Echoes is a prog metal band from
Venezuela which has created a lot of interest among the prog metal
fans with their debut album Nature/Existence from earlier this year.
They are signed to ProgRock Records and I got in touch with them for
their story.
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Let's start with the beginning: Has any
of you been involved in any other bands before you joined up in
Echoes, which bands were you influenced by and why did you choose
that name ?
We've all been involved in projects before Echoes,
but none of them has done enough to be worth of mention: most of them
were cover bands. As for our influences, they are very broad since we
all have very different backgrounds but we can all say that some our
biggest influences are traditional Venezuelan music, classical music
and just to name some bands: Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, ABBA,
Porcupine Tree, ISIS, Opeth, A Perfect Circle, and so many more.
You are from and lives in Venezuela. How is the music
scene in Venezuela these days ?
The music scene in Venezuela
is quite big, and the progressive rock scene is growing every day;
there are a lot of new bands coming out and a plenty of musicians
trying to push new projects out there, which is great. There's still
a lot of room for growth since Venezuela is a tropical country and
people like to party all the time and progressive rock is not the
most 'party inclined' kind of music.
Let's go straight to
your debut album Nature/Existence from earlier this year (2010) who
is riding high on the top 20 list of this years best albums. Please
tell us more about this album.
It took us about four years to
get it done, mainly because we didn't know anything about doing an
album when we started and even though we had most of the music
written when we started recording, the production process took a
while since we rewrote a lot of the material we had and rearranged it
to fit the concept we were working on, since it is a concept album
about love, life and how they are both cyclical in nature, which is
the reason there are plenty of recurring themes hidden in the music
and the words.
How did you get a deal with ProgRock Records
?
Once the album was completely done for release we contacted
their president, Shawn Gordon, and showed it to him to see what he
thought of it and he liked it a lot and offered us a great deal to
get the album out.
How is the creative processes in your band
from coming up with an idea to it's being recorded ?
Since we
almost never write music together, it's usually one of us recording
an idea, it can be a couple of bars, a little riff or even a full
song structure, and sending it to the others to see what they think.
Once that's done, we start bouncing stuff off each other and adding
or taking away from it in order to build something meaningful to all
of us.
For those of us unknown with your music; how would you
describe you music and which bands would you compare yourself with
?
We can say that our music is progressive metal that cares
about the songs more than about the musicians that play them. It's
progressive metal influenced by industrial electronica, folk music,
extreme metal and a lot of pop that doesn't worry about playing lots
of notes and showing off instrumental abilities.
About comparing
ourselves with bands, it's something we hate doing, since everyone
always hears something different, but you can certainly hear some
Pink Floyd, some Genesis, a little bit of Porcupine Tree and some
Pain of Salvation too. I think we can also compare our stuff to some
of Opeth's stuff without the screaming.
What is your plans
for 2011 and beyond ?
Right now our main thing is finish
writing our second album so we can go in the studio sometime mid 2011
and have the album out by 2012, let's see if we manage to fill our
self imposed deadlines. Besides the album, we're also trying to find
dates to play some concerts in and out of Venezuela, especially line
up some festival dates abroad.
To wrap up this interview, is
there anything you want to add to this interview ?
Thanks a
lot for sending this over, we've followed ProgArchives.com way before
we started with Echoes and it's actually one of the places where we
found out about a lot of the bands we now love, so thank you very
much for having that site running and for supporting music and
musicians.
Thank you to Echoes for this interview
Their PA profile is here and their homepage here
Edited by toroddfuglesteg - December 28 2010 at 09:37
/PAlogo_v2.gif "Progarchives.com Homepage")
Echoes
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