Interview: Get to Know LO SCISMA

Interview with Alex, songwriter & guitarist, of LO SCISMA

What first got you into music?

People often expect a simple answer to this question. Usually, it's something about hearing a record, picking up a guitar for the first time, or dreaming of standing on a stage. Those are beautiful stories, but they are not ours. Music didn't enter our lives as an ambition. It entered as a language. Like many musicians, each of us has travelled a different artistic path over the years. We've had the privilege of playing in projects that taught us discipline, songwriting, the beauty of collaboration and the responsibility that comes with sharing music with an audience. We don't see those experiences as chapters we've closed. They are part of who we are, and without them LO SCISMA simply wouldn't exist. But there comes a point where experience alone is no longer enough. You begin asking yourself a different question. Not "What kind of music do I want to write?" but "What is still worth saying?" That question became impossible to ignore. LO SCISMA wasn't born because we wanted another band. It was born because, after years of making music, we realised there was still a part of ourselves that had never truly spoken. We weren't looking for a new identity. We were looking for honesty. At first it was simply a studio project. No deadlines. No expectations. No marketing strategy. Just songs written without asking whether they would fit into a playlist or an algorithm. Then something unexpected happened. Those songs stopped sounding like experiments. They became conversations. Not only between us, but with the people we had become after years of living, travelling, succeeding, failing and changing. That's when we understood that LO SCISMA was no longer just another musical project. It had become the place where our collective conscience could finally speak without compromise.

How would you describe your music to someone who hasn’t heard it before?

The easiest answer would be "alternative rock." The most honest answer is that alternative rock is simply the vocabulary we use. LO SCISMA isn't built around a genre. It's built around a perspective. We don't sit down and ask ourselves whether a song should sound heavier, more melodic or more accessible. We ask whether it is telling the truth. Every musical choice comes after that. Some songs carry the weight of alternative metal, others breathe through post-rock atmospheres, industrial textures or stripped-down acoustic arrangements. We're not interested in protecting a style. Styles become cages very quickly. What remains constant is the intention. Our music isn't trying to escape reality. It's trying to walk straight through it. We write about loneliness without romanticising it. About power without simplifying it. About fear without pretending to have solutions. About hope without turning it into a slogan. LO SCISMA isn't asking people to agree with us. It's asking them to stop accepting everything without questioning it. If our music leaves someone uncomfortable for a while before it offers comfort, then it has probably done exactly what it was meant to do.

Was there a defining moment when you realized music was your calling?

I don't think there was a single moment. It was a gradual understanding that music wasn't simply something we did. It was becoming the way we processed reality. Over the years we've experienced many sides of this world: rehearsals, recording studios, live shows, long journeys, disappointments, extraordinary encounters and moments we'll always carry with us. Every project has left something valuable behind. LO SCISMA doesn't exist in opposition to any of that. It exists because of it. There comes a stage in every artistic journey where technical ability is no longer the challenge. The real challenge becomes honesty. You realise that writing another good song isn't enough if it doesn't reveal something true about who you are. That's what changed everything. LO SCISMA gave us permission to stop performing versions of ourselves and simply become ourselves. For us, music is no longer just entertainment. It's responsibility. If we're asking listeners to spend four minutes with us, those four minutes have to mean something. Otherwise silence would be more honest.

Where do you find inspiration for your lyrics or melodies?

Reality has never lacked material. The problem is that we've become incredibly good at looking away. Our songs rarely begin with a melody. More often they begin with a question that refuses to leave us alone. Why have we confused visibility with value? Why are we terrified of silence? Why do we consume information faster than we understand it? Why have empathy, patience and doubt become signs of weakness? Those questions eventually become lyrics. Musically, inspiration comes from the same place. We don't chase trends. We chase emotions. Sometimes that requires walls of distorted guitars. Sometimes it requires a single clean guitar with enough space around it to let silence become part of the arrangement. The language we chose for LO SCISMA is Italian, and that was never a commercial decision. It was an artistic one. Italian forces us to be precise. It leaves very little room to hide behind familiar rock clichés. Every word carries weight, rhythm and meaning. That responsibility makes us better writers.

How do you balance personal expression and creating something your audience will love?

