Faintin’ Goats - Faintin Goats - Of Fallible Gods and Android Dances

With their electro-punk-noise-industrial-shitgaze sound, Benevento's Faintin' Goats are carving out a niche in the underground of Italian rock, where since last May the ghost of “Failin' Gods” has been roaming — their second album which, while still leaving plenty of room for improvement, won us over here with a series of small, unstable compositions, where the anarchic spirit of late-Seventies underground San Francisco coexists with the urge to turn today's anxiety into energy to be unleashed in android dances.

To find out more, we put a series of questions to Alessio Del Donno and Daniele Pescatore.

First of all, tell us how you met and how you started making music, perhaps also highlighting your respective musical backgrounds.

Alessio: We've known each other since we were kids, maybe eleven or twelve years old. A few years later, we were already playing together now and then, experimenting with guitars and amplifiers, playing Nirvana covers in Daniele's bedroom. Then our paths diverged. I played in 23 and Beyond the Infinite from 2013 to 2020, with steady live activity in Italy and abroad. Alongside that, I kept other lineups going for one-off shows or jam sessions with various musicians. Daniele, meanwhile, went down the blues road.

Which bands influenced you the most?

Chrome, Butthole Surfers, Psychic TV, Movie Star Junkies, Big Black, Factums, Marc Ribot, Captain Beefheart, Pop Group, Shit and Shine, Dead Combo, Six Finger Satellite, Liars, Fall, Suicide, Cheveu and many others... we're passionate about music, and in general we like to keep exploring and broadening what we listen to.

Why did it take you a full five years to follow up “Monomania”?

In the meantime, we both kept other projects going as well. We started writing “Failin' Gods” almost right after “Monomania” came out. In between, there were various relocations, both of us finishing university, jobs in Italy and abroad, not to mention the forced break caused by Covid. Over those years we developed a different vision for the project and worked hard to give our songs a more compact shape. We kept playing all along, but without feeling any rush to put out a record at all costs. Meanwhile we wrote tracks for international compilations, made a few music videos, and contributed to the soundtrack of the short film “La Noce”.

“Failin' Gods” is a “self-produced and self-packaged” album. Is the DIY aesthetic a necessity or a creed?

It's definitely a necessity. But above all, it's great fun. And necessity breeds virtue. What matters to us is playing, making records, putting on shows, making videos, all in total freedom. Even though it now seems like the only way to make music is to follow the same rat race — recording “a certain way”, promoting yourself “a certain way”, having a press office book your shows “in certain places”, always having to pour time and money into everything you want to do and not even being happy with the result — we decided none of that interested us. DIY gives you total freedom, because you don't have to answer to anyone for what you want to do or how you want to do it.

Compared to your debut, on the new album you've been more “combative” in your use of groove. I'd say that, deep down, your latest compositions also carry an anything-but-secondary danceable urge. What do you think?

It's extremely deliberate. We discovered that we like getting the crowd to dance, and it's a lot more fun for us too. Over the years we've found ourselves switching up our instrumentation now and then. At a certain point, we decided to stop and rein in the experimentation into a set of songs united by that groove. “Failin' Gods” is the result. We actually scrapped quite a few tracks precisely to focus on a more compact idea of sound. The danceable urge is something we'll keep experimenting with.

I know you're also interested in a constant blending of music and video. How do you keep that passion alive?

Alessio: Ever since the first track we put up on YouTube, I've wanted to handle the videos myself, because even back when we were composing in the studio, what we were playing already conjured up certain kinds of images for me, and that's been the case for every video since. From there, we both felt it made sense to also present a series of visuals during our live shows, edited and put together ad hoc. We don't always use them, though. When they're not there, the live show takes on a different charge, more "punk" and violent. When they are present, it's easier for people to get drawn into the images, and the atmosphere becomes more psychedelic.

Are you also film buffs, by any chance? If so, how does the "seventh art" influence your music?

Alessio: Yes, definitely. I've enjoyed experimenting with filming and video since I was sixteen, and alongside music, I mostly work on making short films and documentaries, as well as being a passionate "student" of the medium. As for the purely compositional side, cinema has definitely influenced us in a more "subterranean" way too, since the writing doesn't necessarily start from a cinematic idea — if anything, it can happen the other way around. Reusing sound clips taken from films and video material, a bit like the "found-footage" approach I use in our videos, is a language we're drawn to, precisely because it lets us conjure up vaguely cinematic imagery. A kind of collage that lets different worlds and aesthetics meet.

What kind of feedback have you had so far?

After releasing "Monomania", we were invited by the Russian label UIS to take part in the international compilation "Вароша", and from there the Greek label E.C.T. invited us to join another compilation, "International", alongside artists and projects from all over the world, but they also supported us in releasing "Failin' Gods". Other labels have shown interest since then too, always within self-production and distribution circuits. Since the pandemic, we've also had the chance to play a lot more, touring from Sicily to Lombardy, through live clubs, squats, social centres and pubs (!?), getting all kinds of interesting responses. It's essential to find the right context for our music and an audience willing to be surprised and won over by our chaos. So far, it's gone well. More than once some madman has come up to us saying they hadn't had that much fun in years, hearing something they "don't quite know what it is, but really loved." That makes us happy, because audiences are still very curious and just need to be pushed in the right direction...

Tell us about the "La Noce – OST (Music From The shortmovie)" project.

Alessio: It's a short film I directed in 2019, conceived and written with Pasquale Del Giudice. It's about a man with prostate cancer reflecting on his condition. Since it's a theme that's both a bit grotesque and a bit dramatic, we thought it could be interesting to try writing part of the soundtrack using Faintin' Goats' noise-electronic sound. Other musicians and friends from the Benevento scene took part too, Alessio Politano (Oisel) and Andrea Vernillo (Atto Seguente), with whom we also wrote a track together as a feature, a "nocturnal" blues with piano and clean vocals, "My Generation's Wrong". It was interesting to try out different compositional approaches, starting from sonic suggestions or using images from the short as a reference point for the composition, or even sometimes moving completely away from it after having the scene firmly in mind. These soundtrack-writing experiments are part of that ongoing dialogue between different art forms I mentioned earlier.

Daniele: For me it was my first experience composing and recording a soundtrack. It was really interesting to produce something ad hoc for a short film, and I'd like to keep exploring that path, maybe even with live scoring.

Why should music fans listen to your music?

Because it's probably something they haven't already heard, something fresh and different from the recent glut of Italian music.

Benevento certainly isn't the first city that comes to mind for a music fan trying to get a sense of Italian rock, especially its more "underground" side. What's your relationship with your city like? Musically speaking, is there life in the "city of witches"?

There's life, but it's hidden and scattered. There are plenty of interesting projects, but few venues dedicated to live music. Many projects have often had to seek their fortune elsewhere over time. Besides the already mentioned Atto Seguente and Oisel, we've shared the stage many times with Unruly Girls, a project we have a strong connection with and with whom we've also experimented with some compositions — who knows, we might even release something together... We should also mention 23 and Beyond the Infinite, Caboose, Catash, Enzo Mirone, The Delay in the Universal Loop, Forever Alien, Sweet Jane and Claire, Peth Ks Jamba, Evod...

What should we expect if we come see you play live?

Plenty of chaos, noise, relentless rhythms, epileptic visuals, feedback, the odd mishap, and people dancing.

What are your plans for the future?

A few collaborations with other musicians, a more dance-oriented record, a tour of the Balkans and Greece. Then we'll see...

Ride the wave of great music

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