The Hermit Has No God: Interview with Mauna Sol
Romania’s Mauna Sol on “A New Life” and the secular desert at the heart of The Calling.
Hagiography, the reverential writing of saints’ lives, has never been interested in doubt. The hermit is tested; the hermit prevails; the hermit is holy. George, vocalist and story-writer for BraΘov, Romania’s Mauna Sol, was drawn to a different model: “What I did was turn those stories into a more lay version, where that higher power isn’t some divinity, but ourselves, with all the demons, temptations, hopes, dreams and everything else in between, and make the struggle more relatable, humane and anti-hagiographical.”
The Calling, Mauna Sol’s debut album due through Loud Rage Music, is built on a short story George wrote: a man who withdraws from society and pursues rebirth through what he calls a “suicide of identity,” a violent interior process set within a hostile desert. The image is ancient. The Desert Fathers of third and fourth century Egypt, hermits who retreated into the wilderness to wage war against the self, understood the desert as the landscape where nothing could be faked. George’s History degree led him into this territory: “I graduated in History from university and one of my interests was connected to areas with religious competitions and how asceticism and renunciation played their part in political struggles and mass conversions. The most known example can be found in the Bible, but a lot of civilizations or religions have a story or more of miracle-making hermits (saints, prophets, gods) and how they prevailed in the most hostile environment imagined to them to obtain an inner reward, in the name of a personal connection to a higher power.” In his telling, the desert carries more than geography: “That environment was most of the time the desert, which can take multiple meanings, such as a hardship, a personal obstacle or even life itself.”
The Calling is also, inseparably, a band record. Five musicians inhabit a story one man wrote. George describes the fit between lyric and music as intuitive: “Whenever I heard the music, it felt that the sonic landscape and the narrative one met, so it felt like a 3D puzzle, just waiting to be put together. The journey-esque vibes, the intensity, the ever changing emotions are intertwined, in a vibrant, playful fashion, but still with a dark, intense edge.”
“A New Life,” the album’s lead single, opens on arrival rather than departure. George: “It is loud, triumphalist, effervescent, and a hurricane of out-of-control emotions. The listener should feel like the protagonist wants and loves the change, that he is savoring the moment when he is crossing the threshold between a repulsive past and a hopeful future, with all its expected fresh challenges.”
The protagonist survives the desert on nothing but himself. George calls that anti-hagiographical. It might also be called honest.
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