1. Greetings to Montreal, I am glad to welcome as interesting band (to this we will return later) as ENSORCELOR for sure are on the pages of Mortem Zine. To begin with - in what state of mind do you find yourself now?

JNH – wintery. Wintery and positive.

2. Let's put aside all the questions about the beginnings of the band and about the band members, your music speaks for you well. I would be interested in the band name- ENSORCELOR sounds really good, but - what is the story behind it, what does it mean, how shall we view it? I have not found anything about it...

JNH – the first thing people always ask us is 'what does that mean?' or just as often 'is that a real word?' and no, it is not a 'real' word, but as far as we're concerned, it is 'real' so long as it conveys something, a sense of meaning, even if that meaning is obscure. I think probably the idea first startred to germinate because of that Emperor song 'Ensorcelled by Khaos,' i don't know what -they- meant by it, but the word just sort of worked itself into our daily speech. In french 'sorcery' is 'sorcellerie,' and so for me 'ensorcel' always suggested some kind of enchantment, but one that had a distinctly corporeal dimension, like a magic which begins to rearrange the body on a fundamental, but perhaps hard to identify level. A sort of intervention that, as Cronenberg might say, is a 'penetration beyond the veil of the flesh.' on maybe a less absurd, or more absurd level, i also think about 'ensorcelling' as something which is a part of our experience of the life-world, like the kinds of effects, the kinds of spell that the world can cast over you – you know, you can't resist it if you're walking through the woods and just feel this incredible thrum around you, or that insane pink sky in winter when you can see almost as well as day. Even food – eating food, good food, too much food, can just change you, reconfigure your thoughts, your experience of your body, your relationship to the world, and how do you break that spell? It's hard to say, usually you just have to wait it out.

3. I would not try to necessarily pigeon-hole your music at all costs, I feel it more like an icy soundtrack. Well, a bit twisted icy soundtrack. I can sense long soundcapes, pent-up fury and even a slight dose of melancholy. Do you matter this formulation? Or, more accurately - how do you yourself view your art?

JNH – we definitely think in terms of 'soundscapes' as much as we do 'songs.' when you're writing 15-20 minute pieces of music it really pushes your sense of what a song properly consists of, which is both challenging and liberating, because you can't just use a normal song structure and just play everything longer or slower or more times, usually. I think it becomes more about evoking a mood or sense of place. there is certainly a sense of melancholy which pervades our music, but i don't think it ends there. The songs on Urarctica Begins are all about the end of the world, in some form or another, but i think what we try to get at is not a sense of celebrating the end, per, se, but at least that it is kind of pointless to be -sad- about something so huge and unstoppable. As a 'soundtrack,' it was not really intentional, but across our first release and into some of the material we're working on now, there is a narrative that persists, a story being told, that both begins and ends on Urarctica Begins, but moments, chapters of which, persist in later songs..

4. I guess that it is quite sure that the environment you live in necessarily has to have influence on your music. Canada is from the most part seen as wild country bound by woods and ice. Could one say that you are kind of fascinated by winter?

JNH – I would love to say that canada is like this mythic place of old, but really – we live in a city. Admittedly, it is cold as fuck here like 5 months of the year, but we're hardly out in the forest. That said, I am totally fascinated by the winter. I love it, i always have, it shapes your relationship to the land and to the passage of time, and it definitely plays a role both in our songs and in our lives as people and musicians. I can't speak for all of us, though, i mean, some people fucking hate the winter, because it's brutal and inconvenient and everyone's sick and depressed all the time. It's easy to romanticize, but i mean, it's not like we're living in cabins up in the mountains (unfortunately).


5. A kind of follow-up would be a question about your musical influences. Please, give us a few important names that helped your evolution. It is a simple question, yet it might be really interesting for the readers because of the variety that I would kind of expect from your answer. As it could be a question of many discussions to closely describe your art...

