With Wacken XXX looming up to stomp its big metal footprint on again this summer, we’re taking a look at a bunch of the bands who are hitting its iconic stages for the first time. Today we feature a band from the heart of the festival’s homeland, Gernotshagen…
Simple Things first – where are you guys from?
Basically we´re all from Thuringia, almost directly in the centre of . Most of us originated in a village named ‘Trusetal’, but at the moment half of the band are living all over the country.
Before you get sick of being asked…where does the band name come from?
As we mentioned before, the majority of us grew up in the village Trusetal, located directly in the depths of the Thuringian forest. Anyway a big interest in local traditions, history and folklore is given to all of us. For that reason, some of us are always trying to find out new facts about the past of our homeland and studying it. One day our guitar player found out that there once was a very small settlement in the woods, near the current location of Trusetal, while he was studying the chronicles of the village. This settlement, called Gernotshagen, marks the first hint of prehistoric people building houses in the region of the modern village. By now this very small settlement (only some tools and shards of pottery were found there) is seen as the first intention and therefore considered as the ‘origin’ for today´s Trusetal.
For us ‘Gernotshagen’ stands for ‘home’, ‘history’ and ‘ancestral roots’!
Describe your music. Who are your musical influences?
As probably most bands would say, our music is influenced by a huge variety of bands and genres. For sure all of us are metalheads, but everyone listens to different bands. The range is from country rock and heavy metal over to some death metal and hard rock artists, to depressive and atmospheric black metal. This doesn´t mean that all of these influences can be found in our music, but it leads to the individual style of everyone playing his instrument.
Our music could be described as a mixture of black metal elements and melodical pagan-like lead guitar and keyboard parts. Most of our songs are diversified and have both slow and fast parts, dark-melancholic and warmer melodical elements. It’s like a journey through our thoughts and emotions.
Do you have any particular lyrical themes?
The lyrical themes differ from album to album. In general the most recent parts are narrative stories about nature based themes, influences from Nordic and Germanic mythology and considerations about the fall of mankind (mostly in connection with abuse of nature and wilderness).
What´s your live show like? How many shows have you played?
Probably it would be better to ask our fans about what they think about our live shows! In our own mind, we would say that our shows are impulsive, with a lot of energy we try to spread from stage to audience, mostly given by our lead singer and frontman Askan.
We always try to give our best during our live shows to represent us and our ion as well as the music itself. We can’t give you the exact number of live shows we’ve played over the last 20 years, but all in all it has to be something up to around 200 shows.
What´s the wildest thing you´ve seen or done at a live show?
Over the past years we’ve seen a lot of crazy things. It’s really hard to point out one special event. We’ve played a lot of overwhelming live shows at open air festivals with thousands of visitors as well as in small club-sized locations with 20 guests shredding their necks in front of stage. On the other hand we have seen a lot of things going wrong, like abandoning equipment, horrible locations or incompetent organisers. But at this moment we guess, that we don´t want to miss any of these experiences.
What, if anything are you plugging/promoting at the moment?
These days our whole focus lies on the release of our album and therefore the promotion of it.
Other than Wacken, what are your plans for 2019?
Besides Wacken we have already some other live shows this year. Some of them we´ve already played, others are still to come. But as we said before, besides Wacken Open Air, the biggest step we are working forward to is the release of the new album. Right now we can’t name a clear date, but we will do anything to get it to happen this year (probably sometime in autumn). The cover artwork was released at the end of 2018, some new promo pics have been launched but the name is still an internal secret. For sure you’ll know soon…
What are you most looking forward to at Wacken this year?
We are really looking forward to how the audience will react to us and our music, as we are thinking, that we´re a kind of an exotic band at this festival. We hope to reach a lot of people there and hopefully win a lot of new fans. In general we´re excited about the whole experience itself and the enormous size of the festival, the stage and the campgrounds, as well as the vibe. It’s gonna be awesome and we can’t wait to hit the stage at Wacken Open Air!
Gernotshagen: official | facebook | instagram | youtube
