Changing Places In The Fire
Venezuelan emigrants explore loss, longing and exile through prog and post-metal
“Every migrant has gone through this; you adapt to your new home country but you're never fully from there. You end up being too foreign for home, too foreign for there.”
Changing Places In The Fire’s self-titled debut album has been a long time in the making. According to keyboardist and main driving force Alfredo Ovalles, there are demos of songs on the album that date back to 2010, when the core of the collective was a Dream Theater-obsessed prog metal band called Echoes, playing in their native Caracas.
Then life happened, as life tends to, and the various members gradually relocated across the globe. Now scattered across Europe and South America, the reimagined Changing Places In The Fire became a long-distance project that was profoundly influenced by its members experiences of migration.
“It’s the theme of the album,” Alfredo nods. “Every migrant has gone through this, where you adapt to your new home country but you're never fully from there. You end up being too foreign for home, too foreign for there.”
Even before Trump’s military adventurism and the terrible earthquakes that recently wracked the country, Venezuela has been through turbulent times. Alfredo says that writing about it has helped the musicians to process complex feelings towards their homeland and the missing piece was vocalist Daz Medrano, who joined in 2016.
“He's a philosopher by education and he's also a great novelist and writer,” Alfredo says. “The other four of us don’t really deal in words and Daz was able to express the feelings and abstract concepts that we’d been kicking around. The lyrics also feel even more current now than when he first wrote them a few years ago.”
Despite the fact that Daz joined a decade ago, the rest of the band have never met him in person. “He lives in Buenos Aires and logistics are tricky,” says Alfredo with a sense of understatement. The keyboardist, who also performs as a classical and experimental pianist, divides his own time between Vienna and Warsaw. The album was largely written and pieced together at several remotes but the band (minus singer) did up to record the drums in guitarist Antonio Silva and drummer Miguel Ángel Moliné’s adopted home city of Madrid. Guitarist Javier Landaeta, a physicist who was still based in Venezuela at the time, managed to piggyback to Spain on the back of a scientific conference.
The whole thing took a monumental effort but the results are worth it. Evocative, powerful and emotionally charged, the album flits between atmospheric post-rock, grunge dynamics and pure prog strokes, all wrapped around the poetic melodicism provided by the vocals. “We had a big prog rock phase but the common elements in our collective DNA are the Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden,” Alfredo smiles. “We want to use musicianship in the service of the song. For me, it’s impressive that we managed to pull out the record with just three guitar solos and no keyboard solos.”
Now the album’s been released into the world, Alfredo is happy to just see how far it can fly. “It doesn’t matter if it reaches ten, a hundred or 10,000 people,” he says. “It was the source of a lot of fights because distance makes it more difficult, but it helped us process a lot of things and if it helps just one more person like that, it’s done its job.”
- Paul Travers
PROG FILE
LINE-UP: Daz Medrano (vocals), Alfredo Ovalles (keyboards), Javier Landaeta (guitar), Antonio Silva (guitar), Miguel Ángel Moliné (drums)
SOUNDS LIKE: A layered mix of atmospherics, progressive flourishes and big rock dynamics
CURRENT RELEASE: Debut album Changing Places In The Fire, out now via Wild Thing Records
WEBSITE: changingplacesinthefire.com