SOURCE – So for our readers who don’t really know about Eilera and who will be reading about you for the first time, tell us a little bit about the band.
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – Eilera is my name as a solo artist. I have been working as a solo artist since 2003. Walking my path as Eilera has led me to working with many musicians, including studio sessions or band members. I am currently taking my time to fix a band, in the deep, meaningful sense of the term… I love working with a band. This is the hardest thing to find and it takes time to build it. Yet how rewarding!
Currently I am working with Jani Luttinen on guitars and Jan Sormo on bass. I am about to audition drummers. The latest person I have been working with in studio is Tero Kinnunen, who you might know for recording and touring with Nightwish.
SOURCE – What is your current release? Explain a little about it…
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – My current release are 2 singles called Frozen Path and Into the Sea. These are absolute fresh air for me, after the heaviness of the previous record Darker Chapter… and stars. These two songs happen in eastern Helsinki. Frozen Path belongs to the family of my passionate, romantic and dangerous songs, like for example “Fusion”. “Into the Sea” is darker and relates to feelings of loneliness. It belongs to my other family of songs which is: healing with Nature. Like ‘Celtic’, for example.
Here in my WARM/COLD blog you can read the story of the songs, hear some of their radio edits versions and see photos:
SOURCE – In your mind, what kinds of themes or emotions do you think the music is expressing?
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – I think my songs are a place to escape from daily ugliness into an adventurous dimension where Beauty is allowed.
SOURCE – Lets talk about Fusion… to me it marks another evolution for the band. Do you feel the same?
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – I do. Fusion was the first LP – and the only one this far – I did for a label. (Spinefarm Rec, pre Universal times) I had been asked at that time to combine the style of my work from my debut-album Facettes with a heavier sound, in order to match with the label’s image. This was technically not a problem for me, as I had been writing metal songs for several years before with my previous band Chrysalis. It was quite a challenge artistically speaking, yet it remained a very spontaneous creative process.
I started to work on that new style with the appetiser EP called Precious Moment, also released by Spinefarm Records. I absolutely loved working on that EP and I was encouraged by the result to go on in this direction. It received very good feedback from the specialised press and Spinefarm Records loved it too. More importantly, I was very happy with it.
Fusion was also a rich working experience for me, quite tough, and I learned a lot very fast. It got a good welcoming from the press as well. To me though, Fusion started the decline with my main collaborator and best friend at the time Loïc Tézénas. As we were working every day in the same room I started feeling pressures that made the working process much more difficult and less natural. Therefore, Fusion was at the same time a positive evolution and the beginning of a much darker time, that extended and ended with the following self-released LP Darker Chapter… and stars.
SOURCE – Do you have any other releases planned this year – a single/EP/DVD perhaps?
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – I have a whole album awaiting on demo. I don’t know yet how we are going to finance it, the music business currently being such a mess. Maybe some crowd funding…
I’ll keep everybody informed on the official Eilera FB page. I’ll also keep posting videos there, photos and whatever work we currently achieve. The first thing for now is to have a band drummer and to start playing shows. We are also in the process of learning each other as a band… I don’t know yet when we’ll be back in studio recording the rest of the album, but what I know, is that these other songs of my new stories here in Helsinki, start to sound very good played with those guys.
SOURCE – How do you find the balance between your tour and home life? Is it easy for you to just go home and switch off?
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – So far, no big clash. I have not been on long tours yet though. Hopefully soon. Let’s see what happens then…
SOURCE – What’s the rock scene like in France. Are there any bands you think we should be keeping an eye on?
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – The rock/metal scene in France has been very long to emerge and is still in the process of doing so. It has to fight back the monopole of the “Paris style” over the national music market.
I think there is a lot of bands working hard in France, with little means to get recognition. Rock/Metal is still an underground scene in France after all… I have been mostly living in my other home Helsinki these past years, so honestly, I have not discovered any new French bands that I could recommend to you now. I am visiting France soon and I’ll take the temperature then again.
SOURCE – Does the band have a big fanbase and where in the world are you the most popular do you think?
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – I think our fan base is scattered between France, Finland, Germany and America mostly. How big is it? I don’t know!
SOURCE – Do you have any ideas of what could be done to reverse the negative trend the music industry is currently heading in?
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – I think that the solution is the same as in other industries.. Let’s take the bakery industry, for example: some big industrial brands have taken over the small particulars by selling bread in supermarkets at a cheap price. The baker next door, who owns his own business, cannot survive, even though his bread tastes much better. Maybe his bread costs a bit more, but it is baked by a specialist who put his soul in the work. Who do we want to support: the supermarket or the baker?
I think we have to decide now what world we wish to live in. We have to decide also in which music world we want to live in: a formatted one owned by major companies, or a musical world from artists?
I think that passionate people have to take power again over the money world. So what we can do is to discover our bands on the internet, or via friends, and once we really like an artist, play the game: support this artist. Mutual respect is the key: the artist works hard to give quality, and the crowd supports the artist by buying its work. I am for example, waiting forward to buying the new Apocalyptica album.
SOURCE – Care to say something to your fans?
Aurélie Potin Suau (Vocals) – Love you.
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