I’m coming into this as a newer listener, so I’d love to hear it from you directly, how did Hierophany begin, were you all involved from the start, and how has the line-up evolved over time?

Hello, thank you for the interview and the interest in my work.

Well Hierophany is 19 years now but this we used to be known with another name for the last 18 years now, I started this band when I was 18 years old as a DSBM OMB project, after that I started to search for musicians to play live along with me, then I wrote the first relevant album called “Los Tres Mundos” and I think the journey started by that point.

I´ve had several line ups with me during the years, since I´m the composer of all the music on the band and vocals, so this, my latest line up is the most important to me since they´re with me since 8 to 12 years now.

2. If someone had never heard Hierophany before, how would you explain the essence of your sound and the experience you’re trying to create with Tenebrario?

- Well, Tenebrario is a deep journey through the Ancient Mysticism, so I tried to create an album that can involve you and release you just at the end of the whole experience. To be more precise; I wanted to create an ominous, dark, gloomy and powerful album, creating a lot of atmosphere during the whole trip, but at the same time I was trying to deliver a High Quality production, without loose those super important elements behind, so I started to look for good Black Metal producers and I finally found Simón Da Silva from The Empty Hall studio which understood at the perfection what I was looking for this album.

3. I’ve noticed that Hierophany has a very ‘full,’ densely layered sound when the tracks fully open up, almost like a wall of ritualistic noise, so is that density something you consciously build toward, or does it emerge naturally in the writing process?

- Yes, those noises that you hear at the background are actually an amazing Orchestrations during the whole songs made by my friend Sebastian Giuliano from Dahaka Productions who also understood at the perfection my ideas and he printed into my music Masterfully.

4. As a band, where do you tend to draw your inspiration from, other music, or more from things like texts, philosophy, or visual art?

- I like to get inspiration in other bands that I admire, for example, for this album I was very inspired by Akhlys, Watain, Martrod, Ascension, but to be honest, I won´t to sound like a copy of the bands that I like, I always try just to get some inspiration from my favorite bands, but I would never stole riffs or something like that trying to emulate the sound of those bands, I think that is ridiculous tbh, and I did something similar in the past when I was younger, I wrote a song called Los Tres Mundos, and there´s some parts with piano and guitars and that fragment sounds like a copy paste of SHINING which was a band that I used to like that times, so after that and during the time passed and I got older I just want to be the most far away from the sound of the bands that I like.

5. There’s heavy use of Latin titles like “Ars Moriendi” and “Vigilae Mortuorum,” what draws you to these traditional religious languages and texts?

- Well, I haven´t mention yet that my bloodline brother Faustus is the one on charge of the Lyrics and concept of the band, so he´s strongly inspired by ancient texts, so those titles and lyrics were masterfully delivered by my brother.

6. I noticed this album makes a lot of use of background textures and ambient detail, like the tribal-style build-up at the start of track two with the chimes and percussion, and especially track five, which leans fully into those elements with things like bells and breathing. It felt incredibly immersive, especially at high volume, so do you record all of those sounds yourselves, or are you working with samples, and do those ambient-focused tracks take just as much time and care to build as the more ‘traditional’ songs?

- Yes all the vocals, sounds of breathing were recorded by me with a certain purpose on that specific song.

This song is long, ritualistic and you for some people is too long, but it was necessary to made part by part on this process no matter how long this song would be, but at the end I liked the final results, also the voices talking in Latin at the end of the track are from my brother FAUST.

7. The closing track really stood out to me. It’s super immersive and the guitar work feels huge and commanding, so how did that song develop from its initial idea into the finished piece we hear on the album?

- Well, the main riff from the beginning were recorded like 3 years ago, one day I was trying to create new music, I recorded the full introduction and then I just leave that Stuff just like that on my daw in my Laptop, after some years I remind that I recorded some riffs here and there, and then I started to compose with those initial riffs I made years before.

The whole process to compose this album was two weeks, (except for Beyond the sacred) I just sat day by day recording and creating, two weeks without almost see my wife or my son, just focused into create this new album, so at the end of those two weeks I was more than satisficed to hear the results of those nights spent recording this songs, I recorded 5 songs in those two weeks.

8. Looking back on the making of Tenebrario, did you have any favorite songs to record, and what made them particularly enjoyable or memorable?

- Well, I must say that I have two favorite songs from this album and those are Ars Moriendi & Beyond the Sacred, and the reason why I like them more than the others is because Ars Moriendi is the very first song that I created ever without a classical structure, If you put attention on this song, there´s no riff that you can hear for second time in the whole song, I mean, there´s a continuous evolution all the time during the whole song, so a riff will only repeat under his own cycle, but you will never hear again that riff again, and that´s why this is one of my favorite songs of the album because the level of complexity, and Beyond the sacred is also one of my favorite songs because I had to compose and record the whole song in two days, because the label suggested me to add another song to the EP (initially it was an EP) so I was about to tour over South and Center America, so I challenged myself to create and record a song in two days and the results were fantastic, I liked a lot how the song went, because to me is not the matter of time into create something, but the masterfully to make something memorable in a short time.

9. The artwork for Tenebrario is really intriguing and a bit unusual, who created it, and what’s the story or meaning behind it? How did you decide it would be the centerpiece for the album?

- The Cover art were created by the Mighty Denis Forkas, and the main idea was a combination between the ideas of Faust, mine and Forkas, so at the end we finished stablishing this one as the masterpiece por the cover art.

10. Do you play live at all, or is Hierophany purely a studio project? If you were to take this material to the stage, what kind of experience should people expect from a Hierophany performance?

- Yes we do play live and I try to deliver a whole experience to the crowd, usually when we start to play people is instantly absorbed by the darkness of our music so I try to never broke the atmosphere, so there´s some ritualistic mantras that I made live, I really enjoy to play live, to me is the best part of making music.

11. Finally, what can fans expect from Hierophany in the future, new music, live shows, or any other projects on the horizon?

- Absolutely, I need to be inspired to create again another good album, but the time comes I can tell that is gonna be something bigger than tenebrario, that’s for sure.

We are preparing our very first European tour for the end of this year or beginning of the next year, so there´s a lot of things to do yet.