• MESMERIZE have a history of over 10 year behind them. However, they have only released one album so far. Recently they moved to another record label and they will soon release two new albums. For all these and much more interesting things we had a talk with Piero Paradivino (guitars). We are surely talking about a band that all heavy/power lovers must, at least, listen to!

1.GIVE US A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF THE BAND. INTRODUCE THE MEMBERS.

• All right. Mesmerize were born in 1988 (then with the moniker The Mesmerizers) and were formed by four schoolmates: myself (Piero Paravidino, guitars), Andrea Garavaglia (drums), Folco Orlandini (vocals), Paolo Chiodini (guitars); we lost a couple of bass players on our way until another friend of us, Andrea Tito, joined us in 1994. It's been quite a long time from the beginning to our first album ("Tales Of Wonder", 1998), mainly because we always played what we liked, classic heavy metal, and there were a really low interest in this in the first 90's, especially in Italy; anyway, we held fast and got through two demo tapes and a lot of concerts until there came the rebirth of classic metal.

• Well, back when we had to find a name, we were fond of Iron Maiden (in effect we still are!), so we used to learn all their lyrics by heart; we often found this word which fascinated us, being also the theme of a famous E.A.Poe horror tale. It comes from Mesmerism, a pseudo-science founded by Dr. Mesmer in the XVI century, who was convinced he could heal people with his animal magnetism; in effect it was mainly suggestion, and it evolved into Hypnotism; still today, "mesmerize" is used to mean "hypnotize,fascinate, charm".

• Talking about "Tales Of Wonder", it's our first album and the first real studio experience, to leave out the demo tapes recording, and I think you can hear this in it. Sure, if we were very happy when we finished it, today I must admit there's a lot of things who could have been done better, sounds, arrangements and so on. Anyway, it has a number of very good songs in it, and it's still a pleasure to listen to it; moreover, we had a lot of positive feedback from people and reviewers, so it has to be good after all!

• There are some good news about this point: actually we have already recorded two CDs after "Tales of Wonder"! The first one, "Vultures Paradise" was recorded in June 2000: it is a double EP, with four new songs and four covers (from Sortilège, Warlord, Black Sabbath, Tierra Santa); it has been waiting to be released for quite a lot, but Underground Symphony have overcome their recent problems and they're having it printed these very days. Our new full length, "Off The Beaten Path" has been recorded earlier this year and features 11 new songs; it's surely our best work and we are very excited about it, we hope it gets a really good attention! We worked very hard on this album and I think we succeeded in writing excellent metal songs and getting a great sound, very powerful. It will be released by our new label, Dragonheart/Audioglobe, in January 2002; they already did a great job with Domine and Drakkar, for instance, and we're sure we will get a lot of promotion and a good distribution by them.

• Mainly they're about fantasy tales, as our first album title suggests. We are often inspired by books, movies, comics, legends, and so on; so we have songs about the Darksword fantasy saga, about the old sci-fi book and movie "Logan's Run", about an Italian comic criminal hero, Diabolik, and so on. But sometimes we also feel the urge to say something about how we feel or what we think of the world, and so there are songs about the media lies, drugs or about how life can suck bad or be a great thing depending on where you look at it from.

• Yeah, we have a great time when we play live! We had the chance to play quite a number of gigs in all these years, the count is around 110, in effect. We play essentially in pubs or clubs, where there's a close contact with the audience, and when they go crazy about your music it's one of the best feelings you can have. of course there are also some bad nights, but this is part of the game. We didn't yet play in a "big event", but we hope we can have this chance with the release of the new album; it would be one of our dreams come true!

• The most important thing is that we were and still are friends before bandmates; this allows us to keep an excellent mood inside the band and express ourselves as we like, with no such things as fighting about who the leader is (actually, nobody) or not being able to say what one really thinks. The main difference in us is that we all work now, so it's becoming harder and harder to save the time for our music and our band. but we strive on,dedicating our free time to it, nights and holidays included! About the music, not much has changed in what we like and don't like, so our genre has remained more or less the same since the days we first grabbed a guitar; but we have gained experience, so this reflects positively in how we write and play music.

