Klimt 1918 - Technical Rehearsals for Italian Shoegazing

Born out of the ashes of obscure extreme experiences straddling doom, death (metal) and gothic, launched by one of our country's most valuable labels, My Kingdom Music, and consecrated by their move to the German cult label Prophecy, Rome's Klimt 1918 have followed one of the most original and stimulating paths in Italian rock. A striking, moving debut ("Undressed Momento", 2003), a second album ("Dopoguerra", 2005) of rare cohesion and intensity; hybrid, postmodern and engaging sounds plus a candid attitude that bristles at any kind of categorization make Klimt 1918 genuine outsiders in independent music, Italian and otherwise: and their music, so fresh and vivid, rich in imagery, contrasts and suggestions, makes them arguably the Italian band most worth following with the closest attention.

On that note, I was very pleasantly surprised by the pronounced U2 influences on your latest, intense album "Dopoguerra". How did these sounds find their way into Klimt 1918's music?

U2 are the classic teenage love, one of those bands you can't help but listen to and absorb one way or another. Already on our first album "Undressed Momento" we were reaching for U2-style guitar sounds, but on "Dopoguerra" it was all more deliberate and planned.

Do you also feel close to the "shoegazers"?

Well, the shoegaze movement is actually our present, because it's something we've only discovered in the last few years. While recording "Dopoguerra" we absorbed this genre, which grabbed us immediately. Slowdive, Catherine Wheel, My Bloody Valentine, a whole English school that produced a series of extraordinary records and which is influencing us enormously, especially in what we're creating for our next album.

The nostalgic mood is what most characterizes Klimt 1918's songs, evident not only in the lyrics but also in the smallest musical details. What inspires such feelings in you?

I like the fact that our music has an emotional thread running through it, represented by nostalgia. It's a feeling that fascinates me a great deal, and one I picked up from certain dark-wave and from Robert Smith in particular; his songs were gorgeous, at once melancholic and terribly joyful. That feeling of crying while laughing, or laughing with tears in your eyes, has always fascinated me, and it feeds heavily into one of the ideas behind our band: the theme of youth, of impermanence. 

So can we call Klimt 1918's songs “positive”?

Absolutely. Ours is music that's as melancholic as it is hopeful. The very title "Dopoguerra" ["Postwar"] speaks to that. We wanted to make a record of “reaction”, music for the rubble, music for what comes after something that has wounded us deeply. Positive music, however hard-won, but ultimately driven by a simple, vital mood. I can't stand forced drama. With “Dopoguerra” we wanted to celebrate not the suffering itself but what comes right after it, the convalescence: something that's about as universal and cross-cutting as it gets.

"Undressed Momento" was a debut hailed by critics, and it really is a record full of gorgeous songs: what do you think of it today when you happen to listen back to it?

The first record is always the most derivative one, the one where you pour in your whole life and musical background. That's partly why "Undressed Momento" is a much more varied album than "Dopoguerra" — less cohesive, sure, but with far more ideas. A debut album holds the roots of who you are as a musician. The second one, on the other hand, is more focused, in the sense that you start to understand more precisely where you want to go and what you want to achieve. I still think "Undressed Momento" has excellent songs, but on "Dopoguerra" a lot of the sounds from the first album disappeared; the delivery and the writing are leaner, it's a more balanced album.

Listening to one of your records is like flipping through a photo album, a cascade of images of memories and feelings. It seems to me your music is heavily influenced by the visual arts.

Absolutely true, I'm a tireless consumer of photography and film. "Dopoguerra", for instance, was heavily inspired by neorealism, by Rossellini, De Sica. My relationship with images runs deep, and that spills over into the music too: I love bands that make “cinematic” music like GYBE, Mono, Mogwai, Sigur Ròs. I love music that leaves total room for the imagination, which is why I've drawn so close to post-rock, and I'm even thinking of starting a project of my own in that direction. I find these genres also suit Klimt's music very well, but it's not easy for us to move that way, since ours is a band that wants to stay very direct and tied to the song format. In short, we're still a rock 'n' roll band, and proud of it. But take Dredg, for example, an American band who are influencing us enormously right now for how interestingly they manage to combine post-rock with song form; with our next album we'd like to try moving toward that kind of sonic exploration.

