FAR FROM GOD

What does anything means, basically?

Promotion for Far from God has started in late April already and since then I’ve been head over heels, no time, no life, keine lust.

I’ve singlehanded around 200+ interviews a, between zoom, face to face and e-mail interviews and appointments and yes I’m quite and still exhausted by the more to come…

This period is also personally challenging, to say the least.

Interviews in Portugal get a lot of traction as journalists always approach the more “political” side of things (even when there’s not one) and by the fact that we do more generalist and some quite mainstream press, quotes and clickbait gets viral all the time and I’ve truly became the character of Type O Negative’s song: We hate everyone, that goes like Right Win Commie, Leftist Nazis, point their finger, rumours linger…

Manipulation has always been the major force of crowds and puppet masters. More often than not we are the puppets, not the masters.

Behind every comment of praise and love, it hides generalisations and noise that one, while in a band, has to learn how to absorb as the way is always forward and there can be no excuses for the music you make, dream up and deliver as it’s the case of Far from God, a totally conscious and very wanted move in the Moonspell musical chessboard.

When you set yourself publicly and share such a private, transparent thing like the music we do, you have to know something: not everybody will like it. It’s much more about reaching to all people, we have to aim for the “right” people, no political pun intended here.

Not to like your music is as legit as someone do appreciating the hello out of it and magick can only happen when you sing and play to like-minded people who think love is pain, religion conflict and music the most harmonious disharmony ever invented, to bring us together under the flag of empathy.

If that what follows, one or the other, praise or hate, sometimes is hard to place in the spot it belongs, you have to remember what brought you here inn the first place: an urgent need to translate into words and music your troublesome inside and outsides but also to communicate it properly. Communication is full of virtues but faux pas too, the unknowingly that makes us human and therefore politically incorrect.

Music is storm and calm at the same time.

Like that weird weather we sometimes have in Portugal where there’s sun and rain at the same time and we say that witches are conspiring and eating stall cornbread.

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (on this picture with her brother Friedrich Nietzsche) became the custodian of her brother’s thought on his sick and dying years. She was a nationalist, antisemitic and politically ambitious. She gathered his scattered notes and reshaped them into a doctrine more useful to power than to thought. Where Nietzsche despised herd mentality, she offered prophecy. Where he attacked nationalism, she supplied myth. That became Triumph of Will, the philosopher’s false testament.

The Nazis found in her archive a thinker they could parade before the masses. The Übermensch became a slogan, not of superation but of supremacy.

One of the great ironies of modern history is that Nietzsche spent his life waging war against dogma, only to be recruited after death into the most violently dogmatic regimes mankind has known.

Talk about misunderstanding.

Nietzsche was a philologist. That was his job and vocation. His calling and his tribute to a mankind he wanted more to improve than to belittle. He was also a classical composer.

It’s to his music I’m writing.

In a very tiny nutshell, N. travelled into the past for the words, their etyma. He picked them up, dusted them and compared their original meaning, their Greek archetypical essence, to his contemporary times. The unavoidable conclusion was corruption. Of the word, of its significance, its concept. The result was instrumentalization, just like his beloved sister did with his body of work.

There’s no word that has been more corrupted and instrumentalised than God.

There is no concept that we have driven so far from God than God.

Many people, whom I consider “far from god” (a new category for me since I started writing this album under this title and direction) has been too quick putting judgement on me and the band: “Is he a born-again Christian” ; “where is Moonspell”; “ does he talk about love now?”; and the classic with a new twist “they are not metal anymore, they play disco”. Ungh! Grrr!Booga!Ooga!Booga!Unga Bunga!

This is the newspeak of online entitlement and “fast thinking” a newly found but quite primitive way of the ego altering the undeniable nobility of thought, speculation and process, into an unrecognisable and shallow, almost inquisitive, demand for justification other than clarification. People looking for things online and inside them to justify what they already think anyway, be it a flat earth, a flat band or a flat soul.

Religion is conflict.

Music is conflict.

Love is pain

Doubt. Confusion. Anguish.

We don’t know if God exists and how it would exist or not. Better man than you and me, and women too for that matter (Simone Weil-Waiting for God), have tried not to justify but to search for meaning and ways to shorten the distance and ease our metaphysical pains .

Back in the day I had a Gnoseology teacher at Lisbon University, who has also a musician, very popular among children and folk interventionist singers. His name is JOSÉ BARATA MOURA, a specialist in German “Idealism”, a man of complexity who also entertained the sons and daughters of school clerks by playing them his musical hits in the Xmas annual party, in the same forum where Deleuze and Umberto Eco have lectured. He put music in simple terms: disharmony (two strings clashing) creating harmony (melody). Conflict.

And what is love other than taking big chunks of yourself in order to be with another person, defying the modern conjectures of “yourself first”. How can you love someone without getting yourself out? Ah…those violent delights as Shakespeare would put them.

Bibles are meant to be read. Not to be burnt.

For better and worse, in sickness and in health, the Bible is the most important book in the history of our society and a lot of music and literature revolves around it. Including mine.

I’ve developed a bit of an intellectual problem against the shock value and misappropriation of religious symbols by Black Metal bands. It’s fine they use them for their antics, but the problem here, contrary to Heavy Metal otherwise formative vocation, is that they spread ignorance and prejudice.

To be far from god is what men do.

The Islamic terrorism, the Judaic occupation of Palestine, and the presidential evangelism of Bolsonaro and Trump are three very actual examples of the distance to God, to the true intentions of religion and faith, of the god and gospels and dogmas they freely choose to to follow and observe, merely to end up strangling the world on a warlike grip.

Coming back to Nietzsche, God, the ideal, the notion, the construct is rotting with corruption. So is our peace and prosperity. Far from God is, by all means, a Nietzschean title, that comes from antique to modern to show corruption and invoke revival.

Yet what really matters to me, more than mine or your distance to God, which is but a metaphor, is our deviation, the space and time and all the futile material and immaterial we put between us and what we could be. We are far from our loved ones, from our family, from our potential, from our nature of good.

If all is lost, we shall see- but Nietzsche was not a nihilist but a philosopher of hope. He often talked about Reconquista, not the historical event, or even the title of the last song of the album, a song that writes about claiming back what’s ours, our path, God, love or whatever suits you and me as, for the sake of how far we came already, giving up might be a thought but never a solution. Like Nietzsche made his best to teach us

Far from God, but closer to ourselves.

Is where I want to be.