Jan 312025
 


photo by Ben Redcatcity

(Last fall we had the privilege and pleasure of premiering and reviewing a full stream of Le Déclin, a new album by the veteran French band Ataraxie. Today it’s an equal pleasure to present an extremely interesting and topical interview by our Comrade Aleks with two founders and key members of the band.)

They’ve played extreme death-doom since 2000; they have three guitarists in the lineup; they are Ataraxie, and their fifth album Le Déclin was released in October 2024. The band demonstrate a high level of stability, as their new material consists of four tracks with a total duration around 80 minutes. It means that Ataraxie keep on holding to their old patterns and mix both slow and crushing funeral doom riffs with bloodthirsty death metal slaughter and merciless blast beasts. These elements help to make an emphasis on the band’s nihilistic manifest against the foulness of humanity corrupted to the core.

Honestly, it’s a familiar picture to Ataraxie’s fans, because its founders Jonathan Théry (bass, vocals), Pierre Sénécal (drums), and Frédéric Patte-Brasseur (guitars) are still here. And their companions Hugo Gaspar (guitars) and Julien Payan (guitars) aren’t rookies either; they’ve spread these bleak vibes of doom and damnation for the entire decade.

But these guys not only know how to perform such painful, agonizing music, but also how to represent it precisely in a verbal way. And in the end, this interview with Jonathan and Frédéric is something I’m proud of.

 

 

Hi gents! How are you? Your sixth album Le Déclin was released on October 25th; do you already have some feedback? How far did it reach?

Jo: Fine thanks! The last months were pretty hectic to promote our new album and prepare the first gigs. Yet, it was worth it as we’re really satisfied about feedbacks we’ve received for the moment. Even if we don’t play the most consensual genre of doom/death metal, the overall feedbacks have been really positive. Our most loyal fans were happy about it, as that’s what matters the most for us.

Fred: we just wrapped up a short tour for the album release and the feedback was highly positive. It couldn’t start a better way.

 

I sent questions to Monolithe, and asked them the same question: Do you feel the support of local media now, after all those years in the very catacombs of the French underground? Did the situation change for good or for bad?

Jo: I do think we have support of all French local media that truly support doom metal for years. I don’t really care about the rest, as our music is and has to remain a genre for connoisseurs. For instance, we had good reviews in Metalians, Rock Hard France, Thrashocore, and Satan Owes Us Money to name a few. I hope it will give us more regular opportunities to play in France because we have to admit that’s not the country where we play the most.

Yes, it definitely changed over the years. Looking back in 2000 when we started the band, there was no real doom metal scene at all in France. It arrived a bit later thanks to the doom-metal.com forum, and then the genre definitely became more popular thanks to subgenres like drone (khanate, SUNNO)))), stoner (Sleep or Electric wizard) and funeral doom (bedroom projects, Ahab, Bell Witch). Now there is a strong doom metal scene worldwide and France now has a really diverse doom scene with gig-quality bands like Funeralium, Dionysiaque, Nornes, Subterraen, Barabbas, Conviction, Mauvaise Foi, Cerbère, Hangman’s Chair or Cult Of Occult.

 

 

Your previous album Résignés was released five years ago, and a damn lot of shit has happened since then. How did the band spend this period?

Jo: Actually, Résignés was a cursed album as we didn’t have much time to promote it ‘live’ as the pandemic started shortly after its release. The good thing is that this pandemic gave us plenty of time to focus and work on new songs. So I started to compose new songs at that time and started to exchange them with our guitar players Hugo and Julien and that was a really prolific period. We even still have 2 songs left for our next album from this period. Then, it took around two years to adjust musical arrangements all together inside our rehearsal room and then we finally entered the studio.

In parallel, we tried to promote a bit more for Résignés as no gigs were allowed shortly after its release because of lockdowns. We played at really cool festivals, Dutch Doom Days or Dusk till Doom for instance, and that’s how we met David from the label Ardua and then agreed on a deal with him.

Fred: I’ll always have this feeling that Résignés didn’t get a fair chance to be played live more, but that’s every band’s curse for this period. As for myself I shared my duties between Ataraxie and Conviction, the trad. Doom band I perform with, and I was deeply involved in the arrangements, preproduction, and production stages of this new album. It was intense, tiring, but I say it was worth it.

