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Interview
Deutsche VersionInterview mit Tystnaden (26.09.2006)
The Italians with the Swedish name gave to us an ambitious debut album named Sham Of Perfection in the vicinity of In Flames and Ayreon. Singer Laura De Luca kindly answered a few questions with detail and poetry.
HH: Hi! Congratulations to a very interesting and intriguing album! How do you feel, now that Sham Of Perfection has finally reached the fans?
Laura: Thank you very much! We feel really excited, happy, we feel deeply moved. It's like a dream come true for us. When Limb Music came into contact with us, before the recordings of the album, we felt like we were ready to do this step, we thought we had the right stuff to realize a full-length album.
HH: How were the reactions so far?
Laura: The reaction of the press are good and also the reactions of the new fans. We are very happy and we did not imagine such good responses...
HH: How did an Italian band come by a Swedish name and why did you pick it - after all it means "silence"?
Laura: We were purposely searching for a particular moniker for our band, a meaningful and significative name... we preferred to sacrifice the pronunciation of a more simple band name. For us, the words Tystnaden, which, as you said, means silence in Swedish, perfectly represents what we wanted to tell with our music and the contrast between melody and aggressively in our songs .That contrast represented us since the beginning.
Tystnaden is a Swedish film by Ingmar Bergman made in 1963. With this moniker we also wanted to make a tribute to the nation that gave birth to the music which inspired our musical project in 1998.
HH: Who is responsible for the songwriting? Is there a mastermind or does the whole band bring in ideas?
Laura: A new song starts from one of us, usually one of the two guitarists or from the keyboard player, but the magic of Tystnaden is the way we work on the original idea: we try to get a strong impact thru a very aggressive guitar-riffing, but being at the same time focused on creating a good melody, that can be easily reminded... Lyrics are the final step, and they are inspired by the mood that the instrumental song provokes in the soul of the lyricist.
HH: Who writes and arranges the vocal lines?
Laura: I write and arrange all the vocal lines, even if some great arrangements you can listen to in the album were ideas of Luigi Stefanini, one of the most expert sound engineer here in the north of Italy and the one that has followed us step by step at New Sin studios during the recordings of Sham Of Perfection. Luigi has worked with me in the arrangements of the vocal lines and he taught me a lot of things.
HH: Where do your influences come from? The promo sheet mentiones In Flames, Dark Tranquility and Sentenced, but your music is a lot more varied than that.
Laura: Yes, I agree with you! Our influences are truly different, we are six musicians each with his own personality and we all like different kind of music: Alberto, for example, he likes pop music at the same way of Dream Theater, Cesare loves Nevermore and at the same time he likes The Beatles, Lorenzo likes the hip-hop of Fort Minor, but at the same time he's a fan of Dream Theater, and he likes the brutality of the Slipknot, but also some kind of music really different, like jazz and trance. Federico is the black metal guy, but he also likes al lot of guitar heroes, and I love bands like Slipknot, System Of a Down and Ill Nino, and I was also a fan of Amorphis, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity...
As you can see our influences are truly different, and I think that you can probably find some of the music that has inspired us to become musicians in every Tystnaden song...
We think that maybe our compositions could sounds original because of all of these different influences...
HH: All of your songs have almost the same length, from 3:57 to 4:59. No song is very short nor do you have overlong epics. Is that coincidence or did you arrange the songs this way?
Laura: Well, we set our minds with a conscience decision on keeping all our songs limited in time, under the barrier of five minutes. We think that a song has to have an immediate comprehension. The limitation in time is both because of avoiding the prolixity and because of liking our songs under the barrier of the five minutes while composing them. None of the songs we've written needed a length over.
HH: If Sham Of Perfection were a flower, what flower would it be and why?
Laura: It would be a daisy. Because the daisy means simplicity, plainness, pureness...and this is how we consider Sham Of Perfection and his birth. It's not the result of a commercial stunt, it is the genuine result of our minds and souls, the result of our love in our music..
HH: Your relatively few live dates indicate that you all have regualar jobs beside Tystnaden...
Laura: Yes, we all have regular jobs beside Tystnaden. This musical project takes us every moment to spare, with the same energies after so many years...but for living our regular jobs are obviously necessary!
HH: Will we see Tystnaden live in Germany?
Laura: Well, we hope it! Really! It would be great and we love live shows because you can feel the nearest contact with the people, even if you are an unknown band coming from nowhere and no one knows that you have already released your first full-length album!...it is the right way to make us known by the people.
But we don't know yet the plans of our record label for tour dates. We are waiting a opportunity that will benefit the band, our fans and people who will hear us for the first time. It could be with a bigger known band or a very good unknown band. Time will tell...J
HH: Thank you for your time! Any last words?
Laura: Thank you for this your interview, I really enjoyed very much! With this you gave us the opportunity to make us known.
We hope that Sham Of Perfection will be appreciated and that people will support our band Tystnaden, bringing up this underrated kind of music more and more.
Kisses!
Laura De Luca