Grenouille - Milan keeps burning!

The Italian alt-rock scene is going through a period of great creativity, with many new bands forcefully stepping into the spotlight. We got yet another confirmation of this on Saturday, April 24th, when two excellent acts from the recent national crop played at Sottoscala Nove in Latina: Rome's Eva Mon Amour and Milan's Grenouille, who despite opening the night were the evening's biggest draw.

Grenouille's performance was vibrant and convincing, with the four tracks from the new EP “You can't make a revolution in Italy” slotting perfectly into the band's live set and pointing toward new directions compared to the typically grunge sound that characterized their 2008 debut album “Jumping into the fire”.

They kick off right away with the title track from the new EP; after a few minutes to get their bearings, room is quickly made for “Jumping into the fire”, the band's first anthem, whose line “Milano sta bruciando” has become their true rallying cry. “Il porno è la democrazia” is the track that, more than any other, charts new musical territory, while “La terza guerra mondiale” is pure Nirvana style, and the crowd loves it.

After a moment devoted to their cover of Il Pan del Diavolo's “I fiori”, comes the overwhelming closer “Babilonia”, which seals forty blazing minutes, confirming the band as musically positioned at the crossroads between the grunge of Cobain and Alice In Chains and the Italo-rock leanings of Verdena.

The quartet is made up of Marco Bugatti (vocals and guitar), Giuseppe Magnelli (guitar), Davide Borin (bass) and Andrea Caristo (drums). The show at Sottoscala Nove was also a chance to get to know the four members of the Milanese band a little better.

Here's the rundown of our engaging chat with the band's frontman, Marco Bugatti, in which we talked about music, but also literature, politics, their hobbies, and the current state of the Italian alt-rock scene.

To start off, tell us about Grenouille's career path so far.

Our band was born out of an idea of mine and Giuseppe Magnelli's (the other guitarist in the lineup).

The idea was to create a rock band inspired by the Italian alternative scene and Nineties rock, with an eye also on late-Seventies punk and the post-punk of bands like Pixies and Sonic Youth. Our goal was to manage to write convincing songs in Italian, and we honed our noise improvisations at a historic little venue on the Milanese underground scene, Moonshine.

We made a huge racket, starting out with two acoustic guitars and not even a microphone — I'd scream like a madman — playing a few covers alternated with our first songs, which we later abandoned. Gradually we refined our sound, and once we had our first convincing songs, we started playing with Davide (Borin, the bassist) and our drummer at the time, Fabio Giussani.

We recorded our first demo, featuring two tracks, which made the rounds on the Milanese music scene, even reaching Carlo Pastore and Davide Toffolo.

After a second demo, our current drummer Andrea Caristo joined, and once the last songs were written, we threw ourselves into producing our first album, “Jumping into the fire”, with the then-fledgling Via Audio Records. After spending a year and a half touring it around venues and festivals of various sizes, we decided to try something new, recording three songs we'd written in the meantime plus a cover, in a new way, searching for a more distinctive sound.

You take your name from the peculiar protagonist of one of the most successful cult books of all time: Patrick Süskind's “Il profumo” (Perfume). In some ways he's a deeply poetic character, but toward the end of the book he commits horrific crimes. What led you to choose his name for the band?

We find J.B. Grenouille a romantic hero, obsessed with his own passion and self-destructive. Three strong elements, all present in the spirit of our songs, which very often deal with passions or behaviors taken to extremes, extreme situations or addictions. He was also an artist, obsessed with his goal: creating the scent of human passions so as to manipulate them and win people's love. It's very reminiscent of the situation of anyone who insists on making a certain kind of music these days.

There's an extraordinary passage in “Il profumo” (Perfume) where Süskind expresses the indispensability of smell: every human being can survive without seeing, without being able to hear, without taste or touch, but couldn't live without breathing. Life and scent as two sides of the same coin…

I think the same can be said of emotions and dreams. All things that music feeds on, and that no one could ever do without.

I imagine you can't make a living from music alone, unfortunately. Do the four members of Grenouille all have other jobs alongside being musicians?

