Greetings from Bulgaria and congratulations on the new album! The doom metal diamond Oionos is a definite step forward. Is the concept a continuation of the theme from Days of Nothing?
Thanks a lot! About the new album I’d say it’s indeed a prosecution of the theme of apocalypse that we dealt in the previous album. The main difference is that here it’s intended to be as apocalypse created by man to destroy the entire human being along with himself as well. In Days of Nothing the tragedy is about to come, here the scenery is post-apocalyptic and the survivors are main characters. They are not men, but objects, and their bodies are unmoving, cold and naked. They often think of the past that was and don’t see any future. This is, in brief, what the album is about. In addition there are some lyrics dealing with other matters like “Outsiders”, which is about five years that we spent with the Foreshadowing, or “Survivors’ Sleep”, which, beyond the metaphor of those who came out alive from apocalypse, is our remark and critic on all religions in general.

Both lyrics and music in Oionos are literally steeped in suffocating melancholy. Do you really believe that humanity will “self-devour” itself one day, so to speak?
It’s clear that the world we’ve been living at the very moment is going to reach a saturation point, and it seems it’s going to explode. We always imagined the apocalypse like something to reset the world and make it restart from zero. But even if all this happens it wouldn’t change anything. We would always make the same mistakes and play ourselves off against each other. It’s a sad thing but that’s life.

It’s kind of modern these days to include speeches of famous historical figures in music, but the words of Roosevelt’s and Oppenheimer’s rarely sounded so true and eerie…
We wanted simply to identify apocalypse with the atomic bomb, the nuclear explosion with clear references to some historical events as the Cold War and Hiroshima bombardment in order to give a more visual character to the entire album.

What inspires you as a band in general to compose such dark music - the new album sounds even more depressing than its predecessor. Do you take your inspiration from pure fiction (books, movies) or you just look around and get ideas from everyday life?
We probably drew our inspiration from some movies some of us were watching after a long time as “The Day After” or “Millennium” TV series. Ans this gave us in the long run the main idea to represent with our music the images of a nuclear explosion and a scenery of a post- apocaliptic world and flashbacks recalling the Cold War. I think the very strenght of this album lies in its heavily iconographical features.

The artwork is once again created by Seth Siro Anton. What does the face on symbolize and was the idea yours or his?
The artwork was entirely created by Seth Siro Anton. As a matter of fact we would like to suggest some ideas of how the cover should be like, but in the end we preferred not to interfere in Seth’s work. We know how an artist is jealous of his art and after all it’s a right thing, probably if we were in his same place we would be jealous

too. I think the image of the old man might be strictly connected to the figure of that old man with a strange posture in “Days of Nothing” artwork. I see in the old man eyes a warning of the apocalypse that is going to arrive, or better, more than a warning, a foreshadowing...

What about Sotiris who appears at the end of the homonymous song Oionos, I believe his words are in Greek?
The spoken words at the end of Oionos are indeed said by Sotiris, who’s Septic Flesh guitarist. Initially we wanted to try and insert a spoken word in Latin, but whatever we said should be translated from Italian to Latin, and since no one of us knows Latin we thought to try it in Greek. In order to make the narative more evocative we absolutely needed a Greek speaking mother-tongue, and Seth suggests to us Sotiris, who often use this kind of spoken style for Septic Flesh too.

Your cover of Sting’s “Russians” is by far one of the best pop interpretations I’ve ever heard! You did a great job on it, but why did you chose this particular song?
Thank you very much, we’ve very happy to hear it from you! This choice comes from the fact “Russians” has got a mood which is very close to Oionos: the fear and the perception of an imminent atomic holocaust (in Cold War between Russia and USA); and in these days, due to republics that still claim to possess arsenal of nuclear weapons or that are developing that kind of technology, this issue was dramatically topical.

In general, Italy is not so famous for its doom metal scene. What persuaded you to take this darker path and why do you think most Italian bands prefer to play more cheerful music?
The main thing we all have in common is that we’ve always been attracted by obscure sounds since we were young. Alex and Andrea were fans of the gothic doom scene since the 90’s, we think is a true scene, free from the logics of the mainstream, and fascinating in the same time for the subjects it deals. Yes, you’re right, most of the Italian music is cheerful and happy, probably because of the climate, Italy is a warm and sunny place, whereas in cold and cloudy places like Finland or Germany people is totally addicted to genres as Death or Black metal, or Gothic. It’s for the same reason that Italians or Spanish are more outgoing and Germans and Norwegians more inward-looking. But fortunately this is not a rule and it’s just to generalize, obviously there’s a lot of dark sound supporters in Italy, I think in the latest years there had been a major interest to dark and metal from Italian young people in general.

Some band members played in Spiritual Front and Klimt 1918, Marco was in How Like A Winter. What’s the current situation of these bands? I read that Marco will work together with an ex-Within Temptation drummer and a band member of Candlemass on a new project…
Yeah, you’ll be probably referring to that black metal project of a syberian guy called Kamlath. That’s right, together with Marco in this project will be involved Mike Wead and Dennis Leeflang. Apart from Marco, Andrea and Jonah already played in the Italian black metal band Grimness and still been playing in this band, while me and Alex are not involved in any other project.