Welicoruss interview

Alexey, what are your musical influences when it comes to writing for Welicoruss?

HI ! It’s hard to talk about my influences, but my musical taste is very versatile – start from classical music or electronic music and all the way to Black Metal and also of course progressive and ambient music. At various times, I was influenced by different bands. I grew up with Metallica and Megadeth, then came the band with much heavier sound like Moonspell, Therion, Lacrimosa, after that was Folk and Pagan – like Wardruna, Nocturnal Mortum, but now am more into progressive stuff such as – Tesseract, Gojira. In any case I always try and write music with feelings and closer to my soul, and in that case that could be anything.

Can you tell me about the concept for the album Az Esm’?

It is a quite difficult theme, which is very hard to be described. It would be the same if someone was trying to explain a blind person how the red and blue colors look like. AZ ESM’ – is a philosophical approach of thoughts about the inner world of man, about the universe around us, about the ancient civilizations and mythical beings and all of that is interpreted into a form of fantasy and stories. I personally don’t like to talk about these things straight forward, there for I choose such a style of expressing it. Overall, to me this is a very personal album and I would even say occult.

Since Az Esm’, is not in English, do you find that to be harder to convey the overall message of the album?

Yes, you are right, but on the other side the music itself contains a lot of information, which am sure of that every person picks up on the first listen. Music is a universal language. Besides that Russian language sounds pretty interesting and unusual to Europeans and all the rest of the nations. In any case we will be experimenting and mixing languages in the future. And then again we have the lyrics written inside our booklet in English also, so anyone could understand what we are singing about.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never listened to it before?

An obscure sounds that pulls you in a ritualistic trance (state) with aim to detach you from the perishable world and show you the other side of being – occult, arcane and enchanting. We treated this album as a picture, which contains of many little details and shades of colors, which could be studied for hours, but yet every time you would find something new. The ordinary heavy guitar riffs were immersed into the atmosphere of the orchestra, and we added on top of all that excellent and catchy guitar solos! I think that you should listen to this album!

Do you have plans to tour? If so, is it difficult with so much orchestration to pull it off in a live setting?

At this very moment we are trying to play as many as possible live concerts all over Europe, we are all the time arranging concerts and we travel everywhere to perform live concerts. We have a very professionally prepared everything for our live show, so everyone knows exactly what he should be doing and about the orchestra I guess the computer is doing an excellent work. And this choice was made long time ago, since none of the keyboardist that we know could cope with the abundance of the orchestra that is written on our last album.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions!

Thank you for the given opportunity to represent our band to your readers!