Ianva - In Search of Lost Ardor

by Claudio Fabretti

A happy anomaly on the Italian indie scene, Genoa's Ianva reject the sounds, styles and templates of the national alternative-rock mainstream. They combine the martial drama of neofolk with the heritage of the Italian singer-songwriter tradition and a decadently "noir" attitude. Their debut full-length, "Disobbedisco!", a kind of theatrical tribute to D'Annunzio's Fiume expedition and his legionnaires, has become a genuine musical event. We talk to the band's two voices, Mercy and Stefania D'Alterio, in this exclusive interview.

Mercy, first of all can you tell us what Ianva is today, and what pushed musicians from such different backgrounds to come together on this project?

Ianva is an atypical musical ensemble, at least by current standards, counting as many as 9 core members plus an ever-renewing roster of occasional collaborators. It should be said that this lineup wasn't part of the original plan. Initially, in fact, the issue wasn't putting together a band, but rather bringing a very specific sound to life. An encouraging preview of that sound, albeit in a much more modular and repetitive form, had already been worked out by me, Francesco and Argento, experimenting for fun with samples. At that stage we were interested in creating backing tracks that sounded dramatic and martial, evoking apocalyptic scenarios, but that—by choice of sonic texture—didn't draw on sources any later than the late '70s.

The warmth and depth of the original samples, assembled into relentless, obsessive loops over which we wove rhythmic patterns played at maximum dynamic intensity, gave rise to something genuinely intense, light years away from all the limp stuff you'd hear around at the time. What remained was the problem of limited harmonic development. We solved that by bringing in Fabio Gremo, with whom, separately, I was writing more "authorial" material. We thought it would be interesting to combine these two aspects. Hence the need to go back to fully-played music and widen the lineup enough to cover the entire sonic landscape, which up to that point had only existed virtually.

So everyone brought in musicians they trusted, and I introduced Stefania, who also contributed her expertise in Italian vintage cinematic and mainstream music, which went on to form the final strand of Ianva's musical DNA.

What are your main musical influences? Here too, it seems there's no shortage of diversity...

If we consider individual influences, the sum total would be huge, but not everything feeds into the Ianva sound as such. At the start, the dramatic-martial component drawn from Laibach, In The Nursery, Puissance, Sophia and similar acts was strong—that's undeniable. Among other things, we liked the aura of menace that some of these projects conveyed, while also giving the impression of having a great deal of fun doing it. It's healthy for someone, every now and then, to come along and expose that kind of priestly doublethink that lurks within the so-called alternative scene. In the end, though, our love for Italian soundtrack art of the '60s and '70s clearly ended up winning out.

I still love the situationist spirit of those Slovenians, but on the other hand, I also think that entire discographies of acclaimed ambient-martial projects aren't worth a single track by Trovaioli, Micalizzi, Cipriani, or the De Angelis brothers. Then there's Morricone, but we're certainly not the only ones nor the first, seeing as the best records by Death In June, Sol Invictus et similia have always chased something Morricone-esque. That said, if I may, when us Italians put our hands on certain sounds, we've got an extra gear. As they say, to each his own expertise.

All this, however, doesn't mean that certain typically British or Teutonic strands don't exert their influence too. Seventies acid-folk, for instance: Comus, Spyrogyra, Mellow Candle, Malicorne... Stuff we listened to until we were sick of it, and which, duly Mediterraneanized, ended up embedded in our sound. There's definitely a whiff of kraut-rock, there's the decadent rock of Roxy Music, of Reed's "Berlin", or of Bowie's "Lady Grinning Soul". And then there's post-black metal à la Ulver, thirty-year-old Italian chart-pop, 1920s cabaret, para-mainstream Italian wave à la Faust'o, Decibel... quite a mess!

Personally, I couldn't do without Scott Walker, Marc Almond, Peter Hammill, Arthur Lee & Love, Duncan Browne & Metro and many others. Listening to them is good for the soul, but it also teaches you to be demanding with yourself when it comes to writing and composition.

It seems there's a special bond between your Genoa, its historic singer-songwriters, and the France of the chansonniers. Do you feel the weight of this legacy and this connection?

