Kerrang Magazine got a very interesting Interview with System of a Down with some great photos with it ..the interview titled :

System of a Down are not like other bands. They write songs about their penises.
They believe babies have the answers to live`s big questions.
They think everyone hates them.
And now they`re back to blow our minds with the weirdest albums ever... !
Click read more to read the full inteview
 
Or head up to our Forums to Discuss the whole interview and get more scanned images.

Oscar fever is over LA. Banners hang from lampposts; hotelssurrepitiously raise their prices- knowing their star suites are guaranteed to be booked for the duration- and TV stations recycle Oscar previews endlessly, celebrities jabbering into the ether about films they appear to know very little about.
In hotel lobbies and along the Sunset Strip there are millisecond sightings of celebrities- Spike Lee here, Stephen Dorff getting into a car there.
There`s a buzz, a backround babble of Tinseltown tension. It´s all anticipation, rumours and predictions- the hype before the storm. Across town, out in the valleys, something similar is going o­n. Never tighten. The build up to something special has begun.

Waiting outside a small recording studio a gaggle of gournalists and photographers stand in line for the conveyer belt of interviews that is the `joy`of a press junket.
Then the main prayers arrive, all so markedly different from each other in body language, conversation and transport that you`d have to guess they were all in the same organisation at all. System of a Down are back in buisness.
First up is vocalist Serj Tankian in a sleek Mercedes that swishes with understated elegance, smooth lines and class.
He unfolds gracefully; his docile face, long nose and manic hair make him look like a caricature of himself.
He spots those he knows and huge them, remembering names of people he hasn`t seen for years.
Then it`s guitarist Daron Malakian in a vast, convertible Hummer: isolated, protected and cocooned from the noise and blare of LA`s streets. He jumps down, shake a few hands- head down, eyes to the ground- and movies inside.
Bassist Shavo Odadjian barely makes it at all. "If he were to be o­n time," smiles Tankian,

"We`d know something had gone seriously wrong. It could upset the whole balance of the band."

When he finall drops by, Odadjian, as Malakian does earlier, immediately pulls out a container of weed and loads up a pipe. "I get it prescribed," he says, hardly believing his luck."I told my doctor that i get a little tendonitis in my leg. So he writes me a prescription for marijuana. Ijust go to the chemist and they hand it over. It`s fucking great!"

Despite the joking, there`s an air of seriousness here because this is the first time the international press have been granted a listen to a few select tracks from System of a Down`s upcomming double album `Mezmerize/Hypnotize`. This is their baby, the project they`ve been working for 2 years and Malakian, for o­ne, is nervous.

"You heard 9 songs, right?" he worries." Wow, that`s so many songs. I think we`re letting people hear too much."
Given that there will be up 26 songs o­n the new albums, his paranoia seems strange.
That those nine songs will blow anyone anyway that hears them makes his concern stranger still.They brood with power, with a more maintain their unabashed individualism.

`Cigaro`opens with a scream of `My cock is bigger than yours`, while `Vicinity' contains impenetrable lyrics like `Banana, banana, banana, terracotta/ banana, terracotta, terracotta pie`. They`ve not mellowed, then.

The band is herded into seperate rooms to wait for their interviews.
Apparently Tankian and Malakian talk so much that, o­nce o­ne gets going, the other can`t get a word edgeways. Malakian sits alone in the live room of the recording studio. o­n a table in front of him are car keys- perhaps for a quick exit- candkes, a pipe and a film can stuffed with potent weed.

Over the next half hour, he`ll smoke four pipes in the sort of doses that could tranquillise a horse. He looks tired, perhaps because of the strain of talking about himself so much and so frequently. You sense it would be easier for him to just tell his interviewer to listen to the tape of the previous journalist so unexcitedly does he trot out the answers to the questions he`s been asked a million times.

-Are you proud of the album?
"I´m very proud of it."

-Why released a double album?
"We didn`t want to save songs, all the songs deserved do be released."

-Why release the two albums seperately,`Kill Bill`style?
"We didn`t want to overwhelm people with too much music at o­nce."

In the back of his head he could be thinking anything right now, so automated are his responses. It´s really not his fault, just the nature of being in a huge band that generates so much interest.
However, Daron Malakian is very different to most people. o­n stage he looks like a maniac, whirling, geeing up by his band´s not entirely conventional music.
In reality, he´s small, timid and a little shy when he´s with just o­ne other person. he looks uncomfortable, twitchy and clings to his hash pipe almost like a security blanket.
"I automatically assume people don´t like me," he says.
" I have nothing to base that o­n, it´s just how i feel. I feel like everyone´s going to hate me. When i meet people, i usually think. ´This guy thinks i´m a real cheeseball`.Maybe you´re doing it right now..."

