WL//WH Interview CHRISTINE PLAYS VIOLA
Established in 2008, the Darkwave/Goth four-piece from Pratola Peligna, Central Italy, was confirmed as one of the most consistent and constantly evolving bands on the Italian and international post-punk scene with their recent fifth studio album, “F.I.V.E. Fear Increases Violent Emotions,” on Cleopatra Records, as Mike’s review attests. But without further ado, let’s delve directly into the band’s past, present and future.
Hey Men! Let’s start with your origins. How did the band start? Who are your early influences, and how did you come up with your name?
Christine Plays Viola was born around 2008 from a shared fascination with dark romantic imagery and post-punk melancholy. We were absorbing bands like The Cure, Joy Division, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, but also film scores and cinematic atmospheres. From the beginning, the intention wasn’t just to write songs, but to build emotional spaces where sound, mood and silence could coexist.
The name arrived as a vision more than a decision. “Christine” was inspired by the Siouxsie and the Banshees song — we imagined her as a fragile, ghostlike woman suspended in time, playing a soft instrument somewhere between memory and dream. “Plays Viola” added a classical, almost sacred elegance, something intimate and theatrical. The contrast felt essential: beauty and shadow, vulnerability and tension. The name already contained the emotional architecture of the band.
How has the fact of living in a peripheral part of Italy shaped your path?
We come from central Abruzzo, geographically peripheral, even if Rome is not far from us. Especially in the early years, we would constantly travel there to attend concerts, meet people and slowly build connections. It wasn’t impossible to access the scene, but it required intention. Nothing came by proximity; everything had to be pursued.
Living outside a major cultural center creates a paradox. On one side, it can isolate you. You’re not breathing the industry every day, you’re not inside the constant circulation of opportunities. On the other side, that distance forces strength and self-sufficiency. You learn discipline very quickly. Contacts, tours, collaborations — you earn them step by step. In big cities, sometimes even inertia can generate opportunities. In peripheral places, you can’t rely on inertia. You rely on will. And that struggle becomes part of your identity.
Let’s talk about the Italian dark/goth/alternative scene. What’s your take on it?
In all honesty, we sometimes feel like white flies inside our own circuit. We don’t say this in a self-celebratory way; it’s more a reflection on the state of the scene. Many productions, not only in Italy but internationally, tend to recycle familiar clichés. A lot of bands resemble each other, and even when songs are pleasant, the songwriting often feels reduced, safe, and unwilling to take risks. There’s a strong aesthetic identity in the scene, but sometimes that identity becomes a comfort zone. Few artists truly try to push the language forward or search for a personal voice beyond the expected references. Darkness risks becoming a template instead of an exploration.
That said, we deeply respect artists who approach the genre with honesty and intention. A band we admire for their integrity, even though they’re not Italian, is Then Comes Silence. They manage to stay inside the tradition while still sounding alive and contemporary, which is a difficult balance to achieve. We believe the scene grows only when artists dare to challenge it from within.
How has CPV evolved since 2008?
At the beginning, we were more instinctive, more romantic, more raw. Over time, we became more architectural in our writing. Today we think in terms of structure, narrative and psychological tension. We’ve always tried to follow what felt true in that specific moment of our lives. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes less, but we never compromised. We always chose to do what we wanted without half measures.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 2008. Our music grew with us through long journeys, silences, interruptions and rebirths. Everything we created was first for ourselves to feel alive, to chase that shiver music has always given us. Mood and emotion have always been poured directly into our work, and along this path, we crossed different musical territories, constantly shedding and renewing our skin. With F.I.V.E., we partly returned to our origins, but we came back after a long voyage. We carry with us experiences, disappointments, encounters, personal fractures and everything we lived as individuals and as a band. The approach is different now: more mature, more conscious. What we kept: emotional honesty and cinematic atmosphere. What we left behind: naivety and unnecessary excess.
How has your writing and recording process developed?
Many of our songs actually begin as synth soundscapes, almost like fragments of a film score. We start from atmosphere first. We extract the emotional temperature of those textures and then translate them into the band’s language. Tracks like “Desolate Moments” or “You Don’t Fool Me” were originally far more orchestral in nature before finding their final shape.
If we had to describe a typical workflow, it would look something like this: soundscape / synth / orchestral → guitar → bass & drums → lyrics & voice.
We build the emotional architecture first, then the physical body of the song. There are exceptions, of course. Some tracks come from a raw guitar instinct and grow collectively in the rehearsal room; “Jackie’s Curse” is a good example of that more direct energy.