Well, in the previous question I left it out not because it hasn't had any weight, but precisely because, on the contrary, it's so central and foundational that we perceive it almost as automatic. In Genoa, that whole world, that imagery, especially once you're past thirty, is a widely shared heritage. You could really call it a kind of familiarity, since the likes of De André, Tenco, Bindi, and Lauzi were the music playing around the house when we were children.

In particular, De André became over time a sort of household spirit of Genoese-ness, and helped bring about a different level of awareness of a certain civic character so undefined and elusive that it wasn't even clear to us. At least until Fabrizio provided us with a quintessence of it, pure and polished like a Fabergé egg. And it took an immense artist to pull that off, given that the subjects he dealt with, his own soul, and that mysterious civic soul we mentioned earlier, were competing in equal measure between prickly gruffness and a tolerant generosity lived out with a strange sense of shame, as if it were some ugly flaw to hide.

It goes without saying that the road taken in Genoa ends up at Brel's rainy Plat Pays, at Ferré's Rive Gauche, or at Brassens' Midi, full of oddball anarchists, sometimes pathetic, sometimes despicable, but always able to teach us something about ourselves that, out of cowardice or sheer convenience, we might have preferred to ignore. It's no coincidence that on our first mini-CD we wanted to include a lovely live rendition Stefania gave of Brel's classic "Amsterdam", and for the same reason, in arranging the title track we kept more than half an ear on the masterful arrangements Gian Piero Reverberi did for "Tutti Morimmo A Stento".

Unfortunately, even in Genoa all this is being rapidly liquidated. The youngest are, in every respect, identical to their peers anywhere else in the West; they've never heard of any of this and don't even care. The older ones are either busy staying afloat, or signing up for merengue classes, or giving themselves a heart attack at the stadium. A city that has come to a sad end.

Is there something linking you, on the other hand, to the international neofolk movement, with which many have associated you? And which neofolk bands do you prefer?

Ianva is a band that makes Italian easy listening music. "Easy" in the sense the term could have had 30 or 40 years ago. That is, "extremely heavy", if measured against the simplistic thinking guiding almost all of today's music production. On top of that, we have a marked fondness for historical and cultural themes tied to the national story. A story that's already long over. Today's Italy is a disintegrated, soulless country, and so it gives us no inspiration, nor any interest in taking sides with any enclave. That point clarified, the fact remains that our first live show was as headliners on the first of two nights of a very important international neofolk festival held every spring in Switzerland. Add to that the fact that our first responses (and also the most substantial ones) came from that circle of listeners, or from adjacent scenes. So if I now started being fussy and drawing a thousand distinctions, I'd really be shameless. Sure, I've had disagreements even while moving through that scene, but when I see it attacked from the outside, I can't help but object. That's because whoever attacks it does so for two reasons. The first: because they're convinced they're carrying out some "high anti-fascist vigilance", and I don't think it's necessary to point out how abysmally stupid that is. Or, and this is almost always the case, they're settling small private scores under cover. Which says a lot about the average human quality that's now dominant even in "alternative" scenes.

Still, I consider that style a wonderful missed opportunity. This, mind you, not because of the boycotts people in that scene love to tell each other about, but because of the ineptitude and lack of talent of a large share of its protagonists. It was a brilliant idea, it could have become the only authentically subversive musical movement in thirty years! And when I use the word "subversive", I'm not referring to any political aspect, but to something far more ethereal, yet in its own way more radical. I'm talking about the ability to force paradigm shifts in collective, or more specifically generational, feeling. It could have become the sound of absolute dissent, the non-political kind, the kind that can no longer stand the present. A present marked by a petty, oily, ham-fisted totalitarianism. A totalitarianism ferocious and devastating toward cultures, landscapes, lives and souls. So it would make sense to counter it with an imagery that takes on the responsibility of reminding people that human beings also need to feel united. To demand an existence where there's room for harmony, for preservation as well as dynamism, for fixed points as well as points of flight. A world that doesn't keep slipping out from under your feet every second.

In reality, neofolk is an extremely sentimental movement, driven by intentions that are, in some way, noble. But idealism isn't enough. The widespread idea that you can get by without real skills, real professionalism and real planning is like a crack that lets all sorts of things creep in. Including paranoid little führers, vain idiots, if not outright crooks. That's why we run on our own, even though we have excellent relationships with some bands and artists, and there have been a few records we've really liked. Always too few, though, if the goal was something more than just scraping by.

