Mark Morton from Examiner.com spoke with KATAKLYSM frontman Maurizio Iacono recently about his EX DEO project.

Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

Examiner.com: So how did you manage to keep the Ex Deo sound from bleeding into the tried-and-true Kataklysm sound? Was that a difficult balance to maintain?

"No, I think the songs just developed the right way. I know there are a lot of bands out there that have side projects that sound exactly the same as the main band, but I don’t see the point in doing that. But if I was to go into this project with a bunch of new guys with whom I didn’t have an immediate chemistry, I think it would have failed.

The cool thing was, when we were on the road touring for the Kataklysm Prevail album, I’d go on the bus and put on the HBO series Rome on the DVD player, and it didn’t matter who was partying on the bus, they’d all stop and come watch it with me. They got so into the visuals and the brutality that it actually inspired them to want to be a part of it. That’s really the foundation of how Ex Deo came together. Of course, if it came out sounding like Kataklysm, I would have stopped it and gotten other people out of necessity, but it actually worked."

Examiner.com: How did you come to turn the album into Roman History 101? How did you decide on which events to focus?

"First of all, I grew up with a lot of that history. I’m actually of Italian descent – both my parents were born in Italy. So I flew to Italy a lot, and whenever I was there, wherever I was standing, I got this impression…let me it it this way, when you step off of a plane in New York, you just get this sense of newness, but when you get off of a plane in Rome, you feel steeped in history immediately. Just touching a wall that has been intact for 2,000 years, or walking onto a hill where so many slaves were crucified…something about that experience has always intrigued me. I eventually started reading about it and really getting into it, and felt that I needed to do something with it.

So Romulus is my way of introducing Rome. I couldn’t really go too in-depth right away, because we’re talking about an empire with over 1,000 of history. I didn’t want to over-complicate it and run the risk of it going over everyone’s heads. So what I did was started with Rome’s foundation with Romulus, and then I went into characters that people knew, like Julius Caesar and Octavian – things people could connect with and understand right away. And the more people catch on with it, hopefully we can do a second record and go into more details and get into more crazy s*** that went on back then. I want to keep it interesting, though."

Read the entire interview here.