Tina Interviews Helalyn Flowers

http://www.myspace.com/helalynflowers

http://www.vampirefreaks.com/u/helalynflowers

http://helalyn-flowers.music.mindviz.com

 http://www.purevolume.com/helalynflowers

HMTV Canada: Hi Helalyn Flowers How are you? The design and wealth of information at your main web is awesome. How did you come up with your band name Helalyn Flowers and how long have you known each other?

Helalyn Flowers: It’s Max who came out with that name. It obsessed him for some days like a mantra until he proposed it to N0emi as the band s name. We just split up our previous band The Claw and were searching for a name able to fully reflect our true spirit.  Helalyn is an archaic English term which stands for hidden zone. A sort of B-zone that after vulgarly became hell. It’s arid and desolated and flowers (seen as vital source) can’t grow on them. It’s something absurd but we are absurd! We are against conventional life, we know no rules and we strongly believe in our energy! We are alien to and in this world. So, we are the flowers that grow on the ground they wouldn’t.

HMTV Canada: When did you form your band? What inspired you to make music together and who are your current band members?

Helalyn Flowers:  As told before, we split up our previous band in 2004 because we were terribly tired of all those musical cowards and hobbyists who used to play with us. So, we decided to continue as a duo since our synergy is absolute, as well as our will to create something never seen or heard before. Our reciprocal esteem and awareness of our capacities and talents was the only true input to the band s starting. We two are and will be the only core and motor of Helalyn Flowers, depicting of other musicians who accompany us on stage!

HMTV Canada: Tell us about your unique style of music your major influences? How has your music evolved or changed since you first began playing? Who writes your songs?

Helalyn Flowers: What you listen is the summa of all our influences and likes. It’s like a kind of filter if you want.  When we began Helalyn Flowers, we were so much influenced by soundtracks like Queen Of The Damned, Spawn, Resident Evil and others, great albums like Mechanical Animals,  Untouchables and  Ultra  plus Bjork, Miranda Sex Garden and other fantastic early 90s Alternative stuff. You know, we are true music-lovers and listen to a very big variety of genres. It doesn’t care the style but how much we like it. The earlier influences have been increased and not replaced at all! All Helalyn Flowers s songs are written by both us. Generally Max starts with a riff or with a rough draft of arrangement and together we see what works and what doesn’t and what we want to add or delete.  Then N0emi adds lyrics and vocals, but often it happens that we start from a N0emi s vocal part to arrange the whole track. There are no rules in this process!

HMTV Canada: What can you tell us about your instruments brand are you subject to brand loyalty or will you play whatever s available? What kind of recording environment do you have?

Helalyn Flowers: Since we aren’t sponsored yet by any brand, we won’t name our brands, ah-ah!

HMTV Canada: Where have you performed? What is your favorite and least favorite venues? Do you have any upcoming shows?

Helalyn Flowers: We played our last show in a Fest in Italy and it was a shame. Unable engineers and really bad organization. Continuous technical problems even during the show, until in the middle of the fourth track we leave the stage. But our performance was great and we tried to maintain our professionalism high despite of the technical problems. Unfortunately, this kind of things happen too much times in Italy, a country in which everyone is an improvised and rogue! We wait for the albums coming out to deal with a foreign booking agency for Europe. Our upcoming shows are all in Italy until next January.

HMTV Canada: Do you have a record label? Are you a member of any organizations? Can you tell us about your latest CD release, anything from messages to inspirations, your biggest challenge as a band.

Helalyn Flowers: Our debut-album A Voluntary Coincidence will be out on November 9, via Alfa-Matrix. This album is pretty different from what we did in the past and at the same time it holds each component of our sound that is actually known to the public. It includes 11 tracks (also E-Race Generation and Voices, which are the only two already edited tracks, even if re-recorded and re-mastered this time) and the official title is A Voluntary Coincidence. Also, a limited-edition version will be out. It will be a box including gadgets to be defined plus a bonus disc with remixes. The opening track is Eye for a Day, the harder song of the album together with DGTal Blood . You can find metal guitars, mixed with hard electronics beats and alienating vocals. In this song frames of daily life are seen under the viewpoint of an eye itself, without being filtered by the human mind, seeing things in an absolutely direct and uncorrupted way.  DGTal Blood is a song dedicated to all the ones who never believed in me and would stop my passions. Nothing and no-one can stop your will if you really want. In songs like I’m human, defective, My girlfriend insanity,  Tide Line  and  Silent Conversation, synth-pop influences are combined with rock guitars and a very pop approach for the vocals.  I’m Human, defective is a dialogue of a human life, speaking about its mistakes, defects and lacks, which suggests us to see the human race like a neglected experiment.  My Girlfriend insanity is a song that I feel very intimate. Many times, it happens that no-one can understand your state of mind, neither yourself I feel insanity like something so visceral, hidden and penetrating That’s the only thing, which totally knows yourself. For this, I feel Her my girlfriend.  Silent Conversation is a song which describes a dialogue with my inner self, and Tide Line speaks about a very hard period I lived, like I was the onlooker of my own drowning.  A Sweet and Deep Bomb In My Heart is the song, which more represents Helalyn Flowers sound. It’s full of odd orchestrations and a warm atmosphere that we really love! Here guitars change a lot sound, from hard-rock to industrial, and vocals are popper and infectious. This song is a reflection on life, corruption and hypocrisy. It speaks about the will to disappear and wake up in a brand-new world without religions, politics and lies.  Alice In My Chamber is together with E Race Generation one of the more electro-influenced but with a punk approach which gives to the song freshness and peculiarity. In this case, I used a popular icon,  Alice , to represent fantastic world, where everything can happen. Mine is a provocation, I defied Alice to come in my secret chamber to try and find things impossible to find neither in her fairy tale! Yes, I described a part of my mind that makes me afraid, impossible to stop, impossible to hold at bay...  E-Race Generation and Voices are already popular in the clubs worldwide. In E-Race Generation (For E, I mean the electronic. I called electronic race the new generation, which day-by-day becomes addicted to the fake, the artificial and feelingless things) I speak about a woman who works as business agent of a new pill which contains different feelings and short fragments of life. It’s the ideal for people that are not enough brave to risk living their own life.