 

 

How often did Ataraxie play live during this period? And do you plan to play more frequently now with the new material on your hands?

Jo: Maybe 4 gigs a year if my memory is not too much drowned inside beer, ahah. As told earlier, we did our best to promote Résignés live when it was possible to play again after the pandemic, but it was quite difficult to find gigs. Indeed, there are now many tours in Europe so gigs now have to be booked at least 1 year in advance. Thus, we had to change the way we searched for gigs. So now,  a friend of us (David, i.e., drummer of Sordide) is in charge of doing it and it’s now much more efficient.

We have several gigs already scheduled next year and even a tour (mostly in Germany for the moment) so I think people should have the opportunity to see us on stage if they will.

Fred: I have the feeling that the covid crisis consequences are gradually behind us, so I guess you can expect us to be more frequently playing live from now on.

 

All of your albums are pretty huge, and, for example, L’être et la nausée (2013) was presented as a double-CD edition. Did you keep your creativity at tight rein this time to fit all of your ideas into one CD?

Jo: Thanks for your great words! Yes, we definitely always keep an eye on the length of the songs to fit inside various physical formats. If you look carefully at the length of Le Déclin, it’s 82min on DLP whereas it’s 80min on CD/cassette. Actually, we realized a bit too late these 2 extra minutes, ahah. So Fred had to do a special master file to make this album fit on a single CD and this was fine for the DLP format. So yes, format limits are a real constraint for us and that’s why we now tend to limit our albums to 4 songs. You may also have noticed that the price of DLP has raised a lot, so making a TLP is not an option.

Fred: Don’t worry about the 80 master, we carefully managed to cut here and there in a way you won’t really notice compared to the 82-minute version. Still, it was an interesting and unexpected challenge to perform that at the very final stages of this recording process!

 

What was the most difficult part for you when you worked on these songs? Where do you feel that you succeeded?

Jo: I think the most difficult part was to complete all guitar and bass arrangements and find room for everyone. As the idea was to keep our music dynamic and rich, we did our best to keep them interesting for listeners. So when you have a bass and three guitars, it’s often a matter of tradeoff. You’ve got to keep what truly serves the music. So the next difficulty was to find the sound for each instrument and the best mixing settings. We spent a lot of time on this with Sylvain Biguet, who is a real nerd. I think we had something like around 27 mix versions and everyone had still some comments even at the end! So yes, again a matter of tradeoffs, and perfection is an ideal.

Fred: I second Jo on that question. It’s not always that easy to back off what your musician ego commands you to add on an existing arrangement, but in the end, what the music needs gives us the last word.

As for the mixdown process, I think we told Sylvain a dozen times that we were satisfied with his latest version of the mix, but he would always come up with ideas to make it sound better. And I’m glad we listened to him — he made it sound more huge each time!

 

 

How did you feel about the band’s progress in this material? I’d say that Le Déclin looks like a new step for the band, but it’s hard to tell where you grew up.

Jo: Thanks again. It’s always hard to answer this kind of question as music’s inspiration comes to us naturally, if you know what I mean. So I don’t really know what triggered this. I can only tell you that we will always try to not repeat ourselves. We don’t want to become the Bolt Thrower of doom/death even if our genre has narrower limits than Ulver’s music. Everything is relative. Unconsciously wise, I think it may just be a matter of influences and the way we digest them over time. Maybe our musical stomach has aged well, like a refined wine!

Fred: Thank you. From my window, I take every album as a new challenge, with the previous one as the root for what has to be accomplished. I think we all have a strong idea of what Ataraxie should be, as a musical entity, and one of the key aspects is to be able to keep things interesting, musically speaking. That pushes us to experiment with a few things when composing and arranging songs, which we only keep if it fits what we expect Ataraxie to be.

 

The promo sheet states that the new songs’ lyrics push the same themes that were already presented in Résignés. Were there some specific cases that inspired you?

