Murder Therapy interview!

Murder Therapy can’t be unknown for our watchful readers, since i’ve already written an article about their debut album. And after their good starting, why couldn’t we continue with an interview, in the end they will become better known at Europe eastern parts. To my questions the guitarist Francesco D’Adamo replied, 3,2,1 rave!

Please introduce the band for us! What kind of positions have the band-members? How old are the band-members, and what other projects have the musicians? (what is important, please tell more about it/them!

Hi Zoli! Thanks for this interview and for your great review!
Murder Therapy came to life on September 2007 and with a different line-up we recorded on June 2008 “The Therapy”, a nice 4 tracks EP but with a lot more old school sound compared to Symmetry of Delirium. Then on February 2009 the band began its metamorphosis with Samu on drums and Sean as second guitarist and with this line-up we worked on Symmetry of Delirium, out on Deity Down on September 2009. Then Marcello entered the band as new bass player. Well, with these line-up changes I became the oldest guy in the band with my 30 years, Riccardo is 26, Sean and Marcello 19, Samu only 18 (he was actually 17 when we entered the studio), nice contrast don’t you think?

About other projects, I play guitar in another band called Cryptic Theory they’re located in another area of Italy, so I don’t have much time to rehearse during the year. Samu and Sean both play in another band now called Cyanea (they were called Chaos Among Nameless until a few weeks ago), while instead Marcello plays in another band called Rusted and sometimes with No More pain, a Nightwish tribute band. Riccardo has no other projects at the moment. Well, as you can see, we share other projects but, at least until now, it has never been a problem for the band. I would say they’re all chances to improve us as musicians.

It’s killer music, brutality, and if I look at the lyrics, it’s like a journey into a sick mind of a killer. How do you get inspirations to the music and lyrics? I could ask, what are your influences besides the everyday life?

Nice question! I think we all have different inspirations in the band. I’m not talking only about music… I don’t think influences are directly connected to music, going to see an opera written by Sergej Prokofiev has no influence in what I’m going to play on my guitar the day after, yet creative things are contagious and they can give you motivations to create by yourself. Art in general is really contagious: cinema, painting, music of course, architecture and so on, getting in contact with these aspects of humanity can “influence” your music. At the same time being angry for a stupid fine could in some way influence your creativity. Everything influences us, everything. Something more, something less, but we will never be able to know exactly what moves us in a particular direction instead of another. Maybe influences are more obvious in our lyrics, or at least in a part of it. Tales of the Bizarre, Two Shots in Colebrooke and Staring at the Zodiac are as you said a journey into mental deviance and madness, and Riccardo took direct ispirations from madmen’s biographies and letters. At the same time, if you look at more personal lyric as “Delirium”, how could you trace the path which brought Riccardo to choose a word instead of another to create this epic cry of despair? It’s a rational search for the right words guided by all the opposing forces of our ego.

The Deity Down Records is a fuckin’ great label, I haven’t heard a bad album from them, the old Gerard knows which album is worth to release. How did you get acquainted with them?

Yes Gerard from Deity Down is such a great person! We’ve been really lucky to meet him along our way. When we recorded our EP “The Therapy” we sent a copy to really all the extreme labels in the world! Deity Down was positively impressed and we immediately accepted the contract offer. It’s a label with still a really personal and communicative dimension and which put a really big effort in promoting the bands in the roster. Really we couldn’t have found anything better for us.

What feedbacks have you got? Are you satisfied with the sounding and the design of the album?

Until now the feedback for Symmetry of Delirium has been simply fantastic! We received and we’re still receiving great reviews and most of all a lot of people, from different musical backgrounds, showed us their interest for the album. We’re really satisfied with how the album sounds, Stefano from 16th Cellar Studio did a great job, probably his best production until now, and Alex Eckman-Lawn worked so hard on the artwork to give us what we were looking for.

How could you define the Murder Therapy by genre?

I’m really satisfied that Murder Therapy can’t be labeled so easily. In general I don’t like too much tags and categories but if someone asks “what do you play” I simply answer: death metal. This says all and nothing at the same time, so if there’s need to go further maybe it can be described as a mix, at least on Symmetry of Delirium, of classic death metal like Immolation, Suffocation, Morbid Angel etc… with a lot of modern influences coming from schizo bands like Cephalic Carnage, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ulcerate, Gorguts and Meshuggah. In few words, psycopathic death metal.

Let’s list your favourite 5-5 albums from thrash and death metal.

