and hearts; plus, since we’ve been asked several times in the recent past, some merchandising from the band will be released and made available for purchase quite soon.

Thank you Claudio, cheers!
Thanks a lot, Carla! It’s been a real pleasure talking to you, I hope we’ll catch up again in the future. All the best to you and to the readers of Antichrist Magazine! We hope many of you will come visit us at Godless Enthropia official page, for live reports and news about the album (and of course for listening to our previous works, for those who hadn’t heard of us before).
https://www.facebook.com/Godless-Enthropia-112241268879858/timeline/