Abiku - Fantasmi della casa accanto

Imagine running into an old friend you'd lost touch with: you tell them what you do, that you play in a band... They ask you, just to get a sense of it: "Play me something." What song would you play them?

We'd most likely choose to play "Sommergibile" and "I Fantasmi della Casa Accanto", which live we perform back to back without a break, as if they were a single suite. These two songs feel fairly representative of our way of making music. They're songwriter-rooted tracks, but polished with more expansive moments alongside others that are more straightforwardly pop.

"Technicolor" came out in a rather "unexpected" way at the end of 2011. Something of a bolt from the blue: can you tell us how you met? You're from Grosseto, a fairly small community, but from the start you showed a clear musical vision. Did you all start from the same point, or is Abiku the intersection of your different sensibilities?

We started playing together in 2009 (with a lineup very different from the current one) because of shared musical interests. We used to play 90s alternative rock covers, and the first songs we wrote were heavily influenced by that genre. With Edoardo joining in 2010 and Virna, who started playing bass with us in 2011, we drastically changed the way we played and recorded our first album, "Technicolor". Although we all share some common ground in terms of musical taste, it's fair to say each of us comes from a different background. To give an example, Virna used to play in a punk band, while Edo spent two years at Siena Jazz. It might seem like an unlikely combination, but we're firm believers in cultural integration.

"La Vita Segreta", your second album, came out recently. Whatever one might think of it, it's clear there's a lot of work behind it — in the writing, in the arrangements. Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of the album?

Some of the songs included in the album's tracklist date back to right after "Technicolor", and there's one in particular, "Non Andare Via (Parte II)", that we were actually already playing before the first album, but which we then decided to leave out during those recording sessions. That said, many of the songs were instead written within a limited timeframe, with the intention of giving the album a clear, unifying thread. Specifically, Giacomo wanted to explore the mechanisms that govern the interactions between our psychological life and the outside world. Musically speaking, Edoardo did a remarkable job on production, managing to blend together fairly different songs into a continuum that, in our view, works.

Compared to "Technicolor", there's a sense of an ever-stronger identity for each of the instruments. Can each of you tell us about an arrangement passage you're particularly attached to?

Virna: I think it's fairly easy to guess that I'm the one with the least technical skill, which is why every time I approach one of our songs I do it in a rather instinctive, intuitive way, and only rationalize it afterwards. "Parsec", though, gave me quite a few headaches — I didn't know how to play such a delicate, spacious track, especially in the chorus. One day, while I was in the shower, I started humming a melody while thinking about the song, and that's how the bassline was born — probably the one I'm most satisfied with on the whole album.

Stefano: the part I'm most attached to is definitely the drums on “Otto Ore”. When we started rehearsing the track I wanted to back it with the famous Train Beat (a rhythm typical of country music), but at the time I simply wasn't able to play it. So I fell back on a post-punk rhythm, keeping the kick-and-hi-hat ostinato.

Giacomo: I fondly remember when we arranged the glockenspiel part on “Qui Non Succede Mai Niente”. That song was almost never played in rehearsal — we did all the work directly in the studio, trying out various solutions. One evening I put on headphones and, with the backing track playing, improvised that four-note melody on the metallophone. Edo then, as always, rationalized it and replayed the part, giving some dignity to my half-baked intuition.

Edoardo: There are many moments on the record I feel attached to, and many came about completely by chance, like the piano part at the start of “Guerra Civile”, which I'd recorded on a piano that still needed tuning, as a kind of sketch to try and pull some ideas out of. Then, listening back to it by chance a few days later, I found it perfect just as it was, and I left it that way — though I did have to replay it once the piano was actually tuned.

From the very start you went with Italian, an unusual choice for a band making “international”, “contemporary” music like yours. It has to be said there's a real naturalness to it — the meter never feels forced, and there's no affectation in what you're trying to express. Does the same work go into the lyrics as into the music, or is it a more natural process?

