INTERVIEW TO SIASKEL!

As a big fan of the South American extreme metal, one month ago I haven't hesitated to contact via FB the Chilean black/death metallers Siaskel for an interview useful also to satisfy my many curiosities about the people of Selk'nam, the now defunct indigenous Patagonian tribe explored into the albums of the band. This explains why the interview, at a certain point, becomes almost an hystory lesson, and I think that the Selk'nam are worthy to be further deepened by everyone is interested to this kind of themes. So, enjoy this very long and good interview!

Siaskel - "Haruwen Airen" (Signal Rex Productions, 2016)

Band: Siaskel
Title: Haruwen Airen
Genre: Black/Death metal
Year: 18th November 2016
Time: 40 min
Rating: 73/100











As we know, black metal is a very particular and unique genre. Specifically, many black metal bands prefer to sing through their own national language than every kind of popular music. In other cases, some bands are so set to the roots of their own land to sing in very unusual languages. Ultimately, these linguistic experiments are relatively frequent: to name a few, the Spanish Ostots, being Basque, sing in Basque; instead, Wóddréa Mylenstede, a mysterious English entity, sing even in Old English, which is, in practice, a dead language. It's like to say that black metal has a (fantastic) educational purpose because, in these cases, it's able to bring again to light strange languages that aren't the now ultra-abused modern English. But then, there is also the band that we'll talk about today: Siaskel, a Chilean quintet founded in 2003 which, releasing their debut album only in 2014, sing in Ona Language, that is the idiom of a group of Native Americans called Selk'nam lived in the far South of Latin America between Argentina and Chile, before to be extinct during the last 40 years of the previous century due to the death of its last survivors (in fact, the Selk'nam were brutally exterminated, a common fate for many others indigenous tribes). But now Siaskel have honored again the memory of Selk'nam through their second album "Haruwen Airen", originally self-released on January 2016 before to be re-released on cassette by the US label Graceless Recordings (February 2016) and on CD by the Portuguese label Signal Rex Productions (November 2016).