IKARIA BY MINDPATROL
Luxembourgish Extreme Progressive Metal band Mindpatrol has specialised in narrating stories through its music ever since its birth in 2012. To breathe life into the worlds and characters of their imagination, Mindpatrol uses all means loud and capable of drawing an image in front of the listeners’ inner eye.
We call our style extreme progressive metal since we like spicing up good old Prog with harsher Metal genres. Right now, we’re preparing the release of our 4th album, ‘Ikaria’, which is released on June 4th via Green Zone Records. „Ikaria“ is a concept album telling the story of the eponymous city – a place where an omnipresent mind monitoring mechanism forbids all kinds of ill intent or crime. Talking about freedom of speech, eh? A self-written German novel accompanies the album.
Our 3rd album ‘Vulture City and ‘Ikaria’ play in the same setting, one being a free but truly rotten place, the other a seemingly perfect, but in the end, similarly rotten place. They represent two opposites, neither of which is good. We went with the bird as symbolism since it deals with freedom and takes a reasonable approach to the extreme, thus including the image of Ikarus, who flew too close to the sun.
The process of creating something new is pretty much what fuels our creativity, just like consuming the output of other creative minds is. I don’t think any singular event shaped us to that extent. Instead, it’s the many small joys and challenges that motivate us to be creative. We just enjoy doing what you’re doing, and I think an open mind helps a lot. Be it books, movies, music, other forms of art or life itself, as long as you open up to all those things around you and think over them thoroughly every once in a while; there’s an abundance of inspiration to be found.
All of our albums are indeed concept albums. We like the intense atmosphere a concept album can build through the narrative and a reprise or two. The stories we tell are works of fiction, mainly to entertain and deliver emotionally. Sure, sometimes there’s also a meaning behind it, but we don’t intend to be preachy about that. It’s up to the listener to discover that layer.
The artwork was created by Stéphane Pianon, who did all of our album covers so far. He’s a friend with a special talent just to get what we have in mind without knowing every minute detail. Given how “Ikaria” plays in a seemingly perfect city with many flaws under the surface, we went with a more straightforward approach this time, depicting this duality through using white for the clean and futuristic touch and red for the bad things buried beneath.
www.mindpatrolband.com
