Carpacho! - The real and the illusory

Two albums and two EPs aren't a huge amount over ten years of career, but Rome's Carpacho! still wanted to celebrate the milestone of their first decade together, putting together a selection from their catalogue to serve as an introductory guide for those who don't know them. The compilation, like all their other releases, is freely downloadable from bandcamp. The occasion proved a good opportunity to send the band a series of questions taking stock of various aspects of the band's life and beyond. Singer Marco Catani answered on their behalf.

Since I usually prefer compilations in chronological order, is there a specific reason you decided not to follow chronology when putting together the tracklist? Among other things, a chronological order would have shown that, over time, your songs became progressively less carefree and more balanced. Or do you feel your trajectory shouldn't be described only in those terms?

We put together the tracklist for "Non è più tempo di illudersi" trying to make the sequence of songs flow smoothly. In that sense we preferred not to go chronological, so as not to risk ending up with a tracklist that felt disjointed and lacked cohesion.

Maybe our recent songs are less carefree, which is an attribute closely tied to a certain lightness dictated mostly by the age of whoever is writing and composing. They're probably more balanced because with more experience you pick up a bit more method. Certainly balanced not in the sense of conventional: for instance, one of our most recent tracks, "Pasticho," which closes "la futura classe dirigente," has a convoluted structure, almost progressive, something we'd never dared to do before.

Thinking back over the sequence of your albums, it also occurs to me that the British touch present in your style has progressively faded, while, on the contrary, an increasing Italian-ness can be heard over time. Here too, what do you think?

In recent years our listening habits and sources of inspiration haven't undergone a drastic shift toward Italian music. In that sense we don't think the British influence has waned.. we're less indie and more pop, and maybe this shift makes us inevitably more traceable to certain Italian influences that have always been present in Carpacho! anyway. For example, we've always loved Battiato and (much less) Baustelle.

As for the choice of songs itself, do you feel you left out tracks that are, in absolute terms, better than the ones you included, but that would have served the representative function the collection is explicitly built around less effectively?

There are probably some songs left out that are better than others we did include in the collection. For example "Maledetto il trucco" is a song we consider among our best, but it didn't seem to fit an operation like this one. With this collection we wanted to offer a kind of guide to Carpacho!. We made a synthesis of our journey, and inevitably some aspects end up represented only marginally. To dig deeper, there are the albums, including the ones available as a free download on our Bandcamp.

Over the course of these ten years, has the process of making a song changed, aside from the departure of the original members and the arrival of the current ones? If so, can you tell us how? If not, can you describe that process for us anyway?

The creative process hasn't changed all that much. It usually starts from an idea, more or less complete, which we then work on together to reach a result that satisfies us. Most of the time the original idea comes from Marco (Catani, singer), who's also responsible for almost all the lyrics, and sometimes from Daniele (Little P, guitarist) too. The electronics and the more orchestrated arrangements are without a doubt the favored territory of Pasquale Citera (synth), who isn't called "maestro" for nothing, just like Amedeo Minghi. And the drum patterns are Isidoro Galatro's doing.

Let's go back over the announced breakup and the subsequent reunion. How do you see it now, looking back? Can we simply say the reunion was a sensible remedy to a decision made too rashly? Or is there more to it?

At the time it was a painful decision, but a considered one. Marco and Isidoro were about to move to London shortly afterward, our relationship with our label at the time, Sleeping Star, had just come to an end, and there was a clear sense that we needed to put a full stop to that chapter of our story. In reality, we later realized that what we were dealing with wasn't so much a definitive retirement as, precisely, the end of a historical phase. So we recalibrated and let ourselves be carried into this new phase of Carpacho!, which so far has produced an EP and an album. Before the breakup too, we'd made an EP and an album. Maybe we're even ready for a third Carpacho! phase… Tremble!

I remember an interview of yours on Rockit where you basically got angry at those who had reviewed "La Fuga dei cervelli" too positively compared to what you felt was its real worth. That stung a bit, because I'm one of those people. Are you still convinced that those excessively positive reviews did you more harm than good?

Oh, yes, you're right. There was a lot of attention around "La fuga dei cervelli," and the impression was that a lot of the criticism was "uncritical," just following the flow without questioning it. Honestly, we've always been cautious readers of reviews - people talk about "epoch-defining" records and then you go and listen to them and they're barely listenable. Look, being harsher reviewers would certainly have done the whole indie scene some good. We cared about the issue so much that "Il reale mi dà l'asma" (the song that opens the collection) is precisely about that.

Incidentally, in that case you were anticipating a topic that's increasingly gaining traction these days in the comments of music fans online, namely the problem of too many positive reviews, especially in Italian indie. Based on your decade of experience, what damage do you think this attitude can do, both to the bands that receive all this praise and to those who don't get any?

Very few people actually hang around Italian indie music sites and forums. Italian indie music is a niche, and a rather self-referential one at that, and thinking you can measure your own worth based on the praise or indifference of a few hundred people is a somewhat hazy view of reality. YouTube view counts are far more indicative of a band's actual "reach" than the tone of reviews on specialist websites.

Forgive me for insisting on this point, but it matters a lot to me and I think you could give an interesting answer. You often hear that if certain bands didn't have all the media attention they enjoy, other names forced to stay in the shadows would have more chance to emerge and thus build a bigger following. Personally I don't always agree, and I see it as a question of potential appeal: if a band makes difficult, refined music, it can't get angry because those who make easier stuff get more attention, more gigs, more revenue. Even if the people who made easier stuff didn't exist, there still wouldn't be more people going out looking for the difficult stuff, and if you make difficult music, you can't expect to have an audience beyond a certain limit. What do you think?

The idea that media attention given to band X overshadows band Y is a colossal load of nonsense. There's no reason, backed by even a shred of logic, to support that argument. If anything the opposite might happen, if this kind of media attention towards bands even really existed in Italy. But regardless of whether you make easy or difficult music, we can honestly recall very few new bands that have enjoyed real media attention in recent years. Unless you're talking about people coming out of talent shows.

Staying on topic, do you feel that "La Futura Classe Dirigente" was met with too lukewarm a reception from critics?

Two years after its release we can look back on what happened with a clear head. The album got two "types" of reviews: the "wonderful pop record" type and the "they could have done more, the record never really takes off" type. The real problem is that, having had no press office and no label (Pippola Music died immediately after putting out our record), that album was barely reviewed by any outlet at all. Anyway, we won't get into whose fault it was or wasn't... certainly we would have expected something more.

Forgive the obvious question but I can't avoid it. How do you picture Carpacho!'s second decade of life (I didn't forget the exclamation mark)? Does the fact that Micecars are also making a comeback risk taking up time from the member you have in common, and so slowing everything down a bit?

Ah, who knows, we honestly have no idea. And thanks for the exclamation mark, we appreciate it.

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