Interview LO SCISMA

LO SCISMA discuss artistic freedom, social responsibility, and rejecting industry conventions, exploring their debut album I Mercanti della Pace, creative philosophy, and the fractures they hope their music creates.

1. LO SCISMA is described not simply as a band, but as “a choice.” What does that choice mean to each of you personally, and what made you feel that this was the right moment to create something outside the usual rules of the music industry?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

The choice came before the band.

All three of us already had (and still have) our own musical histories, projects, experiences and identities. LO SCISMA was never created because we needed another band. At the beginning, it wasn't even supposed to become one. It was conceived as a studio project: a place where we could make music without thinking about positioning, expectations, genres, numbers or what would happen afterwards.

Then something changed.

We realised that the absence of expectations was giving us something we hadn't planned: absolute freedom. We were writing and playing things that we genuinely needed to express. At some point the project stopped being an experiment and became a necessity — almost a need of the soul.

That's what “the choice” means to me.

It means deciding what you are prepared to sacrifice in order to protect the reason you started making music in the first place.

For me, it meant writing without having to reproduce what people might expect from my other musical experiences. It meant allowing myself to follow an idea even when it was inconvenient, strange, too direct or impossible to categorise.

Sandro brings his own interpretation of that freedom. He can approach a song with the physical instinct of a drummer and, at the same time, think in terms of electronics, loops, spaces and arrangements.

Claudia brings another dimension entirely. Her voice has become the human face of these words. She can make vulnerability coexist with anger, fragility with confrontation.

LO SCISMA exists where those three personalities meet.

We didn't create this project because we believe the music industry is our enemy. That would be far too simplistic.

We created it because we didn't want the mechanisms surrounding music to decide what kind of music we were allowed to make.

LO SCISMA is the place where we don't negotiate that.

That is the choice.

2.Your manifesto speaks strongly about rejecting algorithms, numbers, and the constant pressure to be visible online. Why did you decide to build LO SCISMA away from social media, and what have you learned from taking such an unconventional approach since 2024?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

We are not against technology. And we are definitely not nostalgic for some imaginary golden age when everything was supposedly more authentic.

Technology is extraordinary.

The problem begins when the tool becomes the judge.

At some point musicians started receiving a very strange message: your work matters if it generates engagement. Your song matters if people don't skip it. Your identity matters if it can be communicated immediately. Your career matters if a graph moves in the right direction.

Eventually, without even noticing it, you can start thinking about music through the eyes of an algorithm.

We wanted to remove that observer from the room.

When LO SCISMA started in 2024, we wanted the songs to exist before their communication existed. We wanted an idea to be allowed to grow without immediately asking ourselves how it could be presented, promoted, photographed, reduced to content or made more accessible.

That distinction became incredibly important.

There is a difference between making something and then communicating it, and making something while already thinking about how it will be communicated.

The second process can slowly change the first.

What have we learned?

That invisibility can be incredibly liberating.

When nobody is watching, you stop performing.

You start listening again.

To the song. To the people in the room. To your instincts.

Today we obviously understand that digital platforms are part of the world we live in, and refusing every form of digital communication would simply become another dogma.

But there is a fundamental difference:

we can use the algorithm without allowing the algorithm to use us.

The day we change a song because somebody tells us that the chorus needs to arrive earlier for retention, or that an intro is too long for people's attention spans, something fundamental has gone wrong.

Music cannot become afraid of losing the listener.

Sometimes the listener should be asked to make an effort too.

3.Your debut album, I Mercanti della Pace, tackles themes such as propaganda, power, war, alienation, media manipulation, and individual responsibility. How do you transform such complex subjects into songs without turning the music into simple political slogans?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

By refusing to tell people what they are supposed to think.

A slogan gives you an answer.

I'm much more interested in creating a question.

There is obviously a political dimension to I Mercanti della Pace, because war, propaganda, power and information are political subjects. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But political doesn't necessarily mean partisan.

I'm interested in mechanisms.

How does fear become consent?

How does language make violence acceptable?

How can the same event become two completely different truths depending on who tells the story?

When does information stop describing reality and begin manufacturing it?

And there is another question which, to me, is even more uncomfortable:

How much responsibility do we have ourselves?

Because blaming governments, media, corporations, political systems or some undefined idea of “power” is easy.

Questioning our own willingness to believe the version of reality that makes us most comfortable is much harder.

That's where many of the songs begin.

I don't want to write: “These are the good people. Those are the bad people.”

Reality is rarely that convenient.

I would rather put the listener somewhere uncomfortable and leave them there.

The objective isn't to make people agree with us.

If somebody listens to the record, completely disagrees with something I've written, but spends five minutes genuinely questioning one of their certainties, then the song has already done something meaningful.

4. The title I Mercanti della Pace immediately raises questions about who controls the narrative around peace and conflict. What does this title mean to you, and was there a particular event, idea, or realization that inspired it?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

The contradiction is the entire point.

