Quadro di Troisi - A human comedy and a pylon in the sun

There's an old adage warning musicians about the difficulties of a second album following a brilliant debut. The trio behind Il Quadro di Troisi (Donato Dozzy, Andrea Noce, aka Eva Geist, and Pietro Micioni) have brilliantly escaped that impasse simply by telling “La verità”, or, which amounts to the same thing, “The comedy” of their lives. The album thrives on deep, delicate balances, in which attention to detail, the fine chiseling of every word, every sound, the flow of the melodies, the nuances of harmony and rhythm, all serve to return to the innocence of the original intuition. Which is to say, to the very source of poetry and expressive urgency. To fall in love with these songs, or rather, to properly return the love they hold for the listener, one has to clear the mind and heart a little of the residue of inattention that everyday life leaves behind; so as to let this elective universality of theirs truly touch us. These are healing songs. Each of us has one to share.

“The comedy” is a title rich with suggestions, some more immediate, some more literary. I'd love to know what the deepest and most substantial connection is between you and such a beautiful, evocative word.

Donato: The first thing to say is that the word comes from the lyrics of “Intenzioni”, one of the tracks from our previous album. In the final edit the track was shortened, and a section of lyrics was cut in which we talked about a “poor pylon” through which thousands of conversations passed, and therefore souls connected from one part of the world to another. All that was left for the pylon was to live out the comedy born from the tangle of all those stories and all those words. That's where the idea came from for what we originally thought would be the new album's title: “Commedia di un traliccio al sole”.

That would have been a great title too, very conceptual I'd say.

Donato: Almost Seventies. We loved it, but in the end we opted for essentiality.

Pietro: I didn't even know that was the genesis of the title!

How come, Pietro? Has your involvement in the project grown more intense over time?

Pietro: I gradually became part of this wonderful story. At the root of it all I'd put my friendship and artistic collaboration with Donato, who then introduced me to Andrea, back at the time of the first album, and little by little I went from being a musician to being an integral part of the whole creative process.

Coming back to the title, I take it this is a much more human comedy than a divine one, right?

Donato: It's also an Italian-style comedy, if you like, which is a cultural chapter we're very attached to for a thousand reasons. And besides, comedy is a kind of story that can hold so many registers, so many inspirations, where you laugh, you think, you smile, you get swept up. Just as the pylon's wires carried the words of so many people, so the title word contains all the others that are sung throughout the album. I'd call it a waltz of emotions.

Speaking of emotions, “Il profeta”, which opens the album, has on one hand this absorbed, almost ecstatic musicality that harks back to the first album, but on the other hand the lyrics build to an emotional peak that sets up the rest of the record.

Andrea: Yes, in fact, we've also started opening our live shows with this track. The vocal part is a demo I recorded on my own. We loved it and kept it.

Donato: Also because, when recording it, Andrea had applied a very particular chain of effects to the voice, and we didn't want to risk upsetting that balance, or ending up with a take that was less powerful expressively.

Did you start working on the album during the pandemic?

Andrea: Yes, so in the first phase everything was done remotely. Keep in mind I've been living in Berlin for a while now…

Pietro: That's why I missed the story about the pylon (laughs)

The second track “La Terra” struck me a lot for its lyrics too. When Andrea sings “Il tuo cuore è freddo/ Ricevi i messaggi in sogno da me/ Tu imiti la guerra/ Ripeti le immagini viste già in altre realtà/ Il tuo cuore è freddo (…) Io imito la terra/ Ripeto le immagini viste già in altre realtà/ E resta il tempo/ Solo di viaggiare nel tempo”, I can't help but think of “Silence, Time Turns”, a track by Terra di Benedetto, artistic and life partner of Mino di Martino, with whom she founded L'Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale and with whom she shared, together with Franco Battiato, Juri Camisasca and Lino Capra Vaccina among others, the experience of Telaio Magnetico. Aside from the elective affinities with Battiato's vision and sonic philosophy, I sense a sort of ancestral call to a sensibility other than everyday life, which seems to me a beautiful and important message. Is it an intentional reference?

Donato: Well, the lyrics are by Stefano di Trapani, so you can never really say. He's an unpredictable mind, among other things; aside from Battiato, obviously, the world of Juri Camisasca is also very close to us.