Jo: (Un)fortunately our modern world will ever be a neverending source of inspiration for me. Politicians, media. and the masses are the worst source of inspiration for me. The lowness of the world has never been so worrying, to be honest. As you can see, everything is now about views even when facts are here. That’s how the most vile politicians/tyrants have ascended to power, to say ‘I’m so clever that I don’t believe in this even if thousands of scientists proved the contrary’. If you say that everything is about alternative facts and do your best to avoid educating the masses, the cocktail is deadly.

As a scientist, I don’t understand how anti-science movements (global warming deniers and antivaxxers, to name the worst ones) now can rule a country like USA. They now may have a head of health who is antivax! For me, it’s like heading NASA and believing that the earth is flat. It’s just completely WTF! And of course, we also have our dose of insane populists in Europe whose inspiration are all the WW2 tyrants.

 

You had damn impressive, challenging artwork for Résignés, and here we have quite a bleak one. How did you come up with that minimalistic image?

Jo: Actually, when it was time to work on the artwork of Le Déclin, I wanted a picture that sums up well all the concepts of the lyrics at the same time. I wanted something strong and classy that embodies what will be biggest challenge for Mankind to overcome, i.e., global warming. When we searched for a new artist to work with, I was contacted by Arnaud Daval who is a French landscape photographer based in USA. I was blown away by the quality of his work.

So when we exchanged about the concept he didn’t know exactly how to embody this at first. Yet, after several back and forth’s, he finally suggested this pic and we all knew that was the right one. It’s massive, concrete, and extremely sad at the same time.

The variety of this world is vanishing step by step under the flames of capitalism. In the meantime, people only keep on worrying about the 100th name to describe a new sexuality or Selena Gomez’s new boyfriend. What a wonderful world!

 

Considering this, how do you see the 2024 Summer Olympics’ opening ceremony? Is it triumph of freedom or a celebration of globalization? A brave manifest or a hypocritical shit-parade?

Jo: It’s a complex question to answer because it has to be well balanced.

On the one hand, I was happy to see bands from many diverse genres playing in this opening ceremony. Indeed, to be honest, there is no diversity at all in France when it deals with music. It is mainly about rap, electro, and French popular singers like Michel Sardou, to name the most grotesque one. So that was cool to see metal represented by Gojira promoting metal to the world, and the other usual bands we know unfortunately too well here. It gave visibility to the metal genre.

As usual we also had all Christian retards screaming blasphemy around what was supposed to represent the last supper. Nobody will ever know if it was done on purpose or not. To be honest, I don’t care. but that was at least enjoyable to see these fuckers complaining. Satire has always been a big part our culture in a secular country like France where you’re free to believe in Santa Claus, garden gnomes, or a bearded hustler.

On the other hand, that was obviously a big hypocritical commercial event that didn’t care that much about real human values at the end. To make this event happen, the city of Paris pushed all homeless and drug addicts outside of the city.  And remember, we organized Paralympic ones as well; we were happy about results but politicians have never done the least for disabled people. Last but not least, in a context where France has a huge financial debt, we must cut funds everywhere, so mostly ecology measures, education, and health are concerned. So yes, the financial consequences of this event will have dire consequences for generations to come. So yes, I totally agree with you this event had a big hypocritical side as well.

Long story short, everything is about “fifty shades of grey”, ahah, and this opening ceremony was one of the examples. There is a bit of light in everything but we still live in a dark world!

Fred: I was especially happy to see Gojira perform for the opening ceremony, but I must add that my other highlight was Philippe Katerine singing a song (un)dressed as the Greek god Bacchus, singing a song about how less violent the world could be if we all lived nude. I didn’t expect at all this guy to be here, it was surreal, as this guy usually is.

And I was not so surprised by the hateful reactions his song received… reminds me of this quote from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, about Jesus being sacrificed: “What did he say to make them so mad at him?” – Love each other out.

The Olympic Games were, despite their disadvantages, a two-week welcome break in the middle of a political crisis in France that left most French people on their nerves, and still does to this day. We all witness that our world is more and more fucked up, and our way to cope with it is to play and sing about it.

 

Accepted! Thanks for the interview gents!

Jo: Thanks for this interesting interview and see you all doomsters on the road to doom your soul!

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