For the recording of F.I.V.E., we made a conscious decision to remove pressure from the process. Working with our sound engineer and friend Salvatore Carducci allowed us to let the songs mature naturally. When something didn’t align, we paused instead of forcing it. The album took two years to complete, a long time, but necessary to reach clarity and conviction. We wanted every choice to feel inevitable, not rushed.
Individual strengths within the band?
If we had to translate each member into a value or an archetype, the band becomes a small ecosystem of forces.
Fabrizio is the mind and the endurance, the one from whom most musical impulses originate. He is architecture, persistence, the quiet engine that keeps moving even when everything feels stalled.
Massimo is the poet and the courage. He gives language to emotions most people would rather keep buried. His voice is not decoration, it is exposure. He turns vulnerability into form.
Marco is the fireman and the teacher. In moments of tension, he extinguishes storms with a smile. He listens deeply to music, to people, and his bass is both anchor and compass. He keeps the structure from collapsing.
Gianluca is calm incarnate. A silent stabilizing force. Just his presence can reset the temperature of a room. Behind the drums, he is pure groove and precision, a human metronome, but with a heartbeat.
Together, these roles are less about skill and more about balance. CPV exists in the tension between these personalities — and that tension is where the music breathes.
After the Covid hiatus and the Cleopatra affiliation, how has the direction changed?
After the pandemic, we felt there was something unfinished inside us that needed to be explored. Even if we were absent publicly, internally, we were rebuilding. We had to cultivate new stimuli and recover emotional resources. Private lives inevitably took priority, and all these factors pushed us to the margins of the scene for a while.
But in retrospect, that distance was evolutionary. Sometimes, stopping is healthier than dragging yourself forward with nothing meaningful to say. Silence can be fertile. It forces honesty.
When we decided to return, we wanted to do it properly with a partner that represented the level we were aiming for. The conversation with Cleopatra came very naturally. Brian Perera listened to the material and immediately understood our vision. His enthusiasm mirrored ours, and from that point, everything aligned with surprising simplicity. The pause taught us patience. The return gave us direction.
Key themes of the new album?
F.I.V.E. is about internal fracture, the moment when fear stops being an emotion and becomes architecture. The album explores psychological control, emotional escalation and the slow collapse of identity. Each track is a different voice speaking inside the same mind, like chapters of a single breakdown. We chose a more guitar-driven sound because we wanted tension you could physically feel, something sharp, tactile, almost confrontational. The record breathes in waves: pressure, silence, impact. Our influences still live in the Gothic and Post-punk tradition, but they’re filtered through a cinematic lens. We think in images as much as in sound. It’s darker, yes, but also more focused. Less decoration, more incision. This album is not about despair. It’s about observing the mechanics of fear from the inside.
Other art-related inspirations?
Cinema, photography, and literature, visual storytelling shapes us as much as music does. Directors like Lynch or Tarkovsky taught us that atmosphere can speak louder than dialogue. Noir cinema, surrealism, and fragmented narratives influence the way we structure emotion. We often see images before we hear sounds. A scene, a light, a gesture can generate a song. Photography teaches us framing and silence; literature teaches us rhythm and inner voice. Our music is an attempt to translate those visual and narrative tensions into sound. We don’t separate disciplines, we treat the album as a film without images.
Bands you’d love to cover?
We’ve always loved the idea of covers as a transformation rather than a tribute. In the past, we’ve reinterpreted Joy Division, Talk Talk, and even “Sweet Harmony” by The Beloved, songs we filtered through our own emotional lens. If we looked ahead, we’d love to touch something by Bauhaus or The Psychedelic Furs, and maybe dare a CPV reinterpretation of a Duran Duran track. We’re also drawn to The Cure, early Depeche Mode, artists where melody and darkness coexist naturally. A good cover should feel like a parallel universe version of the original. Familiar, but haunted.
First record you bought?
We don’t remember the exact first one, we grew up as musical omnivores, constantly exploring. But among the earliest records that shaped us were “The Black Album” by Metallica, “Achtung Baby” by U2, “Disintegration” by The Cure, “Nevermind” by Nirvana, and “Black Celebration” by Depeche Mode. They arrived almost like portals. Each of them opened a different emotional geography: heaviness, melancholy, rebellion, intimacy, darkness. Looking back, it makes sense that our identity was formed at the intersection of those worlds. Those records weren’t just purchases, they were early coordinates of who we were becoming.
How has the gothic scene evolved?
The gothic and dark scene has become more global and fragmented. In the past, it felt concentrated around specific cities and movements; today, it exists everywhere, connected digitally rather than geographically. That openness has created hybrids and new interpretations, which is healthy, scenes that don’t evolve eventually fossilize. At the same time, there’s a risk of aesthetic repetition. Sometimes the visual language survives more easily than the musical one. We see many revivals that celebrate the surface of the genre without fully exploring its emotional depth.
