Simona: Let’s start with your impressions about this tour…it is your first time in Italy…
Adrian Hates: No, second time…
S: ooopsaaa…first interview after a long time, first gaffe!
Arianna: at the festival di Bassiano! With Rosetta Stone and many other groups!
AH: yeah, a long long time ago…it was a very nice place but not very well featured; it was an early stage for us so I guess it’s a very big difference compared to the stage of today…
S: so, how about your 3-days tour in Italy?
AH: I think that today was my favorite…I don’t know, most ot the times when I come into a location i kinda feel if it is gonna be good or not…I came here and I thought: that’s might be the right stage for tonight! Rome was quite good as well…while yesterday was a bit…uhm…
S: “dead”?
AH: yeah…in Vincenza…well, I don’t know…we couldn’t get them moving, the audience was just there standing…you know, you feel like an idiot performing two hours on stage…but today was really great!
S: “Panik Manifesto” has been released with the beginning of yout Tour…would you like to spend some words about this new MCD?
AH: yez, it has been released on the 8th of November …I started working on “Panik Manifesto” really after “Freak Parfume” was done and even in the process of finishing it…because…I don’t know… one weak after “Freak Perfume” I thought that probably I said everything I had in my Soul for the moment but then I suddenly thought “no…”…I didn’t want to go back to studio because after 3 months it has been very stressing but…after a week I was back in the studio again..I don’t know why…I’ve got these new pieces, the songs just flew out of my fingers, very quickly…and then we had the tour coming up, and distributors and my label and partners said: “maybe you should do some special release for the tour”..;ok what can we do…I didn’t want to release another Maxi-CD, you know we released two Maxi-CD before “Freak Perfume”…so I didn’t want to released something that was goin to be just a waste of money for the fans so I decided to record and finish up these 7 songs that I’ve been working on and put these on a Mini-album and work this Mini-album as a full-length CD…and even the design, the graphic: a 16 pages booklet, digipack format…something I think ia unusual for a Mini-album…I think a lots of Bands would have used these 7-tracks as new full-length, while we put out it in the mid-price section for fans and for us as well…
S: is there a special concept behind “Panik Manifesto” or, as u said, the songs just flew out of your Soul?
AH: Well, I wouldn’t say there is a special concept…it is closely attached to “Freak Perfume”, it is about the shadowside, the darkside of “Freak Perfume”…though I wouldn’t call it a “second part” but it is definitively an addition, and that’s why I think it’s a very good to “feel” them together: you can mix the songs, and feel them as a unity…
S: Back to the live-show: I noticed the more heavy use of guitar on stage as compared to the Cd-releases…are you gonna experiment more on guitar in the near future or …
AH: Yes, we will definitively do more guitar in the next album, that’s for sure but we will see how we can work the guitar, what we can do with guitar…I mean: working on guitat it doesn’t necessarly mean that you then closely identify it as guitar, that’s what we do very much like: using guitar as an “effect” and it is very interesting and also very funny; it is a challenge for the guitarist and also for the arranger and the composer…Oh well, we have so much time now, we are not gonna release any album until sometime 2004, so in the Summer we will “sit down” and slowly start working on new material. I have some plans and I’m very excited about the project we are going to work on, because it will involve a lot of musicians, not only the band… I’m sure it will take us a year to write the new album…it will be bery funny to see how it will work, and the organization… it’s gonna involve 30 or 40 extra musicians…
S: Oh it sounds great! But…I read that you prefer to work on your own, won’t it be the case of the new album?
AH: Oh no, I will! I still do that! I see a difference in writing it and “packaging” it…what i call packaging is making the songs, execute them with the help of impact from others…while for the emotional spark of the songs, that’s what i like to do by MySelf, because it is so private, so intimate what I write about, that I find difficult to share these moments with others …
S: Indeed…so: regardind the lyrics, and especially “Freak Perfume”: I got the impression that they are more direct compared to the previous releases…according to me, it seems like you were expressing “more” your personal Feelings instead of just general reflections on mankind…do you agree?
AH: I would not completely agree with your statement, since my songs have always been about my very personal thoughts, my intimate thoughts, my opinion on life, on mankind…several things…just the spectrum of the subject changes…sure, this album was more about my life, my private life, and about the two years since “One of 18 angels” was released…a lot of private things that happened in that time, that I needed to get rid in Music…well, you know “Diary of Dreams” it’s kinda concept: like writing your own “studies” for yourself, writing your thoughts and your emotions, putting them into “form”…
S:…like a kind of therapy…
AH: yez, it is a kind of therapy, definitively! That’s the oldest that exists: “feeling” yourself while writing what you think…you know, sometimes the abstract forms get very simple once written down…it was a very hard process for me…also because with “One of 18 angles” we reached a very big audience, we got a lot of attention, there was a lot of pressure on me so with “Freak Perfume” I decided to go very much into MySelf and look into my Heart and simply write what I think I had to do…Because you know, you can’t deny that expectations from an audience can influence you and I was very scared to get into that because I didn’t want to be influenced..I did “One of 18 angels” once, and I didn’t wanto to do it twice so I said...I was just going to experiment and do whetever I feel like at that moment, and that’s how “Traumtänzer” for example came up: I had it, written and composed it in english language but I didn’t like it…it just didn’t sound right, I don’t know why but it did not, so I kicked off the complete lyric…
S: it perhaps didn’t express completely your feelings?
