One interesting name on the Finnish Top 40 list is Stratovarius, which represents the heavier genre of music. They are still in Top 10 after five weeks and now on the sixth place. Here are the bass player Jari Kainulainen and vocalist Timo Kotipelto from the band. Tell us guys, has the success on the album chart surprised you ?

TK: This has been a really big surprise and we just want to thank everyone who has bought Visions. We expected that if everything went well, we would make it to Top 15, but we went straight to the 7th place, and when we went to number 4 we were just wondering what the heck is this ??? And now that we have come down just by one step a week on the list, it feels really great to be a Finnish metal man!

Visions is the 6th album for the band. What kind of process was it to record this album and is it usually hard for the band to make a record ?

TK: This was surprisingly easy. Basically Episode was harder to accomplish because when we did the demos for the album, we didn’t know yet who would be playing in the band. Then we got these two great musicians; Jens Johansson and Jörg Michael. Now that we have toured together around the world it was really easy to record this album, almost surprisingly easy ! Although the aims were set high again and we tried to do a better job on this album than on Episode, and I think we succeeded in doing that.

JK: Yes, we played so much together and learned to know each other better, so it was so much easier to do the recording this time.

TK: It takes a lot of time of course to record an album, but we always want to do the best possible job and if it takes more money, then we’ll use more money. Anyway, this album didn’t cost as much as Episode, so... But of course we are talking about considerable sums of money. We don’t do it the easy way, we do it how it must be done.