"Disobbedisco!", your first album, is a concept album. Can you tell us how it came about? Are the characters real? And what does the "disobedience" of the title refer to?

At the risk of sounding like a bullshitter, I like to think there was some kind of psychic attunement at work. After all, in the period when the idea took shape, an genuinely striking series of coincidences occurred. Maybe our nausea with the present had reached such a point that it primed us, in some way, to become a kind of "antenna".

But, leaving aside the evocative aspects, the fact remains that those few, turbulent years between the end of the Great War and the rise of Fascism — by now mysterious territory for the average Italian today — were one of those hinge-points where History finds itself facing a staggering array of possible paths forward. But what struck me most, first and foremost, about all the memoirs from Fiume, as well as the abundant literature by war veterans, was something I'd call "anthropological" in nature. Thousands of pages passed through my hands, and in the end, the feeling wasn't that we're separated from these men by just a few generations, but that we belong to a species that has "mutated" compared to the one that once set those thoughts down on paper.

There's a fine essay by Calderazzi on the subject, with a title that alone captures the essential point: "Almeno Non Ignobili" ("At Least Not Ignoble"). That's exactly it. The concept of "ignobility" seems to have evaporated entirely from collective feeling, or else it's become so vague and "reduced to reportage" that it has lost all weight. This is, it seems, quite the opposite of what happened back then, when the sphere of decorum and personal honor extended so far as to find an interface with the collective and, by logical extension, with History itself.

The memoir from which we drew the key aspects of the concept is a minor work that constantly veers into the novelistic, complete with an intrigue in the background that today we'd call esoteric-conspiratorial, but it proves remarkably reliable when it comes to the mentality, the customs, the color of those days. It matters little that the author likely uses fictitious names to conceal the true identities of the protagonists. It's their archetypal quality that interests us. They come from opposing sides and, like everyone, always obeyed more out of a sense of duty toward others than out of faith in authority. They stop and rebel only when they see the shadow of the Ignoble spreading. They seem to tell us that while one can still do one's duty even suspecting the cause is wrong, it's unthinkable to do so for a clearly ignoble cause. Gabriele D'Annunzio, echoing Garibaldi, telegraphed that single reply (Disobbedisco! / I disobey!) to the Council Presidency that ordered him to stand down on the eve of the occupation of Fiume.

The treatment we received from the Allies, their rapacity and their clear intent to reduce Italy to a vassal statelet of ice-cream vendors and mandolin players, gave rise to a kind of "insurrectionism in uniform" that had little to do with politics and much to do with ethics and utopianism. A reckless, mocking defiance in the face of the wishes of the Anglo-American powers already positioning themselves as "masters of the world" — the kind of defiance we can now only dream of.

In your lyrics I sense pietas for those men, but also nostalgia for that Italy and those values, or at least the impression that there was a kind of "barbarization," a progressive loss of dignity and courage… Was that really the last "generation still capable of devoting itself to endeavors that transcended the personal"?

I remember the context in which I expressed that idea. It wasn't, of course, exclusive to that experience alone. Naturally, those who took part in the Resistance, or say in '68 or the Years of Lead, certainly didn't do so for personal gain either. Nowadays it's fashionable to point out, partly rightly, that these historical experiences only ended up producing new establishments, often as harmful as the one crushing us today. Which makes it almost inevitable to scale down the idealistic scope of these events and reread them all through a far more pragmatic lens. In practice, as is typical of a nation as endemically factional and sheep-like as ours, we've swung from one extreme to the other. From the most angelic, improbable hagiography, we've moved to a reading of events dominated by a mean-spirited and fundamentally vulgar sentiment, very much in keeping with the tenor of our times.

Based on these new interpretations we should believe, for instance, that all the '68 generation were simply ambitious little sharks bent on storming the halls of power for power's sake, impatient with how slowly the generational handover was happening at the top. We should believe that ALL of them went on to have brilliant careers and became wealthy parasites that the gullible masses must keep in privilege through their own sweat. And that, above all, they were all acting in bad faith from the very start. This interpretation is utterly absurd, not only because it disregards the facts entirely, but because it clashes with something intrinsic to the human condition, a trait of our species: the idealism, the restlessness and, almost always, the wishful naivety of the young, especially young men.

