Extracts from her (very long ^^;) interview with Machi, from their official site Ainsi soit-il

"When I was just a little girl, I did many things. I had the opportunity to be a model, to work in commercials or on radio. But I didn't want to be an idol. When I was a little working like that, I was thinking that I didn't want to be just a material which is exploited. I wanted to use myself as a material and be the one who creates. So I stopped it all."

"Any band thinks the creator and their songs are inevitably different. This doesn't concern only Machi, but what most surprises all the persons I meet is that I have exactly the same face as in the photos, the same make-up (she doesn't retouch her photos) (...) wearing the same clothes, saying the same things as in their songs, and my hair also is not premed, it's natural."

"I have the feeling that I create songs with ideas of yesterday or today, but I think I give forms to what I've been holding in me since I was a kid, which may be of the field of subconscious, what I've always been asking to myself."

  "I can feel that it comes from the sky, but in reality I express what is in deep inside me as honestly as possible... I wish to remain someone who never loses this for all my life."

"When what you dreamed of happens in reality or by a strange coincidence you meet the person you had to meet at the right moment... you think at these moments that something like destiny maybe exists I want to make appear that kind of feeling."

"Illusions which aren't isolated in a box can get furtively into our every day life. That's what I want to express."

"When I am working on my songs, more than a half of them is about what happens or what I am thinking about in my real life, but I also use my imagination, and I won't tell anyone where what really happens to me stops."

"It is said that today goth is in vogue and whatever you do it will be sold, but I don't do music for selling."

"I like gothic, but for a long time I've been only interested in beautiful, sad and romantic stuff. So, among monsters I only like vampires. They are the only ones who are beautiful and elegant. And, inside me, the devil isn't ugly like the real devil, but must have a face of angel."

(About Marilyn Manson) "Objectively, I think he is not bad. But it's a pity because of him romance disappeared from current gothic."

"Since I was a kid, I've been talking to another "me". I thought there was another person."

"It seems that the ones who create need to have in their life time where they confront solitude."

"When I was at primary school and was wearing a skirt, I said: "my boy, why are you wearing a skirt?""

"If I was a boy maybe it was the contrary. I would have thought: “why should I wear pants?” And I would have gone to school wearing a skirt. I was a kid who always resisted to what was defined."

"When I was in the last year of primary school or first of middle school, (...) there was a shop in my neighbourhood where my mother often bought clothes for me. It was a place which gathered persons who liked occidental glam rock (...) One day, I was proposed to go to a party (...) There, I saw a very beautiful woman, who looked like Greta Garbo or Faye Dunawaye, a beautiful occidental woman (...) The light of the shop went out, and half of the men who were sat there went outside. Then this beautiful woman suddenly climbed on a round table, and started a striptease. I was half drunk and thought with surprise why these men went out while there was a striptease, but when she was all undressed, I realized she was a man! But he was wearing red garter belts and black laced underwear for women. I was totally seduced and at this moment, I decided I will be this kind of person in the future (...) All the annoying moral of the society broke down."

"We are musicians, but not artists of show business, that's what I think."

"If technique becomes greater than heart, then it's the end of an artist."

"Rock artists sell their position, their lifestyle, so it's not exactly the songs we are selling (...) and we say : you can live that way, try to be more free, that's what we have to do (...) Another thing, we have to give dreams, romance. Mankind can't live only with clothes, food and house. What is more important is romance (...) If we can't see dreams in the future and can't have romance, I think we'll die, even if we have food (...) I have the feeling that giving forms to dreams at certain point and offering them to help people having dreams, is our role (..). If we were born, it's for doing this. If we don't do, so it means we didn't assume our responsibility towards this world (...) I feel like I make sweet cookies for the ones who are very tired."

"I've always been someone who can't live if I loosed freedom. For example, let's suppose I was imprisoned somewhere, a friend of mine said that if this place is comfortable, (s)he would always stay there, that on the contrary (s)he would feel at ease. But if it was me, I would escape by all manner of means, even at the risk of my life."

"Gilian the bassist was also coming in the studio always wearing a mini skirt. And, at that time it was just before I left the home, I had numerous problems at home, my mother was alcoholic, had a breakdown and was like a bit mad, so she called the police and told them that we have stolen things from her house, and on the way we were going to the studio, they were watching for us and arrested us, well, pratically for vexation. It was after my family did a lot of violence to me, at that moment we were 3, but the policeman said about Gilian-chan : "let the new-half (note : transsexual) go back home", and they let him go. I and Gardie were arrested. We had that kind of experience (...) I think that the inspector was afraid (note : of the "transsexual" ^^)"

"We have the image that we can play in a band only during our youth, but if thinking it as music, I think it's something we should face devoting all our life to it."

Translation by : Hyluko