• Above all I want to have fun playing and to reach as many people as possible with our music, so they have fun and get some good feelings from it, and I hope to be able to carry on this for still a long time. What I can only dream about is living on my music, but with metal and in Italy, this is far beyond any reality!

• Well. well, I don't know! It has been part of my life for so long that I don't know what I could have done instead of it. Maybe I would be working twelve hours a day for a brilliant career, or I would be running a bar in S.Domingo, or maybe I would be a writer, or a painter. who knows?

• Hard one! Well, I think "The Werewolf" is a good candidate to represent Mesmerize music; but shortly after I'd add "Hell On Wheels", and among the new songs, "Vultures Paradise", "Argos Died Twice" and "King Of Terror".

• As I already mentioned, we all started as Iron Maiden fans, and we still are, though they sure have done some real 'faux pas' in their way; more generally, we like everything about classic and 80's heavy metal, so I can say Helloween, Black Sabbath, Dio, Queensrÿche, Manowar, plus a lot of  other stuff which you can imagine! In more recent years, especially after the growth of the modern power metal trend, it's difficult to tell which bands are honest and which are just riding the waves; I must say anyway that we don't like much all this symphonic-orchestral-cartoonish stuff, which is becoming a boring and flabby cliché. There are anyway a bunch of good things, such as Blind Guardian or the first Angra; personally, I have madly loved Skyclad, a really honest band which brought some new things into metal music without betraying its spirit and which never gained the success they deserved; sadly, with the split from their singer Martin Walkyier it could be all over now.

• Yes, definitively with Rhapsody, Labyrinth, Domine, White Skull and so on, Italy gained a very special place in the metal scene, which would be really unthinkable some years ago; all these bands paved the way for the whole Italian scene to be considered worldwide. This is obviously a very positive thing, and we also took advantage of this. Unfortunately, it also brought so me less good things, such as the springing of a thousand of clones who tried just to ride the wave, as I told above, yet being untrue, inexperienced and still claiming with presumption to be the new sensation. Anyway, if you dig, you find some other excellent bands such as Projecto, Drakkar, Shadows Of Steel, Elvenking.

• I can't live without a book to read! My favourite writer is, maybe not a surprise, Stephen King, and above all his  books I'd choose IT as the best. I read a lot of other stuff, though, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, humor,comic books. I just can't make a list, it would be longer than this interview!

• Funny you asked. in effect we got to appear in movie soundtracks, with a few songs from "Tales Of Wonder"! An independent American movie company, Brimstone Productions, asked us the rights to use them for two of their horror movies about werewolves, and they should have been released in the American amateur market by now. As to write a whole soundtrack. well, it should be a vary fast-paced movie, because I'm not exactly into composing atmosphere music!!!

• Those attacks shocked me for the way they were cruelly prepared in cold blood to strike innocent people; I think some kind of reaction was unavoidable, but I fear the way things are evolving. all could escape control in an horrible way.

• Underground Symphony have a long history of hard work to support Italian underground bands, and we are grateful to them for what they did for us; anyway, it's quite a small label, and it focuses mainly on new bands; it has little resources for promotion and distribution. When the contract with them was over, after the second CD, we had the chance to move to a bigger label, this meaning having the chance to reach a much wider audience for our music, and that's what we just did.

• As I was telling you before, the "Vultures Paradise" double EP is being printed these days, so it will be actually released soon.The Tierra Santa song was in effect a request from Maurizio Chiarello, Underground Symphony boss, who is a big fan of the Spanish band; since it was such a good song, we were glad to satisfy him. Besides, I always liked to dig for less known bands and I often discovered some great bands: another example is the 80's French band Sortilège, whose song "D'Ailleurs" we also cover in the same CD.

• Thank you for this pleasant interview with such interesting questions. I just want to remember our website, the Page Of Wonder at www.mesmerize.it, which is always updated with the latest news. I hope your readers will give us a chance in the near future! Always support Heavy Metal! Up the 'rizers!!!