In 2014, Australian prog metallers Ne Obliviscaris ventured into unchartered waters and launched a crowd-funding campaign that enabled them to finance a world tour, something no other band in the world has achieved. WHen they released their fourth album, Exul, they explained the emotional story of its conception to Prog....
"Xen’s secretly a vampire, he’s 463 years old!” chuckles Tim Charles, Ne Obliviscaris’ violinist and ‘clean’ singer. “If you see photos of him from 20 years ago, he pretty much looks the same,” he continues.
The photos Charles is referring to come from the band’s conception – they’re now in their 20th year – and he’s right. Harsh vocalist/lyricist Marc ‘Xenoyr’ Campbell, also known as Xen, exudes an ethereal glow sitting on a regal gothic throne in his home for our interview, having not appeared to have aged a day since then.
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“On his birthday every year on social media it’s become a tradition of asking fans to send him rainbows and unicorns because we’ve also never seen him wear anything except for black in the last 20 years,” Charles laughs.
Campbell shakes his head and confirms, “My inbox is an abomination. It’s terrible.”
It’s this lighthearted banter yet clear, deep admiration between the band members that’s contributed to the success of Ne Obliviscaris. As Campbell and Charles sit down with Prog for their first interview since 2017’s Urn, the topic quickly arises of the band’s formation two decades ago and how they came to be.
“Tim and myself are ultimately the last of the founding members of the band,” Campbell nods. The pair met on an online metal forum where Campbell had mentioned starting a band.
“I saw that you were online talking about strings in metal and I contacted you asking if you’d be interested,” he recounts to Charles. “I’m trying to do something. I have zero experience. ‘Come along to rehearsal and see if you’re interested,’” he smirks.
Charles recalls the event without a moment’s hesitation, “Yes!” he exclaims, smiling, “I remember I played a violin solo from a song called Angina by Tristania, and Xen knew the song and was really impressed that this violinist knew this fairly obscure song.”
That mutual knowledge and common ground progressed from that moment to become the true foundation of today’s version of Ne Obliviscaris.
“It’s music with beautiful extremes,” Campbell says.
“It’s intense in many different directions,” Charles agrees. “It’s not quickly digested. If you listen to it once, you’re only going to get part of it. You’ve got to listen to it multiple times to appreciate everything that’s going on.”
The two agree that Ne Obliviscaris are extreme progressive metal mixed in with elements of black metal, classical and even jazz, as Charles explains: “There are plenty of people we know where we’re the most extreme band they listen to but they got hooked by a section of a song that wasn’t metal. Plus, you know, not all bands have a violinist.”
Campbell laughs and adds, “All the mothers like Tim.”
It’s not been an easy road though, as Charles confirms that for the first nine years, they didn’t really get anywhere: “The 2003 line-up all fell apart very quickly. Within about 12 months the entire band changed.”
Matt Klavins (rhythm guitar) joined the Australian six-piece in 2004, but according to Charles, “a lot of it was just by chance”. “We got Benjamin Baret [lead guitar] across from France in 2008,” he adds, “As well as Martino Garattoni, who is our bassist from Italy.” The band, as Charles points out, is international with half of the members in Australia and the other half dotted around Europe.
Following their nine-year struggle to get anywhere, Charles notes that the 2012 release of Portal Of I saw significant growth for Ne Obliviscaris.
“It’s been really pleasing and exciting to watch because with each record, more opportunities get offered to us and it’s been really gratifying after that first decade where we didn’t really get anywhere,” he smiles.
In fact, Portal Of I was their first album release, Campbell recalls. “A lot of people that are new listeners to us only think that we’ve been around for 10 years because of that,” he laughs, “They don’t realise we’d done 10 years of hard work before the first album.”
Since the time that Portal Of I was released, the band members believed they would remain a very underground band. Charles explains, “I remember wondering how many people could really get into this progressive, extreme violin metal stuff? Literally one week after Portal Of I came out we were contacted by Season Of Mist saying, ‘We want to offer you a record deal for the next album.’ We’d spent nine years trying to get anywhere and within one week we already had a record deal for the next three albums.”
He gives credit to the international nature of Season Of Mist as a record label for their ability to then hire booking agents in the USA and Europe.
“We were getting offers to do overseas tours when Citadel came out [in 2014].” The only problem was that, at that time, there was no money in the pot to fund those tours. That’s when Ne Obliviscaris decided to do what no band had successfully done before, and launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund an international tour. It was set up with the intention of raising $40,000AUD (around £23,000), and Charles explains that the goal was met within just 38 hours of launch.
Shortly afterwards, in 2016, the band launched a successful Patreon account, which offers multilevel subscriptions
at varying amounts per month that fans can opt in to in order to receive exclusive first listens to new music, merch, early access to tour tickets and more. At the time this was unusual, but since the pandemic this trend has been widespread among bands and executed to varying degrees of success.
“We were the first band in the world to use that as a way of making a living,” Charles explains, confirming that their Patreon does well enough to pay each member a full-time wage so they can focus all their time on the band.
“We were expecting a bit of backlash for that,” Campbell says, “but if you care too much what people think, you’re never going to get anywhere.”
There was so much encouragement that he explains they forged ahead, and reminded people that it was not mandatory for anyone to contribute.
“Weirdly enough, it was the industry more so than the fans where the backlash came from,” Charles continues. “With our fans the response was enormously positive.”
New album Exul was delayed from 2020 and the pair explain that it was down to factors that stemmed from multiple lockdowns.
“We were all planning to be in one place to record in the USA with Mark Lewis, and Dan [Presland] had gone over to record drums. He made it back into Australia before they closed the borders by about 10 hours. Everyone else obviously couldn’t leave the country, so we recorded everyone at separate locations,” Campbell describes. Exul ended up being recorded at 10 different studios over two and a half years.
That uncertainty didn’t lead to a lack of productivity or any compromise on the final result though, despite the members having not seen each other for many years.
“We haven’t been in the same room since June 2019 because of all the border closures,” Charles explains. “The government was just making it up on the spot!”
Exul, which literally translates to ‘exile’, was written in the pre-pandemic period, although certain elements naturally developed through that lockdown phase.
“I think it actually helped the end result,” Campbell says, with Charles adding, “Xen and I often write stuff last. An example is the violin solo at the end of Graal – I recorded violins
a year later than expected and I wrote them in the studio.”
“For me personally, I feel like the pandemic impacted my performance,” Charles continues. “When you’re going through so much, you use that energy to connect to the song and the performance and I think that definitely came through on this record.”
Campbell agrees, mentioning that the themes of the album are varied but all handle issues of unwanted departures, with the first single, Equus, inspired by the Australian bushfires
of 2019. Those themes weren’t predetermined ahead of the writing process, but Campbell explains that it came together that way.
“Everyone was dealing with living a different life, exiled from their normal way of living, and then you have a war that’s happening. Coincidentally, it seemed to make sense to call the album ‘Exul’.”
