In the beginning, there was nothing. Now there is CENOBIA.
A journey that began in May of last year with the anonymous, masked performer’s debut track ‘Devour Me’ now comes to a head with the release of EP ‘Lethal Devotion’ on September 18 – an extraordinary vision of an artist, pushing and pulling at who they are in this world, and the next. The EP itself is a savagely raw work, full of post-metal swells and metalcore bludgeons, meshed together with heartfelt storytelling to craft a sound that is both affecting and bold.
Now, Rock Sound dives into CENOBIA’s fascinating story but, in typically mysterious fashion, we are met instead with a ‘conduit’ who has been given permission to represent the artist and speak on her behalf. Through them, we examine what the writing process has provided for CENOBIA and explore what is next as this new phenomenon begins to take shape.
Rock Sound: What was CENOBIA’s intent with this project, and how has that adapted over the course of its creation? What conclusion has emerged from the process of bringing it to life?
Conduit: CENOBIA is a narrative on and manifestation of the endless life circles that we follow that repeat themselves. She is drawn from personal experiences in her own life, and those narratives feed into the cycle of rebirth she represents. Of wanting to be someone else and living a life where she feels like she didn’t belong or she wasn’t the person she wanted to be. She sets out on this journey to become something else entirely, and every chapter she releases is an episodic manifestation of that journey. By the time she reaches the end of that cycle, she isn’t quite back where she started, but she can look back and realise nothing actually had to change, and what she had at the beginning was fine the way it was. Through all this trauma, she has come out the other end, and she can say she is something else. CENOBIA is the cycle of life, death and rebirth, and seeing how history and patterns repeat themselves.
An example appears in ‘Devour Me’. That is the beginning and the end. That’s the first and the last time you see CENOBIA’s face because she wanted to be something else. She wanted to shed who she was. And when she dives into the bathtub at the beginning, she is then rebirthed as something else entirely. But it’s not the same. Her rebirth splits her in two. From there, it is all about the cycle she goes through to go back and undo the mistakes she made. And in the end, she can never be made whole again, and she can never be the person she was at the beginning. Maybe she never needed to take that step, but she did, and she was triumphant in the end because she took it.
RS: Those two sides of CENOBIA are represented in the sense that one of them seems powerful and confident, and the other afraid and unsure of the world that they have been pulled into. Yet, surely that more confident half of her still feels a sense of trepidation, wondering why they feel so comfortable within the darkness?
Conduit: The two halves represent the divide between days when she wakes up confident and knows what she needs to do, and days when she knows she isn’t happy and that maybe all of this wasn’t meant to be. To then look at ‘Throne Of Want’, you see the triumphant half of CENOBIA trying to take down the manifestation sitting before her on the throne to claim what’s hers, but there are also little flickers of the version of her from ‘Devour Me’ in there, too. She is present, and she has tried to display the duality between these two emotions. These two feelings. These two parts of her that together make the one being.
The story follows her as she faces this adversity, comes out the other side, and watches herself evolve. At the end of this journey, she looks back to who she was when she began the process, and she sees that she has made some choices. She is a different person. Maybe she didn’t need to hate who she was at the time when she started that process, but she knows that she’s stronger now, and it was all necessary. This is all her own reflection on human nature.
RS: What is it about heavy music that felt like the perfect vessel for her to share her story and her findings on such an emotional journey?
Conduit: Nothing makes her feel more whole than listening to heavy music. She feels at peace in that environment. She lusts for destruction. She wants her audience to feel what she feels when she’s part of that community at a metal show. The heaviness comes purely from personal preference. The duality of delicate melodies crafted by piano and voice, contrasted with crushing riffs, creates a paradox: you can feel her emotional vulnerability as well as her strength and confidence. Playing the weak with the strong, almost in a yin and yang. Her white cloak and her black cloak. She thinks writing heavier music is a far more expressive way to represent CENOBIA.
RS: As much as that yin and yang is represented through a lot of black and white within both halves of CENOBIA, there is also a lot of gold involved as well. Though as the story unfolds through her music videos, it becomes more and more prominent. Where does that colour come into play?
Conduit: It is very deliberate. It is based on the Japanese pottery art Kintsugi. CENOBIA can’t be made whole again with just black and the white merging together because that makes grey. That would also just be being made whole again, which is not the conclusion that is come to within that technique, which is why the pottery is repaired with gold. It is fusing what was once broken in an attempt to be made whole again, and it’s beautiful. She wanted to slowly start adding gold to herself as a sign of repair, almost like her strongest side is slowly coming back to her. The gold ring, the gold strip down the face. It is almost like she is reforming, and by the time you reach ‘Swallowed By The World’, there is a beautiful transcendence. She has been repaired, not to be who she was before, but something else entirely.
