Endum's New Album is Out!

Since I’ve decided that this blog is not only about my own concerts, but also about recommendations, here I am with another post of that kind. My oldest brother, Sanyi is a multitalented man: a programmer, a visual artist, and a bassist-double bassist all in one. If I have a creative idea that I don’t know the technique for, I usually ask for his help, and this has been the case since I was very little (he was already a 12-year-old big boy when I arrived). He taught me how to draw hands, take photos, and make linocuts. But we also wandered around Pompeii together, just weeks after he had left archaeology school, and he managed to get us into the excavation areas, eventually even joining the team for a month of actual digging. We had several bands together. With the folk music band, we even performed in Rome, and with the band Nemulas, we played at festivals multiple times. When I was in high school, the two much older brothers' friends and my friends were basically my social circle (Trinity times).

I always knew that Sanyi was a rock star. I was four years old when they first played with the Smafu band at a canteen. I remember the yellow tiles. There’s an anecdote about how I got upset about the loud volume and said, "Silly Sanyi, why is he shouting?" By the way, Smafu was a landmark institution in the city and a shining star on Szeged’s cultural map (see video klip here). Luckily, they have a concert every five years since their formation and breakup: I watched last year's concert online from Stuttgart and sipped a beer while doing so. His second famous band in Szeged was "NSZK – this music is ska", and I was 12 at their first concert, which took place in a basement. I wore a checkered shirt and a tie and partied standing on a radiator. I remember I kept the cigarette-smelling shirt for days, smelling it because the concert was such an experience. I think some people were doing cocaine in one of the basement rooms, but I only have vague memories of that. Anyway, my mom took me there and put me on the radiator, so I was safe.

I’m lucky that even though I barely know the Endum band, I still have a special memory connected to them. Sanyi turned 40 in 2022, and we organized a huge surprise party for him in Budapest. The celebration had two parts: an exhibition where we showcased Sanyi’s main artworks (graphics, t-shirts, sculptures, daughters, tapes, CDs), and a concert where Sanyi played with his bands. The concert started with Smafu (my sister Melitta and I even joined in on backing vocals), and then Endum played, a band I had never heard before. Their frontman is a striking figure: a huge, bald Dutch guy. The music mostly seemed like noise (we didn’t focus much on perfect sound engineering). Lot of notes. Softly pleasant.

And now about Krak.

At first, I was startled because it was loud, there were many sounds, the growling was intense, and the drums rattled. The music cut through me like an icy wind. However, this intense anxiety is usually replaced by something entirely lyrical, where you feel the silence without there actually being silence. At this point, the death-march-like repetition, the suffocating dissonance, and the throat-ripping growls fade in my ears. Something almost sentimental, melancholic, and even lyrical emerges. In the rarest cases, you hear it as head-banging metal: often, it’s precisely the lyricism that propels the listener into alien, previously unknown galaxies, while at other times, the polyrhythmic play breaks these visions. The rhythmic changes often cause a hallucinatory sensation, leading to a feeling of losing consciousness: at such moments, my head is flooded with warmth, a paralyzing numbness takes over my brain, and my limbs become tingling and numb.

When I first listened to this album, I was in Liechtenstein, watching a group of birds in the sky as they elegantly circled. I thought to myself, life is beautiful: both metal music and small birds exist in it. Therefore, I would recommend this extremely emotional music most of all for snowy, mountainous, sunny hikes.

A little fun fact:

Sanyi shared that the album cover was created after his one-year-old son, Illés, chewed on the French edition of Kundera’s Risibles amours. The book cover has a slightly figurative graphic, and Sanyi photographed a piece of it in a way that it wouldn’t be recognizable. Instead, the focus is on how, due to Illés’ saliva, the torn pieces of the cover, originally a greenish-brown print, turn bright green around the areas where his teeth had bitten. Sándor photographed many interesting objects with the intent for the cover, this being one of them. He always used the same filter combination on the photos, but in the end, he chose this particular piece as the album cover.