Societies with a large number of young unmarried men, lacking a clear social and professional place, are inevitably turbulent. Islamic countries are particularly reactive to the steamroller of globalization, not really because of their ruling classes, but under pressure from their vast masses of young people. So, as you can see, the Fiume generation wasn't technically the last in that sense. Even today I can side with Subcomandante Marcos or the guerrillas of the Niger Delta for the same reasons that, had I lived back then, I would have sided with the men of Fiume. But if we look at Italy, and consider who was the last to grapple with the question of sovereignty, of the freedom to be an autonomous agent of politics and History, then that generation truly was the last. Fascism wasn't, since it became dependent almost immediately on national power blocs in a strongly conservative and class-based role. Nor was the Resistance, which in its Communist and Actionist duality entailed vassalage to, respectively, Soviet Russia and Anglo-Saxon Capitalism. Nor were '68 and '77, which weren't even remotely touched by this issue or these concerns — if anything, they were the ones who threw the last handfuls of dirt onto its grave.

You seem to stubbornly pursue a path entirely atypical and against the grain of the Italian indie scene — the Tora! Tora! scene, so to speak, and similar circles. I imagine your aesthetic and your approach have cost you a certain amount of ostracism from the usual suspects. How do you relate to Italian indie rock? And what do you say to those who link you to certain right-wing ideologies common to part of the neofolk scene?

After all, it's clear that the "right-wing" ideology found in neofolk is, in most cases, simply a matter of aesthetics used as an escape into the imaginary, a kind of stylistic protest. Understandable in many ways, I'd add. I believe the ongoing, years-long slide into abjection and vulgarity will only multiply aversion and dissent toward the present age. Which is — a point I always stress — the only possible, despair-inducing scenario. But these are symbolic revolts, and, all things considered, low-risk ones. Can you really picture even the most fanatical neofolker facing the prospect of, I won't even say prison, but a single night in a holding cell? And yet there are people who act as if they were dealing with the Nar terrorists! Consider too that there's something pathological in the fact that on one hand not even an Art Deco cover or a haircut is tolerated, while on the other, practically anything goes. Even the worst of the worst.

They can say whatever they like about me: that I'm a fucking reactionary, that I'm playing a dirty game, that my opinion is unacceptable on its face — but I still think there's something lame about it from a purely logical standpoint. Our case, though, is different. We probably rub a lot of people the wrong way because there's no way to hold anything over us. We're not forced to beg for little deals for printing and distribution, and we're masters in our own house. In our small way, we're constantly in the black. We're appreciated abroad, in our own fashion, doing what others haven't even remotely considered doing for years: being Italian, and doing it with our heads held high, no less. It seems we're becoming an inconvenient presence.

We've received, for instance, compliments and encouragement from some very well-known people — pillars, let's say, of "highbrow" Italian music — but only in private. We're fine with that. Writers and journalists visit our site, and even the mainstream press has approached us, though very cautiously. Perhaps they were hoping for good material for the usual "human interest" pieces they like to run, and in that we were happy to disappoint them. They only want real or presumed nazi-skins to throw into the pillory section. They're not interested in creativity, in complexity: they know their audience! The fact that we've gathered and tried to give dignity to things, musical and otherwise, that Italy abandoned along the way out of anxiety to conform, out of servile diligence, doesn't mean anything to people whose sole professional purpose is "normalization."

In fact we're not a right-wing band, nor do we like fake-militaristic theatrics on stage. It's just that we have neither the need nor the desire to resort to all the clichés and little uniforms of the "respectable" underground, which is invariably left-wing. That, apparently, is already enough to be considered suspect material.

As for the Italian indie circuit (because abroad things go differently; in Norway we even found ourselves in a readers poll right below Sonic Youth, for example), aside from a few exceptions, there's a basically mutual indifference. Surprisingly, though, we've gotten good feedback from certain hip-hop circles, thanks also to the odd and welcome "tribute" paid to us by the guys from TruceKlan, who sampled "Di Nuovo In Armi" for a track on Metal Carter's latest record.