Yes, of course. I work as an outside contractor for a call center, which gives me a lot of flexibility with my hours and lets me pursue my passions. Andrea works as a sales assistant for a big DIY chain. Davide is finishing his degree in Architecture and works at a rehearsal studio. Giuseppe studies and teaches guitar.

Aside from your enormous passion for your respective instruments, do you have any particular hobbies?

We're all film buffs, and we like to read. Andrea is a die-hard Fiorentina supporter. I'm working on a comic strip. Giuseppe likes doing electronics, sampling the effects from his guitar. Davide has a passion for straight vodka. No ice.

I find your sound to be a successful mix of grunge malaise (Nirvana and Alice In Chains in particular) and the rock urgency of our own Verdena (who often borrow sounds clearly derived from Motorpsycho). Are these deliberate echoes, or does your sonic search end up tuning into these frequencies purely by chance?

Nirvana and Alice In Chains were two of the bands we listened to most during our formative years, when we were kids, along with Pearl Jam, Afterhours and Marlene Kuntz. It's no coincidence that our band's name is also a reference to "Scentless Apprentice," a track from "In Utero" in which Kurt Cobain talks precisely about Grenouille. Verdena, on the other hand, have never been a reference point for us, at least as far as I'm concerned. Andrea likes them a lot, and Davide and Giuseppe listen to them too, so I imagine something of theirs might somehow come through in our sound, but I'd put that down more to chance, or to the fact that we're partly drawing on the same musical genre.

Your lyrics are full of clear references to the immobility of the current national political scene. Touring Italy to promote your music, do you notice young people's persistent lack of interest in politics, or is something changing?

There's a lack of interest in politics because for years now someone has had an interest in diverting public attention away from the country's problems and the ones our generation will have to face. Twenty years of commercial television and the Tangentopoli scandal have bred a distrust in the possibility of contributing in any way to how our community is run. They've further sharpened that deeply Italian mindset whereby it's only right to look after your own interests and those of your inner circle, by whatever means, legal or otherwise. Political ideologies have lost their meaning, and we're sliding towards the oblivion of an authoritarian democracy. The few who understand this are deeply worried; most people simply don't care.

Speaking of politics: it's striking that you chose, for the cover art of your new EP, the drawing of the kiss between Brezhnev and Honecker, taken from a mural on the Berlin Wall. There's nothing sexually ambiguous about it: it was a traditional greeting in Eastern Bloc countries. Seen today, though, it seems to sum up, in a surprising way, certain political-sexual drifts of our times.

The cover is a reference to our gerontocratic political class, intent solely on looking after its own interests, keeping the country stuck in immobility. What's more, sex has become a bargaining chip in today's politics between politicians and businessmen. Sex and money to seal deals within their small, exclusive circle of friends and acquaintances. The Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War, the one we were caught up in years ago, the same one still used today by the right as a bogeyman to gather votes. The threat of a return to communism, while they do business with Putin. But it's also something a certain nostalgic left perhaps still longs for, dreaming of an anachronistic revolution. The Berlin Wall fell a while ago now — accept that you're living in the present, and it'll be harder for anyone to take you for a ride.

On top of that, the image chosen for the EP's cover is a provocation aimed at a homophobic society like Italy's. I'm sure a passionate kiss between two men (because that's what it looks like, if you look closely) will make quite a few people turn their noses up.

"You can't make a revolution in Italy" eloquently highlights the difficulties that exist in our country for anyone trying to make a certain kind of "alternative" music. I'd like to dig into this with you...

For anyone making alternative music it's tough, because there's no interest in the message. The new frontier of music is reality shows. The media try to capture people's attention by building characters the audience is made to grow fond of through the televised portrayal of their suffering. Once the character has been created, they get him to make a record, ideally with a song written to measure, tailored to fit him like a brand new outfit. This is the sense of belonging we're being trained into: screened, mediated content, the absence of any original, free, subjective message. With the loss of political and social ideals, the sense of belonging is disappearing too, even in music. On top of that, the avalanche of information we're subjected to is partly taking away the pleasure of discovery. The ugly part is that sometimes you think you've found different logics and different realities in other circuits, and then you realize that's almost never actually the case. Everyone's just trying to take the money home, without risking getting too passionate about it.

