Recently, I was offered the opportunity to have a video interview with Vitaly Dubinin of Russian heavy metal institute Aria. Being the immense fan that I am of the band, I could not say no, despite the fact that video really isn’t my medium. Or at least not yet. In order to even publish the video, I started my own interview channel on YouTube, which given my undying love for lame puns is of course called Kevinterviews.

Please watch my interview with Vitaly Dubinin in the embedded video above. Dubinin speaks Russian throughout the interview, but English subtitles have been provided by Yana Filimonova, for which I am extremely grateful. Also, I cannot thank Trond Nicolaisen of Tomorrow’s Outlook enough for setting up the interview and editing the video. Something I have no post-School for Journalism experience with, but I am planning to get back into for some more video interviews.

Just for clarity’s sake: this weblog is not going to disappear. My main focus has always been written content and that will not change. There will still be an Album of the Week review on this weblog every week and I am still looking to publish as many interviews with interesting metal musicians here as possible. Kevinterviews should be seen as an extension of my Kevy Metal weblog rather than a replacement.

Having said that, it would be a waste of effort to just start a YouTube channel and not do anything with it after its first serious publication. Currently, I have no interviews planned for the YouTube channel after this one, but I am seriously looking into the opportunity of publishing more video interviews through the channel. Whenever I have news, you, my readers, will be the first to know.

But for now, please enjoy this rare glimpse into Aria’s inner workings for their international fanbase. Anyone interested in the band’s music will be pleased by the in-depth look that Dubinin provides into the band’s history, their songwriting process and their plans for the future, now available for most of the world to understand as it is subtitled.

And just because it is possible, let me close the whole thing off with a video from Aria’s YouTube channel. Fragments of this particular video were used to open and close the video of the interview: