Interview: The Chronicles of Manimal and Samara Discuss Their New Single/Video "The Descent"
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“Creating the video is for us a very important stage in the making of meaning in our music. The moving image really provides a suitable medium to consolidate and crystallise the message imbued in the music and lyrics.”
How did you two meet and decide to create music together? Also, what does the band's name, "The Chronicles of Manimal and Samara" represent?
We like to tell others that we met in a dark corner at The Worlds End (a pub in Camden Town, London) where Manimal became captivated when he found out that Samara’s favourite band was Slayer and that she loved both death metal and techno. We started making music together later, in early 2020, during the first London lockdown.
Andrea: The lockdown gave me the time and headspace to focus on making new music. I was determined to create a sound that could resonate throughout the wide spectrum of musical genres. In particular, I wanted to combine electronic music with rock, two genres of music that usually don’t share the same crowd. I wanted to create something that could bring people together, kind of like what Bob Marley did through his music and the message that came with it. During this period, I recorded quite a number of instrumental tracks. I wanted Samara to provide the vocals for all the new music I had recorded so I came up with an idea...
Daphne: Our first vocal recording session happened when Manimal asked me to improvise and recite some of my old poems over an instrumental track that he had composed. The magic happened once I started reading my poems out loud – the stanzas of my poem fit so snugly into music at the very first take. The structure of my poems and writings went perfectly with the musical arrangement of the song. This was when we realised that we had found our ‘sound’ and decided that we would make ‘the performance of words with music’ our thing. This recording was in fact, “Psychopath’s Monologue”, our second single.
We originally created ‘The Chronicles of Manimal and Samara’ as a manga comic series and developed the characters and the storyline, which was a tale of a schoolgirl who runs away into the jungle to escape from society and the modern world. “All grown up but alone in the wilderness, she discovers someone who would change the course of her life forever…” This story will be further elaborated in our 7th single, ‘TCOMAS s01 e01’ which we will be releasing on the 18th of December 18th – so do stay tuned.
We decided to adopt the names of these two weird and wonderful characters in our band name, and used our drawings of the two characters on the cover artwork of our debut single, ‘Atoms’. I guess you could say that “Samara” and “Manimal” represents our alter egos, or perhaps our musical doppelgangers...
Congratulations on the release of your new single/video "The Descent". What was your creative process for the development of the song, and was it self-produced?
Yes, it was self-produced, everything about TCOMAS that you hear, see or read is made by the both of us. Our collaborative process usually begins with Andrea composing and recording the music, which Daphne then casts into words.
Andrea: Before making the music, I usually begin by mentally visualising the topic or the story I want to convey. When this visualisation becomes clear in my mind, I pick the instruments and start to record it - translating this vision into music. For ‘The Descent’, I wanted to capture the essence of nature’s duality and for the music to convey a sense of the beauty and brutality of nature on a spectrum. Mother nature operates on her own timing which is not synchronised with the ways of civilisation, so when she decides it is time to strike, we don't expect it nor recognise the signs of imminent disaster immediately - this is the story behind the music of ‘The Descent’.
Daphne: I wanted the lyrics to really bring out the story that Andrea wanted to tell through the music. Nature does not have a voice, and hence she communicates with us through signs. For instance, she warns us that imminent natural disaster is about to strike by giving us signs which manifest in abnormalities in the tide, wind, and the way animals behave. So I decided that the best way to translate Andrea’s musical language was for the story to be told through the voice of Mother Nature herself, whereby she warns mankind of imminent natural disaster in the form of a monologue. Hence the lyrics had to be recited and chanted rather than sung. But I also wanted to go beyond placing brief interludes of spoken word over the instrumental composition. So I re-wrote two of my old poems to give the sound and structure of words a more regular and rhythmic pattern in order to set it in lyric-mode within the musical composition.
The music video for "The Descent" is incredible; was it difficult trying to decide which footage to include?
Thanks, We are glad you enjoyed it! It actually wasn’t that difficult to decide what footage to include. The main challenge was deciding how to tell the story and convey the message and meaning through the medium of moving images. We wanted our video for 'The Descent' to do two things. Firstly, it had to convey a sense of nature's transcendence and almost divine and numinous character. On the other hand, it also had to convince viewers of the realness of its powers of destruction.