AH: I don’t know what was on but..it was wrong! It was not just right that way…so I decided to write it in German language and suddenly it sounded so perfect to me…and also “Chrysalis”: we have close friends that actually didn’t believe that it was me who has written that song! You know, before the release of the album I played this song in front of 5 or 6 people and the response was like: “uhm…this is interesting…ehm, is this really you??”…oh my god…I was absolutely uncertain of what people might say…needless to say that it was an enormous success, in Germany it entered the Media Control Chart by sales! And it was kind of funny to enter the chart next to Phil Collins! Funny…you know a lot of musicians say: “I don’t want to be in that chart! …it’s just bullshit!”…I don’t think so…indeed it was funny…I even bought one of those magazine where the chart was published, put the page with the chart on the wall, it is something we can smile about when we look at it…because it is also something you can be proud of! You know, the major industry is such an high competitor…and in the week we were in the chart, there were also In Strict Cinfidence in that chart and later on we had 7 other bands in the “top 100 Chart”…God here we are! With totally indipendent bands, totally indipendent concept, totally indipendent commercial advertisment, and absolutely indipendent distribution campaign and…Halo! we are able to compete with Major industry, that put million and million of US dollars into their products… funny! I imagine those Major people should have puked their shit out of themselves when they saw that! Or something like “pff, how can I manage that?” .
That’s good, we are able to get that far!
S: I guess your “relation” with Music changed in the latest years, passing from a spare-time activity to a job: the band, the label…
AH: Yez, especially with the Label…you know, when I started all it was basically for MySelf…then I had 1 band, 2 bands, 3 bands, 4 bands…well, I mean: what is a 4 bands for a Label? It’s like 4 releases a year, you can manage that in your free time…i had a job, I didn’t earn money with the Label and with my Band…then preferences changed and suddenly we had more and more Bands…we got "Assemblage23" and "Diorama", and other bands that suddenly started to develop very well and Diary of Dreams as well…it is something I noticed after the release of “One of 18 angels”, that my part in the office grew more and more, and my time at the Studio as well…so it was difficult to arrange, because it is my Company, ‘course I have people to work with me otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it anymore in a way…but it’s kinda hard to say “ok folks this is the work to do, I have to stay in the Studio to work on my Music”, I’m the LabelBoss, I should stay “there”! so, it is tricky, very tricky to find a good level but luckily we have Winterbreaks and Summerbreaks in this industry, which give me the possibility to work on my stuff
S: Again regardin your lyrics: apart them being inspired by your personal reflections, are there any Artist or Writer or whatever that have infmluenced you in some way?
AH: well, I admire a lot of Writers that’s for sure…but there’s more operation on personal vision…not trying to be like them…inspiration indeed, but then people could misinterpret that and believe that I try to be like them…and that’s something I don’t want to hear…For example: when I listen to Music personally, a huge range of Music, it goes from Jazz to Classical Music, pop, rock, metal, and trip-hop is also good stuff…I love a lot of that stuff and I’m inspired a lot by these Artists for what they did, it makes me happy to listen to them but I’ve got my own style …so same goes for Writers, I’ve got two French Writers I love a lot and they are Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, they are my favorite, then I have a couple of German Writers, which are from German Expressionism, 1910-25, for example Schüler…I don’t know if you have ever heard of that…it was a time in Germany in which literature was at one of the peak, it is absolutely amazing, very dark and very metaphorical language…it is something we have in common, we have the same literature comeback we love. You know in Germany at that time there was the beginning of Industrialization: the factories growing, less “normal” work and more machines, and there was a lot of fear in the country about how the Future might be, and they “pictured” the future of the year 2000: everybody thought man was goin to fly and so on…
S: indeed, like for example the movie “Metropolis” from the German Expressionist Fritz Lang…and then Wiene, Murnau…
AH: yes, and also there were a lot of Painters focused on that: very “cold” images, very emotional, and it something I like very much….oh well, I just wish I had more time to read! At the moment I’m reading “De Illuminatus” once again, it is such an amazing book, that is unreal…(showing to us the cover of the book ndr)…it is insane, it deals with a very ancient symbol, do you know this Symbol?
A: it is like the “thrd eye”…
AH:yez…this symbol went to several countries, it started hundreds and hundreds of years ago…and the founder of “Illuminatus” in Germany, Adam Weishaupt, looks exaclty like George Washington…and the funny thing is that the 1 US dollar in its back has got that symbol…I’m not saying it is true, I’m just saying it is funny… George Washington: “W” is the 23rd letter in the alphabet and Adam Weishaupt , “W” is the 23rd letter again, and the 23 is the logo number of “Illuminatus”, and if you just look around…well, the Pyramids used to have 5 corners, and in American the Pentagon has got 5 corners…and again 23: we have a cigarette brand ending with 23, and then we have Chanel N. 5 …there is so much stuff with 5 and 23 (“Lost in words of anticipation, lost in worlds of revelation, 23 and 5 resulting, equalli absorbed their sigh…” from “Chemicals” ndr)…it is scary, very scary…all big dictators of this world have benn killed on the 23rd of some month….it is unreal, it is fiction mixed with facts..it is sort dangerous for your mind to mix …but it is very good to read, if you want to study and have fun at the same time, definitively.
S: well, since I do not believe in “coincidences” thank for your advice about the book…it is now time to end this interview, would you like to add something?
AH: I hope we will come back soon, that’s all I want to say, and thank you very much for the interview

