MOTHER CULTURE BY TROND SALTE
Avast hails from Stavanger, Norway, and fuses the aesthetics of black metal with the atmospherics of post-rock to create a soundscape that is both breath-taking and mesmerizing. Since starting out in 2015, Avast has released a two-track EP, been on one European tour, and in the autumn of 2018 the band released its debut record Mother Culture through Dark Essence Records.
Reviewers and promoters have placed the band in many different genres, with blackgaze and post-black metal being the most prominent. Critics have also pointed out that the band is clearly rooted in punk rock and hardcore, particularly considering their lyrics not being centred around typical occult black metal themes. Instead, their lyrics deal with social and environmental issues in a poetic and philosophical disguise.
Our latest release, ‘Mother Culture’, is an atmospheric, dark and poetic blackgaze journey through some of the myths that modern civilization is built upon. The record addresses the potential for a global catastrophe and is based on the philosophical novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
“The World Belongs to Man”, which was the first song we wrote and rehearsed for the record, was probably written all the way back in 2015. I remember that this particular song, plus “The Myth and “Birth of Man”, were part of our live repertoire for a long time, probably from early 2016, and at that time we didn’t even have proper lyrics written for them. I think we finished the lyrics to the entire record way after the recording process itself had started. The recording process was kind of painful because of that, so that’s why we have the lyrics for the sophomore written already. Moreover, recording Mother Culture took forever. We started recording in late 2016 or early 2017 and did not finish until early 2018, so the day when everything was done was a definite highlight, for sure!
https://avastband.bandcamp.com
