Ines Lukkanen – Embassy of Silence

Interview by Cristina Gregori

Embassy of Silence is a finnish metal-rock band. Catchy melodies filled with grandeur, as well as experimentation are key elements in this musical project. Actually,after an acoustic tour, they are working on a new album that promises a real gem for lovers of the genre. We have still to wait for the spring of 2014,but fortunately we as a guest the voice of EOS, Ines, that surely splits something more with us.

Yes, it’s always nice talk with you guys and girls!

Tero, our guitar player and main composer  has another band called Saattue, he asked me to feature with some vocals in their recordings and when we started talking about music we realized that we both want to do some kinda of project where we make music that takes influence from band as Opeth, Shape of Despair and Type o Negative to name a few. Tero then said “Ok, let’s gonna compose some songs and I’ll send to you” and I said “I am sure you will send me a lot of songs, yeah (sarcastically)” and indeed I was “Oh my God,this shit is truly amazing”. So we first borrowed some members from Saattue and later some of the members have changed but for example our bass player Samu is still here and going strong. That was how we started. We came up with the name, so seriously it’s like the most boring story ever. I said “I will make a list of every band names and you can choose if you think some of them are good” and Embassy of Silence just was sounding good, it isn’t like a epic back story with explosion and stuff. I supposed later that maybe it’s a bit ironic because our music isn’t silence and silence is really silence but there’s not really a lot in the background of the name.

I’ve sang since I was three. I’ve been in several bands but not many of them have made any recordings, with one band that it really happened though. We made some songs,  posted them to a site called mikseri.net, where Tero heard it. He thought: “Hmm,I like this woman’s voice and maybe she would sounds good in contrast with Saattue‘s music”. I was guest in the first and the second albums (ndr: she consults Tero), I don’t really know why Tero wanted me featured on the second one as well but I supposed it was awesome! (laughs)

I guess when we talked about influence that we would like to have, like I said earlier, we thought they could be  Opeth, Type o Negative and Shape of Despair but later we even had such band as Kingston Wall and Pink Floyd and various like old progressive rock bands influencing our music. We’ve been going more and more into progressive direction which we love. And also Anathema, you can still hear some influences in our music to these days.

Well, actually pretty much after our first album “Euphorialight” we started composing right the way ’cause it’s just very natural for us to always being making new songs. It’s again pretty boring the story, in the sense that when we thought we had great stuff we went to the studio. “Antler Velvet” as an album showed a lot of progress, change and growth in us as means both musicians as composers and also we found a little bit more groove and speed to the music. It’s still sounding like us, and maybe we also put a little bit more thought into the concept so that it started to sound more professional. I mean of course we’ve always been professional about things, but this time I think we showed we really had found our own sound.

Actually, I love it when I’m asked that question, because some people really just consume music like junk food. My ideas at least used to come mainly from books and movies, but these days ideas may well come from a single simple idea or like a theme. “Touch the Zenith” is a good example, I personally don’t believe in rebirth, but the concept is really romantic and exciting – that we would have souls that would go on through the eternity and and then we have learned everything that we can, we would finally be released to the universe. The song is about two souls that have been meeting throughout history since they first started their journey. I don’t even remember where that came from, but I thought it was so interesting that it deserved a song.

I think we’ve always sort of had concept albums even when the concept has come to us only after the release. I actually just thought about this when I was sitting in the bus last Wednesday, that there is a carrying theme on the next album. The songs seem to go into the direction of very morbid, like death and murder featuring in several of these songs in different ways, and I know this doesn’t sound very original of a  metal band that sing about death and murder?! OH MY GOD, call the press but in the lyrics I’m trying to approach these themes with new directions and angles. I mean, a death isn’t necessarily the death of a person, it could be the death of an ideal. So many options to go with there. So I think this time it really will be a concept album.

First, I would like to say the fact that we’re not really sports fans. Our second guitar player Jarno had some contacts to a guy who  was arranging the music in the event and they need some songs, and so we were like “Yeah, we will do it, of course we will do it! Women’s American football – how cool is that, and also sexy!”. So, we made and recorded the song (ndr:she consults Tero) in a week, so we were really fast because we were totally inspired with the idea of making music that was completely different from how we usually do it, and that’s the fact why the song is quite short and maybe easier. We also appeared as guests in the actual event,the gold medal championship game. We got to toss the coin, it was so cool! In the video we had some women from the Finnish team, and we shot the video where they trained, as if they were just having a training session, and we played in the background. Then at the end the girls just attacked Tero because he got the ball. They said “We can’t really attack him, we would break his back and neck” and we said “No, no, come on, we’ll get a new guitarist! Maybe not, maybe next time!”

Well, it’s not impossible. I think some bands that always had, like us, sort of special acustic vibe and tend to release an acoustic album at some point. We may do, we haven’t really thought about it. As the other question, at some point, when we started, we had some acoustic gig before the brief tour, and we realized that our songs translate to acoustic versions quite well. It doesn’t really stop as from working out  but each instrument is still heard better by the audience. I mean it doesn’t really require much as for the audio setup of a venue, so I don’t know, it’s also a bit more intimate for some reasons; the veil or wall between the audience and the band kind of tends to thin somehow. It’s awesome.

Embassy of Silence as always and will always love you, keep loving us back, keep following us on Facebook and keep waiting for the next album which is going to be even better than the previous ones!  At last we think so, and we’re pretty sure that you will too. So kisses, love and hugs. Thank you very much!

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