WOM Features – Labirinto Premieres New Video “Divino Afflante Spiritu”

Novembro 21, 2018Novembro 21, 2018 Fernando Ferreira

World Of Metal has the honor to premiere the new video from one of the best post-rock band from Latin America: Labirinto! Below you watch the video for “Divino Afflante Spiritu”

“It was conceived at very difficult moment when we had lost our very dear dog Joca, who had always been with us, since the beginning of Labirinto. This video is dedicated to him. It’s a myriad of emotions that flood over us everytime we play the song. We tried to convey all these feelings in the video in a more surrealistic way. We shared the concept and ideas we had with clip director André Schutz and he was able to synthesize everything in a dark but very beautiful way, full of metaphores.” says Labirinto’s guitarrist Erick Cruxen.

According to Schutz: “Adding images to instrumental music is a trap. You have to be very careful so that the plot doesn’t steal the music’s lead role. That’s why we chose to create a visual atmosphere without a very clear narrative, but in which the conceptual elements would look more evident. We tried to build a space that would be located between the spiritual and mudane worlds and that’s where the characters of the video gravitate.“

São Paulo’s LABIRINTO are not the spearheads of a vivid local scene, but to stay within the realms of post-rock metaphory, more of an isolated island within a vast ocean of nothingness. There is not much contemporary instrumental heavy music anywhere in South America. There are hardly any record labels and international bands seldomly make it over on tour. All the more surprising that this island of LABIRINTO has been releaseing records for 13 years already.

„Divino Afflante Spiritu“ is already the band’s 10th release, but only the 3rd full-length album. The band’s back catalogue is made up of a number of EPs and splits (with THISQUIETARMY among others), a detail which showcases the band’s strong roots in the DIY scene. Guitarist Erick Cruxen and drummer Muriel Curi, a long-married couple, have learned how take control of every aspect of the band’s universe themselves: from running their own record label to booking their own tours to running their own recording studio, the internationally renowned Dissenso Studios in São Paulo. The band flew in Billy Anderson for the production of previous album „Gehenna“.This time, Cult Of Luna‘s Magnus Lindberg was hired, but the entire production happened via the internet, exemplary for this time we live in, without Magnus ever setting foot on Brazilian soil. „Since the pre-production phase, Muriel kept in touch with Magnus“, Cruxen comments. „We talked a lot to him about our plans and ideas for the tracking sessions. He did an online support video session during the recording sessions, and we were aligning ideas for technical decisions. He was monitoring the whole recording process, basically. At the end, we sent him the audio files and he mixed and mastered the album at his own Redmount Studios in Stockholm.“

The result is an album of dense and menacing atmospherics, textural drones carefully layered over and blended into the heavy guitar riffs’s shimmering, beautiful distortion-scapes – and for the first time ever, vocals make their debut on a LABIRINTO album, on opening track „Agnus Dei“. „We invited Elaine Campos, she’s been singing in Brazilian punk and crust bands for over 20 years“, comments Curi. „It’s a huge pleasure for us to have such a veteran from the punk scene, a feminist and anarchist, guest on the track.“ It’s clear from the first synth drones inaugurating the opening track that doom lurks on the horizon, that „Divino Afflante Spiritu“ is not going to be a soundtrack to a tropical paradise – it’s a dark, cold record. „This album has a great emotional weight, explains Cruxen. „It flourished during a very difficult phase in which we lost a very dear entity. It was a whirlwind of emotions that are materialized whenever we play the songs. This album, more than anything, represents for us loss and suffering, but also, passion and friendship.“

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