Your lyrics are kind of poetic and the artwork is really beautiful! Was there a concept behind the album?

Thanks! Being honest there were no special concept behind the album, for artwork great thanks goes to Ekaterina Uspenskaja from Moscow, she did it really great.

5. All your lyrics are translated into English but you sing in Russian/Belarussian(which??). Is there a certain attitude behind that? (comment: I know this question sounds a bit naïve but maybe you could tell something about YOUR message to the world...)

We sing in Russian, most of Belarusians use it as a native language due to some serious influences of Russian culture in 19\20 centuries. Concerning our lyrics, older tracks have absolutely personal lyrics, but newer ones reflect more social topics. We`ve tried to translate them to English because we know there are a lot of people listening to our music who don`t speak Russian. So we wanted to be understood by them. It was pretty hard to translate it in the right way because of huge amount of idioms, but we hope we made it pretty understandable. Main topics are inner emotions concerning questions of freedom, justice and intolerance.

6. Since you come from a country that has a difficult political situation, let's turn to non-musical-questions now. Could you give a brief description of the current political situation in Belarus? (c omment: Could you also tell something about the elections in 2010?)

I guess the best word to describe it is stagnation. Stagnation in economy, science, culture, everywhere. Absolutely illegitimate authority on all levels. Everybody knows it, everybody is speaking about it, but sometimes it seems like people are too frightened to do something more than just speaking. And of course there are conditions for this. Our government have shown it`s true face on the last presidential elections. Official results were smth near 80% for Lukashenko, but all the exit polls were saying that he had not more than 40%. There was a huge mass protest, counting 30-40 thousand people in the center of Minsk, that was cruelly suppressed by police and army. As a result – more than 600 people were arrested, all the opposition politics were imprisoned.

Another mass protest, so called “silent protest”, took place in summer of 2011. It had no political leaders, no banners. People just went outside every Wednesday, met at central square and were standing still, just clapping in hands, expressing so its dissatisfaction with government. This action was unique, because it took place in all the big cities of Belarus, and it united all segments of the population. But results also were very sad: our government started to use “unofficial police”, dressed like a normal citizens. They were mixing with the crowd and pushing random people to the buses that also had no special signs. More than 1800 people were arrested during 15/06 – 06/07.

After that there were no serious actions of civil disobedience and most of the people have become frightened.

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