We don’t begin with the audience, but we never forget the human being on the other side of the song. There is an important difference between respecting listeners and trying to satisfy them. Respect means giving them something honest, carefully written and emotionally real. Trying to satisfy them means anticipating what they might approve of and changing yourself accordingly. The first creates a relationship. The second creates a product. When we write, we don’t ask whether a passage is accessible enough, whether a chorus follows a current formula or whether a subject might be uncomfortable. We ask whether it belongs to the song and whether we believe every word we are saying. That has to come first, because listeners immediately recognise when an artist is performing sincerity rather than living it. At the same time, we don’t believe that artistic integrity requires deliberately excluding people. Complexity is not automatically depth, and obscurity is not automatically intelligence. We want our music to carry ideas, but we also want those ideas to reach someone. A song can be direct without being simplistic. It can be memorable without being empty. It can have a powerful hook and still contain something worth returning to after the first listen. Perhaps this is where our previous musical experiences become especially important. Each of us comes from projects that have allowed us to learn different things about songwriting, live performance, discipline and communication. Those paths remain active parts of our identities; LO SCISMA neither replaces nor denies them. It gives us a different space—one in which those experiences meet and become a collective voice. The real balance is therefore not between expression and approval. It is between absolute honesty and the responsibility to communicate that honesty clearly. We don’t want to tell the audience what to think. We want to create a place in which people can feel, question and perhaps recognise something they had never managed to put into words. When that happens, the audience doesn’t simply love a song. They begin to inhabit it.

What has been the most rewarding moment of your career so far?

All of us have experienced important moments through our other projects: records, stages, journeys, collaborations and encounters that have shaped our lives. We would never reduce those experiences or pretend that LO SCISMA suddenly erased everything that came before it. That would be false and deeply disrespectful to the people with whom we have shared those chapters. With LO SCISMA, however, the most rewarding moment was not connected to numbers or industry recognition. It was the moment we understood that something initially created inside a studio had become necessary outside it. The project began without the intention of becoming a traditional band. It was a protected space where we could write without expectations and allow the music to exist before deciding what it was supposed to become. Then the songs started demanding more from us. They needed bodies, a stage, an audience and a shared experience. That transformation became tangible during our first A-Social Live in Rome in early 2026. The event was promoted outside the conventional social-media machinery, through direct communication, a WhatsApp community and word of mouth. It was a risk, but also an important test of everything we had been saying. We wanted to know whether a community could still be built through trust rather than constant exposure. Whether people would come because something had reached them personally, not because an algorithm had repeated it until it became familiar. They came. That evening was rewarding not because it proved that we had discovered a clever promotional method. It proved something much more important: human connection had not disappeared. It was simply being neglected. Seeing people gathered around songs that had started in isolation made us realise that LO SCISMA no longer belonged exclusively to us. The audience was not passively consuming a performance. It was completing it. There have also been private messages from listeners who recognised their own fear, anger or vulnerability in our lyrics. Those messages matter enormously. When someone tells us that a song has given language to something they were carrying alone, music stops being content and becomes contact. That is the reward we value most: not being admired from a distance, but reaching another person closely enough that they feel less invisible.

Are there any specific milestones you’re working toward in your career?

Of course we have concrete ambitions. We want to release I Mercanti della Pace properly, bring it to the stage, work with serious partners and allow the project to grow beyond the boundaries in which it was born. We want to play meaningful concerts, reach new listeners and build a catalogue that gives LO SCISMA a lasting artistic identity. But we are careful with the word “milestone.” The contemporary music industry often teaches artists to measure their existence through external indicators: streams, followers, playlist placements, views, rankings and short periods of visibility. These things can be useful. They can open doors, attract resources and help music travel. Pretending otherwise would be naïve. The problem begins when the measurement becomes the purpose. A million passive plays are not necessarily more valuable than a room full of people who understand why they are there. A viral moment can disappear in days. A meaningful song can remain inside someone for decades. Our real milestone is to build something that survives the machinery surrounding it. We want LO SCISMA to be recognisable without becoming predictable. We want to grow without diluting the language, the musical contrasts or the principles from which the project emerged. We want the Italian language to travel with us, not be treated as something we must overcome. It is not a limitation. It is the most precise instrument we have for expressing the emotional and social reality we are trying to describe. Another important milestone is turning the values behind the music into concrete action. Part of the proceeds from I Mercanti della Pace will be directed toward organisations working against violence against women. We do not present this as charity attached to a marketing campaign. It is a responsibility connected to the people we are and to the subjects we choose to confront. If we speak about violence, power, silence and responsibility, then our commitment cannot end when the song finishes. Professionally, we want the project to become sustainable enough to continue creating, recording and performing without surrendering its independence of thought. Artistically, we want every release to move further than the previous one. Humanly, we want to remain capable of recognising ourselves in what we create. The greatest milestone would be to look back years from now and know that growth never forced us to betray the reason LO SCISMA was born.

How do you prepare for a show or tour?