I’ve never been into thrash so I can’t make a good list. Probably the thrash album I’ve listened more to has been SlayerSouth of Heaven, but it’s not excatly my kind of music, in particular I don’t like those kind of vocals and guitars so often working on fast triplets. Too much solos also for my tastes.

My top death metal classic albums from the nineties are:

Morbid Angel Domination

DeicideLegion

ImmolationHere in After

Suffocation
Pierced from Within

Morgoth Odium

Coming to more recent stuff, if they can be considered „death metal”, I would say:

Ulcerate Everything is Fire

Cephalic CarnageAnomalies

DecapitatedOrganic Hallucinosis

Meshuggah Obzen

Gorguts
From Wisdom to Hate

It’s a hard job to put down these lists, you always think “I’m sure I’m forgetting about…”

Your favourite music from your childhood, haha?

Oh, that’s a question I’ve been waiting for a while! My family has never been into music at all, so from them I didn’t receive any musical direction. My childhood was in the eighties so for sure… Michael Jackson! I used to listen to Suzanne Vega a lot too, and I still like her voice now. Then crap like Bon Jovi and Europe and stuff like that. But now that I think about it maybe my first contact with music was with anime themes. They sounded so ’70s, with funky and heavy bass guitars, they were great!

Answer them with one word!

Death metal or girndcore?

Death metal!

Deathcore or death metal?

Again, death metal!

HC or thrash?

Uhm… neither.

Scalpel or kitchen knife?

Kitchen knife.

Delight or joy?

Delight.

Horror or porn?

A porn with horror elements would be sweet.

Fear or pain?

Fear.

Which would you choose: murderer or pathologist?

Pathologist.

Lonely man in a big city, or castaway on an island?

The first for sure.

Hard or soft plectrum?

Medium 🙂

Skin or meat?

Skin.

Thanks Francesco, what should we know about Bologna? Is it a big city, or a small town? Do you play live there, and what could you tell us about the bands from Bologna?

Well, Bologna isn’t such a big city. But it has all the cultural happenings of a bigger one, so it’s perfect for me, at least compared to other italian cities. It’s not crazy like Rome, not so depressive like Milan, it still keeps a kind of human dimension and because of its university there are a lot of people coming and going all over the year. We’re going to have a show here right on this friday, it’s the first one in Bologna after the release of Symmetry of Delirium and yes, of course in the past we’ve had various shows here. Compared to other places in Italy, Bologna is quite an active city from this point of view, even if recently it isn’t easy to find places where you can play death metal. Nice metal bands from this area are Chaos Among Nameless (now called Cyanea), Hobnailed, Hateful, Unbirth, Jesus Ain’t in Poland and others that surely I’m forgetting now!

What do you think about the economical crisis, who are the guilty ones in your opinion? Can you see the changes in your environment (or in yourself)? What is your profession?

Wow we could work out a full interview on this matter. It isn’t a matter of opinions, studies point that the origin of the crisis is in the american economic bubble in loans and investments on highly risky stocks, know as „toxic”, which were passed off as safe and stable. It certainyl is a convergence of a thousand things… you know something interesting? In Autumn 2008 the stock burnt out more money than all the money that has been produced in the 20th century. Vaporized, deleted, extraordinary. Changes are under everyone’s eyes, and for many things i don’t dislike them at all, even if they touch me directly. It appears that the next economib bubble will made of renewable energies and the „green” world. We’ll see.

Me, I’m actually working in a therapeutic community with young guys coming from outside UE. Well, The Therapy… ehehe.

Which bands of the italian metal scene are worth to check out in your opinion?

Lately there are more bands coming out of Italy in the extreme metal area, and you probably already know them, I don’t feel any need to name them again. But searching in the underground, even if it’s not a “metal” band, my choice goes surely to Storm(o), they play a crazy and desperate mix of music that reminds me a lot of Converge and The Dillinger Escape Plan, they’re very very young and really talented, check them at this address: http://www.myspace.com/stormhc.

Although you are a italian, my next question is: wine or beer?

No, no, no…. RUM!

Have you got a message to the readers of the Fémforgács webzine? Closing words?

Check our music on our myspace address or on lastfm, you can find some cool live on youtube too, and who knows, maybe in the future we’ll have some chance to play live there! Until then,

In Last Resort

Alpha and Omega are

Approximated to your Zero

Asymmetry in Deconstruction

of our Failure.

Thank you for the answers and the opportunity! I hope we could meet live in the future, take care!

Zoli