Interview by Vsevolod BaroninTaken on 06/27/2019. Originally published in Russian by Soyuz Records Publication. Guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani is not one of those characters of the world rock scene who make bold statements and put on the eccentric shows — he just works hard, endowing humanity with not only excellent instrumental albums, but also entertaining fun concerts as part of the guitar super project G3, and sometimes G4... But the musician's next marketing ploy cannot be called trivial — demo recordings of the truly legendary 80s pop-rock trio Squares has finally become available to a wide audience in the form of the album Squares — Best Of The Early 80's Demos, where the future star played in 1979–1981... Hearing something yet unheard of, there was no way to shirk the opportunity to talk to Joe.

Exclusive interview by Vsevolod Baronin with Royal Hunt leader, André Andersen Taken on 12/10/2020, Moscow, Russia. Originally published in Russian. There is a serious suspicion that Dystopia — Part I, the fifteenth studio album by Royal Hunt, an international act from Copenhagen, released in December 2020, went relatively unnoticed, not only because of the newfangled contempt of listeners for the physical media (records and CD’s), but mainly due to socio-economic perturbations around the fancy coronavirus pandemic. And it was very, very vain: it was on this album that the leader of the band André Andersen, a Russian-born multi-instrumentalist and composer, embodied the plans hatched back in 1999 — to create and record a full-fledged opera project featured several vocalists. And on a more serious basis: the source of inspiration and, let's say, the libretto for Dystopia — Part I was the first half of a very popular and respected book by the classic of American “new wave” science fiction Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) — this time it is Fahrenheit 451. As the name of the album implies, in the future, we should meet with the second part of Dystopia, but for now, it is worth discussing with the ideologist of the…