Continuo Renacer strives for change

Hello from BRUTALISM. What’s been happening for you lately?
Hi. One of the reasons is that we´re not pro musicians, another one is that we have to compose and record the album.

So first obvious question- how did Continuo Renacer begin back in 94?
We were a small group of people interested in extreme music, so eventually we decided to play that kind of music. Diego, Xabier and Javi were the first guys to create Continuo Renacer.

You guys were originally a Death Metal band in the late 90s before switching to progressive instrumentals. Care to explain the reason for the shift?
There were several line up changes over the years. Some new flesh made Continuo Renacer a much more prog oriented band.

What are some of your influences for your music, both past and present?
Regarding old material we would like to mention Death, Atrocity, Morbid Angel, Pestilence, Cryptopsy...  A band we adore is Suffocation. Nowadays it seems that it is a nice era for metal bands. Some of the bands we´re listening to are Periphery, Animals as Leaders, Blotted Science, The Faceless, Obscura, and of course, Decapitated.

Do you have any Death Metal material- either in the form of demos or unreleased tracks- and do you think you’ll ever release it to the fans so they can really see how far you’ve come along?
No. CR released a Death Metal oriented demo long time ago but we don´t want a re-creation of that. It´s classified X... ask Mulder.

When creating Progressive Metal, what are the main things you focus on to give Continuo Renacer its distinct sound compared to so many other bands out there that perform a similar genre?
When creating a song we don’t approach the compositions thinking that we have to sound like this band or that band, or a mix of both of them… we ended up playing this style of music mixing our  personal different tastes that we have from our background. Each of us listens to different styles of music that are not really close to each other and the mix of all that is what maybe gives us a distinct type of sound. Often people tell us that we sound like this or that band and most of times we don’t even know them. So if we sound like other bands or even if we have a distinct sound is a matter of uncontrolled factors.

On your latest album the epic “Newborn” is almost fifteen minutes- your longest track to date. When concerning epic tracks do you find it difficult to write music that will stay intriguing for that long or do you just jam and combine it all together for a ‘spur of the moment’ deal?
Well, on our first album there were two long songs too. “The Intruder” and “The Unknown Man” were one single song as they were “The Chaos Therapy” and “The Harmony Therapy”. “The Newborn” was the first song we created and it was ten minutes long or so, but we knew it was unfinished. We took it back once we finished the rest of the tracks. We jam and then combine what we think is good for the song. That´s what we do with all the songs but in this particular case we just jammed a lot more till we thought the job was done.

Looking down the road, do you think that with the advances in Mp3 downloads (not always legally) that Metal and bands have themselves a disadvantage where releasing things on CD is not as prominent and now they have to work extra hard to tour to really make music as a ‘living’ as opposed to hobby?
Unfortunately we don´t make music for a living. Mp3… it’s a way to spread our music all over the world. We use them too. We released a CD because we wanted to play gigs. The way to make it for a living is to play gigs.

Have you ever encountered people who have admitted they blatantly ripped off your hard work and how did you react (or would react if it never happened) to the pirating?
The funny thing is that when we ran out of copies of our first album, we passed fans the link to download it. So we don´t really care about it. One thing we don´t do is to sign pirated copies.

Since tours are now the heart of music these days, has Continuo Renacer done much touring in their career? Any places or bands that you really want to go see/ tour with?
We´ve toured Spain but we´d like to tour all over Europe or even Japan. We´d like to meet our Dutch fans.

Last question- your fans are the heart of everything, from your Death Metal days to the current Progressive Metal days. Has there been any specific praise or support that has really made mark to show you that this was the right direction to go in that you can recall?
Joey DeMaio told us (drunk) “Keep on this way and America will love you”. We will just follow the leather.

Again, thanks for your time and keep up the awesome versatility of your work!
You´re welcome. We really appreciate your interest.

PS. Excuse us for our crappy English but we know what leather means.