Exodikon is in the best shape in my opinion currently and the internal atmosphere looks very good. At least that’s what you look like currently 🙂 Am I right? Could 2024 be a defining year for Exodikon?
József Pósfai: Hi guys, first of all thanks for the opportunity! I’m glad if you see it that way, because we have similar feelings, I think the release of our second album gave us a big boost emotionally and musically we are probably at our zenith so far. Of course, there is always room for improvement, but I am personally happy with where we are now and I’m looking forward to what the future holds for us. 2024 is definitely a defining year for us, because we’ve released a record, in two languages, and – if we don’t count the guitar/bass instrument swap that happened between Gábor Borhidi and myself – this is the first time we’ve managed to do it with an unchanged line-up.
Also, we will be 20 years old this year, so yes, 2024 is an important year for us.
Your formation dates back quite a long time and it would be worth talking a little about what has happened to you in 2 decades. Where and when did you start? What was the beginning like? What were the pitfalls. What brought you back into business?
PJ: It was 2004 when my brother (Ferenc Pósfai), a couple of high school friends and I decided we wanted to start a band. We didn’t really have any specific motivation besides world fame and rock and roll 😊 Aside from joking, the love of music had pretty much defined our lives by then, which can be attributed to two factors: on the one hand, we went to music school as kids, where we played in a brass band. That’s probably where the desire to play music together comes from. On the other hand, we were touched by metal music in the early 2000s. Like many teenagers at that time, we were caught up in the nu-metal wave, but unlike most of them, we went on heavier ways and ended up with metal music as our auditory nourishment. This eventually set our musical directions. So we really just wanted to combine these two factors in a way that could maximize our fun.
Going back to the original question, we started rehearsing in the autumn of 2004 in our home village of Úny, Komárom-Esztergom County. At the beginning we played covers (Dissection, Amon Amarth, Hypocrisy, In Flames, At the Gates etc.), and then we started writing our own songs. We have very fond memories of the beginning, although objectively speaking the production was much more immature then, both technically and musically. But those were good times, with many, many euphoric moments.
After that we recorded a demo (Indulatól irányítva) and an EP (Trapped in Infinity), along with a few band member changes and a number of gigs, and then around 2014 we lost our motivation a little and put playing music aside. The main reason for this was that the members were then geographically distanced from each other, and everyone was more focused on establishing their own individual existence and careers. This put music-making on the back seat for a few years.
But around 2017 I realised that I wasn’t doing very well mentally and physically, despite the fact that my life was going in the right direction. So I felt something was missing. It took me quite a long time to realise that the lack of music had left a void in me that kept growing in the background. We wanted to fill that void again by starting the band, now based in Budapest.
Around 2020, how did you start to prepare for your first album? Do you think the debut went well? Who expected what and what did you get out of it 🙂 ?
PJ: Actually, most of the material for “Árnyam útján” was already done around 2018-2019, it was just a matter of finalizing them with some structural changes and finishing the lyrics. So by 2020, it was “just” a matter of recording the album, which was finally released in 2021 by H-Music Hungary as an attachment to HammerWorld magazine.
We didn’t really have high expectations, we’d never done a release with such a big sound, so for me personally it was more important to finally get our first LP album out, to close the gap and put an end to the period we were in.
I asked you how well you think your debut went, because I think you have been an underrated band so far, compared to the quality of your music. Maybe there should have been a bit more feedback and fme. How much do you believe that good music will find the right listeners over time? What have you experienced in terms of growing your fan base?
PJ: On one hand, thank you very much for the positive feedback about our music! On the other hand, I think of our subgenre as a niche, and a weird hybrid of it. On the one hand, it’s not melodic enough to be melodic enough for some fans because of the vocal arrangements, so the audience who can accept it with a good heart is very limited, so for them it’s “not music, even though the musical arrangements are good”. On the other hand, our music is not traditional enough to be acceptable to those who like music from the 80s, so for them it could be considered commercial. So we are a little bit in between these two communities, which doesn’t make it any easier to build a fan base, hence everyone can find a band more suited to their own musical preferences in a matter of minutes.
Fortunately, we’re not complaining, because after the reactivation, I think we can say that we’ve managed to build a small but dedicated fan base here in the capital, which is much more than we ever dared to hope for.
Referring tot he question whether good music will find the right ears over time? In my opinion, this is only partly true, because for that to happen, you need a promotional agency that delivers the music for listening in the first place. I can’t imagine it any other way in the over-supply of music in the age we live in now, simply because an ordinary listener (including myself) doesn’t necessarily have time to browse through all the fanzines and listen to everything to make his own value judgement, because there is noise everywhere, and if he finds bands he likes in the noise, he is not going to look at the release calendar every day to see what 50 new LPs have just come out today.
What were your plans after the release of your first album. What changes did you want to make for the following the album release? How many concerts did you plan and how many did you do?
PJ: We didn’t have any world-changing plans for the debut album. We were in the midst of the Covid era, so we couldn’t have planned an actual record release tour even on a conceptual level. Instead, we were left to play ad-hoc, mostly in Budapest. However, we were pleasantly surprised to be honoured to play on both MetalFactory and LowLand festivals during the festival season, and we thank you for that, both were great experiences!
…and then we came to the second album, which was released by two labels. H-Music in Hungary and Wormholedeath abroad. It’s perfectly fine. It should be an interesting year because of the support from the foreign label. What are your expectations and what have you seen so far in terms of opportunities abroad?