Preparation begins long before we enter a venue. There is the obvious work: rehearsing until the arrangements become instinctive, refining transitions, programming electronic elements, controlling dynamics and making sure that every technical detail supports the performance rather than distracting from it. We take that part very seriously. Spontaneity on stage is only truly possible when the foundations are solid. But technical preparation is not enough for LO SCISMA. Our music carries subjects that require emotional presence. You cannot sing about alienation, fear, violence, identity or social manipulation while mentally treating the evening as another date on a calendar. The songs would immediately become empty gestures. Before playing, we try to remove the noise around us. We don’t need elaborate rituals. We need concentration, a moment in which the three of us remember why those songs exist and what it means to place them in front of other people. Each member brings a different history and sensibility to the stage. Alex carries the composition and artistic direction through guitars that can move from physical impact to almost cinematic space. Sandro combines drums and electronics with the experience of someone who understands both precision and collective energy. Claudia does not simply interpret the lyrics: she gives them a human body, including their strength, fragility and contradictions. The performance works only when those individual elements stop competing and become one organism. We also think carefully about the structure of a show. A concert should not feel like a list of songs played in succession. It needs tension, release, silence, confrontation and moments in which the audience can breathe. Volume matters, but it is not the only form of intensity. Sometimes the most powerful moment is the one immediately before the band enters again. Touring introduces another responsibility: preserving that emotional truth even when fatigue, travel and repetition begin to affect the body. The audience in the final city deserves the same commitment as the audience on the first night. Nobody should receive a mechanical version of something that was written to be alive. When we walk onto a stage, we are not trying to demonstrate that we are experienced musicians. Our other projects have already given us stages, records and years of professional life. LO SCISMA has a different purpose. For the duration of the concert, we want to create a space in which masks become unnecessary. The audience does not owe us attention. We have to earn it, one song, one silence and one truth at a time.

What’s the most unusual or memorable thing that’s happened to you on stage?

The most memorable moments are rarely the spectacular ones. They are not necessarily the technical accidents, the unexpected interruptions or the stories that become entertaining anecdotes afterwards. Those things happen, and they are part of live music, but they are not what stays with us most deeply. What remains is the moment in which a room changes. You can feel it when an audience stops behaving like a collection of separate individuals and begins reacting as one body. Sometimes it happens during the loudest part of a song. More often, it happens in a silence: the second after a lyric has landed and before the next instrument enters. That kind of silence is not emptiness. It is recognition. During our first A-Social Live, there were moments when we could sense that people were no longer simply watching us. Something in the songs had crossed the distance between stage and audience. The words were no longer only ours. You could see people carrying them through their own histories, fears and experiences. That is incredibly powerful, but it also creates responsibility. When someone sings a lyric back to you, they are not always celebrating the band. Sometimes they are using your words to say something about themselves. They may be thinking about a relationship, an absence, an injustice or a part of their identity they have never been able to express openly. In that moment, the stage stops being a place of separation. It becomes a meeting point. We have all played live through different musical projects and experienced many forms of audience reaction. Those histories remain precious to us and continue to shape the musicians we are. With LO SCISMA, however, the relationship feels different because the material is so closely connected to our collective conscience. The most memorable thing that can happen on stage is therefore very simple: someone understands. Not the arrangement. Not the technical work. Not the reference behind a sound. The human meaning. That is the moment when a concert becomes something more than performance.

Can you tell us about your latest project or release?

Our central project is I Mercanti della Pace, the first full-length studio album by LO SCISMA. The title translates as The Merchants of Peace, and it contains the contradiction at the heart of the record. We live in a world where some of the strongest declarations about peace, morality, freedom and security are made by systems that benefit directly from fear, division and conflict. The album does not approach that contradiction as a political pamphlet. It is not tied to one party, ideology or moment in the news cycle. We are interested in the deeper mechanisms: how language is manipulated, how fear becomes consent, how responsibility is transferred, and how people gradually accept realities they would once have considered intolerable. But the record is not only about institutions. It is also about us. It asks where personal responsibility begins. How much are we willing to ignore in exchange for comfort? How often do we condemn a system while continuing to feed it? How easily do we confuse having an opinion with taking a position? The songs move through alternative rock, groove, electronic elements, heavier passages and more atmospheric spaces. That variety is not decorative. Each arrangement has to serve the subject. Some ideas need physical impact. Others need emptiness around them. The Italian language is essential to the record. We chose it consciously because these songs needed the emotional precision of our own language. Italian can be difficult inside heavy or rhythmically complex music because every syllable is exposed. You cannot hide weak writing behind familiar sounds. That difficulty became part of the artistic challenge. Before this album, we released A-Social Live in Rome – 2025, documenting the first public expression of a project that had originally been conceived inside the studio. That release captured the moment LO SCISMA became a real community rather than only an idea shared among three musicians. With I Mercanti della Pace, the project takes the next step. Part of the album’s proceeds will support organisations working against violence towards women. This decision is not separate from the record’s meaning. If we speak about power, silence, responsibility and the consequences of looking away, we cannot treat those subjects as lyrical material alone. An album should not be expected to save the world. But the people making it can still decide what they are willing to stand beside.

