Rockezine.com interview with Disillusion on Nov 12, 2006

with Schmidt on Nov 12, 2006


		Please introduce yourself and the band. Hello. My name is Schmidt, singer and guitar player for Disillusion Leipzig/Germany. This year the band has actually celebrated its 10th anniversary. Of course there have been changes in line-up. I was with the band from the very beginning back in school and have found two great companions in Barthel and Maluschka in the year 2000 after long search. Very soon we released a 4 track demo `Three Neuron Kings` and a 2 track single `The Porter` - both stirred up German Underground very much right from the beginning. Musically it was most likely Trash Melodic Metal with a strong tendency to what was later to be our first full-length `Back To Times Of Splendour` (2003). Hard, fierce, melancholic, poetic, progressive and very ignorant when it came to combining things, people say they cannot be combined. In 2002 we signed to Metal Blade Records and 2006 will be the year of GLORIA, our second full length...
		Who inspired you to play music, and why? I actually started out making techno music on an Amiga and an Atari ST I had when I was still a teenager. At some point I went on a trip with a couple of friends. One night we had a fire going. One guy brought his guitar and that was it, I fell in love. I started to learn to play right away when I went to the US a couple of weeks later. When I came back I knew basically every song of Guns`n`Roses, Pearl Jam, Faith No More and Soundgarden. That`s how it all started.
		Is there a certain message you`d like to pass on with your music? If so, what is it and why? No, not really, not something we necessarily want to express, politically, socially. Maybe it is the music and our eagerness to go the complete way without compromise every time we do a record, that you could call a message, but still it is about the music.
		From your point of view, what is your favorite track on the new album and why? That would be the title track GLORIA which in my view combines the ideas on the records completely, is new, fresh, unheard but yet is like a bridge between the new stuff and our previous records.
		What are the plans for the rest of the year? We are doing a lot of shows in Germany right now preparing for a tour to come. We definitely love to play live. Disillusion have always been fighting with the live sound though. Not so much because the material is complicated to play but it is a tremendous job for the soundman to be very sensible for the important parts you need to hear or the song is crap. The Material on GLORIA is fairly easy to play live actually, no comparison with BTTOS, where we felt we needed to have 10 people on stage to get everything across. Today it works very well, if the stage sound is balanced, too. Again, it is more the surroundings than the things we play. We are constantly working on that! So, there is always a lot to do!
		Did you ever visit www.rockezine.com? If yes, did you like the site? Sorry, no, never been there.
		Do you like e-mail interviews? And why? No, not at all, to be honest. It is a dull way of communicating. I rather have the person I talk to next to me or at least on the phone.
		My last question: did I something forgot to ask? Well, if you would ask me what GLORIA is in my eyes, I would say something like this ... Though a million themes are combined it still is a metal record. Highly modern, in aspects far beyond the boundaries of the scene. GLORIA is an urban record, pulsating, rough, with edges and sharp twists all along - a stampede, a pop hit collection, a theme park, a disco sampler, a bulldozer, a whiskey, a fist in your stomach and the pill to soothe the pain. Maybe it is a soundtrack to a David Lynch movie, maybe not.
		(Jeroen Habets)