CPV sits in a liminal space between heritage and reinvention. We deeply respect the lineage, the bands that built this language, but we’re not interested in nostalgia as a museum. For us, dark music should remain alive, unstable, and contemporary. A living organism, not a costume.
Internet era and AI?
The internet has unquestionably expanded access, from discovery to distribution; anyone can reach listeners anywhere in the world. That democratization has been transformative. It gave voice to artists who would have otherwise remained unheard. Yet alongside this abundance, attention has become more fragile. There is more music than ever, but less time to absorb it deeply. The challenge now is not simply to be heard, but to be felt. Many musicians we respect have pointed out that the internet collapses distance but also compresses meaning. Listeners scroll rather than linger. Songs can go viral, but a lifetime of listening takes patience, and patience is in short supply.
As for AI, we can’t deny it exists, and we have to learn how to coexist with it. We see it as an additional tool, not a substitute. It can assist, suggest, and accelerate, but it cannot replace human trauma, memory, fear, desire, and emotional complexity. These are the elements that truly generate art. For us, creation still begins in the rehearsal room, a physical space where emotions, ideas, and lived experiences collide. Composition is intimate, fragile, deeply personal. AI, even with enormous power, does not live by its own light. It cannot express what each of us carries inside, what we believe is the soul, and that soul is unique in every human being. So the internet is both opportunity and tension; AI is possibility, not prophecy. The real work remains human: listening deeply, feeling deeply, creating deeply.
Your most influential albums?
It’s impossible to separate these records from our lives. They’re not just albums, they are inhabited rooms, inner seasons, wounds that learned how to sing. “Hunky Dory” and “Low” by Bowie were a silent revelation: the discovery that fragility can be a form of light. Late-night listening, headphones pressed too tight, and the feeling that music could open spaces inside us we didn’t know existed. It wasn’t escape, it was recognition. “Pornography” by The Cure was a magnificent collapse. An album that doesn’t ask for comfort, but for immersion. It taught us that despair can have an elegant, almost sculptural form. Entering that sound felt like agreeing to remain in a windowless room and discovering that even there, a fierce beauty exists. “The Velvet Underground & Nico” was the first crack: poetry and noise coexisting without compromise. Music that didn’t seek approval, but truth. “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division became an internal pulse, something constant and subterranean. You don’t listen to it, you pass through it. It is the sound of absence taking shape. And finally, “If I Die, I Die” by Virgin Prunes: a ritual more than a record. Music as an extreme gesture, as theatre of the soul. It taught us that art doesn’t need to be comfortable, it can be a threshold to cross.
These albums didn’t just influence us. They gave us a language to name emotions that had no words yet. They transformed chaos into structure, pain into aesthetics. They are inner maps we still consult today, every time we search for the point where music stops being sound and becomes necessity.
Songs you feel proud of?
Rather than naming a single song, we feel deeply connected to our second album, “Vacua”. It’s a record that feels like an exposed nerve. At the time we were writing it, we didn’t try to protect ourselves. We let the fractures show. Every lyric, every atmosphere came from a place we didn’t filter. In hindsight, that vulnerability may be the reason it felt overlooked; it wasn’t designed to please, it was designed to survive. We poured a part of our private lives into that album. There are moments in “Vacua” that still feel uncomfortable to revisit, because they carry emotions we never fully resolved. But that’s exactly why we’re proud of it. It’s honest in a way that can’t be recreated on purpose.
For us, “Vacua” is not a step in a discography; it’s a scar that learned how to sing. And scars don’t disappear. They become part of your voice.
What are you listening to lately?
Lately, we’ve been moving between old pillars and new voices. We still return to records that feel like home, but we’re equally drawn to recent releases that challenge our ears. We’ve been listening a lot to Ashes and Diamonds’ “Are Forever” album, the latest LP, “Ferrum Sidereum,” by Zu, and Amanda Bergman’s “Embraced For A Second As We Die.” They sit in very different emotional and sonic territories, but that contrast is exactly what feeds us.
We don’t believe in genre loyalty, we believe in atmosphere. Some days require noise and weight, others demand fragility and space. What we listen to reflects the same tension that exists in our music: darkness coexisting with beauty.
Many thanks for the interview! Anything you’d like to add?
F.I.V.E. is not nostalgia. It’s not revival. It’s a psychological document of where we stand now. A map of fractures, silences and inner echoes. We hope listeners enter it like a room and stay inside long enough to feel something real, something that lingers after the sound fades. Thank you to the readers and to the editorial team for opening this space. In a world that moves too fast, attention is a rare act of generosity. We don’t take it lightly.
See you somewhere in the dark.
– Christine Plays Viola
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