JNH – do you mean bands? I mean, we certainly listen to lots of heavy metal and black metal and doom, and most of us come out of a punk or hardcore background, so i think that all creeps into what we do. As i don't write any of the music, my influences are more literary. I think it would be fair to say that Immortal and Neil Young probably play almost equal parts in shaping the music we play...

6. ENSORCELOR to me seem like an unexpected apparition at the end of the year, as I got to your record a bit later...I especially value the raw garage nature, or lets call it "trueness" that the EP bears. When it comes to the sound, how has the response been so far? Do you see yourself continuing in the same spirit or are you planning changes? I think that it would be quite a pity to lose your original sound, the spontaneousness ...

JNH – I'm glad you like the rawness, it's interesting, being part of a loose scene where there is so much appreciation for raw, dirty, lo fi, 'kvlt' sounding music, because there are parts of our record that i think we all feel are just plain BAD, but for others it is exactly that sort of flawedness that people like. We've just finished a recording session that i think sounds very different, we put much more time into it and had a very different studio setup (the first was just recorded in the freezing concrete cube that was our jam space, in a decaying old industrial building by the train tracks), so i hope that the sense of urgency and honesty remains, but there is always the risk of losing that as soon as your start putting more thought in ahead of time to what you're working on. At the same time though, the new material was recorded -by friends- -for friends-, in a studio our friends built (Crane Studio), here in the neighbourhood, and we all feel really good about that.

7. "Unarctica Begins" was released in April. How much new material has since then spawned in your heads? Are you planning for example releasing a full-length? Are you planning to use any of the songs from the EP? Will it be a thematic successor or is it going to represent different approach and "face" of ENSORCELOR? I personally value when a band decides to release just new songs on albums. The old ones belong to the old, the new ones to the new :) , why should one repeat oneself again and again!?

Our new songs are much much slower, much darker, and much longer. We are planning to release a 2-song LP sometime in the new year, that is all new material, and thematically very different, i think. It's going to be called ENSORCELOR II: CRUCIFUGE, and where the EP material was very cold, very barren, these songs, while still heavy and slow, are more about life-systems than 'total death'. Both deal with the deconstruction of the human species, by being incorporated into the domains of plants and fungi, so there is a stronger feel of organicism, humidity, growth, fermentation and rot. It's basically about moving outside of the realm of the human. It will be released by our guitarist's label MEDIA TREE. We have also re-recorded one song from the EP, 'This Even Doom,' and another song that fits into the thematic storyarch that the EP set up, that is very very cold, very bleak, which we will be using for future releases. One of these will be a split LP with MONARCH from france, who are good friends of ours, and an amazing band, so we look forward to that.


8. I came across a few of your live pictures on the internet. They look really intense. I especially like the mic stand, not that many bands use tree trunks. :) You are a really young band, have you already played abroad, for example in the US? What can the attendant expect from your show? I guess that total noise destruction is not far from the truth, right?

JNH – we realy don't play much outside of montreal, we did a few dates with MONARCH last summer, but just in canada. We intend to mount a larger tour at some point in the future, but it's tough because we're all very busy and broke. I don't know what to tell people to expect from our shows. Probably for us to be very drunk, very loud, and very slow.

9. When I mentioned a bit of melancholy in connection with ENSORCELOR, I meant the track "This Even Doom", its deeper mood and woman vocal. Does the soft woman vocal voice belong to your bass player Yailén (I hope I did not confuse the names)? We at the Czech Republic have a sludge band with a (not singing) woman bass player - Gospel of the Future. Do you know this name?

JNH – I don't know Gospel of the Future, no, but i'll check them out! The clean singing vocals are Yailen's, who sings more on our new recordings as well.

10. Well, that is all from me, it was a pleasure to chat with you at least this way. All the best and I will be looking forward for your new record, whenever it comes. I hope this is not our last talk, I will remember you. Hail.

JNH – It was our pleasure! Thanks for getting in touch, it's an honour to be approached to be on your blog, take care!