Almost everybody publicly declares themselves to be in favour of peace.

And yet war remains one of the most persistent political, economic and industrial realities of human history.

Nobody introduces themselves as a merchant of war.

The words are always different.

Defence.

Security.

Stability.

Liberation.

Prevention.

Justice.

Necessity.

Peace.

The vocabulary changes.

The bodies don't.

That contradiction fascinates and terrifies me.

I Mercanti della Pace isn't an accusation against one government, one country, one ideology or one historical event.

That would make the record much smaller than what we intended.

The question is broader:

What happens when peace itself becomes a product?

When the language of peace can be used to justify violence.

When morality becomes communication.

When suffering becomes content.

When victims become more or less important depending on which narrative needs them.

There wasn't one particular event behind the title.

There were too many.

At some point I Mercanti della Pace appeared almost naturally because those four words contained the contradiction at the centre of the entire record.

And what disturbed me most was precisely that the phrase sounded respectable.

Almost reassuring.

That's what made it frightening.

LO SCISMA · Nel Nome di Dio

5. Musically, LO SCISMA combines heavy grooves, prominent bass, essential guitar work, and influences that extend beyond traditional rock. How did you develop this particular sound, and how important was it for you to avoid conventional genre boundaries?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

It was extremely important, although we never sat in a room saying, “We need to invent something new.”

That's probably the fastest way to create something artificial.

Our sound developed through subtraction.

As a guitarist, one of the most liberating things for me was realising that I didn't have to fill every available space simply because we are fundamentally a rock band.

Sometimes one riff is enough.

Sometimes one note is enough.

Sometimes the most powerful thing the guitar can do is disappear.

That created room for everything else.

Sandro has an extremely physical relationship with drums, but electronics, loops and programmed elements allow us to create this strange dialogue between something human and something mechanical.

And Claudia's voice gives us another enormous space to explore because it doesn't always need to behave like a conventional rock vocal. It can whisper, speak, become rhythmic, fragile, intimate and then suddenly become enormous.

Bass and groove are fundamental.

We love the physical sensation of music.

And our influences don't stop at rock. Hip-hop, electronic music, industrial music, alternative pop and completely unrelated forms of music can all enter the room.

We never ask:

“Is this rock?”

We ask:

“Does this make the song stronger?”

If the answer is yes, it belongs to LO SCISMA.

Genre can be useful when somebody needs to describe a band in three words.

During the creative process, it can become a prison.

6. Alex, Sandro, and Claudia come from very different musical backgrounds, including Vlad In Tears, 100x100 Batteristi, and Rome’s underground scene. How did these different experiences shape the identity and chemistry of LO SCISMA?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

They shaped everything.

And there is something important I always want to make clear when we talk about our backgrounds: LO SCISMA isn't an attempt to escape from our other musical experiences.

Quite the opposite.

Those experiences are part of us.

You don't spend years making records, performing, travelling, rehearsing, failing, succeeding, meeting musicians and discovering music and then suddenly become a blank page because another project begins.

My experience with Vlad In Tears is part of the musician I am. I don't want to erase that history, and I don't need to distance myself from it in order for LO SCISMA to have its own identity.

The same is true for Sandro and Claudia.

Sandro brings an extraordinary relationship with rhythm. 100x100 Batteristi is one visible part of his musical path, but what matters to LO SCISMA is the way he thinks. He doesn't simply play drums underneath a song. He thinks about architecture, dynamics, electronics, tension.

Claudia arrives from another musical world again, including Rome's live and underground environment, and brings something neither Sandro nor I could manufacture.

A different sensitivity.

A different emotional vocabulary.

A different relationship between the words and the person standing in front of the microphone.

And those differences create friction.

I love that friction.

We don't need to have identical instincts.

Actually, I think LO SCISMA exists precisely because we don't.

Sometimes the most interesting moment in a song appears when three different musical histories disagree about what should happen next.

Perhaps that's another meaning hidden inside our name.

7. Claudia, your vocals often prioritize urgency, emotion, and credibility over traditional vocal virtuosity. What do you look for when interpreting LO SCISMA’s lyrics, and how do you emotionally enter the world of these songs?

Claudia:

I've always loved the way Alex writes.

Even before LO SCISMA, I appreciated him enormously as a lyricist because there is something very visual about his writing.

When I read his lyrics, I don't simply understand what he's saying.

I see it.

I see the place.

I see the person.

I see the gesture.

Sometimes I can almost see the light in the scene he is describing.

And that makes my relationship with the songs very instinctive.

I don't approach the lyrics thinking first about how I can demonstrate something vocally. I try to understand where I am emotionally inside those words.

What happened five minutes before that sentence?

Why am I saying it?

Am I angry?

Am I terrified?

Am I trying to convince somebody else, or am I trying to convince myself?

Sometimes a line needs to sound beautiful.

Sometimes beauty would completely destroy it.

Sometimes you need to hear the breath.

Sometimes the voice needs to break a little.