For the first part, we felt the best method to capture the essence of the sublime in nature was to try to show the full extent of nature's beauty by contrasting imagery of nature’s grandiosity with her more quiet and patient nature. On one hand, we showed nature’s magnificence and grandiose side on a macro scale – blizzard sweeping across the jagged peaks of snow-capped mountains, the swell of waves crashing into rugged cliffs, the migration of whales across the great oceans. In contrast, we also wanted to show that beauty in nature can also be found by observing her quieter details and qualities – the germination of seeds, the resilience of the animals and living creatures large and small that we share this world with. We usually take these fleeting moments of beauty for granted, so we slowed down the speed of the footage to bring out the beauty in the small and slight detail in some scenes – the patient growth of plants, water running over moss covered rocks along a gentle creek, the satin sails of jellyfish moving through the current of the ocean's deepest trenches, the meticulous bumble bee collecting nectar, flower by flower...
As for the second aspect – we wanted to show the realness of the dangers and powers of destruction when nature chooses to strike. We decided the best way to do this was to play with the notion of time and ways of representation by juxtaposing digital and film footage, alternating historical news and documentary footage with contemporary stock videos. By contrasting footage of the past with the present, we felt that it would accentuate the authenticity of the powers of nature's destruction and the realness of a natural disaster happening and directly affecting our lives both in the present and in the future.
When someone listens to or watches "The Descent" for the first time, is there an overall message being conveyed through the visual and the lyrics?
Daphne: My interpretation of the music was that it gave me a sense of nature's transcendence and numinous beauty [and brutality] and her independence from civilisation, as in operating outside of our time. These are qualities that were almost abstract and otherworldly and beyond the scope of mere physical human experience. This is why I wanted the lyrics to give nature a human voice, a human psyche, and have her message told through a language that we can understand and relate to. So I decided that the song would be narrated through the voice of Mother Nature personified who warns us of imminent disaster through an ominous monologue, which she recites with both affection and stern admonition – almost like a love letter to humanity.
The lyrics are based on some old poems which I re-wrote for the song. One of these poems was in fact a poem I wrote back in 2004 right after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami which started off in the west coast of northern Sumatra, very near to where I was. When it happened, it struck very close to home, so the sense of danger and relief at having narrowly averted the path of disaster was very real. The last line of the lyrics “climbing trees to have a glimpse of the world, crumbling nevertheless”, I wrote after watching a video on the news showing survivors of the Tsunami were stranded on tree tops in the aftermath of the Tsunami where a flood ensued. It is uncanny that something I had written years ago fit perfectly with the music and message of a song that Andrea wrote years later. It is perhaps synchronicity at work here!
As for the message conveyed in the visuals – in the second part of the video, we chose to use footage of volcano eruptions as it would evoke the latin saying “Igne natura renovatur integra” – ‘through fire, nature is reborn whole'. The story and message in “The Descent” continues in our next single, entitled “Love in the Time of Pestilence”, which we will be releasing on the 27th of November.
Creating the video is for us a very important stage in the making of meaning in our music. The moving image really provides a suitable medium to consolidate and crystallise the message imbued in the music and lyrics. That’s why we always create a video to accompany each song as we feel that it really completes the full picture.
Will "The Descent" be a part of an upcoming EP or album release next year? If so, what can you tell us about it?
Yes, “The Descent” and all the other singles that we released so far will be part of our debut album named “Full Spectrum”, which will be released sometime early next year.
The album comprises 11 tracks lasting over 67 minutes which we composed, wrote, and recorded between February and June 2020 during the first London lockdown. Each song takes upon itself to continue the meaning and message presented in the previous song. The record fluctuates between highs and lows, traverses dystopia and utopian worlds, and sweeps across the wide spectrum of musical experiences.
The concept behind the album is for it to take listeners through the full spectrum of life, love and human experience, balancing dark and grim reminders of human mortality with messages of hope and declarations of love.
While much of the musical content evokes a nihilistic and dystopian world, the album also offers triumphant moments of hope and individual agency, as well as moments of resilience and resistance. Likewise, much of the lyrical content bears stern messages to humanity, reminding us of the ugliness of man and the decrepit state of civilisation. But these grim messages also open up avenues for escaping beyond the harsh reality of the modern world – to a place whereby one can contemplate the transcendence and the numinous of our inner world.
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