Perhaps these easy pigeonholings stem from the fact that certain words ("daring," "honor," "splendor," "nation") have for years now been the property of the Italian right. Just as D'Annunzio and his legionaries have been, for that matter. Was that a natural appropriation by that political camp, or do you think, on the contrary, that there's been a collective repression, by everyone else, of those values and of that particular historical phase?

That checks out. Except for the fact that for some years now there's been an attempt to reclaim the Fiume enterprise for the left, in a kind of pre-no-global reading championed by the likes of Hakim Bey, Salaris, and so on... There's certainly some truth in those analyses, but they sidestep a certain ontological absurdity that your question, instead, brings to light. If certain terms are rejected on ideological grounds, then by the logic of opposites the left ought to prefer cowardice, duplicity and dishonor, darkness and the planetary pimp. But is that really so? A feature of every human language, era and culture, these concepts are today — I'm not sure how spontaneously — shunned simply because, for a certain period, they were the keywords of totalitarian propaganda. And not only fascist propaganda. Do these zealous watchdogs of linguistic correctness really think that imperial and Stalinist Russia, the Cuban revolution, Marshal Tito, Ceausescu, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot didn't use similar terminology? The partisans I knew spoke of their experience as a "national redemption." The fascists countered with the motive of "honor to be saved," even in defeat. Redemption, honor… Heavy concepts today, when one is obliged to stick to two or three elementary dogmas.

It's a recent development, this a priori denial of the enemy's human dignity. Fascism was "absolute evil," Islam is the "absolute enemy," we are the "empire of good"... A vision born of pure mental retardation! A fine result of the extinction of chivalric spirit from Western thought. Today, the right blames Marxist cultural hegemony for this erasure, and the left has ended up believing it too. They're even proud of it. Too bad it isn't true, or at least not entirely. Red Army veterans, for instance, were famous for the epic charge of their stories and testimonies. Up until the early Seventies, the Italian Communist Party published translations of Soviet war memoirs. I have a few at home. They're packed full of certain words and certain concepts. Not to mention the various Resistance autobiographies...

The truth is something else. Seemingly unaware, the contemporary left has been so thoroughly steeped in liberal thought that it has lost all sense of itself. It takes on, entirely and enthusiastically, the burden of blame that should, at the very least, be shared equally. It's advanced liberal-capitalism that requires deep control over the collective mindset. Naturally, in order to deactivate certain human prerogatives — holding to one's personal honor, the instinct to react against abuse, the inability to coexist with the vile beyond a certain point — it was necessary to make the related vocabulary itself unusable. The famous control over words. Words that, moreover, all have to do with the collective dimension, with freely joining a shared destiny. A tall order in a society where we're meant to believe only private interests exist. A genuine meta-communication aimed at channeling us into a cynical, selfish, wretched, cowardly existential outlook. With broad brushstrokes of do-goodism, of course. And the left, as always, swallows it with a zeal that frankly strikes me as incredible.

Your records have a strong evocative, almost cinematic charge, I'd say. Listening to "Disobbedisco" you inevitably find yourself immersed in those places and atmospheres. What role does the visual, imaginative element play in your music?

A fundamental role, I'd say. Even before recording a single note, I could say I already knew our characters as if they were real people, and that I had actually visited those places in that time. I have vivid images before my eyes of the settings and the views. If "Di Nuovo In Armi" or "Colpo Di Maglio" are great collective shots with an abundance of extras, "Fuoco A Fiume" or "Per Non Dormire" are close-up, subjective takes. Andrea Chimenti undoubtedly carves out a stunning close-up for himself. Yes, "Disobbedisco!" would make a great subject for a film, or better yet, for a TV drama series of the kind they used to make in the Seventies.

No one, a hundred years from now, will think to set an epic story of love and death in our present day. Only kids' tantrums, couples breaking up, small-time climbers' schemes, "Bagaglino"-style boob shows and assorted Muccino-esque melodrama... Nowadays, for some, imagining is a matter of survival.

Another essential component of your music is passion. In another interview, you claim that "the contemporary age has an unmistakably feminine streak, but also a wholly frigid one." Is there really no hope left, in today's world, of experiencing eros in its fullest dimension — the kind that overflows from your stories?

