Bologna Violenta - Studying and Deconstructing

The Bologna Violenta project quickly became a "name" within the national independent scene. Three albums were enough for Nicola Manzan to carve out a very well-defined role within our underground music scene, opening the doors to niche success, even though his output is anything but commercial. We met him on the sidelines of a show held at Circolo Hemingway in Latina on Wednesday, March 14, 2012.

A high-voltage evening, opened by the garage noise of Sexy Cool Audio and the post-rock digressions of Gaimer 422. Manzan unloaded almost an hour of unbridled violence on the audience, built around terrifying grind metal riffs laid over purpose-made backing tracks. A shocking, gripping show, one that showed off all the qualities of the multi-instrumentalist from Treviso, who isn't averse to picking up a violin or hurling desperate screams from the stage.

While in promotional photos Nicola comes across as an almost unsavoury-looking character, in person he turns out to be an exquisitely affable, thoroughly likeable guy, and even good-looking. After all (we point out to him), if you play with Baustelle (as he has done in the past) you pretty much have to be good-looking (and he acknowledged our great sense of humour, laughing quite a bit at this joke born of our unconditional appreciation for the icy figure of Rachele Bastreghi, but ultimately also for the strong stage presence of Francesco Bianconi). At the end of the set, Nicola kindly spent some time with us, retracing his entire artistic path, dwelling in particular on the various collaborations he's carried out over the years, on the work process behind his three albums, and on some interesting, thoroughly personal aspects.

The chat begins while he's selling merchandise at the stall together with his extremely busy partner Nunzia, and we notice the great success of his vinyl records, which come with a bonus CD-R for the modest price of ten euros: we're more than a little surprised.

Nicola, do you actually make anything selling vinyl LPs with a bonus CD-R for just ten euros? For that price you usually can't even buy the CD on its own!

Well, one way or another I manage to get a vinyl pressed for just over five euros, and by selling it at ten euros I get to distribute a lot more copies than if I priced it at fifteen or twenty. I'd rather sell more copies at a lower price. What matters to me is getting my material out there, the profit is still a secondary aspect. One night in Rome I priced them at twenty euros, and I didn't sell a single one.

What do you say, shall we start with your musical training?

I started playing around age five because my older brother played, and that sparked a kind of copycat instinct — he stopped pretty early on, while I kept going. At five I was already running the record player at home, you remember those belt-driven turntables? (we nod, ed.) My father had a collection of classical music records, the kind that came in those series like Armando Curcio Editore, the ones sold at newsstands, and he also had a few things by Italian singer-songwriters, like De Gregori and De André. Around age eight I started playing violin, and it was a commitment for the whole family too, what with the lessons and buying the necessary gear. My training was very classical up until I was fourteen, even quite rigid, and then I started listening to other things.

At that age I saw a Litfiba concert in an indoor arena, and I was mesmerized. Not because they were Litfiba, a band I don't follow all that closely, but because I saw this huge spectacle, the lights, the amplifiers, the electric guitars, and I said to myself, "this is what I want to do with my life." That's when I realized I wanted to make rock'n'roll: that event effectively marked my shift from classical music to rock music.

But your relationship with classical music didn't end there.

Absolutely not, actually I kept going with classical music for another good fifteen years or so. Up until 2004 I played in an orchestra, I taught violin at a music school, I had a string quartet, I even have a CD where I played first violin in the orchestra, complete with solos. From around 14-15 I also started listening to metal, but that's a genre that wears you out pretty quickly, and I wanted something even more intense, ever more intense, so within a few months I'd landed on grind, which was exactly the opposite of what I was doing in classical music.

Self-produced grind records get stamped with the two crossed-out eighth notes, like a no-entry sign, as if to say "this is non-music," in contrast to academic teaching, which is supposed to shape you into "music" while treating everything else as noise. Two such distant worlds ended up coexisting in my music, and now here I am, with the material you heard tonight and that you can find on my releases.

You've collaborated with a huge number of artists, give us a rundown in more or less chronological order.