Are there any collaborations in the works you’re excited about?

There are conversations taking place, but we prefer not to announce relationships before they have become something real. The music industry often turns potential collaborations into promotional content long before any meaningful work has happened. We would rather protect the process and speak when there is something worth saying. What excites us is not necessarily the possibility of attaching a recognisable name to the project. Visibility can be useful, but a collaboration built only around visibility usually produces very little artistic value. We are interested in people who understand the identity of LO SCISMA and are willing to enter it without trying to domesticate it. That could mean a producer capable of challenging our decisions without removing their purpose. It could mean a visual artist who understands that the imagery is not simply decoration around the music. It could mean another musician whose presence opens an emotional or sonic space that we could not reach alone. We are also in dialogue with potential professional partners regarding the release and development of the project. In those conversations, the most important question is not simply what a company can distribute or promote. It is whether they understand what they are being asked to protect. We retain control of the writing and production because the sound of LO SCISMA is closely connected to the meaning of the project. That does not mean we are closed to criticism. Quite the opposite. We value informed disagreement and external perspective. But there is a difference between helping an artist see more clearly and asking an artist to become easier to sell. The collaborations that interest us are those in which everyone involved adds something without asking the project to become less itself.

What message or emotion do you hope people take away from your music?

We don’t want to prescribe one emotion. A song stops belonging exclusively to its authors the moment another person hears it. Every listener brings a different history, and that history changes the meaning of the words. Someone may hear anger where we were writing about fear. Someone else may find hope inside a song we considered devastating. Both reactions can be true. What we do hope is that the music leaves a trace. We live in a culture built around immediate consumption. Songs are often judged in seconds, opinions are formed before attention has fully arrived, and everything is quickly replaced by the next thing. We want to resist that rhythm. Not by making the music deliberately inaccessible, but by creating songs that continue to reveal something after the first impact. There is one idea that runs through LO SCISMA more than any other: questioning is not a weakness. We are constantly encouraged to have immediate answers, fixed identities and absolute positions. Doubt is treated as insecurity. Changing your mind is treated as defeat. Listening is mistaken for surrender. We believe the opposite. The ability to question what you have been told (and to question yourself) is one of the last forms of freedom that cannot be given to you by someone else. We hope people leave our music feeling less ashamed of their contradictions, less alone in their vulnerability and more willing to look directly at what makes them uncomfortable. Not every song needs to heal. Sometimes a song must first reopen the wound that everyone has agreed to ignore.

Who are you listening to right now?

Our listening is extremely broad because LO SCISMA was never built around the protection of a single genre. We listen to alternative rock, industrial music, post-rock, electronic sound design, progressive music, hip-hop, punk, metal and artists whose work is difficult to classify. What attracts us is not a stylistic label but a sense of necessity. You can hear when someone made a record because they had something to say rather than because the market required another release. We are especially drawn to artists who understand contrast: beauty beside discomfort, fragility beside aggression, silence beside overwhelming volume. That tension is often much closer to real human experience than a song that remains emotionally fixed from beginning to end. We also continue listening to the music connected to our individual projects and histories. Those musical lives are not competitors to LO SCISMA. They remain active sources of experience, relationships and identity. It would be dishonest to present LO SCISMA as a rejection of everything we have done elsewhere. It is instead the place where different histories meet. At the same time, we try not to listen only as musicians. Constantly analysing arrangements, production and technique can make you forget why music mattered before you understood how it was made. Sometimes the most important listening experience is still very simple: a song reaches you before you have time to explain why. That reaction is something we never want to lose.

How do you see your music evolving in the next few years?

