As a field ecologist and student in climatology, Yianna Bekris knows a thing or two about human impact on Planet Earth. She’s seen the darkness mankind’s actions have caused close up. While measuring old growth forest in Central Oregon a few years back, a vision came to her: Vouna, a solo doom/black metal outfit, whose songs infuse that sense of a dying planet, a slow but hardening reality. The band’s second full-length, Atropos, released July 16 via Season of Mist, takes this sense to a new level: a record that envisions death, not from anything absolute, but something totally universal.
“The album doesn’t necessarily have a concept,” Bekris explains. “But all the songs are about death in some way. I had a death in the family right before I started writing the songs and I was just around a lot of people who were grieving, and I know that death is a very common theme in metal, especially doom metal, but I was just like, ‘I feel like I have to write about this,’ and I think that also gave me an outlet.”
Haunting compositions laid within a deep and tunneling labyrinth make the record more of a story told by firelight, than a poem told in passing. The long sequencing of songs like “Vanish” and “Grey Sky” create a moisture in one’s chest that hangs heavy, drawing the listener down to the bottom: the seed of life, the darkness of existence, the very choices that promote destruction and distance. It is an album filled with memory and pain, but also staunch determination.
Bekris developed a love for metal as a youngster in Seattle.
“When I was a growing up, there was a show called Metal Shop, which is still on, I think. I was just cruising through the radio stations and I found it, and I was just like, ‘whoa, what is this?!”
And when she was old enough to start going to shows, it was death metal that stole her heart. But that was a long time ago, and things were different back then.
“I actually tried to leave the metal scene for a while when I was younger,” she says. “Because, you know, I was a teenager and I was going to metal shows, and I was constantly getting sexually harassed. So I was like, ‘I’m going to try and not be in this scene.’ And I didn’t really like punk that much, but I was trying to be in the punk scene and it wasn’t really working, and I was just like, ‘I just like metal.’ I would say that a lot of my friends are punks, and they like punk, and they play in punk bands and stuff, but it’s not my thing. I just love metal, and thankfully it’s gotten a lot better since when I first started listening to it.”
My Dying Bride was Bekris’ gateway into doom, a band whose outer circumference can be felt within Vouna’s interior.
“I had a friend who just loved them,” Bekris says. “And she had Turn Loose the Swans, and we would just like, hang out and listen to that album.”
Atropos is more spiritual than finite, a continuous pulse reverberating along the patters and designs that are natural like the forest, but also metaphysical. You can feel yourself drifting, pulling away from the pain, from the reality, but you know the whole thing is based on reality, so it’s a place of compromise, but not weak compromise, strong compromise based on belief and truth, and vision.
“I personally like metal because it does try to separate politics and social stuff from the music a lot of the time,” Bekris notes. “Not always, but I think that’s something I like about metal because you can kind of go into this world. Even though I’d personally say that I’m a feminist, in that I want everyone to have equal rights, I don’t factor it into the project. I’m a woman and I happen to play metal. I’ve had all these experiences, a lot of them were negative because I’m a woman, but I didn’t let that stop me, and I kept playing.”
Atropos sounds like the hymn to all the strong people, all the strong forests, the ones fighting against the storms of mankind.
Listen to Atropos in full here:
For more on Vouna, find them on Facebook, Instagram, and Bandcamp.
Photo courtesy of Vouna and Dreaming God.
