EX ANIMO
Dark doom / Kharkiv, Ukraine
Blitz Interview.
1. Let's start with the presentation. Introduce your band. Maybe few words about the history of the band?
Ex Animo is a Ukrainian metal band located in Kharkiv, our music is a specific mix of genres based on musical tastes of every member of the band (and we have a great variety in here!),
2. Everybody, as a rule, give stylistic labels. What about you, how do you stylistically indicate your music?
Someone can describe our style as dark/doom metal, but actually we are just trying to find that golden ratio, our common vector in mixing the aggression and melody of metal music.
3. Your albums are already available to the listener. Is there something that unites them, or there is something individual in each of them?
The albums are very different for many reasons, one of them is it’s more than 10 years that divides them and obviously lots of things has changed. Our first release was more like a blueprint, an experiment so to say, we were filled with ideas but didn’t have enough experience to implement all of them, although “Solitary” sounds pretty raw it still has it’s specific vibe and genuineness for us, we were concentrating purely on music back then, not overloading ourselves with technical details. In fact we still like many songs from there and as a part of this love we’ve decided to do a fresh take on “Alone” for our “Shattered Universe” EP in 2015, you can compare them and clearly see how the band has evolved during this time.
“Neverday” on the other hand is a release that marks our maturity, for many reasons it took us very long to come up with this album but we are very satisfied with the result. It has aggressive but yet melodic metal sound. Each song has it’s own mood and pace, nevertheless we’ve tried to maintain the dark atmosphere of the album and lyrics is a huge part of it.
4. If you still separate the music from the lyrics, what is more important to you? Or is it still a mutually complementary symbiosis?
Those are two parts of one whole, although in most cases they are written separately. We always apply our personal experience to every story behind the songs and try to make it as much personal as possible, same case with the music, those are not just riffs, we are trying to express the mood and the feeling, trying to listen to our inner selves when writing the songs that’s why these two things usually play nice together.
5. Do you create ideas for visual creation of your music (cover) by yourself?
Yes, all the visuals for our latest CD were made by Julia and we greatly appreciate her effort on that, we’ve tried to work with external artists but it came out that none of them understood our ideas that well.
6. What about the live performances? How does the public perceive your work?
You can hardly expect full venues when playing something that is out of the trend right now and which doesn’t require mosh, snakepits and constant headbanging, however there are still quite a number of people that enjoy the “old school thing” and come to listen to the music, we really appreciate that, those are the ones we are targeting with our music, for us music always comes first, not the show.
7. Is there any foreign bands that influenced your music, style, lyrics? If there, which ones?
Of course, in fact most of the bands that influenced us are foreign ones, I can mention such names like Anathema, The Gathering, Moonspell, Amorphis, Swallow The Sun, Opeth, Leprous, Katatonia, Metallica is there as well of course. And there are many musicians outside of metal world that we like, such stuff like Massive Attack or Lunatic Soul, they definitely gave us tons of inspiration and had an influence on us. This list can be endless since each band member has his/her own specific set of music tastes and preferences.
8. Which Ukrainian doom / stoner / occult groups do you like? Recommend someone to the readers.
Unfortunately I don’t know manyukrainian bands, I really like the stuff Kauan and A Noend of Mine are doing, Azathoth Circle are doing some great music as well, guys from Stoned Jesus have definitely deserved a dose of respect.
9. Share your plans for the future?
We have several songs that need to be recorded, shaping and recording them is one of our top priorities right now, apart from that of course we would like to give more concerts especially outside of Kharkiv, idea of making a proper video has been the air for quite some time already, at some point we’ll do something for sure. Stay tuned for more news from us!
10. Good luck and thanks for your time.
You are welcome! A big thank you for the interest in our band and spreading the word about Ukrainian metal scene!
Discography:
"Solitary" full-length 2004
"Soulglass EP 2010
"Shattered Universe" full-length 2015
"Neverday" full-length 2016
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