He doesn´t really like to give much about himself away, preferring ro speak vaguely if possible. There´s a privacy about him, o­ne that will o­nly bend so far. A line in the band´s press release says they´ve had a troubling few years, full of upheaval. Ask Malakian about it, though, and he half shrugs, "Each of us have our own stories".
But if you delve a little deeper, it´s clear that Malakian has had strange and difficult couple of years. In fact today he appears a little lost, as though talking to strangers has made him think about things in a different light.
First there was the war in Iraq, which was something that hit very close to home. "I don´t want to keep crying about it," he says, a little embrassed that his feelings are coming out.
"It hasn´t been easy having my family in Iraq at this time. I get pictures in my head of what might be happening to them, of things they must be going through"

They´ve weird feelings that come from loving someone and worrying about them.
"We´re takling about my grandmither, my aunt and cousins- people close to me. I feel so strange about it. The whole situation is out of my hands."

It´s something that has made him feel impotent and powerless, that the rush of military might that has invaded his family´s home is too powerful for him.
Still, he´s tried to take a stand. "I don´t want to be the person who says, Í don´t like this, i wish something would be done about it´, because I can aktually get up and say something about it. I really don´t know if that affects anything but it helps me deal with things. At least i´m trying. It´s some kind of therapy."

Taking a stand is something System of a Down are well known for, of fighting for justice, of writing political songs, among others. It´s an important side of Daron Malakian too but he goes much deeper than just that- as his constantly shifting music proves.
Tell him his song can seem schizophrenic and he replies, "I don´t know what that says about me!".
Tell him you weren´t suggesting he was mad, he replies darkly, "Well...I wasnt arguing, though". Here he begins to unravel a little, to let the outside into the world he has created. He puts his pipe down for the first time.

Daron Malakian is a very private person. The act he puts o­nstage is just that: an act. Even the following day, while he and his band are being shot for photographs, he cracks jokes, making himself the centre of attention, acting the idiot. Again, it comes across as an act, perhaps masking an insecurity that means he cocoons himself in vast cars, a massive house and an unwillingness to let anyone too close.

"People who see me o­nstage and in videos think I'm crazy. They think that, offstage, i go to strip bars and lead the whole rock star life. Little do they know that i never leave my house. If I didn't have to do interviews , i wouldn't leave my house for three weeks."

He´ll sit alone there, watching TV and writing songs. He says it´s entirely possible that, during o­ne of those three weeks hibernations, he wouldn't see anyone at all. It paints a picture of a very solitary person, something he admits to, although he tempers it with, "Sometimes i get lonely...".
The more he talks, the mire he looks lost and small. "Well," he says. "I´ve always felt small. Physically and spiritually. I´m not lost, though. I know where i´m going ".

He´s not good with other people he says, especially not those in his immediate circle. "I´m not so good at communicating, especially with those close to me. The people i love get it the worst... actually people who love me get it the worst." It´s a way that many insecure people react; they feel that if they don´t like themselves, why should anyone else? "Are you a fucking shrink, dude?" He lookks upset. "I really don´t hate myself. Well...i´m not completely unhappy with myself.... i´m not the most confident person in the world.. shit... i could write a book about my complexes."

What sort of complexes?
"complexes about my looks, about saying stupid shit. For example, i´d never have confidence to go up to someone and say, ´Hi, i´m Daron. Can i have your number?´. My girlfriend is gorgeous but, when we got together, it was because she liked me not the other way round. So i guess there is part of me that has a low opinion of myselg. I don´t hate myself, though."
Are you happy?
"Sometimes."

Are you down more often than up?
"Sometimes both at the same time... i´m not a satisfied person and that dissatisfaction brings out the best in me. It´s not unhappiness; it´s just not being satisfied. Someone asked me earlier, you´ve sold millions of records, how does that make you feel?´. It makes me feel like i need to be better, that i need to write better songs."
Are you worried it will dry up, that you won´t be able to do that?
"One day it could stop. I feel so out of control that, when whoever is doing the channelling picks me and i put out something i believe in, then it´s a big deal to me. It´s what i live for, for finally turning my inspiration into something."
Here o­ne of the band´s US publicist´s team, stopwatch hanging around her neck, ends the interview.
There´s a queue outside the door and all of them want a piece of Malakian. "That was very interesting," he says as i head for the door. "I learned a lot about myself."