Klimt 1918, an elusive band that's hard to pigeonhole: you're not metal, you're not wave, you're not indie, yet you're all of these things at once. Would you agree that whatever “scene” people try to slot you into, there's always something in your music that ultimately makes you feel “out of place”?

Exactly, and I have to say that's not exactly a good thing in terms of visibility. I've had formative experiences in both the extreme scene and the dark scene, and in both I noticed a very strong closed-mindedness — something I didn't expect to find in the so-called indie world; and yet it's even worse there! Maybe no other scene is quite so self-referential, or so incapable of opening up and having a conversation beyond genre lines.

In recent years Rome has seen the rise of a great many bands who, in their respective genres, have nothing to envy in the more celebrated foreign acts. I'm thinking of you, Novembre, Spiritual Front, Dope Stars Inc.: bands you're also closely connected to. What do you think of the city's scene?

First of all, I wouldn't call it a real Roman scene, or even an Italian one. Talking about a “scene” means talking about something that here in Italy has never really managed to take hold — it means having bands with shared goals and a shared awareness of pursuing them together, appearing on each other's records. Like what happens in Canada with the Constellation bands, or, for metal, like what happened in Sweden in the Nineties. With the bands you mentioned we share solid personal friendships and maybe even a common background, but all of us grew up following radically different paths. So I wouldn't call it a “scene”, just very good relationships — which are nonetheless very important.

Like you, many of the strongest and most original bands on the Italian alternative scene have had to go abroad, usually to German labels, to get the visibility they deserve: thinking of records like your "Dopoguerra" or Spiritual Front's “Armageddon Gigolo”, works that could reach a very wide audience, why do you think certain kinds of music don't get the attention they deserve in Italy?

It's not necessarily true that you have to go with foreign labels. Italy does have the potential, but I think it's mostly a matter of attitude: here there's a widespread ostracism toward anything coming from extreme circles, and Italian music in general is very academic — there's a real idiosyncrasy toward anything that's rock. In Germany there's a genuine underground culture, people buy records, go to shows, they're more attuned to the musical side of things. The real problem is that in Italy the people who should be spreading the word about these acts often turn out to be completely blind to them. Meanwhile plenty of bands with no real substance, especially in the indie world, get regularly namechecked in “mainstream” magazines and papers. As for us, we already had a small following after "Undressed Momento" thanks to the excellent reviews we got. With "Dopoguerra" we even made it onto "Rumore"'s albums of the month. And yet we keep playing, and keep getting distributed, listened to, and promoted in circles that have to do only with “dark” or metal. That's partly down to the fact that our current label has a strong pull in those circles.

But what's your relationship with your extreme roots like today? Do you still listen to metal?

Metal… if it weren't so metal it wouldn't be bad (laughs..). Seriously, I think the problem with metal is that it's too self-aware. In my opinion you can be violent without coming across as remotely "metal"; for example, one of my favourite bands is still Deftones, and a fantastic album like their "White Pony", which has huge guitars and extraordinary melodic bursts, can never be defined as metal in the commonly understood sense of the term, beyond the actual sound — that is, as a religion of belonging, as a ritual of behaviours, as a will to be cut off from everything else, and proud of it. Today I think there's nothing appealing about that attitude. The same goes for other "extreme" fields, or for gothic. These days I listen to everything, I don't rule anything out, so yes, I still listen to metal, usually when I want moments of "amarcord" that stir up feelings of melancholy and nostalgia.

To wrap up, what should we expect from Klimt in the near future?

The next album is slowly taking shape. We'll record between May and September and we hope to release it by the end of 2007. Our main goal is to arrive at a sound that is finally entirely our own: "Dopoguerra" was a very personal album in terms of songwriting, but not yet in terms of its actual sound. It's the usual third-album dilemma, a crucial stage where you have to show who you really are. Certainly without disowning our past, but we need to stop sounding the way we did before, developing our recurring thematic thread, nostalgia, through a different sonic approach. It won't be easy. We've realised we'll never have a specific pigeonhole, and we want to stick to that: never aligning ourselves with any one side. Which, I admit, is getting harder and harder: if you come from metal and strip away the more extreme edges, it starts becoming trickier not to end up sounding merely indie or wave or something else. We like the idea of being a rock band, sticking to some very precise rules, and developing our creativity within those boundaries.

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