Australia’s foremost Kings of progressive, extreme heavy music, Ne Obliviscaris will be touring across Australia and New Zealand in February 2018 in support of their new album Urn.
Ne Obliviscaris are one of those bands that is hard not to love with a truly unique progressive style and overtones of violin action, with the release of their latest album, Urn, an up coming Australia/New Zealand tour I sat down with vocalist, Xenoyr, to discuss what the future holds for the rapidly successful band.
Xavier: So, this is your first time playing in Australia since December 2016, how does it feel to be playing at home after such a successful world tour?
Xenoyr: Well its unusual for us to not, also within Australia we try to kind of cover our home ground at least once a year. 2016 was kind of focusing on getting a new album written and released and getting across the U.S. so we’re really excited to share the new material back in Australia and you know, just play to friends and there were so many people that I guess grown up and sort of grown up with us.
Xavier: You’ve just released a music video for your song, Intra Venus, its truly a spectacular work of art. How much hard work and time went into releasing this? And how did the time taken to make this affect the bands schedule, if at all?
Xenoyr: Well the song itself, I worked on it with a person by the name of Adrian Golby, and I had a concept in mind and my path for the actual song and I’m kind of looking at people like “Jack the Stripper” and like some other Australian bands and we kind of went with him because we knew what he’d done, he actually plays guitar for “Caligula’s Horse” for people that don’t know him, and I went to him with a fair few ideas in mind and we kind of worked things out and stressed for a bit of time trying to coordinate everything. After the amount of effort that went into doing everything involved with the video itself, you now know music video wise and certain credits, seeing all the people involved, because they’re professional and efficient at those specific things. No one knows only two of you are actually doing every single thing within the video, well apart from acting, then you will know how much work goes into something like that. We done it essentially over two very long days, in different locations. The band got shooting done in the studio from about half five in the morning till ten at night and a kind of very similar story for the part which involved I guess the narrative to it.
Xavier: This is your first time playing shows in New Zealand, are you excited about it?
Xenoyr: Yeah definitely, its been a long time that we’ve been around and New Zealand is just one of them things that’s so close yet so far, when you haven’t been to a certain place you don’t know what to expect in terms of, do you have a fan base there? Are you going to lose a lot of money making the jump across? And so it’s something we’ve stewed on for a number of years now and we’re finally at the stage now where we’re just going to do it, its probably cheaper to do it then travelling to Perth. And so we’re definitely looking forward to doing it, I’ve always wanted to go because my brother actually lives over there so I’m looking forward to catching up with him, so we’ll see. Its only two shows we’re doing, Auckland and Wellington, so hopefully we get a decent crowd going and it may even be a regular stop for us.
Xavier: What you guys are doing for the music industry and bands all around with your crowdfunding through patreon is amazing. Are you guys the first band to start doing this?
Xenoyr: Yeah in regards to how we’re actually doing it, the first band to be doing this kind of thing. It was I guess a big risk for us to do but we kind of had an idea of how supportive our fan base was to start with considering we did the crowdfunding campaign a year or two earlier from memory and that was really successful for us, and we kind of based what we’ve done with the Patreon thing because we have all these fans that believed in what we do and wanted to support us, doing like crowdfunding tours, essentially for a world tour as well while we were doing it you know our fans believe in us this much then patreon could quite possibly be quite successful so we took that risk. There are a few other bands that I think now do it, Allegion who we toured with across the U.S. started their own campaign as well and there’s a couple others that come to mind but its not something a lot of bands are doing but I kind of feel like its going to be happening a bit more in the future as bands get more confident about what they’re doing, I don’t see a lot of other ways for bands to do this as a full time career without going down that sort of path.
Xavier: The name, Ne Obliviscaris, is Latin for “forget not”, and I don’t think anybody will be forgetting you for a long time. All the hard work you’ve put into making such masterpieces is finally paying off, is there big plans for the band in the future?
Xenoyr: From last year we’ve got quite a big year ahead of us, things we’re still putting together. After the Australian tour we’ve got our European tour and then we’re looking at hopefully going across to Malaysia and even back to the U.S. We are in the process of starting to write our next album as well, so we’re certainly keeping ourselves busy and ideally I’d love to have the full album written by the end of the year and record early next year and release that by mid next year. That would be my goal, as to whether or not that happens. Its going to be a very big year for us.
TOUR DATES
with special guests, Circles
Friday, February 9: Fowler’s Live, Adelaide
Saturday, February 10: Max Watts, Melbourne
Wednesday, February 14: The Basement, Canberra
Thursday, February 15: The Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle
Friday, February 16: Manning Bar, Sydney
Saturday, February 17: The Triffid, Brisbane
Wednesday, February 21: Kings Arms, Auckland*
Thursday, February 22: Valhalla, Wellington*
Saturday, February 24: Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Perth
* Circles Not Appearing
Tickets onsale now from wildthingpresents.com
