Picture Atlantic – Interview & Live Music Video

IRR famous maker Aaron Blumenshine had a nice sit down chat with the boys in Picture Atlantic while they were in San Francisco promoting their new EP ”Dulce Et Decorum Est” with some live songs. Aaron didn’t stop with the video, he took it a step further and shot a video of the band and took photos for your enjoyment.

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Notes by Aaron: A few weeks ago we decided to work on some promotional work and possible album cover material for their new upcoming EP  ”Dulce Et Decorum Est.”

For those interested in the band, you may want to know that I conducted a small interview with Nikolaus Bartunek (vocalist of Picture Atlantic) and found it pretty intriguing… Enjoy.

IRR: What was the major influence for the Title “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
PA: The Major influence for the title was actually a rather famous poem by Wilfred Owen. In WW1, Wilfred Owen was a foot soldier in the trenches, and wrote a lot of really, in my opinion, intense poetry. I didn’t have to dig very far or anything to find this poem, since its probably one of the most well known poems of the war. Something about the name just felt right. That title in of itself is from another poem by Horace, and it translate to “How Sweet and Fitting It Is”.

IRR: What Aspects in history helped form the moon/content of the album?
PA: Mainly the mood and content are shadowed by WW1, and the turn of the century. The short years after 1900 were very much, in my opinion a confused marriage of the late 1800’s, with its carriages, gentleman, and honor, and this bright new future that had just dawned, with its terrible and awesome technologies. If you look back at the pictures from that era, you see many family photos with some members wearing older looking suits, with high collars, and some wearing more modern suits. It must have been a scary time for some people. Having latched onto this point in time where there were some very strict and orthodox points of life and society, and then to have this new generation rising up with the turn of the century. After WW1, I think the world learned quite a bit about the shallow nature of “Gentlemans Code” that the war was so fervently based on.

IRR: Tell me a little about general idea of the album, as far as the modern release, but with classic photography?
PA: I’m not nearly as political as some musicians are, and I’ve never found it even mildly attractive to become a political act, but I started to see parallels in certain points in history, and our time now. We are standing on the turn of a century ourselves, and things are rapidly changing in our culture and in our modern world. We have currently, as a country, been going through some wars that I think are, plain and simple, completely pointless. On a flip side, I have always been in love with literature from before the turn of the century, and even shortly after. That literary world from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to H.P. Lovecraft, has always appealed to me. Naturally I saw that WW1 shared quite a great deal of political climate as our “War on Terror”, and something clicked in my head; for my love of what once was, and my frustrations for what is happening right now in front of me. We may not fight our wars by going over the top of trenches, but I think the action is equally as futile as it once was.

- Live Video filmed and edited by Aaron Blumenshine

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