Sometimes the strongest interpretation is almost whispered.

Alex's lyrics give me images, and I try to become the person living inside those images.

That's why credibility matters so much to me.

Technique is important, of course. Technique gives you freedom.

But I never want technique to stand between the listener and the emotion.

If somebody leaves one of our concerts thinking, “She sang that perfectly,” that's nice.

But if somebody leaves thinking:

“I believed every word she said,”

that means much more to me.

8. The band's manifesto says, “Every song is a crack. Every concert is a question. Every lyric is an act of refusal.” How does this philosophy translate to the live experience, and what do you want people to feel or question when they leave one of your concerts?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

A concert should never simply be the physical reproduction of a recording.

Otherwise there would be no reason to be there.

The stage changes the songs.

They become more physical.

More imperfect.

Sometimes more violent.

Sometimes much more fragile.

There is something extraordinary about people sharing the same vibration at exactly the same moment.

You cannot pause it.

You cannot scroll past it.

You cannot replay the previous thirty seconds.

You are simply there.

That's why the phrase “every concert is a question” matters to us.

We don't mean that people need to leave a LO SCISMA concert having understood some intellectual thesis.

The question can be much more intimate.

“Why did that sentence bother me?”

“Why did I recognise myself in that?”

“Why did I feel uncomfortable?”

“Why did I feel angry?”

“Why did something I don't completely understand affect me?”

Art doesn't always have to explain itself.

Sometimes its responsibility is simply to create the fracture through which a question can enter.

I don't need everybody to love LO SCISMA.

I don't even need everybody to understand LO SCISMA.

But indifference scares me.

You can love us.

You can hate us.

You can disagree with everything we say.

Just don't leave exactly as you arrived.

9. You have chosen word of mouth, personal relationships, rehearsal rooms, and real communities over chasing numbers and streaming algorithms. Do you think the music industry has lost something important by becoming increasingly focused on metrics and digital visibility?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

Yes.

But I think it's important to answer this without romanticising the past.

Numbers have always existed.

Records sold.

Tickets sold.

Radio rotations.

Chart positions.

Venue capacities.

The music industry has never been a monastery dedicated exclusively to artistic purity.

What's changed is the intimacy of measurement.

Today almost every interaction between a person and a song can become data.

How long somebody listened.

Where they stopped.

What they clicked.

Whether they shared it.

Which section generated more engagement.

What demographic responded.

What time they listened.

That information can be extraordinarily useful.

But there is a point where information becomes instruction.

And that's where I become uncomfortable.

If data tells me people stop listening after thirty seconds, that's information.

If I therefore decide that every song I write from now on must reach the chorus within twenty seconds, data has become part of the creative process.

If thousands of musicians respond to the same incentives, something inevitable happens.

Everything starts becoming optimised.

And optimisation is often the enemy of surprise.

I want LO SCISMA to be allowed to be inefficient.

I want an intro that lasts longer than somebody recommends.

I want silence where another producer might put a sound.

I want a lyric that cannot be reduced to a caption.

I want a song to occasionally ask something from the listener instead of desperately trying to retain them.

Human beings are inconsistent, complicated and inefficient.

Why should art made by human beings be anything else?

10. Looking ahead, what kind of “fracture” do you hope LO SCISMA can create? Beyond the music itself, what would you like people to remember about this project and the ideas behind it?

Alex / LO SCISMA:

I don't have the arrogance to believe that a band is going to change the world.

The fracture I'm interested in is much smaller.

And precisely because it's smaller, perhaps it's possible.

I want somebody to stop.

For the length of a song.

For the length of a concert.

For five minutes after reading a lyric.

Stop scrolling.

Stop repeating something simply because everybody around them repeats it.

Stop performing the version of themselves that the world seems to expect.

And ask:

“Do I actually believe this?”

That question is enormous.

Because a real schism doesn't necessarily begin between two groups of people.

Sometimes it begins inside one person.

Between what you've been told and what you believe.

Between what is convenient and what feels true.

Between belonging and remaining yourself.

There is also another dimension of LO SCISMA that matters deeply to us. A portion of the proceeds from I Mercanti della Pace goes to organisations working against violence towards women.

We didn't want the social dimension of the record to exist exclusively inside lyrics.

Words are important.

But if you speak constantly about responsibility and then responsibility ends when the song finishes, something is missing.

Ultimately, I don't want LO SCISMA to be remembered as “the band against social media”, “the band against algorithms”, “the band against the music industry” or simply “the protest band”.

That would reduce everything to another slogan.

LO SCISMA isn't defined by what we are against.

I would rather it be remembered for what we chose to defend.

Independence.

Doubt.

Responsibility.

Imperfection.

Human connection.

The freedom to contradict yourself when experience teaches you something new.

The right to remain difficult to classify.

And above all, the right to choose.

Because a schism isn't necessarily destruction.

Sometimes you create a fracture because you need to look inside.

And sometimes, only after something breaks,

you finally see what was holding it together.

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