Thank goodness you didn't ask me in order of sales, because I wouldn't have known what to tell you! One of the first projects I worked on, and one that left a deep mark on me, was the first solo album by Paolo Benvegnù, Piccoli fragilissimi film. I'd met Paolo because I did some studio work for an artist he was producing; he told me he'd call me back when he needed me, but I figured it was just the usual polite thing people say. Instead he called me for the last Scisma concert, in Florence, to play violin, and I played four or five songs, then he called me for his debut solo album, and that was an important first building block for the rest of my artistic path.

From there other connections followed, among the most important of which I should mention my contribution to Bachelite by Offlaga Disco Pax, and the work I carried on over the years with Alessandro Grazian, a singer-songwriter from Padua with whom I made three albums. I also played on all the albums by Non Voglio che Clara, from Belluno, and I even did a tour of around fifteen dates with them with a string quartet.

Then there's Baustelle, which we were joking about earlier…

I did a very important tour with Baustelle in 2008, it was the tour for Amen, a beautiful album that I consider a sort of encyclopedia of Italian music. I'd been brought in as a multi-instrumentalist, I played four instruments, and I also did backing vocals, so I had a lot of responsibility in a very important production. With Baustelle I also took part in the soundtrack for “Giulia non esce la sera”, and I helped out with the string arrangement transcriptions for “I mistici dell'occidente“. Then in 2009 I went hungry (he laughs heartily, ed.), and in 2010 I went on tour with Il Teatro degli Orrori as guitarist/violinist/keyboardist/backing vocalist, stepping in for Favero who had just left.

I see some affinities between you and Enrico Gabrielli: you're both multi-instrumentalists, both with a maze of collaborations behind you, both with projects that have a poliziottesco flavour to them, you because of the name and him because of the material tackled with Calibro 35. Obviously the musical approaches are very different though...

Spot on, though I actually started earlier (he laughs, sipping a beer, ed.). I remember a MEI event in 2007 in Faenza where I met Fabio Rondanini, the drummer of Calibro 35 whom I've known forever; I gave him my first CD-R and he told me he thought it was really cool. He also let slip that he had a project about poliziotteschi that was about to take off: shortly after, it would become Calibro 35. Enrico Gabrielli and I are friends and colleagues. He leans more towards winds and keyboards, I play more on strings, and the funny thing is we often work on the same records but might never actually cross paths.

Speaking of Baustelle, we were both on “I mistici dell'occidente“, I arranged some parts that he then played, and we're both also on the new Ronin record, just to give another example, but I think it actually started with that Benvegnù album, “Piccoli fragilissimi film”. Enrico and I are kindred spirits, and I've discovered we've also had somewhat similar paths, we've attended some of the same advanced courses, maybe a year apart. We're both musicians who know music and approach music from a place of real knowledge.

How did the Bologna Violenta project come about?

At a certain point life turns to shit, nothing smiles on you anymore, I'd gotten tired of playing in bands, in 2004 I'd moved to Bologna (he was born in the Veneto region, between Treviso and Conegliano, ed.) chasing a dream.

I had a band and we spent two years working on a record that we tried to get released by a major label, but the major label bet on Sugar Free instead, even dressing them just like us. From one day to the next I found myself broke, with no desire to play, the producer dropped us, so I had to find a job, I had to reinvent myself on a personal level. I did a job that had nothing to do with music, but it was part-time and left me time for my hobbies; working shifts from 5 to 9 in the morning, from 9:30 I could get into a studio and still have the whole day ahead of me. I started making these grind tracks, because I had it in my head to start a grind band, something close to Napalm Death, who are one of my favourite bands. For the first time I started building everything on my own.

All very short tracks...

By the sixth track, looking at them on the player I realised they were all 26 seconds long, so I decided to make 26 tracks of 26 seconds each, and that's what I did, over a summer/autumn in the recording studio, thinking it would be the end of my career. That was my first self-produced album: “Bologna Violenta”. I started circulating these CD-Rs, then I ended up on tour with Non Voglio che Clara.