The work I do writing the lyrics for a song follows a very different process from what we do together to build an arrangement. The latter takes much more time, and we usually go through several rough early versions before arriving at the song's final form. Lyrics, on the other hand, need — in my view — to be written naturally and within a short span of time in order to work and feel sincere. Of course I allow myself the chance to make small changes and do some labor limae, but I still feel the need to wrap up most of the work within a few days. A song condenses a state of mind, and I need to write it while I'm still immersed in that particular state of mind.

(Giacomo)

The theme of “La Vita Segreta” is precisely indeterminacy, the disorientation that turns into a longing to escape, a chronic dissatisfaction — everything generates an expectation that's never fulfilled, pushing you to withdraw into this inner, secret life, which your arrangements, so rich in texture, color and transfigure. The one point worth raising is that it all sounds very personal but not especially “universal” — something you appreciate above all if you're in a particular existential state, so to speak. Would you agree?

That's a reasonable way of putting it, and it holds true for most of the songs, though not all of them. There's certainly a dark shadow enveloping the whole record, one you can relate to more if you're particularly sensitive to life's difficulties, but there are also lighter moments that exorcise and, in some way, poke fun at this underlying melancholy. “Canzone Nichilista” is a clear example of that.

Can I ask who your go-to Italian singer-songwriter is, and get you to play us one of his songs?

As far as we're concerned, the top player in the history of Italian music is without a doubt Lucio Dalla. No one else has managed to communicate so well, in such a simple way, images and emotions so rich that they're now part of our national imagination. We've prepared a cover of a beautiful, if not especially well-known, Lucio song. From now on we'll be bringing it with us to our live shows too.

It's clear from the lyrics on the record that you really care about being musicians for a living. Are you all doing that right now? But is it really necessary? Plenty of bands abroad too work their own “Otto Ore” and still manage to make great music in their free time…

None of us, as things stand, works as a musician full-time. I can tell you, though, that it's not at all easy to juggle everyone's work commitments, and we count ourselves lucky if we manage to squeeze in a couple of rehearsals before a show. It's certainly true that being a professional musician isn't essential, that you can also use your free time (as we do) to play, record, tour and so on, but there are several drawbacks. Most of the time there simply isn't enough time to produce something technically polished. Because while, from an artistic and compositional point of view, working in your spare moments isn't necessarily a problem — in fact sometimes the best ideas come at the most unexpected times, almost as if our creative drive works as a release valve — it's not the same from a technical standpoint: if you want to record an album you need time, and if you want to put together a tour to take your music around, it would help to be able to do it on more than just the weekends when everyone happens to be free. What's more, doing any job while constantly thinking about something else isn't healthy, either for yourself or for the work you're doing. So let's say it's not essential, no, but it's still highly desirable.

(Edoardo)

I imagine that at least some Italian bands who sing in English at least hope that, one day, they'll play abroad or at least become known there. Some are even managing it. Don't you feel the same temptation (still with an eye to making a living as musicians)?

We'd love to play abroad, more for the satisfaction of doing it than to chase any kind of popularity, but we remain very convinced of, and proud of, our choice to sing only in Italian. Starting with this tour we've also decided to stop playing covers that aren't in our own language. We like the idea that listeners can appreciate the song form in its entirety, from the start of the show to the very end.

As a way of presenting “La Vita Segreta” you shot a series of tributes to great classics of Italian music (often overlooked by the indie scene, or given a “legitimizing” one-off nod here and there), each filmed in a specific, “iconic” spot of your home province. Do you feel this helped people get to know you? Is the province just the place where “playing guitar is a crime”?

The “Qui Non Succede Mai Niente” project gave us a lot of satisfaction and was useful in getting us known, especially in our own city. In fact, to a lot of people we've become “those guys who play everywhere.”

The song “Qui Non Succede Mai Niente,” on the other hand, starts from very sincere premises but has a fairly ironic tone. It's true that it's hard to make music where there's no infrastructure to speak of, but on the other hand we live in an environment that gives us a lot of inspiration: we play and record on our own, in complete peace and quiet, and we don't need to strike any kind of pose to be considered part of some scene or intelligentsia. In the province, you can just be yourself.

Got a dedication for OndaRock's readers?

For OndaRock's aficionados we picked “Otto Ore,” a sociopathic rant in a

kraut-rock vein. Don't go to work!

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