The next day, at a photo studio a short walk south of Hollywood Boulevard, System are gearing themselves up for another day of press. What´s quickly obvious is that Serj Tankian is very different from Daron Malakian. Where Malakian frets and worries, bouncing from lows to highs, Tankian seems entirely at peace with the world.
He has an aura of calm around him, o­ne that suggests he´s unflappable, that anything is possible. He says things like, "I try to love everything. I try damn hard".
He´s polite to a fault. He´s also very hard to pin down. He looks at you with vast eyes, ready to absorb anything you ask him. When he answers he´s honest but comes across as evasive- the last thing he intends. Still, you´re never going to get a straight answer.
When asked who he thinks he is, he says "My mother´s son".
Ask if that´s all and he replies:" I´m a lot of things but we don´t have time for that".
It´s impossible to find out specifics. Though he´s involved in System´s business decisions, he´d prefer to think about the more important questions: the whys and wherefores of life, what it means and how best to go about living it. Learning from his experiences and those around are the most important things for Tankian.
He will say that people and situations that aren`t genuine make him angry and that, above all, what pisses him off is injustice.
But ask him how he likes to spend his days and what he likes to think about, and you get answers like this...
"The universe is there, whether you pay attention to it or not. I try to pay attention. You don´t have to be defining the universe or necessarily understanding it, just realising what´s there is important- including everything going o­n, whether it´s traffic or wars."
"It´s more important to feel things than anything else. Definition works with reasoning and the logical mind. In the past number of centuries we´ve spent way too much time focusing in the logical and the specific. Everything has to be reasonable. They say,´Don´t act like a child´. Wy not? I´ll live longer! It´s time to shift;it´s time to take lessons from really old people and really young children because they´ve the closest to life and death."
And so he watches young children, enjoying," the purity of experience o­n their face, the absolute joy of not being bogged down by mental regularities".
He talks to his 97-year-old grandfather who is, " Not always in what we call logical reality- he´ll talk abaout outlandish things and i listen to him and the way he explains things is fascinating, like a movie".

It´s comments like those that give him that air of calm, as thougt he´s speaking with a wisdom that comes from knowledge of himself and the world around him.
It wasn´t always this way, though: a few years ago he was very different. He says, "There was a shift in my life seven years ago." He says it wasn´t anything specific, that it was just, "realisation that if i continued not to shift, that i´d be unhealthy.I realised that everything in life was o­ne. I don´t mean that in a hippy, universal way. I mean that everything is connected. o­nce you realize that, you have no choice but to look at things differently". He also says, during that period, he realised he knew nothing. He´d spend most of his life accumulating knowledge and, in his early 20s, assumed he knew everything."When you get older you realise that you don´t know anything, even though you tell yourself that you´re pretty balanced. The older you get the more you realise you know nothing."

That period 7 years ago mist have been momentous, life- changing. Typically he shrugs it off, saying simply " I like change."
He does this constantly when you try to pin him down. It´s nir a deliberate ploy, it´s more the way his mind works and it´s fascinating to watch. He takes pride in seeing the bigger picture, even when dealing with his own band. It´s o­ne of the reason System´s fans look up to them, o­ne of the reasons they believe the band has answers. "Yeah right!" says Tankian. "But I don´t think it´s just our fans. Everyone is looking for someone with answers, a saviour. Look at the Christians, look at the Muslims. It has nothing to do with me. People should concentrate o­n what´s within."

He doesn´t really enjoy thinking about what other people think of him and his band; in fact it´s something he avoids as much as possible.
"Because if you´re driving o­n a road and you´re paying so much attention to looking where you´re going, it´s hard to be looking back and around. It´s hard enough to experience life through the multiple angels of two eyes, let alone the multiple angels of millions of eyes."

So where are you going?
"I don´t have the inner depth and isnsight to predict my future. I´d like to go towards a place of hearing infinite harmonies." What does that mean? "That means sounds intermingling infinitely. I´d like to be dressed by beautiful sound."

Are you happy?
"Happiness is a choice. I always try to take it."

When Tankian talks it´s impossible not to get sucket along by it. He up-speaks constantly, raising the pitch of his voice towards the end of sentences, making him sound more earnest bacause he really, really wants you to understand what he´s saying, whether you agree with it or not. It´s almost evangelical.
The problem is when your time o­n the interview conveyer belt ends. You realise that you´ve barely touched o­n System´s new album- the reason you´re supposed to be talking to him. It´s not something that brothers him particularly; he seems to treat interviews as an experience, a chance to chat about life with a stranger and to see a new perspective.
So, as the people eith stopwatches start gesticulating frantically, you squeeze in o­ne last question about the double album that, o­n the strength of nine songs, sounds like it will be System if a Down´s masterpiece- albeit a distinctly eccentric and unusual o­ne.

What would you have thought of this record if you´d heard it 10 years ago?
"I would have thought it was crazy," he says with a gentle smile. "I would think it was nuts. I´d think the people making it schould be put away."
 

Thanks for meca for typing the whole thing(before edition), and soady for scanning the photos.
Interview Made by Tom Bryant of Kerrang Magazine.

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