These Japanese are mad! Sigh with their extreme metal (a bit black, a bit seventhies-oriented, a bit what they have at hand) are a flashlight in a poor scene: Mirai Kawashima makes us know something more about them...

I would like to ask you something about your frontcover: you've always used strange enigmatic frontcovers for your albums, so what is the reason behind the cover of "Imaginary Soniscape"?

Well, we have always wanted to have beautiful frontcovers to look at that were at the same time creepy and scary because that's what we want to do musically: beautifully scary music. All our covers have been beautiful and creepy. This time we wanted a very different frontcover from what one can see on most meta l albums, and with a strong psychedelic touch in it: Stephen O'Malley, the artist that made it, plays in a stoner band so it was sure him to understand what we wanted to achieve. Anyway it has not a particular meaning, that's just a particular image representing the ebsence of our music.

Also your title seems a reference to the feelings your music can communicate...

You're right, there are so many bands and so many people trying to put many limitations around their music, but we have no limits, our music is like a sound escape through our imagination.

Your music is usually still defined as black metal, maybe as a sort of avantgarde black metal. Do you accept this definition? How would you define your music?

That's a very difficult question to answer really, I am sure that so many people call us black metal, but we never wanted to play a particular genre. Such kinds of labels are useful for market strategies, but we have never thought our music could be summed up in a few words. It's metal, it's linked to many forms of extreme metal, but I don't think there's a definition that can frame us exactly.

Do you think that your musical references have changed with time passing by?Are your influences the same you had back in 1993 when you were born?

I actually think that our influences have remained the same practically. The concept of the band has always been the same, to combine brutal extreme forms of metal with beautiful melodic orchestrations and traditional stuff. But when we st arted in 1993 we were still missing the ability to do that. Now we have progressed a lot musically and we are much more clever at our instruments, our songwriting has improved a lot. But our background has always been the same, very very wide.

How do you write your music?

Well, it depends from time to time. Usually I come up with some new riff or something that often I put down on paper, I have a music notebook for that, sometimes I record this ideas or use the computer to record it. Very often I play the piano to compose. I'm the main composer, 80 % of music comes from my mind, the rest is written by our guitarist. Once our ideas are written or recorded we rehearse a lot and exhange our opinions about how the song must be like.

What are your lyrics about?

Very often I write my personal thoughts about concepts like life and death. This time I've also written something about the fear of getting old and the fear of death in general. Some of the songs in the album are drug-influenced, the y try to reproduce the worlds one can travel into under the effect of drugs. "Nietzchean Conspiracy" has been written by bard Faust old drummer of Emperor, he's a very intelligent person and I liked the lyrics he wrote very much. I received an E-mail from him a year ago, and so the idea of writing some lyrics for us was born at that time through means of an E-mail exchange."Slaughtergarden Suite" is like a horror movie and the lyrics are about the serial murders committed by a pyschopath. All our lyrics can be inspired by horror movies musically, but they all come from our imagination.

Japanese market is usually considered as one of the best market for heavy metal and hard rock in general...what your observations about it?

Well, as far as the melodic metal is concerned you're right...Things like Rhapsody, or Angra, or Arch Enemy and all the German metal in general is very accepted here in Japan, their market is huge quite a lot, but the market of extreme forms of metal like thrash, dea th or black is small in comparison with that. I think that here in Japan the audience is several years late in comparison with Europe or the USA, maybe for the fact that here there's not a huge knowledge of english and every kind of information get here not so fastly. Personally I'm very linked to the metal of the eighties, the metal I used to listen to when I was a teenager, bands like Iron Maiden, Kreator, Buldozer, Death SS, Venom, Mercyful Fate or Black Sabbath, but I don't like the metal of the nineties too much.

What is the main difference between "Imaginary Soniscape" and "Scenario IV" in your opinion?

As I said before, we have improved a lot in writing our music, but the main difference is that now we have used much more synthetizers and instruments of the seventies.

Fulvio Adile