We expect it to become more extreme in its contrasts rather than simply heavier or more complex. There will probably be moments of greater physical impact, but also more space, silence and vulnerability. We are interested in the point where a clean guitar, a cold electronic texture or a single human voice can feel as violent as a distorted riff. Evolution, for us, does not mean abandoning the identity of the project every time we begin a new record. It means understanding that identity more deeply. The central elements will remain: the Italian language, the social and human tension of the writing, the relationship between organic instruments and electronics, and the refusal to separate emotional fragility from force. But we do not want those elements to become a formula. The danger begins when an artist discovers what works and then spends years repeating it. Recognition is important, but predictability slowly removes urgency. We want every new work to ask something of us that we do not already know how to answer. That could mean more experimental structures, spoken-word pieces, acoustic performances, cinematic compositions or songs with an almost brutal directness. The form should remain open as long as the identity remains honest. Our greatest ambition is not to become easier to define. It is to become impossible to confuse with anyone else.

How do you handle the balance between commercial success and artistic integrity?

We do not see commercial success as the enemy of artistic integrity. That opposition is sometimes used too easily. Reaching many people does not make a work dishonest, and remaining obscure does not automatically make it meaningful. Success can provide artists with time, resources, better production, wider distribution and the ability to continue working without treating music as an unsustainable sacrifice. We are not ashamed of wanting the project to grow. The question is what you are prepared to exchange for that growth. Commercial logic becomes dangerous when it enters the creative process before the song exists. When you begin removing an uncomfortable lyric because it may be difficult to promote, shortening an arrangement only because attention spans are said to be collapsing, or imitating what is already successful because uncertainty feels too risky. At that point, the audience is no longer being offered art. It is being offered a prediction of its own behaviour. We want professional partners, strong distribution, intelligent promotion and real opportunities. But those tools must amplify the identity of LO SCISMA, not rewrite it. Our decision to build the project away from the constant pursuit of social-media numbers was part of this principle. It was never a rejection of technology or communication. It was a rejection of the idea that visibility is the same thing as value. We use tools when they serve the message. We do not want the message redesigned to serve the tools. If commercial success arrives because the songs reach people honestly, we will welcome it. If it requires us to become less truthful, then the cost is higher than the reward.

What’s next for you? Any upcoming projects, tours, or surprises?

The immediate priority is completing the path toward the release of I Mercanti della Pace and finding the right professional structure around it. The music is central, but an album also needs context: distribution, communication, visual identity, live planning and partners capable of understanding that LO SCISMA is not simply a collection of tracks waiting to be placed online. We are currently speaking with different realities, and we are taking those conversations seriously. Enthusiasm matters, but it has to be followed by a concrete vision. We want to understand not only who likes the music, but who knows what to do with it without reducing it. The live dimension will become increasingly important. LO SCISMA began as a studio project, but the first A-Social Live made it clear that these songs need to exist physically, in a room, between people. We want the concerts to grow without losing that sense of direct contact. We are also continuing to write. The project did not stop creatively when the album was completed. In fact, defining its identity has opened more doors than it has closed. New material is already exploring wider dynamics, more electronic depth, more exposed emotional spaces and heavier moments where the songs require them. There will also be visual work connected to the album. We use artificial intelligence as one of several creative tools in developing video content and imagery, not to replace artistic thought, but to make possible scenes and worlds that would otherwise remain inaccessible to an independent project. The next phase is therefore not one announcement. It is the transition from a project that has defined itself to a band ready to occupy a larger space. We are not interested in rushing that transition merely to appear active. We are interested in making it irreversible.

Anything You'd Like Your Fans to Know.

LO SCISMA was formed in 2024 by musicians who already had, and still have, meaningful artistic lives elsewhere. Those paths are not a prologue we are trying to erase. They remain part of us. They taught us how to write, perform, endure, collaborate and understand the weight of standing in front of an audience. LO SCISMA simply answers a different need. It began as a studio project because we wanted a place without expectations. A space where music could exist before anyone asked how it would be marketed, classified or received. Then the songs began to reveal something we had not planned. They were not the expression of one person trying to lead two others. They were becoming the voice of a shared emotional and ethical space. A collective soul that none of us could have articulated alone. That is why the name matters. A schism is a separation, but not necessarily from other people. For us, it is the moment in which you separate yourself from everything that asks you to become less honest in order to belong. It is not isolation. It is a choice of conscience. We chose to sing in Italian because that is where our thoughts are most exposed and our emotions are least protected. We chose to build a community beyond the usual race for online attention because we wanted to know whether real connection was still possible. We chose to support organisations fighting violence against women because values that remain inside interviews and lyrics are not values. They are decoration. We are not asking anyone to follow us blindly. That would contradict everything the project represents. We are asking people to listen, disagree, question, feel and decide for themselves whether these songs contain something that belongs to them. LO SCISMA is not a place for perfect people. It is a place for those who have understood that breaking with what is expected can sometimes be the only way to remain whole. We are not here to ask for attention. We are here to interrupt the noise.

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