Steve:   Cristina, after your tour with In Flames and Dimmu Borgir we had a short but nice mail contact. You promised me, that Lacuna Coil will not leave it's musical style for experiments and financial factors. I'm very happy to hear that this seems to have been the truth. Congratulation for this great new album.

Cristina:   Thank you very much, we are really proud of "Comalies", too. It's the best album we did so far, surely!

Steve:   There was not much time between the last output "Unleashed memories" and this new longplayer. For a up-and-coming band this is understandable. But don't you fear that the band could run out of good ideas? Please tell me something about your writing process and your bandworks between touring and studio. How do you take day offs to beware the creativity and enthusiasm?

Cristina:   It depends what you mean for "short time". I don't think that more than one year is a short amount of time! No, we are not scared about having a lack of ideas, and that's just because there's never been any kind of pressure around us. We compose when we are inspired and we enter in the studio when we feel we are completely ready. We were supposed to record "Comalies" months before the time we really started the work, but we postponed the recording just because we weren't satisfied enough. That's just an example of how much we can be artistically free and that's very important for an artist because in this way you can give new ideas in total sincerity.
We didn't have days off this time, we were so enthusiastic that we wanted to record every day, including Sunday.

Steve:   If your budget for recordings gets bigger, is there not a temptation for easy living, so that you spend more time with better studio peripherals than for your great musical arrangements? What do you think of the evolution of bands like The Gathering, Tiamat, Paradise Lost who changed their style nearly complete after the reached a big audience?

Cristina:   Nobody has the secret to do a records you are sure to sell and on the other side I think that it's too important in fact to be coherent with yourself. Just in this way people can look at you as a real artist and not as a copy of it.
I will never judge the music that other bands chose to do. It's THEIR choice and nobody has to judge other people's way of expression.
...A music that everyone in the world likes has not been created yet!

Steve:   A lot of songs live from some studio add-ons, for example the keyboards of "Human". What can the audience expect if they go to a coming Lacuna Coil gig: will you work with samples on stage to reproduce this studio work or will you bring along a tour keyboarder?

Cristina:   We tried in the past to have a keyboard player in the band, but it wasn't really our cup of tea, we prefer to have the guitars in the front more than the keyboards. During the gigs we'll put all the midi sounds and the double vocal parts ( I can't sing two different tones in the same moment!) on a DAT .

Steve:   What can you tell us about "Aeon"? I thought my player leaves this world. Just a funny idea?

Cristina:   It's a good trick we found out during the mixing! We decided to do this thing that lets the listener turn back on the cd player and pay more attention to the record.

Steve:   Andrea's vocals on "Angel's punishment" are very aggressive and emotional. Is there a reference to a real life story or to things that happen this period? What is this song about?

Cristina:   This song is dedicated to all the innocent victims of every war and revolution. That's why we chose to sing the song in this way, with me as an anchorwoman who's explaining the news and Andrea who expresses the pain for what's happening.

Steve:   Let's talk about more lyrics. Is there a basic theme in Lacuna Coil songs? If I read all titles of all albums I think the lyrics are about emotions. The music seems to be sad (but with a very positive message) and the great dynamic in most of the refrains conveys strength and liveliness. This is the stylistic element I love at most. But how are you really? Are problems the main thoughts of a young bandmember, or is it just the art you love and did you choose sad emotions as the most powerful feelings in music?

Cristina:   The biggest influence is definitely true life, experiences we had; but most of all we translate in words the feelings we get from our music. We never write the lyrics before the music is done. We are not sad persons at all, we are very positive, but most of the time you can express better you inner feelings when you're relaxed and alone with yourself, maybe a little bit melancholic, sometimes.

Steve:   Your line-up is stable for some years now. How is your private life as a band? Do you take holidays from each other, or do you spend time like a family? Is there a special formula for the harmony in a band?

Cristina:   We are very close to each other, like a family. But the real friendship is when you have your own life without having the need to see the other members every single day.

Steve:   I know some of you are StarWars fans. Who is the biggest one? You really love fantasy movies I think, because on the photo on the backcover of the promo CD the band looks like cenobites from Clive Barkers Hellraiser....

Cristina:   Definitely Marco Coti Zelati, the bass player, is the biggest fan of Star Wars. If you enter his room it's like to enter the movie, he has all the charachters, special editions, masks, cups, posters... he's freak of Star Wars!
We are not fans of Hellraiser, and the new clothes are maybe more in the kind of a "new japanese" style, very modern, especially the fabrics, with long half skirts, but it's not really easy to see them from the small pic on the cd. We drew the clothes by ourselves chosing the fabric and two girls from Milan under the name Feronia, did them for us.

Steve:   If you look in internet newsgroups you will see that you have a lot of fans in eastern countries like Russia, Poland, Hungaria. Did you ever play there and did you recognize that?

Cristina:   We have a lot of fans everywhere in the world, I have to say, including the countries you told me, where we've never played in, so far. We have a lot of fans from South America. We get tons of mails everyday from over there!

Steve:   When I saw you first with Grip Inc. your personal performance was a bit shy. When I saw you on the last tour I was surprised, because there was a lot of surprising self-confidence and power. What will I see on your next tour? Exploding mices? Little joke - I think the whole band worked a lot between these two tours! Will you do some more dates in Germany, perhaps a headliner tour? Did you ever think of a vocal- war-tour with Tristania? The fans would be mad!

Cristina:   It's the normal process of life. You live, you learn, you grow. I don't find it so strange. We progressed a lot in our work and it's easy to see it, that's normal! We already did a headliner tour in Europe, few years ago, including Germany, that went very good. I don't know Tristania, so I cannot realy tell you if they could fit with our music and same for us with them.

Steve:   The last question: what does "Lacuna Coil" mean?

Cristina:   We chose the name Lacuna coil, because we wanted to have an original name nobody could have, mixing two words from different languages. "Lacuna" is Italian, Latin and means a lack of something, basically of memory or culture. "Coil" means "spiral" in english. The complete meaning of the name is something like "Empty spiral", is really abstract.

Steve:   Thank you very much for this interview. Hope to see you on tour! And you will have to play My Wings, Purify and The Ghost Woman And The Hunter - or I will not leave the hall!

Cristina:   We'll see!!! Thanks for this interview.