In today's world, meaning the advanced West, no trace of it can be found anymore. At first one might be tempted to point to the usual suspects. In short: the visual, mass-media and commercial bombardment of suggestive images, women's flesh treated like pork. The stress of living in an increasingly competitive society, the upheavals caused by a feminism dominated by ideology rather than by a sense of justice... There's a whole well-worn reactionary handbook that's supposed to explain the phenomenon. Unfortunately, though, despite containing some undeniable truths, this tired list of causes now appears to be rapidly turning into just another cliché. This is because of its fundamental inability to provide definitive explanations. It shouldn't come as a surprise: our era is horrified by anything said or done once and for all.

Eroticism — the real kind, the kind the ancient world sang of so sublimely — is a uniquely human trait. Just like the sense of the Sacred, it's an exclusive prerogative of our species. If you exclude one you exclude the other, as if they were two appendages recently severed from the body of our civilization. The fact that today so much insistence is placed on concepts like "transgression," "seduction" and other similar bits of nonsense — good only for selling navel-piercing trinkets and fetish shoes — is telling.

The usual logic of quantity over quality prevails when it comes to freedom. But this freedom becomes ever more demeaning each time around, since it's exercised within a circuit that is inherently anti-human. Has anyone ever considered, for instance, how castrating it can be for an entire male humanity to be forced to give up a whole series of behavioral prerogatives embedded in our genetic code by our own evolutionary history? And are we so sure women actually appreciate that soft, spineless drone every decent man today feels obliged to pretend to be? Above all: are we certain that this hedonistic view of sex as a measure of social success, of one's own "marketability," isn't precisely what has definitively poisoned the realm of relationships?

True eroticism has nothing to do with this crude, obtuse, small-minded, below-the-belt secularism. It feeds on mystery, on cosmic duality, on the cautious mutual interpenetration of separate principles. It lets you sense, in a single breath, both transience and eternity; it fills you with a fever of conquest that finds fulfillment in a single object of love. And it inclines you toward life — not individual, egotistical life, but life itself — so that one's whole being calmly disposes itself toward its own partial continuation through the lives yet to come.

The West today is sadly sterile not because it's too old, but because it's populated by a mass of eternal children terrified at the prospect of their own finitude and death, mortified by their own failures and daily cowardices, besieged by images of silicone breasts and scalloped lips that are still supposed to serve as a "carrot," when in fact they're nothing but the umpteenth eulogy for non-life. Millennia after the well-deserved catastrophe, future archaeologists will find, in the graves of our civilization, these prosthetics still intact, sunk into ribcages or flattened against rows of teeth. That's probably all our era will leave behind.

Your music has been associated with the term "archeo-futurism." What exactly does that mean?

About a decade ago, the French polemicist Guillaume Faye coined this term in a pamphlet — a rather overheated and provocative one, to say the least — that bore the same title. Right-wing stuff, make no mistake, but of an atypical kind. In his attempt to devise new syntheses, the author ended up abandoning the terrain of political analysis and venturing into the territory of sheer weirdness. The tone is often prophetic and the content apocalyptic, so much so that it seems to have been written under the influence of mescaline. The author himself, a former paratrooper and former porn actor, describes himself as an enthusiastic experimenter with drugs. The curious thing is that many of the predictions drawn from that fascist-psychedelic stream of consciousness have since come true, right on schedule.

In any case, that's not the only reason we decided to "pinch" the term from him. If nothing else, because I found the solutions put forward in the text barely, if at all, agreeable. What struck me most was the statement of what I consider an undeniable fact: that any form of dissent today has no path forward other than inventing a new culture of action. More precisely, in the field of Aesthetics. A territory over which the establishment has invested enormous resources in recent decades, but which, by its very nature, proves more vulnerable than others. From this point of view, our little "expropriation" isn't out of place, since our project can be described as a kind of retro-avant-garde. Not only because it shines a light on other individual values and other possible ways of behaving compared to the current ones, but because it does so by drawing on outdated expressive forms that evoke other eras — yet with a view to leaping forward, beyond a "today" that's no longer tolerable.

I think this has been correctly understood by our listeners because, however much our sound might have left us open to criticism, no one has ever accused us of revivalism. We've gotten our hands dirty with things untouchable by the standards of indie correctness, both musically and thematically, and we'll keep doing so more and more in the future, always with an eye toward the anti-contemporary. But with an avant-garde outlook, as if we were fishing today, from the past, for the sounds and the heartstrings we'd like to hear vibrating in the future.

