Ehnahre Interview

VP- Ehnahre plays some deeply disturbing music. Slow and deliberate. What is the concept behind it and

is it difficult to play at slower tempos?

Ryan - The idea behind Ehnahre was to make metal that really is truly dark and disgusting. I feel like a lot of metal bands who talk about "darkness" and "evil", are quite the opposite, playing power chords, and danceable beats. Dancing is not dark. Neither is consonance. We wanted to utilize extreme dissonance, serialism, improvisation, and a liberal usage of loose meter. Playing slow is hard, particularly when the meter is so lax, and we have to do everything by eye contact and visual cues. This also creates some difficult scenarios live, trying to watch the other guys, and do vocals at the same time.

VP- Where did the name Ehnahre come from and how does it tie into the band?

Ryan - The name Ehnahre is a sort of phonetic spelling of the letters N R. When we were in high school, we had a band named Negative Reasoning, which was taken from the title of an Eyehategod song (Non Conductive Negative Reasoning, off of the album Dopesick). Everyone called us N R for short, and now we took that, and just spelled it out. So now I guess it's just our little nod to Eyehategod.

VP - Tell me about your latest release.

Ryan - "Alpha/Omega" is a sort of concept EP. It was written based on two poems by W.B. Yeats. Side A, entitled "Leda and the Swan" is based on a Greek myth, which is often interpreted as a creation myth, the beginning of the world. Side B is called "The Second Coming" which is about the end of the world. We tried to utilize some of the imagery to text paint, and create a "vision" for these tumultuous events. We are now preparing to enter the studio to do our next full length, which will be entitled "Taming the Cannibals", and we are hoping to have it out by September/October 2010.

VP - What is a typical audience reaction to one of your performances? Do you find it more thrilling if they hate it?

Ryan - Typical reactions are confusion, people walking out of the room, and every once in a while, something in the music will pique peoples curiosity and they'll enjoy it. I guess atypically, compared to a lot of experimental musicians, I am quite troubled when people hate it, particularly if it's because they just don't understand it, don't care to try to understand it, or don't understand why we would make music like that.

VP – What plans are in the future?

Ryan -We have a new record being released in October on Crucial Blast so we're trying to finish that up right now. We're also hoping to do a lot of playing out this fall. We'll also be touring for about 3 weeks in October, and 11 days of that tour will be with PussyGutt, a drone/doom band from Boise. We'll be working on our next record after that, and hopefully going back to tour Europe in spring/summer 2011.