One evening in Rome with Non Voglio che Clara we opened for Offlaga Disco Pax + Baustelle. They asked me to open for the Offlaga tour, and with them I played my first live support show. And it worked. “Bologna Violenta” was supposed to be the title of my first record, but then I realised how well it represented my life in Bologna, and it became my moniker. An operation that, at least in its first phase, was strongly inspired by poliziotteschi, even if I don't pursue the same philological approach as Calibro 35. I would carefully pick the titles, maybe watch the film, and then write a track around it, without actually redoing the soundtracks.

Could Bologna Violenta in the future become something that expands to include other musicians, or do you see it strictly as a solo project?

At its core I see it as just me solo, a project that my partner and I follow personally, avoiding handing off to outside structures everything we can manage to do “in-house”. No point paying a press or booking agency if we can do the same things ourselves, through contacts built up over the years. Bologna Violenta is 100% self-produced: so far I've played over two hundred shows that I organised myself, and I've made all my records on my own.

Although it's also true that over the last two years things have partly changed: with “Il nuovissimo mondo” I found a label, Bar La Muerte, and an agency that started helping me out with shows, because I couldn't manage alone anymore. The new album “Utopie e piccole soddisfazioni” also has the backing of Wallace Records.

Bar La Muerte and Wallace Records: what more could I ask for?

To wrap up the thought, I like to think that Bologna Violenta can be a project that's conceptually mine, where I get to decide everything, with no compromises: I have to make something I like, that represents something personal to me. That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to have a band, with a choir, an orchestra and all the rest, but it's 2012, the Monti government, taxes, sacrifices, problems, you just can't make it work, you know?

What's your composing process like? Has it changed over time?

On the first two albums I had extremely rigid rules: first I'd prepare the drums, then find something to put on top with guitars, then the embellishments. I always started with drums, with samples I'd lay out on a grid, trying to make a rhythm that felt satisfying on its own, then I'd add guitar riffs, and in sequence after that I'd add bass, synth, electric piano, strings and whatever other layers were needed. Something changed on "Utopie e piccole soddisfazioni": I found myself doing drums, strings, bass and guitars too. On some tracks the guitars only came in at the very end.

On "Il nuovissimo mondo" so many different worlds converge: theatricality, cyberpunk, hardcore, carefully crafted arrangements, electronics, death metal, jungle, and even traditional chanson.

It's kind of a synthesis of my life. Take "Trapianti giapponesi", for example: it's a track born out of months spent listening to Franco Califano. I'd play his songs back on electric piano - I have big problems with lyrics, by the fourth word I've already lost track of what's being said, because I'm listening to the music - but I found some interesting things to rework on keyboard in those Califano songs.

My tracks represent a lot of who I am - in a single day I genuinely listen to every kind of music. On "Trapianti giapponesi" there's this thing of shifting up and down a tone, a technique I picked up playing with Alessandro Grazian, when we used to do Tenco songs that have these key changes going up a tone, very much in the classic Sanremo style of songwriting, so I wanted to try an approach like that. Before the last album I spent six months on random listening, going through hundreds and hundreds of records, then I'd pick out the things I liked, maybe thinking "damn, I need to put something like this in a track too!". You listen to hundreds of records and in the end a lot of input stays in your head, input that I try to work with without overdoing it, without forcing it, letting everything flow naturally.

And so we come to the excellent reviews "Il nuovissimo mondo" received. Bologna Violenta quickly became a "name", a sort of small cult act on the national underground circuit. Did you expect that?

No, I didn't expect it. I thought that record would be the epitaph of my music career. As soon as it was done, whenever I played it for people they'd say "What the hell is this shit?". Friends kept saying I should try to make more pop stuff, that I'd end up doing hack work with classical music again or working at a motorway service station. At first I thought I'd just press a hundred CD-Rs and that would be it. In the end I made more than three thousand copies of the first album, two thousand of the second, and now we're at an initial run of a thousand copies of the third, which is selling very well.

I didn't expect it, even though I was hoping for it because of how spontaneous the project is: this is who I am.

How has your typical day changed?

The great thing is that now I can devote 24 hours a day to music, and above all to a project of my own. While the recording of "Il nuovissimo mondo" took years and was done in the most disparate places, the new album was made in four or five months, at my place, just to say that today I'm devoting my life to the dream of my life. I am Bologna Violenta 24 hours a day.