Another apparent contradiction seems to be the one between “arditismo” and “decadentismo”, both central aspects of your aesthetic. How do you reconcile two phenomena that seem so irreconcilable?

Only apparently so, though. Studying the history of these movements the way it's usually done – as if they were separate, watertight realities – cheapens certain fundamental truths. These phenomena originate from the same historical phase, feed off the same climate, and involve the same socio-cultural segments. Granted, the interchange between the upper and popular classes that gave rise to a new type of Italian took a fairly long time to occur, given how limited the flow of information was back then. But already on the eve of the Great War, keen observers of the era's mores, like D'Annunzio or Marinetti, were fully able to grasp all its features and implications.

In the beginning there were Des Esseintes, Andrea Sperelli and their like. If you notice, these characters were not merely recluses devoted to beauty, bon-vivants surrounded by Liberty-style furnishings and a gardenia in the buttonhole. Skeptics, yes, but also prey to a strange longing for the firework of the sublime act, dominated by the idea of the “beautiful death”. Ready for the duel, the dangerous affair, the ruinous passion. Suffering over the extinction of the spirit of Chivalry, seen as the sole giver of meaning to a condition of privilege experienced inwardly as undeserved, since it had never been put to the test.

The next step can be summed up in the figure of the aviator Paolo Tarsis, a dissolute mechanical knight who lives each day as if it were his last, aware that the moment of the supreme trial is drawing near. Meanwhile, popular literature appropriates the peculiar topoi of early decadentism, often within a para-erotic framework or through the device of mock didacticism.

It's hard to believe today, but the young men of the petite bourgeoisie of the time – the very ones who would go on to form the backbone of the junior officer corps in the trenches – were far more familiar with the now-forgotten Guido Da Verona than, say, with Papini. Literate young workers, too, happily alternated texts of revolutionary syndicalism with self-indulgent readings steeped in B-grade decadentism. All this, combined with the incendiary action of the Futurists, would give rise to a curious attitude that, decades later, would be summed up in the '68 slogan “we want the world and we want it now!”

The Situationists must have studied the Italian avant-gardes of the early twentieth century and the Fiume enterprise very closely! The idea takes shape that life can be played with nonchalance, with “sprezzatura” to use a D'Annunzian term, but the stakes on the table have to be colossal. At a certain point it became a feeling of generational scope, cutting across social classes, that a world founded on justice and beauty could only be born consecrated by the fire of the battlefield. Hence the unleashing of the Nietzschean Dionysus, who was the true guardian spirit of the legionary movement.

The admiration that officers from the upper classes felt for the “sun-clad street urchins” of the arditi units, the perception of an archaic nobility, purged of every bourgeois superstructure, expressed in their serene fearlessness, is documented in countless memoirs. Hence the inner need, felt by many members of the elites at the front, to live up to this newborn warrior nobility embodied by the rank and file. Andrea Sperelli, in grey-green cloth, had found his great reason to live or die, and Paolo Tarsis will fly over Vienna with a cargo of tricolor leaflets to drop and a dose of cyanide kept in an elegant ebony-and-gold pillbox, its lid shaped like a skull and bearing the Latin inscription “Secretum Tenebrarum”.

One last question for you, Mercy: can you give us a preview of your next record?

Right now we're putting the finishing touches on what will be our new EP, which will pave the way for our second full-length, which we'll start working on right after. The upcoming release will feature a ballad, the title track, which in my opinion is truly impetuous, called “L'Occidente”. I expect it will stir up quite a bit of debate, but that doesn't scare me in the least. Those who are meant to understand will understand. The rest holds further surprises, including a track sung by Stefania, more baleful than ever, with echoes of a devotional yet at the same time Dionysian South. Crowning it all, a sort of prequel to “Disobbedisco!”, whose musical content is an arrangement of a classic that, as far as we know, no one had ever “tackled” before.

This is material that will remain almost entirely exclusive, as is our habit, and won't find a place on the upcoming full-length. As for the latter, it's a bit early to reveal anything specific. It certainly won't be a pure concept album, complete with a narrative structure like “Disobbedisco!”. The reason is easy to imagine: ideas as romantic and powerful as those provided by the story that inspired our debut don't come along every day. Besides, we may be “sonic reactionaries”, but we certainly don't want to fossilize on what's already been done. There will still be a guiding idea, of a conspiratorial bent in our own way, which will let us take a broader look across twentieth-century Italian history.

