TESTAMENT guitarist Alex Skolnick chatted exclusively with BW&BK; scribe Aaron Small last night in Toronto, prior to TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA's show at The Air Canada Centre.

While Alex is on the road with TSO, the rest of his Testament bandmates are hard at work recording their new album, The Formation Of Damnation. “It couldn’t have been this way years ago," admits Skolnick. "I spent a couple of weeks with them before the TSO tour, so we did some pre-production together. We’re all on the same page. They’ve been sending me rough tracks and I’m actually going to do my guitar tracks on one of the days off from TSO in Albany (NY). A couple of the guys and the engineer are going to fly out (from California), we’ll meet up and record everything.”

Alex reveals two new Testament song titles: "There's one called ‘The Evil Has Landed’ and there's another one I wrote called ‘F.E.A.R.’ - False Evidence Appearing Real. It’s based on things I learned reading about psychology. I took a few years off and went back to school to get a music degree, before I started doing Testament (again) and TSO. I was pretty much just playing and studying jazz, but I took some other courses as well like philosophy and psychology. F.E.A.R. – False Evidence Appearing Real is a term in psychology. The lyrics are about how fear is used to manipulate people. It’s used by politicians, religious leaders and even on an individual level. It’s one of those things that can hold you back. When you realize how false it is, it’s very liberating so I tried to capture that in a sense.”

Nuclear Blast will release The Formation Of Damnation in spring 2008.