PipemanRadio Interviews Ancient Entities About PIERCED BY OBSIDIAN

0:00 Hi, you have done to censure. Wow for you, young ro Why come America. It's time for the Adventures of pipe Man on W four c Y dot com. West Pompeas is number one internet radio station. Here's your host, the pipe Man. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four c Y Radio. And say about our next guest.

1:00 They played at a festival recently. That is a killer festival. I was actually gonna be there, but then conflicts happened, so on bum that I missed their set. So let's welcome to the show, Ancient Entities. How are you? I like the man? So yeah, I mean talk to me about Let's start there. Let's talk to me about Milwaukee Metal Fest. How was that? Milwaukee Metalfest was great? Man? The room was packed, like you know, it was just in a really amazing time. Everyone had lots of energy, hospitality was good. They treated all the artists really well. Man, Like, I have nothing but good things to say about that festival. I love hearing stuff like that because it's not always the case in the festival. So oh, that's great for sure. I know the person that does the pr runs the media for it, she's like one of my favorite people, so it must have ran well yeah, yeah, absolutely, I don't think anyone really had any complaints all the time. I love that and that venue is like an iconic venue, so that that's pretty cool.

2:20 And you're local to there, right yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm from Milwaukee. Our other band members are from all over. We got guys in Chicago, guy in Madison, and then our bass player Lukey kind of lives in between US and Racine. So so there's low rivalry there. And then I would assume, because I know my experience, well none of them. You said, we're in Minnesota, and I know that's the big rivalry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no rivalries here. I did a festival there you probably know it called Northern Invasion. Yeah, and that was the first time in my life actually I was to Milwaukee or to Wisconsin general. Like I'm originally from Jersey and I remember going there.

3:12 I'm like, man, what am I going to Wisconsin for? Because like outside of Wisconsin, everybody just thinks all there is is cheese. Yeah, But then I went there. I just have to say is because I love your state. I love your the town, that whole area, the people. But what it was pretty funny because I was camping there and I met some really cool people there, now my lifelong friends that are from there, and we were talking. They were talking all night about the whole uh you know, difference between Minnesota people and Wisconsin people. So but what cool place and what a cool place to play a fest or any show for that matter.

4:01 So and then you have your new album dropping here in June and you just released the single from it, Pierced by Obsidian. Yep, yep, tell us about that song. It is a pretty badass song, So Pierced by Obsidian. I believe this one is our vocalist, as like all the major storytelling here, but I think that was about some form of like Obsidian tipped arrow that I can't remember what race or culture exactly, but I think it was Mayan. But they all like shot the arrows and add like a target or whatever, and pretty much what the songs about. So it's like, you know, brutal, brutal song and obviously about history because that's pretty much what all of our songs are about, our mythology or something in between.

4:57 That I love here that too, because for people outside the metal world, they don't realize that a lot of metal, you know, they think it's about certain things, but it's really about history and factual stuff and telling stories about things that actually happened. Yeah. Yeah, even philosophies and stuff like that. I mean, look at most of Death like that. A lot of that is just you know, philosophical stuff. You know, Chuck is asking and it's pretty it's pretty cool. Yeah, definitely. And you know, I just realized I screwed up because I have a necklace I just blowing Costa Rica that is made of like an obsidian like looks almost like an arrowhead the way it is. Yeah. Yeah, So I mean I should have worn that for the interview just to Yeah, for sure, man, Yeah, that's really cool. Right. So I'm like when you're when I see that, I'm thinking about because I'm thinking about this necklace I have.

6:00 And literally I could take that thing and pierce somebody if they pissed me off the city and gets sharp. That's for sure, no doubt. And so tell us about the rest of the album. This the album is called Echoes of Annihilation. Yeah, love love the name. That's pretty cool. Tell us all about it. So, I mean, like I said before, most of our stuff is historical or something about something historical or mythology. We try and capture that feel throughout pretty much the entire album, you know, like when I present the songs to her vocal spry and he kind of has a couple of ideas or things he wants to talk about. Rather it be like, you know, like the Imynoki Gods, you know, Samerian Mesopotamia, and we have a lot of Greek mine and tech on this album, but that'll change as we write more music and stuff like that. We're just kind of go with a couple of general themes and just kind of pick place, you know, stuff to talk about from all around the world. This album is definitely more of a I wouldn't go as far as say, like brutal brutal death metal, but it has a mix of a lot of thrash like brutal death and like technical elements of death metal in it. That and