Contacts:
DIARY OF DREAMS official website
TRAUMSEQUENZ - DIARY OF DREAMS German Fanclub
ACCESSION RECORDS website

Accession Records HQ
Kottendorferstr.21
D-42697 Solingen
Germany

label@accession-records.de

Sin Skinner
...Keep my integrity intact
I want to base my life on facts
Whatever comes I never know
but Life will ultimately show
Monsters and Demons
I know that I don't know
what you think that I should
I'm writing my bible...
I need to see clearly...
is insanity my friend?...
and constantly craving
for heavenly places
that I couldn't find
in your ignorant faces

Amok
I put so much faith into you
I trusted everybody except myself...
You say my dreams have all turned grey
How ignorant of you to say!
You claim that you can feel my pain
Insane of you to stay!
Bastard
Regret ... that´s all it is!
But what for?
What is the purpose ...
And yet you always look back.
You go to all these familiar places.
You see familiar faces.
Forgive and forget.
My tears dry in this desert
My laughter dies within your smile
I shall rest here, for a while
For I have lost all that I loved.

O' brother sleep
Desperate believers, emotion dealers
Have never learned to cry liquid pearls
And silently these Tribes of Traitors
Have captured everyone, including you
She and her Darkness
Maybe I`ll wake up one day to notice
That all my life was just a dream ...

Mankind
Survive!
Mankind is suffering a severe instability...
what is this faith for?
...if there is nothing to believe in?
What is this world for?
...if there is nothing to adore?...
what is that feeling
that conquers me once you were gone
I feel forgotten!
How can I be so naive,
so ignorant to think you really care!
Watching the world around me change its ugly faces,
yes this is mankind!





(ver)GIFT(et)
Metablic, schizoid indeed, s-care-ful-d we may tremble towards our future, but still always being aware of nothing else more anxiously, but of our dreams.

LUNA(-tic)
Fragile!
I tried to see my liberty
I tried to find my conscious mind
I tried to see humanity
I tried to fly away from my mortality
...undone!
...Was it ever in my range of chance
In my strongest urge I know at least it was

YOU(-das)
...Knowledge never saves from mistakes!

Shattered Disguise
Numb expectations in my shattering voice
Face to face with existence
Ashes of hope in my shivering hands
Melting illusions like a bridge to my dreams...
And Silence Still Remains
My dreams
Written out in words that I can't read
My fingers write
What my mind is not capable to think of
And silence still remains
I'm a stranger in my own skin
But I'll survive
My fingers write
What my mind is not capable to think of
But I'll survive
But for how long...?