Andrea: It's a song that Stefano wrote after dreaming it, about ten years ago. At the time, word had spread that Patty Pravo was looking for songs for her new album. Stefano sent the demo he'd made back then — piano and voice, recorded, I think, with a mobile phone — from which it was probably quite hard to grasp the song's potential. In the end, the collaboration with Patty Pravo never came to fruition. The idea of turning it into a track for Quadro di Troisi came later, while we were finishing work on another of Stefano's compositions, which is on the first album and is called “L'ipotesi”. To the original draft I added the chorus and proposed it to Donato and Pietro, who happily agreed. Stefano had originally conceived it as a ballad, but the arrangement then took a different turn.

Donato: Honestly, in my opinion, with all the affection and admiration we have for her, Patty Pravo missed her chance (laughs).

The album also features several other collaborations: Aimée Portioli, Grand River, the great Suzanne Ciani, Fiona Brice, Daniele Di Gregorio. What criteria did you use to bring them on board?

Donato: Friendship, first of all. Often long-standing, too. And then the pleasure and the creative need to work with each of them and interact with their respective contributions. There are the guests who simply had to be there — not too many, not too few. And above all, they didn't just carry out tasks, but left their own mark within the creative process.

Sticking with songwriting, Andrea, would you call yourself a singer-songwriter?

Andrea: Yes, it's my job. When people ask me what I do, I answer “singer-songwriter”. It seems like the most fitting role for me. Although in fact I also have a background as an electronic musician. Let's say I'm a singer-songwriter-soundmaker; my way of writing is sometimes more “sonic” than traditional songwriting, less focused on the primary importance of words — although this second album is much more “word-driven” than the previous one.

Indeed, in this case I feel like I'm hearing more emotional and direct performances. There's a singer delivering the words to you head-on, even if she doesn't have a guitar in her hands but a mixing console at her side. I find this aspect very interesting, because not long ago a combination like this would have been hard to imagine, at least in Italy. On one side there are sound sculptors like Caterina Barbieri, descending from scientist-musicians like Clara Rockmore or Delia Derbyshire; on the other, a handful of singer-songwriters — very few until about a decade ago — and then the performers, many of them, who very often wrote their own material without it ever being acknowledged or properly valued. Today it seems to me that the synthesis of songwriting, female voice and sonic experimentation, embodied by figures like you, Daniela Pes and Marta Del Grandi, is making its way into the collective imagination. What do you think?

Andrea: I'd say it's a matter to be approached in two distinct steps. On one level I'd put all that “submerged” female songwriting. For many singer-songwriters from the Seventies through practically all of the Nineties, the fact that they wrote their own songs is simply not acknowledged. It's a fact that still carries weight, especially in the mainstream, even today in 2024. There's still a kind of silencing, a submerging of women's role as songwriters. Who today, for instance, remembers that Alice is the author of her own songs?

And then there's women's undeniable ability to work with sound…

Andrea: It's a history that, as you said, goes back to the early 1900s, but one that had been forgotten. In fact, especially in electronic music, there's still a prejudice concerning women's supposed inability to handle technical aspects on their own. So on one hand the figure of the female experimenter was denied, and on the other she would never be associated with that of the singer-songwriter, a role that, especially in Italy, has always been conceived and imagined as male. Now the ecofeminist claims that are rightly entering public debate are starting to shuffle the deck a bit and give a lot of prejudices a hard time. As far as I'm concerned, writing and sonic experimentation have always gone hand in hand, and have always been tied to my identity as a woman too. The stage name Eva Geist itself, under which I've signed many of my productions, says as much. I trained as a classical pianist and then very quickly, from the age of twenty, devoted myself to electronics. At the same time I've always written poems and songs. It's an issue I've always been quite active on. I wouldn't call it a fight — I'm not an activist — but rather a commitment to giving visibility to a female approach to writing and sonic experimentation, especially taken together.

Do you feel things are changing?