7:31 and that that came because I have a lot of different music genres I'm into. I'm in a lot of into like all all kinds of metal, you know, Like outside of that, I listened to other stuff too, but I kind of composed it a way where it all fits together, but it's not exactly Uh. I hate to say it's not exactly one style because it is, but uh, it definitely has a different feel and certain parts of the songs, like if we're writing about the ai Naki, we're gonna have a little more mystery, so we kind of put darker tones to the rifts over those parts and stuff like that. But overall it keeps like a real tribal deeal to it. I guess I dig that that's cool, and I was when I was listening to it. So I'm an old school thrash metal head that also likes death and blackmat all from the beginning, you know, And so yeah, I could hear the thrash in it, and I was like, yeah, I could get down with this. I love when you take genres and mix them together. This is something that wasn't done in the very beginning, and everything was like gatekeepers and keep everything separate, ye, And I think nowadays that wouldn't even work nowadays, even though that's not necessarily, it's still the case in some areas because there's so many bands now that

9:01 if you're not mixing and blending genres, you're not sounding unique. No, matter what, because it's like if you just use this formula, like this is death metal, this is black metal, this is thrash metal, and like go by that formula and everybody's just gonna sound the same. Like the Big four thrash they didn't all sound the same. And certainly, you know, band like Possessed was like was it death metal, Yes, it was the beginning of death metal, but it was thrash metal first then death metal, you know type of thing. So that made them unique even to death metal bands today. And I think that's what makes a band like yours great is being able to capture the unique sound of your band without having to be yeah, ho's to sound like this? Yeah. I mean I grew up in between the old school guys and then like some of the new death metal that was like coming in, and you know, I was even there for like some of like the newer well, I shouldn't say newer sub generals because they're there, but like you know, like metalcore and all that, you know, like when like black Talia Murder or kind of like brand new on the scene and stuff like that. So but like you know, I've been inspired by all kinds of stuff, but Uh. In general, when I when I write an album, I kind of try and look at it as like okay, so if I'm gonna go see this band and like, okay,

10:33 I have to compete, you know with like twenty other bands and try and sound different somehow. Like, so I look at it from an audience to try to be like, okay, if I went up on stage, like what would I want to see from a band? You know, if I went up there. That's kind of like how I write my music, Like I want to I want a death metal band that you know, They're gonna go up there and I'm gonna be like, you know, spinning my air the whole time that they're playing, you know, And that's kind of how I try my right my wrists or more like pit riffs. I guess that's what I call. I love it. Yeah, That's what I'm all about right there. I used to uh live in LA and take a greyhound or hitchhike up to the Bay Area to catch like the beginning shows of Possessed and many other bands. But talk about brutality, Yeah, man, I mean I love all that old school uh stuff too, you know, like in a Nile necrophages. Those are like, you know, some of my like my like huge like you know, death metal bands and you know, like Decapitated if we're going like you know, like old school death metal and shit like that, you know, like the Polish, Polish, Swedish death metal, any of that stuff. Like I love all that, like Carnage, you know, like I think that was like one of my firste Carnage was like one of my first couple of death metal albums, like uh, Jungle Rot stuff like that. You know. Nice. I love all the old school shit too. So what what was that moment in life? If

12:07 there was one that you just knew music was just in you and this was what you were gonna do. You know, man, that was a long time ago, but it happened to me at like a later age because I was an artist before I really was into music or anything like that's all. It was like, you know, I was like a freshman or sophomore in high school and I didn't really listen to music, you know. It was just like whatever someone had on the radio, That's what I was listening to. But uh, my sister was watching something on like MTV. It was like it was a rock band or something like that, and I was just like, oh what, you know, what what is this? And I was like, okay, you know that's kind of cool. And it wasn't like anything like super heavy or it was like some alternative band, and uh, basically I was just like, you know, this is cool, but like what else is there? Like is there something like that goes a little harder this? And then I found uh I think also on MT it was like Romstein Volkerball. They played like some live clip from that. I was like, yo, that was cool, like you know, I want to I want to do what they're doing. And then it just my my taste got progressively heavier. I think after I found that, I found like Behemoth, So it was once I actually found the music, I like, you know that I wanted to listen to. It pretty much just went from like, you know, not heavy to like heavy right right away. You know.

