Oleg Smirnoff

Oleg Smirnoff — a keyboard player tied to Italian progressive metal — was part of Vision Divine in the phase when the band took its arrangements to their most elaborate point. His path includes Death SS, a seminal band of Italian occult metal, and Eldritch, a progressive metal group — a repertoire that places him among the country's keyboard players used to unconventional structures, and not merely to supporting harmonic beds. That background matters in Vision Divine because there the keyboard does not accompany: it shares the front line with the guitar, harmonises in thirds, doubles riffs and takes solos alternating with Olaf Thörsen. It is the neoclassical inheritance the band kept from the start, and it demands of whoever holds the instrument a performance at the same technical level as the guitarist's.