Cesare Malfatti - Found songs and electronic experiments

Just over a week after the release of his fifth solo record (“Canzoni perse”), we reach the former La Crus member by phone following his show at Mamamu in Naples. It's the perfect occasion to have him tell us about the making of an album that rescues previously discarded material and dresses it up in electronics, thanks to the synthesizers of a longtime friend.

Over several years. There are five with lyrics by Alessandro Cremonesi (the third member of La Crus) dating back to 2011, then there are more recent ones, from as late as 2014 at most. Roughly speaking, let's say they were all cast aside from the first album and from the third (“Una Mia Distrazione”).

So did they already all have a final lyric as well?

Yes, I'd already made the demos and some of them even had a complete arrangement, like “Lo So Lo Sai”, which didn't make it onto the first album for reasons of space, and because I already had too many slow tracks. So what I did was strip away the whole arrangement and hand Stefano Giovannardi just the basics — guitar, voice and a bit of electronic rhythm. He took the tracks and turned them completely upside down, to the point where I then had to readapt them, because I could no longer sing them as they were.

When did you start thinking that Stefano's synthesizers could actually work on these songs?

At first I was taken aback, even a bit frightened. Then I asked Stefano's permission to take them back and change a few things, even though eighty percent of what you hear on the record is still his work. I only made them a little more suited to my taste and to what I had to sing over them. Stefano's tastes are very different from mine… in every arrangement there was something I really loved sonically, and something else that felt a bit too rigid to me. So basically I softened up the rhythms, often using old Roland electronic drum machines I'm very fond of.

Can we say that taking these abandoned tracks and giving them a new, rather bold electronic dress is really the true concept behind the album?

Yes, the fact that they had a new dress is what convinced me the most, and I notice in the reviews that a lot of people like it, especially the strong contrast between the vocal timbres and the arrangement, which I initially saw as a risk. Besides, I would never have been able to do something like this on my own. I like the idea of having made a record that's a genuine collaboration.

As always, this time too there are several different lyricists at work on the album (the only constant being Alessandro Cremonesi), who contributed their parts when the tracks still had a very different arrangement. Was it harder to sing the lyrics now, in this electronic sonic context? Was there anything that just didn't work compared to how the track had originally been conceived?

I haven't had any problems with that, also because I've always been very open to this kind of thing, and I think you can always find shared solutions even for lyrics that seem to have been written for a completely different kind of arrangement. This very metropolitan, nocturnal atmosphere came about, and it's something you can feel in almost all the lyrics, but also in the sound itself, ultimately.

On that note, even though the album doesn't talk directly about Milan the way “Una Città Esposta” does, the importance of the urban context clearly comes through right from the two videos (“45 giri” and “Novembre”). How much does Milan influence you musically?

I think a lot, also because, even though my parents aren't from Milan, I was born and have always lived there. It particularly reflects my way of being, which I consider essentially Mitteleuropean, a bit melancholic and foggy. I've never lived in other cities, but from this point of view Milan is perfect.

The start of your solo career had a strong “do it yourself” component (you played everything yourself, mailed out personalized copies of your CDs to fans). “Canzoni Perse” is the definitive arrival at something different: the album was also made thanks to the work of others, and fans now listen to you mainly through streaming platforms. Do you feel comfortable with this evolution?

Yes and no. You're right, it's actually the first album I've made in which Spotify has definitively established itself as the popular way of listening to music. Either way, I made this album with a certain handmade quality too: for instance, the CD comes with a poster folded in twelve by hand by me, and each copy can be personalized, numbered. I still care about that a lot, but I've obviously realized that as time goes by these things make less and less sense, especially because the market for that kind of handcrafted approach is shrinking.

Chiara Castello had already joined you on the previous tour with her loopstation, with great results. Now she sings all the songs together with you, and there's also Stefano's electronics. How does all this translate live?

It mainly translates into a lot of good work, done by the computer (he laughs, ed.). I tried to convince Stefano to make his work more minimal, maybe without a computer, with an electronic drum kit and a couple of synths to do everything live, but that way we would actually risk losing a huge number of important arrangement nuances. In the end we realized it's better to let Ableton Live handle everything (the software most widely used for live electronic performances, ed.), which lets us change the structure of the songs a bit with a pedalboard. The structures are very open, we can decide to do the first verse twice, or do three choruses. It's a great way to have something extra compared to normal backing tracks, and it also allows for a bit of improvisation.

“Canzoni Perse” is just a nice experiment, or do you think it could be the start of something more in your artistic path?

I don't know, actually I'm asking myself that too. It could be an experiment that continues in other songs as well. This thing of giving Stefano some tracks, waiting for him to add ideas very different from mine, and then reworking everything, is something I really enjoyed, and it could genuinely have a future.

To wrap up, exactly twenty years ago, in 1997, the Italian music scene was going through one of its most creative periods. You were part of it, with La Crus, who that year released “Dentro me”. Mauro Ermanno Giovanardi has just celebrated that era with a covers album. Do you ever feel nostalgic about it?

I don't feel nostalgic so much for what we were doing, because we did it naturally, at most I feel nostalgic for the way we experienced it, which is the way anyone starting out and under thirty experiences things. The beginning of something, when it works, is always the best moment, and I think that's still true today. For instance, for The Giornalisti too, right now is their best moment. Afterwards it's harder to keep that kind of experience going, to sustain it. Now that I'm fifty, the weight of it is starting to show, so I do feel a bit of nostalgia, though not on an artistic level. The truly special thing about that period was that we always played in front of huge crowds, and record labels invested a lot. As La Crus we managed to do some wonderful things also thanks to the people behind us who invested in us. We recorded in beautiful studios, we had great experiences abroad. That doesn't exist anymore now.

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