We now turn to a couple of questions for Stefania T. D'Alterio, who is Ianva's chanteuse. An eclectic personality, able in recent years to move between the retro-cinematic experience of Wagooba and an underground journalistic career, marked by a “politically uncorrect” stance, for outlets such as “Psycho!”, “Ritual”, “Classix!” and “Mondoculto”.

Stefania, your musical career begins above all with Wagooba. What did that experience mean to you, and what characterizes, instead, your role as vocalist in Ianva?

Actually, Wagooba was just one of the many bands that have had me behind the microphone over the years (and above all the one that reached the milestone of an actual recording), a lineup I grew attached to because it let me revisit some of my passions, such as disco, dirty electric blues, funk, filtered through the lens of cinematic retro.

With Ianva, in a sense, it was like “coming home”, getting back to what was and has always been my primary repertoire, mindful of dozens of nights spent covering songs by the great ladies of Italian music and top-tier standards (I'm talking about Mina, Ferri, Dalida, Milva, Bertè, Milly, and covers of Brel, Ferré, Weill…) in front of packed gay audiences – an important training ground, an environment I'm deeply attached to and will never stop loving and thanking (and one that in turn has shown it loves Ianva a great deal too, though it could hardly be otherwise – the “baleful” Stavros of “Disobbedisco!” is the daughter of gay icons like Marchesa Casati, Anna Fougez, Theda Bara, and so on)…

So when Mercy approached me, all I did was “dust off” what I had been doing for years, while bringing to the writing of the songs, at the same time, a certain love for the popular sounds of the deepest 60s/70s mainstream (the kind that usually makes the average connoisseur raise an eyebrow, only to later become the subject of a hypocritical, half-hearted rediscovery, if you know what I mean…) and for the soundtracks of our genre cinema. This last element, already very strong in Wagooba itself, surfaces in the current ensemble in what I'd call an overwhelming way.

Nothing so far off the mark, when it comes down to it… I simply brought my own writing and background to bring out even more strongly a sound that was already deeply personal. When we started out, openly presenting this "passionate, popular and Italian" cocktail to the bone (just think of our cover of “O' Surdato 'Nnammurato” alone, which would have horrified any indie crowd…), we were met with thinly veiled scorn, but then, given the results, many people slowly began to "open" their eyes and ears to that whole submerged world they had despised just a short while before. A real satisfaction.

For years you've been involved in "apocalypse culture" and weird culture, also as a writer and editor for the site mondoculto.com — can you tell us something about this activity of yours?

More than anything, it's a passion, one that started back in less suspicious times, when everyone was a bit of a "carbonaro", trying to probe, with an almost documentary and detached approach, the phenomena and oddities typical of the end of the millennium — things that could equally spark curiosity and revulsion in readers (cults, serial killers, extreme or fringe figures and trends, alternative lifestyles…), not giving a damn about political correctness, following in the footsteps of gurus like Parfrey, Goad and company; or honestly rehabilitating material produced in previous decades that had been far too undeservedly forgotten to make room for pretentious "trendy" junk. In short, material considered "unpresentable", but actually worth (re)discovering (this last part especially on "Mondo Culto").

The game went on for more than fifteen years (the last ten or so of which in "official" print form for a number of national publications), in cahoots with other "bad teachers" and partners in crime scattered across various corners of the globe, then the party ended… For some years now, in fact, I've noticed a certain unpleasant self-satisfaction, a kind of "épater les bourgeois" at all costs on the part of a horde of well-meaning newcomers without a shred of judgment or irony… The annoying feeling of finding yourself in the presence of those situations where the kid of the moment sits there happily shouting "poo-poo-bum-bum" just to grab the attention of the nearest adult.

The trouble is that, in recent times, due on the one hand to a prudish, reactionary resurgence, and on the other to an actual putrefaction of reality that by now outstrips even the darkest imagination, the Authoritative Adult has started listening to them and taking them all too seriously (not to mention the chain reactions and copycat phenomena triggered among their peers), with consequences plain for all to see…

(June 11, 2007)