Jun 272010
 

Eryn Non Dae is one of our favorite French metal bands. Hell, they’re one of our favorite metal bands, period. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve put up no fewer than three posts about them and their awesome 2009 album Hydra Lernaïa. You can check out our review of that album here and our interview of END here. In our review, we wrote:

“Alternating between brutal headbanging heaviness and shrieking turbulent intricacy, the music has a very experimental, discordant, anarchic vibe. It’s dense, intense, grim, sharply angled, and often surreal. . . . Hydra Lernaïa is an adventure in the unexpected. It’s obviously the product of considerable thought, extensive work, and a high level of technical proficiency in the playing — nothing less could have succeeded in realizing on such an ambitious game-plan. This is dark math metal with brains as well as brawn, and emotional power as well as rigorous complexity.”

When we were conducting our interview of END back in January, the band was getting ready for a big live show in Toulouse at a venue called The Bikini. We couldn’t go (our teleporter was on the fritz) but over time, videos of the performance have dribbled out. We featured a video of the song “Blistering Hate” in the third of our previous posts. And yesterday we discovered that END has just released a pro-shot video of “Existence Asleep” performed live at the same show.

The song is a killer, and so is the video — excellent picture quality and a really cool light show. END has also recently set up a ReverbNation page, which allowed us to create a widget with tracks for you to stream from Hydra Lernaïa. So, after the jump, we’ve got the video, the streaming music — and some welcome news we got from END’s guitarist and backing vocalist Franck Quintin. Continue reading »

Jan 292010
 

As part of our periodic look-backs at 2009 and the albums that really grabbed us by the throat, we wrote yesterday about Eryn Non Dae and their mind-bending 2009 release, Hydra Lernaïa. The band also graciously agreed to answer some of our off-the-wall interview questions by e-mail.

They also generously agreed to my request for a plane ticket to Toulouse so I could see them play live on February 18. And all I have to do is buy them tickets to fly back with me to the U.S. so they can play here. Such a deal!

Bass-player Mika André was the designated hitter for our curve-ball questions, and he responded to them just as you would expect based on END’s music: No rushed, off-the-top-of-the-head answers, but responses that reflected some serious thought, effort, and intelligence. Not your typical metalhead interview — just as END is far from a typical band.  (read the full interview after the jump . . .) Continue reading »