PJ: We don’t have any specific expectations, but we definitely want to strengthen our presence abroad. So far, this has been somewhat limited by the use of the Hungarian language, because it is easier for a listener to connect with music that they can understand what it is about. I am not saying that switching to English will make it easy for listeners to understand us, because in terms of the lyrics, what we have to say is not limited to a simple statement.
To come back to the point, the expectation for this album is that we can increase foreign interest in the band. And if we can get our foot on some foreign stages, that’s just the cherry on the cake! But that’s our basic expectation now.
As for the Hungarian album, we stuck to the tried and tested recipe and released the album through H-Music Hungary again. Thank you for your trust!
“Chaosophilia” contains 9 songs and can be best described as Melodic Death Metal. How proud are you of the new album? How well did you manage to do everything as planned? What would you say about the songs?
PJ: It’s an interesting question how to define our genre. We describe ourselves rather as black/death metal, because there is a lot of black metal influence in our music, but that’s a matter of taste of course. I’m personally very proud of the album, for many reasons. Firstly, because I think we developed and show more musically and lyrically than on the previous album. On the other hand, it’s the first record we’ve actually created with an unchanged membership since 2018, so it’s actually our first common sentence together, from start to finish, our first real common ground. As I mentioned, the ’Árnyam útján’ record is more of a mix of unfinished ideas from the years before. But ‘Chaosohpilia’ is already a joint creation, the beginning of a new journey that I’m very proud of.
I can say that everything went according to plan in terms of perparing the album, but a little more slowly than expected. 😊 There were a few hiccups along the way, but nothing worth highlighting in these columns. We will of course try to learn from these events to make things run more smoothly in the future.
In terms of songs, musically we’re following the path we started on earlier, black/death metal riffs with lots of tremolo pickings, melodies and song structure twists. But there is now a greater emphasis on bringing black metal elements into the picture. This is mainly due to the fact that Gábor Borhidi has been a huge part of the creative process. As for the lyrical themes, we’re hovering around chaos, as the title suggests. There is a lot more I could say about the lyrics, but they could be summarised as a kind of introverted chaos-philosophical thought experiments. There are plans to explore this lyrical world in a little more depth, and to unpack the content song by song on our Facebook page in the future. So if you’re more interested in the details, follow our page and we’ll try to explain our universe a bit more!
I especially like the track “The Nature of Descent” the most on the album. It’s got a very catchy chorus and is sufficiently evil and melodic. It really has everything. What would you say about it? Is it possible that there will be a video for this track? Based on your experience so far, which songs do fans like?
PJ: Thank you very much, we love this song too! It was the first song of the new era and we released it as a digital single two years ago, so if ‘Chaosophilia’ was the new phrase, ‘The Nature of Descent’ was the first word we wrote in common, so it holds a special place in our hearts too!
The song is based on the premise that everything is transient, that even in the process of flourishing, there hides decline. No one has ever outlived their life. The realisation of this and the frustration that arises from it is the backbone of the song’s message, coupled with a gloating zeitgeist.
A music video has already been made for this song, but only in Hungarian, at the same time as the single was released in 2022, so we consider this story closed, we won’t bother it and we don’t plan to record a video for the English version.
It’s too early to talk about fan feedback on the album, which songs are their favourites.
Not so long ago, you had an album release show, which went very well. How was the night for your perspective? Why did you choose Christian Epidemic, Rivers Ablaze and Witchthrone to play along with you, which I think was a great decision. 🙂
PJ: To be honest I didn’t know what to expect because we’ve never done a release show with that kind of tone before, which is geared towards our record release. That’s why we asked Insane Hellride Entertainments team, who luckily took over the organizational work and made it a show that far exceeded our expectations! Thanks to them, and of course to the bands, for making the evening such a success! And of course to the audience, where we were able to meet some familiar faces and have a few words with them.
I personally think that, if for no other reason, it was worth it just for this show to pick up an instrument as a high school student back in time. So I couldn’t be more satisfied than I am right now, everything is an encore from now on.
Last year you had a fantastic experience performing before I Am Morbid. Did you ever wonder why the promoter chose you? What was it like when you heard the news? Do you think there will be more such surprising and big opportunities in the future? Did David Vincent tell you anything encouraging 🙂 ? Did you ask him for his autograph :)?
PJ: Indeed, this was a defining experience for us, thanks a lot for the opportunity to H-Music Hungary!
It’s no secret, we love Morbid Angel’s work within the band, so of course we didn’t think too much when this opportunity came up 😊 We are basically introverts, so the excitement doesn’t come when we look at such an opportunity, but when the concert is in the realization phase. For me, two defining moments I can mention. One is when we walked past the I Am Morbid container backstage, and two doors down from it was our dressing room. If someone said to me twenty years ago that this would ever happen, I would have laughed hard.
The other defining experience was when we started to walk up to the stage to bring our things before the concert, and suddenly we bumped into David Vincent and Pete Sandoval, who were chilling in front of a fan backstage. It was an absolutely surreal experience to find ourselves in the same space with such icons. So I didn’t know what to do with the situation in my overwhelmed state of mind. In the end, only our drummer Atti caught Pete for a photo with him, and I was left without such a relic 😊
We look forward to more opportunities like this!
I see great confidence and a good future for the team. In the last few years we have seen several cases of Hungarian teams achieving fantastic results abroad. Believe me, if you continue like this, the same will happen to you. 🙂 Thank you for your answers!
PJ: Thank you very much for the encouragement and also for the interview, you had good questions which was a pleasure to answer!
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