Andrea: Since the 2010s, I'd say yes. Not because there are more singer-songwriters working with sound than before, but simply because the ones who are there are finally being recognized. But it's a path on which I think we're lagging behind a bit all over the planet, not just in Italy, and it's not just about the artistic output, but a whole universe of things. Especially in the mainstream, I still see many singer-songwriters forced to point out that they write their own songs. Someone like Bjork has said in interviews that she's tired of people assuming her songs were conceived by a male ghost producer. So imagine if it hasn't happened to me too, despite there being plenty of clear evidence that I personally handle the writing and production myself. So things are getting better, but there's still a long way to go. Women create, but society needs to train its eye to notice them.

Pietro, since Andrea rightly mentioned Alice, I'd like to ask you – since you took your first steps in 80s pop and in italodance, which later evolved into italodisco – something about the music scene back then. Were you aware of the gender gap that ran through even worlds which, seen from today, look so glittering, so easygoing and cosmopolitan? Was there openness, or were there still plenty of prejudices?

Pietro: Plenty, actually. Even in a scene like the one the Easy Going moved in – the project I was involved in with my brother Paolo and with Claudio Simonetti. Easy Going were among the first bands to push a gay-friendly agenda: the name came from the club where my brother Paolo Micioni was the resident DJ and Claudio Simonetti was a regular; the band came together during a session at the Bus Recording studios owned by Raffaella Carrà and Gianni Boncompagni. In circles like that it was hard to perceive any kind of gender discrimination. And yet it was there, and I understand it better now, looking back with some distance, than I did at the time. Paradoxically, the late Seventies were actually more open, more forward-thinking than the following decade would turn out to be. Just think of the cover of the first Easy Going album. Today an image like that would cause an uproar; back then it went by without any trouble. With the early 80s things changed. The pop world became more closed off, more boxed into schemes and genres – and not just in terms of gender.

But you were very young at the time, practically a kid, and I imagine you had a lot of fun. What did you bring from that world into Il Quadro di Troisi?

Pietro: I think mainly the desire to experiment playfully, and that sense of freshness. The songs came out of our urge to play around in the studio with synthesizers and drum machines. Gazebo's first production was made with a Linn Drum 1 borrowed from a music shop, because we didn't have the money to buy one. Generally, my name and my brother's get associated with italodisco, and indeed at the start there were very few of us using machines in a certain way. There was us, the La Bionda brothers, and a handful of others. But that's not a label I really identify with. Our vision was much more wide-ranging than the productions, mostly German, that get filed under italodisco. We had a freshness that I think – I hope, actually – I managed to bring into my work with Donato and Andrea.

It's a freshness I'd connect to the way you, the La Bionda brothers, and also someone like Mauro Malavasi, approached funk. And at this point I'd like to put the same question I asked you to Andrea and Donato too. From your point of view, what has come through from Pietro Micioni's vision of pop into Il Quadro di Troisi, especially on this second album, where his presence has gradually become more and more established?

Donato: I think it's been fundamental to the path we've taken toward a more defined song format, more pop, precisely. A delicate path, made up of a lot of balancing acts, but one we felt was necessary – inevitable, really, as an artistic and creative need. Partly because sticking to the roads we'd already travelled would have meant repeating ourselves, and partly because Andrea needed the right formula to tell a particular moment in her life, and so to give the words the right depth and weight.

My feeling is that one of the necessary premises for the work on the new songs is, besides the first album obviously and Pietro's stronger involvement, also a record that's now fairly distant in time but is gorgeous, recorded by Donato Dozzy together with Anna Caragnano, "Synthesizer player". Does that sound like a reasonable hypothesis to you?

Donato: Absolutely. It was my first experiment built around a voice. It's been exactly ten years now, but my interest in the human voice, which was also encouraged by Pietro's brother, Paolo Micioni, dates back to exactly that moment. Since then things have come one after another like a river in flood. "Synthesizer player" was an experiment, quite an extreme one in some ways, but it made me aware of a desire that had been in me for a long time. I grew up on Italian new wave and on a whole series of musical influences that, in some unexpected way, all manage to converge more in a sung piece than in compositions where the instruments alone are responsible for the expression. Right after that album I met Andrea, and there was a spark – a really beautiful, deep and absorbing exchange.

