Rock Era had the chance of interviewing Crescent’s fronted man Ismaeel Attallah and shared his thoughts with us about Crescent’s latest achievements, new album, and upcoming plans.
Firstly, congratulations for your latest performances in France and Ukraine, but I would like to start with your participation in the French Fall of Summer Festival that was headlined by great bands such as Septicflesh. How did the festival contact you, and how did you see the feedback of the audience?
Thank you very much! We got in contact through Facebook, and their promoter had already seen our performance at Inferno Festival. FOS is simply one of the best festivals in Europe. Extremely professional and they make the bands quite comfortable. The audience in France is mature, they are quite focused and they grasp the songs’ structure pretty fasteven though it might have been their first attempt to check out our music. We received lots of positive feedback indeed! And we were honored to be among such big names. It was our second time to share the stage with SepticFlesh which was pretty cool but also there were much bigger bands of course.
So, moving to your performances in Ukraine;how did you get those precious chances of being the first Egyptian band to perform there, and how did you interact with the audience?
Also through contacting both festivals, we were selected to perform in Carpathian Alliance with some really cool names like Hate, Aura Noir and Horna…etc and we headlined Metal head’s Mission which was in the south of Ukraine on the Black Sea. The audience didn’t expect our ravishing sound! I guess they were expecting something mellow and conventional. They were blown away,I believe, many asked to have our autograph after the show and took pictures with us.
Your album “The Order of Amenti” is really amazing, would you please explain to the audience the themes of the album and how did the process of music writing and recording go.
Thank you. We decided to make an album that could contribute to the Egyptian Metal culture/sound and pay homage to our country; hence the idea of having every song representing a different ancient Egyptian deity/god came to our minds.
I come up with the tunes/Riffs then we mold it with the drum lines, do bits of amendments here and there and the song reaches its perfected shape for us. That’s how we mostly write our music. Lyrics are the final stage but the titles of the song are also at the inception of every song to set the right atmosphere and understanding of the overall sound of every single song.
We recorded with our bassist Moanis Salem all the actual guitar lines and bass lines of course at his home studio “Chaos Eternal Studio”. All the Drums and vocals were recorded in Ganoub Studio. Then, we mixed and mastered with the great Vamacara Studio in France where all the magic happened as you can obviously hear.
You signed with one of the most prestigious French labels Listenable Records, how did they contact you?
Via email, we were in touch a while back but they were waiting for our new record. We contacted several labels as well and received good offers but we came to a conclusion that we will work with Listenable Records, since they are one of the oldest labels that are known for their devotion, hard work, huge foundation and their history speaks for itself that we don’t really need to advertise.
During your performances in different European acts, in addition, Crescent was the first Middle Eastern band who took part in Wacken Metal Battles in Germany, how do mainstream bands look at the Middle Eastern Metal scenes, especially Egypt?
They get quite surprised and most of them don’t imagine that Metal exists in a country like Egypt. When they acknowledge our music, they get even more surprised. They really admire the fact that such sound could come out from Egypt especially that we barely have a “scene” that is consistent, especially that the means of media and coverage aren’t as strong as other countries’. We are quite honored to represent Egypt abroad and we do it with pride.
What is your honest opinion about the Egyptian Metal scene, and the Metal music industry in Egypt?
Well, as we have mentioned this many times before, due to the fact that several international magazines asked us the same question. We need to first define what a music “scene” is and where are we as “Egypt’s Metal scene” from that definition? We have some aspects of it but we have several fundamentals that are completely lacking. We have a few bands and a big number of anaudience that doesn’t represent any purchasing power except some respected individuals. There are no labels/distros, no agencies, no competitive market or competitive festivals, lack of venues, no magazines coverage and only a few webzines like yours. So, certainly, there isn’t an industry to capitalize on a well-established scene in the first place. It doesn’t matter how big it is but what does really matter? Is it up to the international standards and is it coherent and well established or not? That’s the challenge and that’s really up to the “will” of the audience in general. If there is a fan base that really supports Metal in general then the whole other aspects will grow naturally and eventually.
Moving on, you have been contacted by Metal Blast and will be preforming in the upcoming festival. How were you contacted? And how do you feel preforming your new album to the Egyptian audience?
We are in touch with Usama – Metal Blast founder – on regular basis. He knows that it was about time to perform in our homeland after the past 3 years. We are headlining MetalBlast and it will be a night to remember! Expect many songs from the new album to be seen/heard live. We played in the past years already the new album abroad, but it’s going to be our first time to experience it with our fellow countrymen. We are waiting to see a massacre right in front of the stage!
So, moving to your future plans, can you give us hint about Crescent’s future plans?
We aren’t thinking of something in particular, maybewe will work on a new music video (or something similar) along with some other activities like performing abroad and spreading our music more, invading new countries. We already have some fresh initial ideas for new songs but anyhow we are taking it easy as we are at a moment of harvesting what we did the past 2-3 years and, as I said earlier, we will be targeting many shows abroad to spread our music!
Would you please send a message to all Crescent’s fans?
Thank you for your support and devotion! Support all the bands! Follow AhlSina as they are about to release their debut album!
Edited by: NJ Bakr.
