Fides Inversa play black metal in a Primordial style, and they sure take it seriously. I mean, check out the interview below. I had to read it like three times to understand what they were talking about, and I think it basically comes down to “the devil.” Still, their music is pretty rad, so not only do we have the aforementioned interview, but we have an exclusive premiere of their new album, Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans. Get your literate black metal on.
Why did you choose to label your songs by Roman numerals?
For the very same reason that moves a writer to enumerate the chapters of his book.
There was simply no necessity to give a proper name to the various songs since they are nothing but steps on the same path.
Does the album have any unifying concept?
The opus takes form from a study and a spiritual immersion inside the most awful manifestations of the Numinous.
The album title is an expression used by the German theologist Rudolf Otto to describe the human experience of the holy, that in its complete otherness takes the mind from dreadful terror to great fascination. The sounds and the revealed words that constitute this work are the result of an empirical research of the divine through mystical reflections and practices both silent and violent at times. Trying to dissolve the eternal dualism into the absoluteness of the void, real epiphanies may occur, and — as you can read inside the album — the Numinous could be finally perceived as the Morning Star rising in the heart, and the whole experience does include the splendor of the terrific fascination that first freezes in a chamber of fear, where His rage and madness are more than vivid, and than attracts to its meaningful void, where Death is grace and potentiality with flaming wings.
Does your music have any underlying philosophy to it? Influences?
This project took light to express a double necessity, spiritual and artistic, both aiming to explore the mysteries of opposition residing in the cultural substratum of spiritual traditions, universally recognizable as bringers of illuminate knowledge. Trying to circumscribe this thought to a single philosophy would be simply paradoxical, since its foundation is based in the very core of man. Through speculation one could catch a beam, through the Arte one could shine himself.
Influences are innumerable for those whose eyes are wide open, even in a world where the secular and the matter are the law, but fortunately it’s full of enlightening works of art out there, through mediums of every genre. The Devil speaks many tongues.
What has the reaction been to your music in your home country of Italy, a heavily Roman Catholic nation?
None.
The christian-catholic forma mentis is surely entrenched into the popular culture, in a hypocrite way of course, but it does not manifest to the extent to restrain forms of expression little known like black metal.
This influence reflects on politics and social evolution enchaining the progress to the limits of a fake morality, but is there a country where this phenomenon is not present? I think we could recognize this as a problem of modernity.
***Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans comes out October 31 on World Terror Committee. Check out their Facebook here, and keep your eyes peeled here for the eventual preorder.