HMTV Canada: What are some of the highlights of Helalyn Flowers your goals where you hope to be in 5 years with your band your ultimate direction and how your fans are currently reacting to your music?

Helalyn Flowers: Our goal is continuing to make the only music we love and want to listen to, that is ours! We want to be recognized as an universal band, because our music is universal. We are beyond genres, scenes and lifestyles. We are ourselves. We don t even care to be diverse, we are evidence. Our fans welcome this and we are very happy and pleased to collect every day fans from all over the world who are truly devoted to Helalyn Flowers and who are not just the many Myspace-gorgeous-hot-stunning-phenomenon.  Where we hope to be in 5 years? If people will let us become rich, we will be fat, depressed, viced and alcohol/drugs-addicted, so maybe in some clinic? Ah-ah, f**k Rock n Roll attitude!

HMTV Canada: Do you have any remixes or are working on any? Compilation experiences good or bad ones?

Helalyn Flowers: Max already remixed UK act Unter Nulls This Is Your End that has been published on the successful 4CD Box F**k The Mainstream Vol.1, in which we appear with E-Race Generation too. His remix is very different than the original one that was vey in the Harsh-EBM/Industrial style. He took the only clean female vocal part to give life to a new song over again. It came out an energic mix of classical instruments like piano, harp, violins and viola and an electro drum-ground. It was well welcomed by both band and label, even if it’s not oonz-oonz at all. Less provocatory than expected! Actually, we are not working on any remixes and neither we are interested to!

HMTV Canada: What do you think of the current Gothic/EBM/Industrial/ Noise/ Synthpop/ Metal music scene today? Are you affiliated with any dark underground scenes like Vampire Freaks?

Helalyn Flowers: We don’t like scenes. We don’t care of them. We are simply interested to play our music and to reach more people as possible. Underground is just an index of fame and nothing else. There is too much philosophy, idealism and rules in the underground scenes. That is really stupid. Vampire Freaks is another useful to show us off and thanks to them we got in contact with Alfa-Matrix and signed with them!

HMTV Canada: From your experience is there a way bands interact with each other or does it depend on something? An Example of this Question: There are bands that are just starting out, bigger bands will try hard to promote their friends and there are bands that are cool with cross promoting each other in spite of all the pressure.  Do you have any friends that are doing something really exciting in the music scene that you think people should be aware of?

Helalyn Flowers: Nowadays people think that the Myspace s Top 8 exchange is enough. Well, we don’t. The term help has a strong value for us. We are always ready to help our most intimate friends who play to emerge.  Cooperation between bands is something almost non-existing here in Italy. There is a lot of envy and avidity.

HMTV Canada: How do you like our music site at Hollywood Music TV? What advice do you have for people who want to form their own bands?

Helalyn Flowers: First of all, please verify how much you believe in music. If you are music-hobbyists or have other goals in life (all respectable!) just do it for fun and to fulfill your free-time. But don’t expect heaven for this. If you have the fire inside play the music you want to listen and that you are not able to find around. Be your own fave band. Don’t care about what people think of you, just go straight on your way. Avoid covers. The common credence of initially playing covers to reach a higher ability on your instrument, so that you are able then to write your own songs is pure crap!!! Be free.

HMTV Canada: There is a kind of ancient connection vibe to singer, songwriters, something that ties the bands to write about their personal experiences’ inspirations, worst experiences while performing or travelling, do you ever collaborate on these experiences in your music?

Helalyn Flowers:  I don’t use talking about my personal experiences in our songs, even if daily life is a big inspiration source. But I use losing in my mind and talking about histories and visions I live in my virtual world. It’s something abstract that is strictly connected to my personal experiences, but not explicitly. Most of HF lyrics refer to states of hallucination, feelings and visualizations that determined objects or elements may live. Like in Eye For A Day, for example, (included in our forthcoming debut-album), where frames of daily life are seen under the viewpoint of an eye itself, without being filtered by the human mind, seeing things in an absolutely direct and uncorrupted way. Or in I’m Human, defective  that it is a dialogue of a human life, speaking about its mistakes, defects and lacks which suggest us to see the human race like an experiment, maybe still incomplete?

HMTV Canada: Is there anyone special you would like to acknowledge, and any last words?

Helalyn Flowers: We did that in our album’s credits, thanks and dedications. Don’t believe in the rules of music scenes, go beyond and you will be the new gods. Be yourself!

HMTV Canada: Helalyn Flowers, thank you for taking the time to complete HMTV s Canada s Online Ezine Interview. -You Rock.

Helalyn Flowers: Thank you for this pleasant conversation and for the warm support! We wish you all the best in life. Love& Respect-Max N0emi_Helalyn Flowers.