Inside Amplifest: Bosque

Portugal’s own Bosque won’t cheer you up in the very least. Their despair and dirge-laden funeral doom, crafted along almost a decade of existence, is a one way descent into a pit of nothingness and Nowhere, released last year, is their best and bleakest effort to date. Bosque apply dark droning riffs, mournful keyboards and vocals that change between choir-like sung lamentations and grief-stricken growls to build a unique atmosphere that will turn Amplifest into a dark, damp crypt. But before that, Bosque’s mastermind DM took some time to answer our usual questions.

What do you expect of the Amplifest audience?
I expect a diverse crowd, mixing doomsters with a lot of people that was unaware of Bosque a few weeks ago. In my opinion this “audience mix” is one of the most interesting aspects of Amplifest.

We like surprises, but what can we expect from your show?
We’ll play some unreleased songs for the first time and the band will present a new live line up, so this will be enough to make this Amplifest appearance very different from Bosque past shows.

What band do you really want to see at Amplifest?
I’m curious to check (in some cases re-check) most bands, but Cult of Luna, Urfaust, Yob & Pharmakon are my top priorities.

If you had to pick a band or a musician of this Amplifest edition to play with who would it be?
It had to be Pharmakon. Noise and uncomfortable dissonance are a part of Bosque since the first demo, so it would be a perfect mix.

What records have you been listening to lately?
My playlists are very long and are always changing, so all I can say is that today I’ve playing old Black Sabbath and Saturnus.

Enough about music, Amplifest is also about other arts. What books have you been reading and what movies have you been watching lately that you want to recommend?
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to watch movies at the moment, so I don’t have any special recommendation to make. Bosque is deeply influenced by poetry, so I recommend some of my recurring readings: José Régio and Eugénio de Andrade.