Not just an artistic spark, I gather, if I may ask…

Andrea: No, not just artistic (laughs). Donato and I met, and we were together for three years. It all started from a great convergence on a human, artistic and emotional level. From a purely musical point of view, I came to Donato with questions, many of which actually stemmed from "Synthesizer player", which I'd listened to well before he and I met. I think that record already contains the seeds of the way Donato works on the human voice at the level of timbre, giving it colours that carry the meaning of the lyrics on a level deeper than the rational, to the point of overcoming language barriers altogether. I think that's one of the main reasons why Il Quadro di Troisi has a following abroad even though the lyrics are in Italian. People get into the songs anyway, even without grasping the literal meaning of the words, because the sound manages to convey the substance of the lyrics.

Donato: I think this care for the intersection between voice and electronics is a defining feature of our music, and it corresponds to an idea of pop that's closer to how it's conceived abroad. Sound – not just the sound of the instruments, but also the sound of the voice-as-instrument – is essential. And so the sound of the words matters too. Demetrio Stratos used to say it, but so did Nanni Moretti. We're all connected.

How was this attention to the sound of words and of the voice-as-instrument translated into the new compositions, where the lyrical side, already in terms of sheer quantity, is more defined, less conceptual than on the previous record?

Donato: I think the right attitude for chiselling even individual words, as far as I'm concerned, has roots that go a long way back, to the first times I set foot in Pietro and Paolo Micioni's studio, still a teenager, in the Prati district of central Rome. In that astonishing world, full of incredible musicians and amazing instruments and gear, I learned a taste for nuance and detail in pop music. With Il Quadro di Troisi I've been able to put those early lessons into practice too.

Another reference point, on a strictly production level, seems to me the sonic world shared by Alice and Francesco Messina on tracks like "Volo di notte" or "La mano". Do you find that a fitting reference?

Andrea: Of course those records are a reference for me, for all three of us, I'd say. Alice is extraordinary both as a songwriter and as a performer. And the way Francesco Messina produces her is remarkable too. Francesco is also, incidentally, the author of the cover art for "The comedy", so your reference seems particularly apt.

We talked earlier about emotion. It almost seems like these songs feed on an introspective urgency, expressed through a female narrative voice where every event, every nuance matters. What chords does this state of expressive grace strike?

Andrea: It was a necessity. Tied not only to a natural path of artistic evolution, but also to our own lives. There's a secret thread running through the whole album that I'd like to reveal now. When we started working on it, we were still in the final phase of the pandemic. In the meantime, we came out of the lockdowns, the year of touring and promotion began, and Donato and I broke up. I think for many people the pandemic was a moment of death and resurrection. Personally, I went through a profound inner transformation. Maybe I could call it a healing. And the songs on the album tell that story. There's a female narrating voice, and even the title "The comedy" is deliberately a feminine noun. The 'commedia' is life itself, that great illusion we need to bring awareness to.

With that in mind, it seems to me the album closes on some emblematic, beautifully written words, where the theme of "Verità" [Truth] - the title of another key song in the tracklist - returns paired with that of the "Mare" [Sea]: “Mare mi mostri sconvolto/ Il tuo segreto più torvo (…) Non serve a niente esser buono/ così furioso tu emani/ La tua verità/ Mare che chiami per nome/ Battezzi anime nuove”. What is "La Verità" of the Sea?

Andrea: It's as if the sea takes into itself the narrating voice, the feminine principle running through all the songs. Grammatically "il mare" is masculine, but its substance is water, so the sea holds within itself the duality that belongs to everything that exists. In my life there was a need for a healing of the feminine, so that this integration between masculine and feminine - which belongs to each of us, to every part of reality - could be restored. In this album too, as in the previous one, there's a spiritual component, but it lives through characters, images and stories.

Since important work went into the sonic layout of the album to give this narrative definition and depth, I wanted to ask how it will be presented live.

Pietro: We're working on it, from the arrangements to a reassessment of the production choices. It takes considerable creative effort to put together the live show.

The new songs are teeming with images - are you planning a dedicated visual approach?

Donato: The three of us are passionate about cinema, and there's a cinematic quality hidden within each of the album's tracks. We're working on that side of things too.

Andrea: We'd like each song to be represented by a kind of micro-film. But we don't want to give too much away and spoil the surprise.

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