13:35 I think like Behemoth Demigod was maybe like my third or fourth like album I ever listened to, and that that was honestly the album that made me go like holy shit, like that's fucking awesome, you know nice, and you know, it's funny because the the artistry and the music does go hand in hand. So my question is, as we look at the album cover behind me, there is that your artistry. So this is done by our now previous drummer Burns. He came up with the concept of the album art and he did the uh he didn't draw the logo. We had this artist called Art of Darkness do the logo and once once we got that back from him, he did kind of like the filling in of the letters, and he tried a couple different like stone looks and stuff like that. But I think he ultimately settled on this like mono tone like silver and like you know, with red around it. It's pretty cool. I think, yeah, it's totally cool. And I'm all about that too. I think that's why I say it goes hand in hand. Like I like good album art, you know, good merch with great art on it. I think it just all goes hand in hand because music is art and it's like a full on

15:11 for me, it's a full on experience. Like I listen to your album, I want to sit there on the balcony with with the album right in my hand, you know, looking at the album or reading all the stuff while I'm listening to it. Oh yeah, absolutely, that's yeah, I'm still I'm still about buying albums. I know, a lot of the current generation and everything day there's a lot of digital downloading and you know, not even that even like you know, Spotify is streaming and all that, but you know it's cool. I mean, I stream on YouTube. I don't really use Spotify too much. But well, you know what's interesting is like you said, you found music okay, and I did too. Nowadays, nowadays it's almost like you don't really have to find it because of these things.

16:03 And I personally liked it better when I did have to find it because that's how you found some of the coolest stuff. I think nowadays there's just so much flooding, Like if you're listening to Spotify, there's so much playing into you that you don't really take the time. Whereas back then it was like, oh, there's one album, let me go get that, you know, and then listen to it fifty million times. Yeah, yeah, I mean that, you know, you haven't think like back then it was a very like niche market. You know, there was a lot of like you know, definitely black metal bands or anything like that. Yet you know, like there was still a new genre and like, like, you're right, there aren't a lot of There are a lot of bands now like that are out there trying to you know, make it be heard and stuff like that, and you really do have to kind of stand out one way or another is otherwise you know, yeah, people do forget about you easier.

17:03 I found for the way I find new bands a lot is when we're playing our live shows. You know, like I purposely won't listen to the local band or whoever. You know, if we go play a tour or something, you know, I'll go like all the band pages and you know, you know, support, but I'll wait until I go to the show and listen to them. And I find a lot of new bands that way, because like, you know, I'll go there and be like, oh, you know, these guys are super super sick live. You know, I've never even heard of them before. And then you know, then I'll go grab their music and stuff like that at the shows. But but yeah, that's how I've been finding new bands, and that that's kind of replaced the conventional way for me. And you know that was finding a random CD back in the day. Yeah, Well, that's what's cool about festivals because I have it too, where that happens for me. You know, I go and I go on tour and I do radio coverage at all these festivals here in the UK and Europe, and like, I like to make it a point that if I'm interviewing a band that I go to their set. I can. You know, sometimes you're stuck back there working, but if I can. But I find so many bands by being at these festivals that I never would have found before that. And it was saying back in the day, like I used to get this sing in La it was BAM magazine and they had all the gigs and you'd look at to see who looked the coolest, and then you went to the show and you didn't know what they sounded like. I mean like Merciful Fate, perfect example. You know, they

18:38 looked Diamond looked cool as shit. So I'm like, I want to go to that show, and then you know it's I'll tell you a funny story too. I was at a show and Venom, Venom Slayer and Exodus played and Cronos and Tom got into a fistfight backs stage. Are you ready for this? Why? Because Kronos was pissed off because people were some people were calling Slayer black metal and they're like, He's like, you're not black metal, we're black metal. And the funny part is in twenty twenty four, neither one of them would probably be considered black metal. Yeah, so it is great how it's all evolved and become what it is. You know, it's funny. I was one of those people while I was younger that I didn't want it to evolve. I wanted it to stay like really underground and nobody know about it. But now that I go to a festival like a Milwaukee Metal Fest or any other festival and see how many metal heads there are and how many great metal musicians there are, I'm happy us gatekeepers didn't keep it gated. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So tell everybody how they can connect to you guys on your socials, on the web, go your merch store, check out any tour dates, get the new album, all that good stuff. Yeah. So we have a link tree on our Instagram

20:12 and our Facebook and all that. So that's in all of our about sections and stuff like that. That's got our you know, Facebook, Instagram. All our links are our band camp store all of our merchant. I'm still getting the store up. We have a couple of things up on it, but I have to add a couple of things, like we got some we're getting some shorts made, and we got a couple of new shirt designs cool. So we're getting some of the old stuff up on there too that we're just trying to clear stock up. But that's all through our band camp store. You could pre order the album through the band camp store then you Our our main social network right now is Facebook, but we do update Instagram and still have stuff going on on Aaron of course band Camp, So those are our means. Very cool. Is there anything else that we haven't covered that you'd like the listeners to know about. No, just thank you. Thank you for all tuning in and listening, and it was definitely awesome to get an interview from you. So thank you very much and I appreciate it very much, and I appreciate you giving us great music. And I hope to see you live because I'm with you man lot live is where it's at.

21:36 And thanks a lot be for being on the Adventures of Pipe Man. Absolutely man, thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to the adventures of Pipemin. I'm w for Cui Radio