RS: Within her tale, there is much talk of her desire to devour the stars. But by the end of ‘Lethal Devotion’, it is almost as if she no longer wants to partake in that, because there is a realisation that this world does actually have beauty within it. Despite the pain and the hurt and the trauma that has been experienced, why should that pain and hurt and trauma affect something that is still so pure? Was that conclusion intentional?
Conduit: Exactly, why would you destroy something so pure? That is the way that ‘Constellation’ serves as an answer to ‘Devour Me’. She was pure all along. There was nothing wrong with her. The CENOBIA that you see at the end is the same as the CENOBIA you see at the start. ‘Constellation’ is a message to herself. The lyrics say, ‘Look at what you’ve done and what you’ve achieved’, and it is her saying that all of this has opened her eyes. She did this together, and she will never be the same again.
The black figure that constantly reappears throughout is supposed to be the physical manifestation of her trauma, chasing her through the stars. In every world, she experiences the same situation, but on a different plane of existence. So by the time she gets to ‘Constellation’, it is almost time to accept everything that’s happened, learn to love herself, and accept that this will probably happen again. This whole journey was just for her to learn this lesson and realise that it’s all going to be okay. And that journey is always supposed to loop.
RS: What does she feel like the whole purpose of ‘Lethal Devotion’ was? Was it to achieve a sense of clarity? A sense of peace?
Conduit: She thinks so. The whole process was a form of self-soothing and recovery. When it was first written, it was really about how what she had wasn’t what she was happy with. She wanted to end it all and become something else entirely. So the EP reflects that journey. Yet, the more that she fought with it and felt both sides of CENOBIA, being strong within her vulnerability as well as the want to destroy everyone and dominate the world, the more she saw that it carved its own path. She now feels as though these first few chapters sum up every emotion she felt on that journey, and she knows that other people feel them too. And even though she does not speak to her audience directly, she sees everything. She wants her audience to know she is there, and when she sees them reflecting on the emotions they feel, it brings her comfort to know she shares those same emotions.
That is where she allows the little bits of humanity to show themselves. Though CENOBIA feels like an uncontactable Demigod, she wants to leave these little easter eggs of things that are important to her for other people to find. And when they do find them, that brings her such joy. It reminds her of why she is doing this. It is to share her thoughts, her loves, her emotions with other people in the most peculiar ways possible.
RS: That must play a huge part when it comes to her playing live, then?
Conduit: It fills her with joy. CENOBIA is a strong queen demigod, and she wants to rule the world, but then she sees somebody wearing a CENOBIA shirt, and they’re smiling back at her; all she wants to do is tell them how happy they’ve made her. Nothing brings her more joy than people enjoying her art and her craft. That is the key to her heart, and maybe that’s a part of the journey that’s going to continue on. She has learnt what self-love and self-acceptance feel like.
RS: What is the biggest lesson that she has learned from this particular process?
Conduit: She has learned that she might think she is failing, that she is not on the right path, and that she is not achieving her goals, but no matter what, she needs to press on and stick to what she is doing. There were so many times when she deleted ‘Make Us Whole Again’. She didn’t want to commit to the riff in ‘Throne Of Want’. She almost didn’t want to go through with any of this. But there were so many times when she thought that nothing was going to change if she didn’t. And even though she mostly likes to work alone, as soon as she started to let other people in, the sense of community that comes from telling someone what she was doing was like reigniting a flame that had long been snuffed. The mistakes she was making were just lessons to be learned. She now feels as though having the mental fortitude to press on when she wants to give up is the most powerful way to overcome adversity.
She thinks we live in an age of perfection, where everybody thinks they have to be perfect out of the gate. An age of demand where you can snap your fingers and have everything you want at your fingertips. And because of that, she wanted to punish herself every time she didn’t achieve exactly what she wanted every time. It became about separating herself from that anxiety. Separating herself from the emotions that want to bring her down and restart the cycle. It became about finding what inspired her to push forward. She wanted to make music that made people feel what other people’s music made her feel. But she wanted to make sure what she was doing could still be her emotional vestige, first and foremost.
RS: And finally, what excites her about the next steps of this journey that have the potential to be?
Conduit: At the start of the process, she was nothing. And at the end of this process, CENOBIA was born. So now she has this platform. She has got that power. She has got those emotions behind her, and she knows what drives her. She has a sense of purpose. There are endless dimensions to go off of now. She could take this wherever she wants. There is no ceiling, and that was her whole goal. The cycle will continue, but it will manifest itself in many other ways. The beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. Those two halves still exist, and even though she has been reborn, she still has those two halves inside of her. Trauma can remanifest in many ways in our lives, and who knows where life could take her after this journey. She is in a whole new chapter in her own world, and that will reflect what happens in her story as well. Though more than anything, she wants to inspire her audience to create, just as she did.
The ‘Lethal Devotion’ EP will be released on September 18 via Fearless Records.
