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France is a place with awesome artists since aeons ago. We can always expect really good things coming from Delacroix’s country. Öxxö Xööx is definitely a banda that if you like creativity and uniqueness you should listen. Singing in their own language the band brings lots of emotional moments in the song, parts that you need to feel. See below the interview we did with them.
GroundCast: To warm up, tell us how the band started.
Since I was kid I was fascinated with parallel universes and beings external to our world. I always drew a lot and worked this ideas out. I watched a lot of fantastic and science fiction movies but I often noted that the imagery was more or less similar, I saw a much bigger picture.
The Neverending Story moved me a lot, as it is a story about an infinite reality attacked by the
Nothing. This is Fantastica, the universe made by mans fantasy. I was eight when it was released and the concepts of the movie still influences me. For me Fantastica is a reality where we all come from before incarnating ourselves in these bodies limited by five senses and three dimensions. I always felt cramped in it and I quickly developed the idea where consciousness should purify and free itself of duality, density and earths limitations.
I started this project in 2006. At the beginning I told a lot about extra-terrestrial/dimensional beings, then subjects as nature, ecology, spirituality disconnected from religion, darkness, light, love, etc.
GroundCast: What are your influences?
Absolutely anything is source of influence: reality, a deep conversation, a scenery, a work of art, a dream, an interaction with an animal, a plant… I spend a lot of time searching about strange domains, guided only by my intuition in hope to come closer to an unattainable truth. It recalls me a scene in the first MIB when they search about the insectoid ET. Agent K says ironically that there is sometimes truth in official news, while buying the most extravagant magazines because he knows he will find truth in them. Our world is a world of lies. Truth is often where we don’t expect it and I think it is more crazy and astonishing than what we can imagine. My goal is to understand why we are distanced from the universal truth, from light. As the Prince of St-Exupéry said: “language is the source of misunderstanding”. It is our vocal chords that allows us to lie. If we were all telepathically connected we couldn’t lie and this reality would be more pure and luminous.
To answer your question. I am influenced by all things that would help me to uncloak all the maleficent gears that hides things that we shouldn’t know. Because it would free ourselves from fear, and fear is used to control humans mind.
GroundCast: Something intriguing is that the band created its own language to the lyrics. Can
you talk a bit about this and how this idea appeared and how was this process to create
a language?
Its creation was a natural process for me. I didn’t felt at ease with existing languages like French or English. I felt skimped. I didn’t liked to be forced to use established words or sounds that weren’t created by me. I had the feeling to borrow and use something that wasn’t mine. So I opened completely my instinct and started to sing with the sounds that I often used. I isolated each individual sound and made a lexicon from it. I have about four hundred words now.
GroundCast: The band has two Full-Lengths, Rëvëürt and Nämïdäë. What are the main concepts behind these releases, are they connected somehow?
These two albums are effectively linked. They are part of a global process. Öxxö Xööx is also the synonym of the duality in all things. Thus I had the idea to compose albums in pairs even if it doesn’t seem at first sight. The global idea of this project is the evolution to ones self, the return to an infinite perfection that we lost when we came into this world. To make a quick resume, Rëvëürt is the awakening of our heart, our light, our soul, our love that atrophied in contact of the density, a scream coming of the depth of our soul to tell that we are sick of evil, it is a global awakening.
Nämïdäë is the realization once we woke up, realization of the world we are in, looking at things and crying all the tears of our body in front of the darkness and the war. These are dark albums, but it is the beginning of an awakening. I have the concept of the four albums to come, always in pair.
GroundCast: How is the composition process? Do you have a main composer or songwriter?
I compose all on my computer and with my guitar, intuitively and without any obstacle. When I have the beginning of a structure I analyze it and then work the melodies in detail while checking the harmonic coherence. I invented my own way to compose that is quite effective now (after twenty years experimenting, I started to build my own experience and methods). The composition isn’t what takes me the most time. It is all what concerns arrangements, setting things with the band, lyrics and visuals that take a lot of time.
GroundCast: We are in the Internet era where everything can be downloaded (almost everything), what do you think about it?
Like anything that constitutes our world, there is good and bad. Free content is a good thing because it permits to culture and new ideas to develop in human consciousness, but it is also bad for the financial health of the artist, that like everyone, has rent and bills to pay. Personally I think that the true artist doesn’t commercialize his work. Art is something that comes from somewhere else that can’t be judged nor sold. It comes from another dimension, more pure and infinite. The artist must do what it has do to without learning to sell himself. If it brings him money, that’s good, but it isn’t important. How many artists changed the face of the world when they lived as beggars. Anyway when we work for the light, it gives it back well, even if it is the hardest road.
In this skimped world, art is a flamboyant shout, that gives strength, hope, that disturbs or provokes thought about our condition as living incarnate being and our narrow mindedness. A flower that squeezed itself through the cold, gray and rigid concrete. A true artist doesn’t fear himself and isn’t lonely in his heart because he is connected to something other than this world, something superior, transcending the ridiculous paradigms of this limited world. True art is beautiful, wild and free.
I think that every person that is fan of an artist using this approach shall help him, in this occurrence financially, to help them to do what they do. We are at a time where sponsorship doesn’t exist anymore and where people don’t buy albums as well. Something is unbalanced. People should realize that.
GroundCast: And about streaming services as Spotify?
Streaming is a good thing to discover artists. What is a pity is that society isn’t in a righteous approach. If we love an artist, we should have a mean to give them a little money, material, food, etc. But I don’t believe it exist. The artist needs a certain amount of views for the host to pay him for his music/video. It should exist a simple mean to give money to an artist that we appreciate.
GroundCast: A question that maybe lots of people make, how should we pronounce the name Öxxö Xööx?
The most easy way possible.
GroundCast: Making some research I saw that the member are involved in different musical projects, while Öxxö Xööx it’s a bit more metal. How is the musical scene in France?
Living in France isn’t always easy for an artist. It is an old culture. It isn’t easy to break the barriers of the minds. Paradoxically when it is difficult, the human mind learns to surpass and impose itself.
It is valid for bands, but also for the managers. Put simply, it isn’t obvious, but everything is possible when we want it really. Above all when we want to go to the sun.
GroundCast: How would you define the Öxxö Xööx?
Öxxö Xööx is my baby. It is my mean to express myself on a lot of things that I can’t express with words. Like ideas,
particular vibrations, philosophical concepts, visual aspects referring to another reality than ours, etc. It is a mean for me to be understood by others, to tell what I have to tell and to do what I have to do down here. To connect with my imagination freely, without restraint. Öxxö Xööx is like a tree that was planted deeply in earth but that grows and extends his branches and fruits far in the sky. Linking by this way the matter and the immaterial, allowing the light to flood the roots and heal the earth.
GroundCast: Thank you for the interview, now the space is yours to say something to our readers.
You’re welcome, it was a pleasure.
There is so much to say. An empty space is a space that must be filled. I will take that to say that I believe that we are all part of a luminous network, that is limited by something unconnected to the harmony and the perfection in order to disunite and hurt us. Quantum entanglement proves that separation between objects is an illusion, that they are linked, not independent and that we should consider it as whole system. The entire universe would be an unique and big living being. That would say when we are violent or that we kill to feed ourselves (an animal for example), we affect ourself and kill ourself too. Therefore we should love each other (all living beings) as ourselves in order to purify and tend to the multiversal harmony and perfection. All goes to love, it is ineluctable.