Ελληνικά
Last Updated on 08:41 PM by Nikos Nakos
Good evening from Metal Invader and Greece. Before we start talking about your record “Seven Heads Then Horns”, give us a few information about you. Α small bio if you wish.
Giuseppe – Hi and thanks for the interview! The Foreshadowing was born in 2005 by Alessandro Pace (Guitars), Francesco Sosto (Keyboards), Andrea Chiodetti (Guitars), later joined by Jonah Padella (Drums) and Marco Benevento (Vocals). We did four records: “Days of Nothing” 2007 and “Oionos” 2010 while in 2012 Francesco Giulianelli joined the band as bassplayer to complete the line up and give birth to the 2012 Album “Second World”. In 2013 Jonah Padella leaves the band and is replaced by me, Giuseppe Orlando. The result is the brand new 2016 album “Seven Heads Ten Horns”.
Let’s return to the present; are you satisfied by the crowd’s response and what are your plans for its promotion?
Giuseppe – Well, it seems that people are enjoying our new record and we are proud of that! We realized a lyric video for the song “17” and a video for “Nimrod part I- The Eerie Tower” and we’ll be on tour in october with Moonspell and Eleine and in November with AHAB to promote the album.
Marco – Αfter the new album release we had only a few shows, so it is quite early to make a real evaluation of the crowd’s response. However, we are very happy with the gigs we played so far. We are about to leave for a European tour – that will lead us to Greece too – and that will be a big testbed.
Beasts, Babylon, The Great Whore from John’s Apocalypse… All those themes are quite interesting. What’s the message you want to convey through your lyrics?
Marco – The main concept of 7H10H is the fall of Europe through the vision of the fall of Babylon. The willing of make something too ambitious without considering the consequences. We use metaphors and biblical symbols to speak of other things. Most of the lyrics are influenced by what lately happened in Europe and in the Middle East. For example, the song “New Babylon” was inspired by the protest against the Troika in Greece; as “Martyrdom” was written after the events in Gezi Park in Istanbul during the summer of 2013; “Lost soldiers” was inspired by the great waves of desperate immigrants who come to Europe. All these things are basically linked to the main theme of the album.
Giuseppe – We wanted to draw parallels between those themes and what we are living today. It seems that almost nothing has changed since that time. The war is still there, different religions are still fighting each other, there are dictatorships, also the ones disguised by democracy and the European Union is risking to go the way of Babylon because of their lack of communication, greed of the monetary system.
The record’s cover art is a creation of Seth Siro Anton, an artist who has already collaborated with bands like Paradise Lost, Moonspell, Exodus and so on… Is this an indication of you aiming higher than before?
Marco – Actually Seth has already collaborated with The Foreshadowing as well, from the first album. We only took a little “detour” working with Travis Smith for “Second World”. As you can see, we have always aimed high.
What’s your source of inspiration? What urges you to compose music?
Francesco – One of our sources of inspiration are certainly darkness and obscurity. Each one of us has always a dark side inside of himself to accept or to exorcise through the music, which is purposely represented in a gloomy picture. For this reason we draw essentially on every kind of music that has a dark mood. Another source of inspiration is the cult of death. We were born in a strongly religious country where the folk aspects are very recurring during the year. Although all of us are non-believers we have always shown a certain curiosity about this cult of death, especially around Eastertime, when in the historical center of the city you may see the Procession representing the Christ’ death, or you may visit the churches where you can meet these elderly women dressed in black in sign of singing their prayers in unison. Are these recurring images of our childhood that inspired songs like “Chant of Widows” or “Noli timere”, for instance.
Marco – The best inspiration is in the unexpected. You can watch a starry sky for hours, trying to write a poem on stars, and find no inspiration at all, and eventually find it in a cup of tea on your couch. The urge is something you born with. And it’s the only real reason to make art. It’s like satisfying the hunger.
Since we’re in this field, could you please give us an insight into your music’s creation process?
Francesco – First of all, our ideas can be developed in any way, it may happen you got a riff into your head, and if you’re able to record it at once you’ve been lucky. You know, new riffs and ideas come into your head once in a while, but you forget them just as quickly, so it’s important to save them in some way. Sometimes it happens we try to improvise something in the rehearsal room and something comes out, that’s what happened for example with “The Forsaken Son”. In any case we always start from a riff or even by a simple vocal line that we like trying to create a structure. Once we found the song structure we begin to think about which kind of atmosphere we want to give to the song, and at this point we focus our work basically on the arrangement. Finally we take care of the details, like phrasing and solo guitars, soundscape effects or samples or even spoken to be added, which kind of intro and outro we want for the song etc. I’d say our creative process works somewhat like this.
“Nimrod” is the longest in duration track you’ve ever written in your career. How did the idea of composing a 14 minute track came up?
Giuseppe – The main movements in Nimrod (The Eerie Tower and Collapse) came out in different moments, then Alessandro had the idea to join them with Omelia (the second movement) inspired by by the hypnotic panflute of Georghe Zamfir, the author of the soundtrack for “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, a great movie by Peter Weir we appreciated a lot, while Francesco added “Inno al Dolore” (Hymn to pain) creating the right ending for the album . It has been a very natural process.
One of the things that personally excite me while listening to your work is the fact that you’re a cinematic band, as many of your tracks can easily be used as soundtracks for films. I’m guessing you’ve already thought of that, as well…
Marco – It’s because in the music we make there is a lot of atmosphere and in some of ours songs we use a lot of prose, rather than poetry. This makes it more a narrative experience. For example when I wrote the lyrics of Lost Humanity I was inspired by Richard Matheson’s novel “I am legend”, and – composing it – I was feeling the music as the perfect soundtrack for the scenes I was seeing.
Giuseppe – Sometimes we think about that but no one called us to make a soundtrack yet! We recently made a song as a soundtrack for a Cartoon magazine called “Paranoyd Boyd”. Unfortunately you can listen to it only buying a particular number of the collection and it’s in italian only but I think it will be available for everybody within some months.
You’ve masterfully covered tracks like ”The Rains Of Castamere” from my favourite TV series “Game of Thrones” and “Russians” from Sting. Do these covers promise us any new ones in the future?
Marco – Indeed, we have many ideas for new covers, but personally I think we already did enough of them. Never say never though.
Thank you very much for your time! We’ll see you in October at your very first gig on Greek soil… Any messages to our readers?
Marco – Thank you for your interesting questions! See you soon then with Moonspell and Eleine: a show you should not miss. Doom on!