Many people long for the first half of the Nineties, when a large-scale alt-rock scene came together in Italy. Afterhours, Marlene Kuntz, CSI, Almamegretta (just to name the best-known ones) all started out right around then. Almost twenty years on, do you think the conditions exist today for a major new alternative scene to emerge in Italy?

In my opinion, they absolutely do. In recent years I've heard bands with a huge amount to say, especially in Milan; we're lucky enough to have a scene built around venues like Magnolia and Tambourine. Last winter, "Miami Ancora" was put on at Leoncavallo, with loads of bands and singer-songwriters taking turns across four separate stages. I couldn't believe how many people were there: they completely filled the place, which is genuinely huge, right through till morning. There's this small community, partly made up of the musicians and small labels themselves, that keeps growing bigger every year and makes it possible to organize events like this, using the web as a tool for self-promotion.

A lot is happening in the indie underground - in recent weeks, besides you, I've had the chance to meet Bud Spencer Blues Explosion and Amor Fou, two other really interesting projects, and I was pleasantly surprised. Still, I get the feeling that in the '90s there was more synergy between different musicians and bands. Today it seems like everyone tends to cultivate their own little garden without caring about the overall growth of the movement, which would undoubtedly benefit everyone.

I wasn't lucky enough to experience the '90s scene from the inside, so I can't really compare it to the current moment. What's certain is that today there's a strong tendency to take yourself too seriously and just look after your own interests. Making music costs a lot, nobody cuts you any slack, you have to be able to do everything to have a chance of emerging. But every now and then, in the mix, you come across someone who still has passion and feeling, and that gives you a lot of strength to keep going.

Which other Italian bands are you currently in touch with?

Arturo Fiesta Circo, Pan del Diavolo, Io?Drama.

I imagine "You can't make a revolution in Italy" is a prelude to a new album...

Actually, this EP represents a transitional work: an experiment aimed at finding a more mature identity of our own and defining the artistic contribution of each individual member of the band.

We'll start working on the songs for the new album these very days, while we're playing the EP live. We wanted a more varied set: we were tired of playing only fast songs for 45 minutes straight. So on this record there are two calmer tracks, and above all there's a wider range of sounds compared to the previous record, which, given how it was recorded, sounded very punk.

We needed to go through this experience in order to approach the writing of new songs with a new style. After talking about social issues, on the next record I'd like to talk about love - obviously still in Grenouille style, a tormented, fiery, psychotic kind of love. I'd like to call the album "L'amore ai tempi del DSM". What DSM stands for, though, I won't say... for now...

Name an artist you'd do anything to collaborate with.

Davide Toffolo, Io?Drama, Il Teatro degli Orrori.

A so-called "geographical" question: you talk a lot about Milan in your songs. It reminds me a lot of Afterhours. Why is Milan so present in the songs of Milanese artists? For Roman bands, for instance, that's a much rarer thing.

Because Milan has a cursed kind of charm. Milan is loved and hated, modern and vintage, saintly and whorish. It's such a strange, crazy city that it can't help but stir up endless emotions in anyone able to sense it. It's as if it became your lover, your accomplice; it makes you suffer and it makes you dream. It can be your big opportunity, or it can scar your soul, scratch you like a record. Anyone who manages to come to terms with it can only celebrate it like a great, tormented love.

One of my favorite songs by Enzo Jannacci is about a boy from southern Italy who arrives in Milan at two or three years old with his father, bundled up like a parcel, the counterweight to a cardboard suitcase, and as soon as he sees this big city - the houses, the cars, the people, the kids running around - he falls in love with it forever and carries those images in his heart for the rest of his life. And the music fully expresses that feeling that swells your chest. Milan, with its canals, its trams, its center and its outskirts, has that effect. Watch Salvatores's latest film, or try listening to "Pioggia di Novembre" by Vinicio Capossela, and you'll understand what Milan is.

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