Do you still live in Bologna?

No, we moved to Treviso, basically for financial reasons. Let's say I moved back closer to home.

"Utopie e piccole soddisfazioni" is also a collection of the results of some interesting archaeological digs: inside we find Gregorian chants and a 1967 speech by Saragat.

There's also a Prokofiev piece. I like digging back into the past, I like doing archaeology, it really intrigues me to go and pick up certain forgotten things - for instance, I found the Saragat speech on a 7-inch that came out with L'Espresso. Saragat was under the illusion that Italy could become who-knows-what, whereas today we find ourselves the exact opposite. Trust placed in politicians? It's insane to listen back to certain lines today.

On your new album we find more classical music and fewer references to the world of cinema.

I spent months with people placing bets on which films Bologna Violenta would exhume for the next album. This time, though, I put my musical background on the table instead of my cinematic one.

Can you actually make a living from your art?

I get by. Nunzia and I have learned to cut out everything superfluous in life, TV included, and whatever we earn from gigs or record sales we reinvest. And all things considered, touring lets us see some extraordinary places we probably would never have seen otherwise, if we'd chosen a different line of work. In a way, it's an enviable situation, in certain respects.

Obviously we do everything on a small scale, it's all tiny, but then again even Prince today, with the modest sales figures typical of this era, could never have become so extraordinarily huge.

Which collaboration are you proudest of?

In terms of personal satisfaction, probably the one with Ligabue, even though I never actually met him in person during the recording sessions. I played violin on two of the three unreleased tracks featured on "Secondo tempo", the second volume of his greatest-hits collection, released in 2008. The songs were "Il mio pensiero", which also came out as a single, and "Ho ancora la forza", which Ligabue co-wrote with Francesco Guccini. I showed up at the studio feeling like I was going to the doctor's, sitting in a waiting room: a rather sterile situation. But those are the things that get you recognized as a musician, not so much by fellow musicians, but by family or less attentive friends. My dad actually went and bragged about it to the butcher at the supermarket while "Il mio pensiero" was playing on the radio with me on it.

Any out-of-reach names you'd love to collaborate with?

Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor, or Mike Patton, maybe with Fantomas. And, just to aim really high, being a multi-instrumentalist for Radiohead. Now that would be seriously cool!

A collaboration you wouldn't repeat?

Well, there are a few, some of which may never even have been released. I also had some traumatic experiences in the studio, back when I had less experience, and getting a record out with my name on it felt important, like it could be a springboard. Once I ended up arranging three tracks for a singer I'd rather not name. They pushed back on them in a completely unreasonable way. These are the small episodes that teach you how to conduct yourself in the studio, to keep your distance from certain people, not to be everyone's friend.

Which names do you rate most highly on today's Italian independent scene?

I really love the new Offlaga Disco Pax album, "Gioco di società": I'm wearing it out. Offlaga are the missing link between the end of Cccp and Massimo Volume, who then made a great comeback with "Cattive abitudini". I also toured with Vittoria Burattini (drummer and founding member of Massimo Volume, ed.) when she was playing with Franklin Delano. At the time I didn't really know much about Massimo Volume's history, so it was great to get to know her as a person, grow fond of her, and then discover what she'd done in the past with that wonderful band, and end up valuing her twice as much because of it.

Then I really like Zen Circus, I find them spontaneous. Among the younger acts, I have to mention at least Fast Animals, from Perugia — their singer Aimone Romizi sings on my record, they have fun and they play well. There's a lot of good stuff coming out of Italy lately.

Any future projects?

First of all, playing as many live dates as possible on this tour. Then I've got a lot of things in the works — just to give you an example, some channels are opening up that should let me play live dates abroad: I'd love to export my project. I think it could go over well, because it has an Italian root, but there's something more to it than what the average foreigner usually expects from an Italian product.

I'd also like to make a record with just guitar and drums, nothing else, maybe a seven-inch with four hardcore grind tracks, just me and a drummer. I've also had requests to work on soundtracks, a world I've already dipped into in the past — in that case the material would come out under the name Nicola Manzan. But the main project for the future is simply to be a musician for a living.

Ride the wave of great music

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