Interview - Amenra
What is the Church of Ra? Colin:”It´s a collective idea. It´s the church of life, we value our life and how we spend it. We oblige ourselves to get the best out of ourselves and we push ourselves to the limit. We sing about everything we love and curse everything that threatens what we love. We take care of our friends and family. We want our music to heal people. Through the years we became a group of artists with the same goal in mind: lifting each other up instead of bringing each other down. Mathieu: “It´s a huge collaboration. Not just music but also ´Smoke and Dust´ who does artwork. Photographers, people who take care of visuals. The connections that we have with other artists, like Oathbreaker and Hessian for example. We really support each other from the Church of Ra spirit. We´re on the same page. It´s not a joke, we all know what we´re doing.” Lennart: “Amenra loves to do things for other bands. We exist for more than 10 years now and we know how hard it is to achieve something. We want to help other people when we can.” This summer you played a lot of festivals that were quite mainstream. Most of the time you were the most heavy band
of the bill. Do you want to reach a larger crowd? Mathieu: “The more fans you can make, the better. We want to spread our message to a lot of people. We also didn´t expect to play so many festivals.”
Our van was also very dilapidated, but our experience was great.”
Lennart: “Sometimes we´re surprised that we´re asked to play some festivals. It´s not that we contact the festivals, they contact us. It´s nice to see that our music is also appreciated there too.”
Billy Anderson recorded a couple of tracks on Mass V, he´s an excellent producer who worked together with a lot of great bands already. How did this collaboration happen? Mathieu: “As a band we had to decide who to work with when we wanted to release our new album. We invited him over and spent time with him in an old church in the most wooded area of Belgium (De Ardennen) and locked ourselves up there for 10 days. He really brought us to the next level when it comes to recording.”
How was your experience with Russia? Mathieu: “The first time we went to Russia everyone told us it would be dangerous and there would be mafia. I have to say we kept an eye open, just to be sure. SaintPetersburg and Moscow were really great places to visit, nice architecture and great museums. We did a bit of sightseeing too, visited orthodox churches. There was a ceremony going on and it was great to see. When you left the big cities the poverty was more visible. For example gas lines were upper ground and were connected from one house to another and the quality of the roads was horrible. Lennart: “We all had the assumption that Russia was a cold country but it was 30° C, so all we brought were very warm clothes. No one checked the weather forecast before we left.
Mathieu: “We had no idea what to expect from our crowd when we played live but they were very into us.”
Lennart: “Our expectations of Billy Anderson were huge, also because he worked together with so many great bands. In general it was a very spontaneous way of recording. Mathieu and I played some guitar parts just one time. That´s very extraordinary, he didn´t force us to play the same part over and over again. For him it was important that everything sounded real. He values the imperfections in songs. That was different than what we expected.” Mathieu: “He was also very stoked about being in De Ardennen. His
RMP- Magazine November
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