ELUVEITIE BAND PAGE
 ELUVEITIE
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CURRENT NAME
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Eluveitie |
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FORMER NAMES
|
- |
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ORIGIN
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Switzerland |
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STATUS
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Active |
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FORMED IN
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2002 |
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LABEL
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Nuclear Blast |
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GENRE
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Folk music; Metal |
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STYLE
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- |
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LYRICAL THEME
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- |
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BAND ADDED
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2005-04-13, 00:00 |
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LAST UPDATE
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2008-06-08, 02:48 |
The concept behind Eluveitie is simple: Rough, hard and straight from the heart coming Metal becomes one with mystical, primordial Celtic folk music to celebrate a marriage, a feast of mercilessely wild Celtic dancing. The sound of Eluveitie includes authentic, traditional Celtic folk music - played with a rich blend of instruments. Here, "Celtic" has most of all a geographical meaning, comprising the native music of all of Western Europe’s Celtic countries: Helvetia (Switzerland), Brittany, Eire (Ireland), Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and others.
Some lyrics of Eluveitie are written in a reconstructed form of a beautiful but unfortunately more or less forgotten language: Helvetic Gaulish. As a gaulish celtic clan, the Helvetians (afterwhich Switzerland is still named today) spoke Gaulish (continental Celtic) - with their own dialect and linguistic idioms of course. Continental Celtic is one of the two branches which were established within the languaes of the Celts, the other being Goidelic - the Celtic of the Isles. Sad but true, only the western branch - Goidelic Celtic - survives. Not in it's original form, of course, but still well recognizable. It manifests itself today in the gaelic languages of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany (Although spoken on the "Continent", Breizh - Brittany's Gaelic - has it's roots in Cymraeg, the ancient language of Wales.)
But the speech of the continental Celts partly survived in another way (besides the fact that lots of individual words and sentences have been found, carved in stone for instance): In the so-called Swiss-German language, in "Schwyyzerdüütsch" - the language of today's "Helvetia". There are lots of gaulish words to be found - especially among the people who live in the mountain regions of the land. And so the language used in Eluveitie may be called a "new Gaulish" language, using the ancient and the still-existing Gaulish expressions. It is not the Gaulish which the Helvetians really spoke (this language remains lost!). It is my attempt to reconstruct it in the way it might have been spoken. The same is true for the letters. The Helvetians didn't use the Latin alphabet, but the Etruscan, which is, by the way, read from right to left. In the CD-booklet of "Vên", you will find the song titles written in etruscan letters. The lyrical concept is dealing with the history of the Clan Elveti (Helvetians), with it's everyday life, it's spiritual journey. This is too where our bandname comes from: "Eluveitie" simply means "I am the Helvetian" in the ancient gaulish language.
Eluveitie was originally formed by Chrigel in winter 2002 as a mere studio-project; which was completed in summer 2003 when "Vên" was recorded. This self-financed MCD was released in october 2003. After "Vên" was ardently received by the scene, zines, ect Meri, Sevan, Dide, Dani & Chrigel decided to transform the studio-project into a "real" band; so the band Eluveitie exists since November 2003. In early 2004 the first gigs were played. In May 2004 Eluveitie signed to the dutch label Fear Dark.
| Session musicians Add - Fetch |
| Unknown / none |
