SOURCE – What brought about Noveria into existence? What were the early days of the band like?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – Hi Falber, and first of all thank you for having us on your pages! It’s a pleasure being here chatting with you, so let get started! Noveria is a project initially born in Finland where I was living at the time and took it’s final shape in Italy bit later on. I remember that I wasn’t very satifsied with the music I was playing in a band where I was in and I wanted to do something more extreme metal oriented but with a melodic twist, so I picked my guitar and I’ve started shaping the songs that took part of our first album “Risen”. Once all the preproductions were done I’ve contacted the guys to see if they could have been interested in playing those songs and to form a real band… Fortunately they were all very excited about the whole thing and after a few days Noveria was real and ready to track our first chapter!
SOURCE – It’s been three years since the release of your last studio album Forsaken in 2016. Can you bring the readers up to speed with all of the changes and reasons behind the long wait between records?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – I personally think that 2/3 years is the perfect time frame to work out a good record. The main reason is because you have the time to experiment new solutions to put into the music, and to dive deep into every detail. Also usually, you don’t get great ideas everyday, so you need a bit of time to get them flowing and to work them until you get a shape of something that sounds familiar with your distinctive sound and fresh as well. It’s kinda easy to write the same song over and over and we definitely don’t want to sound repetitive.
Simple as that! 🙂
SOURCE – Each Noveria release seems to move the band forward. How does Aequilibrium further your sound?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – I think Aequilibrium uses a familiar formula but this time we wanted to make sure that everyone can sing every chorus of the record after one listening only, while maintaining a raging vibe. All the elements such as electronic loops, key changes and tempo switching and virtuosity are there but this time we definitely had a lot more focus on the melodies. I think it’s just “more”.
SOURCE – What do you feel that you learned from the process of writing/recording Aequilibrium?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – Interesting question. Every time it’s a bit different but this time i think that the most important lesson to learn is that you have to work for the best of the song and not for your personal wish to overdo things in some passages. If a certain moment requires the guitarist to play an easy pattern to help the singer shine…you just do it. It’s the singer’s moment…Your moment will come, and when it comes you push yourself to be the best you can be!
So basically you need to learn to be in the right place and not overdo things for your ego. Playing chords is fun as well and it’s relaxing! 🙂
SOURCE – Given the increases in technology for producing albums, what do you feel is your most important role when work on an album with someone?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – If you work with someone else, you need to respect the other guy’s points of view and style and listen a few times to what he’s bringing to the table, before making useless criticism. Usually with my dear friend Julien, we exchange a lot of ideas everytime and both of us will work for the final objective, which is to make a great song, and that is what we aim for.
From a technical point of view, you need to make sure that everytime you share files everything has to be in sync with the project and easy to manage, in order to not waste time. Everything has to be in order and easy to understand, especially when you bring files to the studio engineer. Time has a cost.
SOURCE – Tell us about the video shoot for Broken – and how important do you believe the visual medium is in the social media platform in comparison to your early days when video channels seemed to have more of an impact for bands to gain attention?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – The shooting was definitely fun as always. Tiresome but satisfying. This time we wanted to also do a storyline which shows the story behind the record. So we called a film company, who provided actors, stuntmen and computer graphics, and worked on the script with us (Blasterio Films). They’ve been very professional throughout the whole process and they delivered a very cool visual experience that goes along with the song.
I think that a video is a good showcase for a band and it needs all the care you put in your record. As a musician, I love a good playthrough video but I think if you can add more depth, it can really help to show what you wanted to say with your music. The most important thing for me anyway, is to have a great song to start with!
SOURCE – What excites you most about playing and performing in the progressive/power metal realm?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – I definitely love to challenge myself for the sake of playing exciting stuff very well and I think it’s a great way to fill my soul with positive energy and vibes. What excites me is also exchanging a good laugh on stage with my mates while enjoying playing the tunes. We connect somehow on a very deep level and people can feel it when they see us play live. I think it’s a great exchange!
SOURCE – What qualities do you believe Noveria has that set yourselves apart from others in the genre?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – Hard to tell from a composer point of view but I think that there’s quite lot of laziness in composing nowadays. Don’t get me wrong -‐ I’m not saying that there isn’t great music around (there is, and a lot!) but maybe I’m getting old (lol) and I can’t often find very much guitar driven rifframa stuffs with a death metal vibe and melodic twist, key changes done well etc…maybe I’m lazy too haha! Joking apart I think that our style is a good balance of many elements taken from more extreme metal genres and some taken from more Pop-‐ish elements. There’s no rule that denies you to have both, the important thing is to mix the style in a way that makes sense and doesn’t feel forced. Also when using weird type of tempos, for me, it’s important that the music still has a natural flow to it, so when you listen to a song you can just enjoy it without necessarily noticing the time changes.
SOURCE – With Aequilibrium out there, what is planned next for Noveria?
Francesco Mattei (Guitars) – We’re already planning with our management a few shows here in Italy for early 2020, and we’ll surely circle Europe a bit around spring. It would be a dream to play in South America as well because we keep getting requests from our fans over there -‐ Let’s see what happens! Thank you for the interview and for all your kind words! Keep it Metal! 😉
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