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In Words: Mandragora Scream



- Morgan Lacroix & Terry Horn - Feb. 2010 - Claudia Ehrhardt -


www.mandragorascream.it








Mandragora Scream
© Mandragora Scream


Morgan Lacroix & Terry Horn - February 23rd 2010 (by email)




Mandragora Scream is back with another album and already on tour with The 69 Eyes. Unfortunately I missed them live, but Terry and Morgan were so nice to answer a few questions by email.


First of all, how is it being on tour with The 69 Eyes? Do the fans of the Hellsinki vampires treat you well?

Terry: It's wonderful! Everything's ok and The 69 Eyes are very nice people. Their fans are nice too! After the shows we always received a lot of congratulations from them.

You are supporting your latest album Volturna live now. Do you have some old track on the set list too?

We also play Dark Lantern, Omen Reveries, Jeanne D'Arc and one song you can't find in any album of ours.

Let's talk about the album... It's been awhile since Madhouse, even if you did a DVD Dragonfly in the meantime. What took so long?

Terry: It was because of the death of Morgan's father... He was also a friend of mine...

What's the meaning of Volturna?

Morgan: It's the merging of two words: Volterra and Sovana.
As a matter of fact, we drew inspiration from a journey we made to Volterra a year ago. Around Volterra there are many small villages, one of them is called Sovana and there you can find an Etruscan necropolis, a very magic place. There we experienced some meaningful inner journeys and from then on, a number of very strange events happened. I had lost my father one year before the journey to Volterra and that really played a major role because once we got to that place that everybody calls the 'Gate to the Afterlife' we experienced something unbelievable, a true journey to afterlife that left a mark on us and contributed to the creation of the concept album that we decided to call Volturna , from the combination of the two words Sovana and Volterra.


Musically there is a lot danceable stuff on the album... Dark, danceable sounds. It seems that the guitars are even more in the background then in their early days... Was that the direction you wanted to take?

Morgan: We usually don't care about the direction to take we just compose the songs and mix them in the way we like and the way it's better in that moment. Maybe next album will sound completely different.

You have 2 cover versions on Volturna. While Visage's Fade To Grey seem to be a quite obvious choice, I was surprised you pick Cher's Bang Bang. How did you choose these tracks?

Terry: We like these songs very much! I think that Fade To Grey is a real dark song even for the lyrics and for the other... Well, Bang Bang is a song we always played since many years ago, this time we decided to record it, I like the way Morgan uses her voice, I think it's very wrapping!

To be honest especially at Bang Bang the male vocals take away the magic... Personally I don't think that the male vocals always do the songs any good.. Why sticking to this sound element?

Terry: There's no male vocal, it's only Morgan (contralto voice) and it's the particularity of this performance.

(Well, to me it sounded like male vocals, sorry for getting this wrong... - editor)

Some were criticizing you for not knowing where you want to go to musically... Or that you now sound more pop then metal... What's your reaction to this critic?

Terry: We don't care about critic... It's not our work... We only think about express ourselves, we know exactly what we want.

There is video for Blindness. Why did you choose this song? Will there be more video clips?

Terry: It's one of the videos we wanted to make, it's an old idea we had, but in the near future we're going to release other videos.

What's on your schedule for the rest of 2010?

Morgan: We're now arranging for more live shows, in Greece, Russia and some festivals in summer, the new album and collaborations maybe a soundtrack, we cross our fingers!!!


Thank you very much and I hope to catch you live somewhere... And good luck for the soundtrack collaborations!



Claudia Ehrhardt

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